Underground (2 page)

When Elena opened the kitchen door for him, Lukas strode out with his arms extended and turned first to face Vinskis and Gedrius because they were standing and their own pistols would be easy to get to, whereas the men sitting at the table would need to rise first. Lukas fired at Vinskis, two shots to the neck, and the man's head rolled onto his chest as he collapsed. Gedrius, for all his drunkenness, had his own pistol halfway out of his pocket when Lukas fired at him. The man went down.

The accordionist stopped playing and stared at them, but Elena's roommate was more cool-headed and leaned forward to blow out one of the candles. The other two men were rising from their chairs.

Lukas fired with his left hand, but his shots went wild. Elena killed them for him. Her roommate opened her mouth to say something, but Lukas did not want to hear it. He fired once at her forehead and she went down too.

“Let's go,” said Elena.

“Wait.”

Lukas went toward Elena's sister, Stase, who had fallen from her chair and pulled herself to a wall, where she stared at them with terrified eyes. Lukas crouched down to look her in the face.

“I have to do this for your own good,” he said. Lukas had to act quickly before Elena intervened.

Stase's lower lip was trembling and her eyes were wild with fear. Lukas stepped back and took aim at her. If he was too close, he might leave powder burns. If he stood too far away, he might miss in either direction.

Stase shut her eyes as Lukas fired, and then she yelped with pain and the blood came down her arm. Lukas turned quickly to face Elena before she could shoot him, which she might do if she misunderstood. “Stase has to be wounded or the Chekists will say she was part of this all along,” said Lukas.

“Why didn't you tell me this before?”

“I couldn't. It was too dangerous.”

Elena's face was flushed. The room was filled with blood, splatters up on the wall, pools on the floor among the wreckage of bodies and overturned chairs.

Elena dropped her hand with the pistol in it and crouched down beside Stase.“I'm sorry I couldn't tell you. When the Chekists come, you can honestly say you didn't know anything. They'll let you go.”

“You've turned into a monster. I don't even know who you are.”

There was no time. As Elena stood up, the accordionist, wounded in the throat by a ricochet, struggled up from his chair and charged out the door with the accordion still on his shoulders. The instrument squawked like a frightened animal all the way down the staircase. The Komsomol director began to stir from where he had fallen beneath the table, tried to rise, and Lukas fired another shot into him.

The neighbours would soon overcome their terror and go to the militia. Lukas and Elena put on their coats, closed the door behind them, and walked down the steps and out onto the street. It was snowing. There was a sleigh for them a few blocks away, near the train station.

The streets were empty and profoundly silent. If a militiaman passed by, he would be sure to ask them for their documents just for something to do. Elena tried to pick up her pace, but Lukas held her back slightly so they would not seem to be rushing.

“We did it!” he whispered.“I couldn't have done it without you.”

“It was so easy to kill those two hateful men, but so strange. What must you think of me now?” asked Elena.

“I love you even more.”

“I feel light-headed, good in a way, yet it was unbearable. I'll never be the same.”

“No, you won't. I wasn't like this either. But we have to strike back, even if it means hardening our hearts.”

Elena would need to do that. Her heart was beating wildly at the moment, so hard that she was afraid it would burst in her chest. She was holding Lukas's arm and now she gripped it more tightly.

Lukas enjoyed the pressure of her hand on his arm. They so rarely had the opportunity to touch one another. He had killed many others before this, but never at such close quarters, and never after talking and eating together. It was all horrible, yet the killing had brought Elena to him again.

TWO

LITHUANIA
SUMMER 1944

T
HE JEWISH PINE FOREST
in the county of Rumsiskes did not have many pine trees left. What trees there were stood in twos and threes on the ancient sand dune, which had been mostly taken over by tufts of giant grasses, many taller than a man and so tough that even goats would not eat them. The sand dune drank up whatever liquid was poured onto it, from the urine of boys, to the tears of heartbroken girls, to the blood from battle-inflicted wounds. But where these liquids disappeared to was anyone's guess; the dune was dry as bones.

The nearby village of Rumsiskes consisted of a few hundred houses strung along several streets, with farm fields running right up to the back doors. Death came by this way very often, fording the river Nemunas to kill again and again. It came with the Teutonic Knights in 1381, with the Swedes in the Northern Seven Years' War of 1563, with the Russians in the Great Northern War of 1700, and with Napoleon's army in 1812. Then came a long period of uneasy servitude to the czars until independence in 1918. Death had visited again in recent times, as the town traded hands between the Reds and the Germans.

If there were few pines in the Jewish Pine Forest, there were still fewer Jews. Killed shortly after the German “liberation” by the Nazis and their local helpers, the Jews were buried in a mass grave by the Kaunas road.

In the summer of 1944, it was unclear how long the Germans would hold back yet another assault from the Red Army on the other side of the Nemunas River. If the current chief of police lingered in Rumsiskes too long, the Reds would blame him for collaboration with the Nazis. The police chief before him lay dead in his grave; the locals had accused him of collaboration with the Reds the first time they came, in 1940. The police chief before that, during the independence period, had been beaten and sent off to die in Siberia. The Reds had accused him of collaboration with the independent government.

The town lay in a bend of the river, a very old route for the exportation of lumber or the transit of armies. There were several barrow hills in the county as well, and the ruins of a hill fort, of which nothing remained but the cellar. Thus the hill had a sunken top, like a volcano, where some of the locals had hidden during the current artillery barrage from the Red Army, having fled up the hill like their ancestors from centuries past. One night the cellar suffered a direct hit, and the hilltop blazed like a true volcano, with wounded adults and burning children rushing and tumbling down from the top as far as the places where they died, frozen in their descent like lava that had solidified after an eruption.

The Petronis family farm bordered the sand dune, on the side opposite the town of Rumsiskes, and although crops would grow grudgingly on their property, the earth was not particularly fertile, so the farmer and his wife encouraged their three sons to study and make other lives for themselves. The farm itself could be the dowry of their sister, the youngest. But all their plans were muddled by the war. None of the boys, not even Lukas, the eldest, had finished his studies. He was a lithe optimist who refused to be discouraged by this setback, although it was trying at times to be home again, where his parents expected so much of him and his younger brothers occasionally resented his care. The second son, Vincentas, had also been sent back from the seminary for his own safety, to wait out the passing of the front.

The Petronis family had thought of withdrawing behind the German lines in the summer of 1944, but what would life be like in Germany? They would be refugee foreigners in a land under attack from two sides. Besides, staying might not be all that bad even if the Reds did come back. What did a farmer have to fear? Petronis owned a modest fifty acres of land, and a farmer was only designated an enemy of the people, a “bourgeois,” at seventy-five acres. He was safe as long as the category was not enlarged to include him.

He was uneasy about that. The Reds had coined a new term: “debourgeoisation,” an excellent bureaucratic word for expropriation. A tailor could not have thought of a better term, because it was like a bolt of cloth that could be cut to fit any size. During the first Red occupation it had been applied to large landowners, policemen, government ministers, deputy ministers, assistant deputy ministers, people with relatives abroad, anti-government activists, school principals, and even the one-legged jazz saxophonist in the Metropolis Café in Kaunas, along with his wife, a hairstylist. One could not be sure the category wouldn't be adjusted again.

It was the end of July and very hot, but the windows were shuttered, an oil lamp on the table casting poor light and adding to the heat. The family was eating lunch at a long table. Above the thatched roof of the wooden farmhouse, German and Russian mortars crossed paths. Occasionally the distant sound of tank rounds was heard, as well as automatic fire. There was nothing to do but wait it out, so Petronis senior dipped his spoon into his bowl of beet greens soup and the others followed.

Then they waited throughout the day, old man Petronis anxious in case the shelling lasted so long it kept him from milking his cows. Late that afternoon, the firing moved west.

About an hour before sunset, the Jewish Pine Forest dune began to move, with wave upon wave of Red Army soldiers coming over the hill. Hundreds of them came on, their faces tired and dirty, their uniforms torn.

They were hungry because the front lines travelled without field kitchens, so the men had to live off the land. Father Petronis sent his daughter inside and the three brothers brought out a table on which they cut up slices of bread and laid out pieces of sausage as well as poured out all the milk they had into jugs. About twenty of the soldiers ate there while others fanned out to neighbouring farms, but they did not stay long because they had to rejoin their units before nightfall.

The first day had ended fairly well. The soldiers were just young men after all, tired and hungry. Maybe they were afraid too. Maybe things would turn out all right.

The German lines stiffened near the East Prussian border, so the lack of Red Army field kitchens became a burden to the local farmers, especially those who lived near the main roads and whose farms were easily accessible. The Red Army rode about in Studebakers, Lend-Lease gifts from the Americans.

Red soldiers believed that food, at the very least, was their due. Declaring themselves liberators and guests, they could show up at any time in groups of four or six. If food was a soldier's due, liquor was his reward, and these same soldiers appeared with farm goods, guns, grenades, saddles and even horses, which they traded happily for buckets of home-distilled
samagonas
. A farmer's joy at a good trade could be marred, though, when another farmer from a few kilometres away recognized his saddle or his horse and demanded its return.

Once drunk, the soldiers reflected on the unfairness of their own poverty and that of their families back on the collective farms, and began to steal from the farmers at night. The barking of the farm dogs did not deter them; the soldiers shot barking dogs. They emptied storerooms of food and took farm implements. The people of the countryside no longer wore wristwatches. It was also dangerous to be thoroughly cleaned out by the thieves, because subsequent thieves became angry if they wasted a walk up a farm lane only to find there was nothing left to take.

More worrisome than theft was the Red Army's hunger for labour and recruits. Trenches needed to be dug in case the German army counterattacked. And the front was a maw that devoured young men who were thrown at it without arms or training. Since Lithuania had been occupied by the Reds before the German occupation, Lithuanians were deemed Soviet citizens, whose duty it was to fight the Germans. Any who chose not to fight were deemed fascists themselves.

And so the Petronis boys, Lukas, Vincentas and Algis, went to their uncle's farm a dozen kilometres away, where the locals did not know them well, and helped to bring in the August rye. The young Petronis men passed for labourers, and whenever Russian cars or press gangs appeared, the women warned them and they hid in the forest or in a pit under the barn floor.

Lukas and Vincentas found out that university students and seminarians were being given draft exemptions, and so they left their younger brother behind and made their way home. They packed bags with food and clothes to go to Kaunas to have their passports stamped with military exemptions so they could continue their studies.

The Lithuanian capital had been moved to Vilnius, so many of the buildings in Kaunas were abandoned and some were in ruins. Even so, the streets were full of soldiers and trucks as well as country folk, often women in head scarves, scavenging for lamp oil or aspirin or any other items that were no longer available in the countryside. The Jewish houses were empty and long since sacked.

Lukas was relieved to be back in Kaunas, relieved to get back to his life. He wanted to
get on
with things now, to live in a city, to read books and talk in cafés, to see movies and listen to the radio. Above all, he was tired of armies and wars, which had already eaten up enough of his twenty-three years. He was slight and quick, and he liked to laugh. He had been an excellent shot as a hunter and a very good explorer of the Jewish Pine Forest as a boy, but he intended to study literature and teach in a high school, or even the university if he was lucky. Vincentas was not that different from him, and they looked something alike, although Vincentas wore glasses. But the younger brother was otherworldly; he adored vestments and incense and had practically taught himself Latin before he even started high school. Only their brother Algis preferred life in the countryside.

Having left Vincentas at the nearby seminary, Lukas went to the main office of the university, which hummed with phone calls, secretaries carrying sheaves of papers, and some of the younger professors, huddled in committees, discussing their various tasks to get the university up and running in some fashion for the fall semester. Kuolys, the long-haired Latin professor who had terrorized Lukas in his first year, now looked up, smiled and came over.