Underground (11 page)

Lukas pitied Ignacas and helped him when he could, but the man had become mournful unless he was eating, and Lukas could listen to only so much misery without having it weigh him down.

Ignacas looked about them to make sure no one was within earshot. “There are a few more days to go until the amnesty runs out,” he said.

The Reds had declared an amnesty after the war ended in Germany, and many partisans had taken up the offer. Some of the bands forbade it, but Flint let his men make their own decisions. The only rules were that they leave behind any good weapons they might have and take poor ones, and that they not betray their old comrades. The first part was easy, but not the second. How was one to placate a new master without betraying a former one? Lukas asked him this very question.

“Here's my plan,” said Ignacas. “I'll wait until this parliament is over and then I'll slip away. When I turn myself in, I'll do it in some village, where it will take a while for them to work their way up to the proper authorities. Then I'll bring them here as a sign of my sincerity. But all of you will be gone, you see? I'll have betrayed nothing.”

“The Reds aren't stupid. Do you think they'll believe that?”

“I'm a good liar.”

“Even under torture?”

“They wouldn't torture me, would they?”

“They do sometimes.”

“But not ones who give themselves up. I don't think they do. But even if they did rough me up a little, by the time I told them anything, all of you would have moved on.”

“Except yourself.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“You know they never keep their promises. You know your father owned too much land. You're an enemy to them by category—anything you say won't change that.”

“I can't think like that. I need to believe in something, and I need to believe they're at least partially sincere. They're building a new world, but they're still fighting a war with people like us. They'll become gentler over time.”

“You're sounding more and more Red with every sentence. Maybe you do belong with them.”

“Oh, come on, don't turn on me like that. You knew me back in school. You knew what I was like then. But let's face it—I'm useless as a partisan. I wasn't meant for this kind of life. It'll kill me in the long run.”

“If they don't kill you first.”

“I never realized you were such a hard-liner.”

“I'm not. I'm just cornered. I know I have to fight because I have no other choice.”

“You do have a choice, and so do I. Why should our generation be sentenced to death? What did we do? We need to find some way to live, some way to go on.”

“Taking amnesty won't do it.”

“Maybe not for you, but what about me? Would you hold it against me?”

“Each of us has to do what he must.”

“But will you tell Flint about my plans?”

“What you just told me isn't a plan, it's an idea. And I don't want to hear any more about it.”

Ignacas nodded, seemed about to speak again, but decided against it and turned to waddle away. He was no longer a fat man, but he still carried himself as if he were. No matter how much he gave in to them, the Reds would find he stank of “bourgeois.”

Elena made her way past a small group of older partisans by a smokeless fire where Flint was speaking with the leaders of the other bands. They fell silent as she passed. Farther on, a trio of young men sprawled on the grass, two cleaning their rifles and a third writing a letter. They tried to engage her in banter, but she did not have time to talk. She was looking for the latest newspaper and sought out Lukas among his newspapers laid out on the grass.

Absorbed with his work, Lukas did not look up from the press he had been cleaning. He had his sleeves rolled up and wore an apron to protect his clothes from the ink. Sensing someone nearby, he began to speak without glancing up. “I didn't have enough alcohol to thin the ink properly. It's still sticky, and I'm hoping the sun will dry it out. It would be a waste to let the newspapers smudge after all this work.”

Lukas's hair was long, curling over his ears. Like the other partisans, he was a little feral, but he wasn't coarse. He looked swift and comfortable, though there was trouble on his face. When he finally did look up at her, the trouble evaporated and his beautiful mouth broke into a smile.

“It's you,” he said.

They had not seen each other since early spring, just before the seizure of the town of Merkine.

“I was afraid you might not come anymore,” said Lukas, “after you lost your brother. I'm very sorry about that, but I'm glad to see you here. I lost my brother that day too.”

“You did?”

“Yes.”

She had hardened her heart to help get over the loss. She had thought she could get on with things now, but when she heard of Lukas's loss it reminded her of her own and she could barely speak. Lukas sensed her feelings and came forward and took her hands in his. She looked down, surprised yet gratified, and saw that the ink of his hands had smudged onto hers.

“My brother's real name was Tomas,” she said finally, squeezing his hands before letting them go. “I didn't like his code name—it made him sound slippery and cold. He wasn't like that at all, at least when we were younger. After he went into the forest, he changed and started to become taciturn. I think he was killing his old self in a way because he was afraid of being soft. I never had a chance to see him much in the winter because it was so hard to get around. And then the next thing I knew, I received word that he was dead. Now I wish I'd tried harder to see him.”

“How could you have known? None of us knows when our time is coming.”

“No. You say you were with him on the final mission?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell me what happened?”

It was not that Lukas didn't want to be with her, but he wished they could talk of something else.

“Lakstingala was there and they'd been friends for a long time. Why don't you ask him?”

“I already have. He told me in his rough, country way, his soldier's way.”

“What do you expect me to add?”

“I don't know. Why don't you just tell me what it was like?”

“All right.”

Lukas took off his apron and they sat down on the grass. The radio was playing on the stump nearby, and the conversation of men murmured indistinctly at the other end of the clearing like the sound of a brook.

“Do you have a cigarette?” she asked.

“I gave them up. The smell of tobacco smoke carries quite a distance, and I didn't like the cravings for it when we were on a mission and I couldn't smoke.”

“Then tell me what happened.”

Lukas stretched out, leaning on one elbow, and related the day's events in Merkine. He trod carefully through the story, leaving out the part about Ungurys catching fire. He told Elena he was shot cleanly by the sniper and died before knowing what hit him.

“And you retrieved his body?”

“Yes. We buried him a few kilometres away, in a forest.”

“How did you dig the earth in the winter?”

“We used an old bunker.”

“I would like to visit that place someday.”

“I could show you, if you like.”

He looked at her then and thought he would like very much to travel with her to that place, sad though it might be. A pair of bees flew slowly about the field flower she held absently in her hands, and she observed them for a moment, and when she looked up, she caught him staring at her face. He was embarrassed, and she blushed in turn.

“Did you bury your brother near mine?” she asked.

“No, we couldn't get the body. I didn't even know he was dead for a couple of days. I kept waiting for him to find his way back to me.”

“Are you sure he wasn't captured?”

“It doesn't seem likely.”

“Miracles happen sometimes. I've heard of people surviving and showing up much later. I almost wish I knew less about the death of my brother, just so I could have a little hope. Lakstingala tells me I should be very proud of him. Everyone knows about the day the partisans took Merkine. There are stories about it all across the country. He's some kind of hero, I guess.”

“Of course he is, but that doesn't make it any easier to live without him. Life is hard.” He hadn't meant a great deal by the statement, but it seemed to strike her in some way. She let the flower drop and reached forward and took his hand and squeezed it. For a moment he was afraid he might burst into tears. He crushed the emotion.

“Yes, it's very hard,” she said. “Sometimes I think it's unbearable and there's no escape from it. I feel like I'm in a vise that's being tightened by a quarter turn each day.” She let go of his hand and looked away to the newspapers lying in the sun. “If the ink won't dry, why don't you blot the sheets?”

“Paper is scarce and I can't be wasting every second sheet.”

“I had farm cousins,” said Elena after a while. “Their mother laid out linen on the grass to bleach it in the sun.”

“My mother used to do that too. Maybe she still does,” he added.

“You haven't seen her for a while?”

“About a year now. Not the rest of the family either.”

“At least you still have them. I just have my sister.”

This was the sort of conversation she could never have in the city anymore. There it was unsafe to say too much, but here she could say whatever she pleased.

“What happened to your family?” asked Lukas.

“Our house took a direct hit when the Reds were coming in the second time. My mother died right away and the house was destroyed.”

“And your father?”

“The Reds took him the first time they came.”

“So they deported him to the North?”

“I think so. He was in prison in Kaunas for almost a year. I know they knocked out his teeth. His body wasn't there with the others the Reds shot when they pulled back before the Germans, so they probably took him to Siberia.”

Or they might have shot him on the way, but Lukas did not say this. “He must have been important.”

“He was a high school principal, but his brother owned a car dealership in America. It was enough. They took him in the first days. Then, when the deportations started, my mother and I went to Kaunas and walked out among the boxcars to look for him. There were a lot of people like us, carrying packages with clothes or food for the families stuffed inside the cars. We called up to the air holes, where there was always someone listening. But we never found him. It was a hot day and the guards were getting irritated. They threatened to put us on the trains if we stayed around any longer.”

Elena was going to say more, but Lukas heard something and rose to go to the radio and bent over to listen.

“What is it?” asked Elena.

“Be quiet a moment.”

She watched him listen, two furrows of concentration forming between his eyes. “Get me a pencil,” he said, and she went to the partisan who had been writing the letter when she first arrived. When she returned, Lukas took the pencil and began to make notes.

“Well?” she asked, but he shushed her and continued to make notes until the radio broadcast ended.

“Good news,” he said. “I'll tell you later.”

“Tell me now.”

“I have to speak to Flint first.”

He walked to where the partisan leader was talking with the others, and the two of them conferred. A little breeze came up and stirred the newspapers laid out on the grass. Elena tested the ink to see if it had dried. It had, and she stacked some of the sheets carefully, leaving others to dry more.

Flint called the men together and all came around except for the sentries. Flint gave the floor to Lukas, who stepped forward and spoke from his notes.

“The Americans have dropped a bomb on a city in Japan,” he said. He repeated what he had heard in the broadcast. “It's a very big bomb. It destroyed everything.”

“How big?” one of the men asked.

“Half a city was wiped away.”

“What do you mean, ‘a city'?”

“I don't know, but the radio said over a hundred thousand dead.”

“That's impossible. A bomb that big could never be loaded into an airplane.”

The men broke in with many technical questions, most of which Lukas could not answer. He knew only what he had heard on the radio.

Elena was unsure of what to make of the news, but the same was not true of the other partisans. Once they had understood properly what Lukas had said, they took the explosion of the atomic bomb as very good news, the best news they had heard in a long time. They began to cheer and applaud.

Elena elbowed her way through them to Lukas. She took him by the sleeve and pulled him aside.

“What are they so happy about? Think of all those dead civilians.”

Lukas was flushed and happy. “We hoped the Americans would go to war with the Reds once the Germans were beaten, but they didn't. Probably this means they weren't strong enough to finish off the Japanese while taking on a new enemy. But now they are. Now that the Americans have this bomb, they can destroy the Reds. They can beat them back. We might be on the verge of freedom.”

“In that case, God bless the Americans.”

He looked at her and found her beautiful. How had he missed this before? All it took was a moment of hope and he could see clearly again.

“Do you think you could help me?” Lukas asked.

“To do what?”

“You work in an office. Your typing is probably better than mine. If I wrote out the news story, could you type it up on the stencil for me?”

“Yes, I can do that.”

Elena waited as Lukas wrote out his summary of what he had heard on the news. The entire camp was buzzing with conversations about the announcement and how soon their lives would be changing. She listened for a while to the news from Warsaw, but there was no mention of the bomb on that station. Moscow said nothing about the bomb, but it did repeat word of its declaration of war against Japan.