Underground (28 page)

Monika's face was tear-stained, but she had calmed a little since the conversation had begun an hour ago. He started again.

“My duty is to my first wife. I have to go back to her. I made promises to others before I made promises to you.”

“Your first wife,” Monika said bitterly. “You're making poetry out of my grief.”

Monika thought Lukas was referring to Lithuania as his first wife, making a metaphor, but he didn't correct her. Lukas felt protective of Elena now, not wanting to talk about their lives together in the presence of another woman, not even this one. He was putting distance between them and already she was looking stranger and stranger to him, like someone from an accidental moment in his life.

Although he knew he had to make himself hard, Monika was still the woman who had come to him in the countryside in Bavaria, the one who had made life possible in the first confusing months in France. He loved her, but could not let this feeling dominate his thoughts. He had to drive her from his heart, but the necessity of the task did not make it any easier.

Lukas had not told Monika everything that Zoly had said, just that there was a new offer from the British for him to go into Lithuania and he was accepting it.

Monika reached for her glass and drank it down but did not refill it. “We've only begun our life together here,” she said. “We were on the way to building something. And now you want to throw it all away on some kind of adventure. You could have studied anything you wanted after you finished writing that book. Medicine, architecture. If the military appeals to you so much, you could have applied to French officers' school.”

“I didn't say I wasn't returning.” Elena might be dead after all. Zoly might be lying to get him back inside to help Lozorius.

“Don't try to soften what you're saying. What are the odds, really? You might get killed on the way in, or you might get killed while you're there. You'll almost certainly never make it out again. It's not called the Iron Curtain for nothing.”

“It's risky, all right, but not impossible. I made it out once before. I could be back in a year.”

“It's like going to the land of the dead. Think what you're giving up. Do you love me so little?”

“I love you so much.”

“This makes no sense at all. You're just a soldier who's finding it hard to adjust to civilian life. You need to give it a little more time. You're bored now, sitting at a desk and writing that book, and worse, in the writing you're thinking about the past all the time, reliving your old battles. But you wouldn't have to sit at a desk all day if you didn't want to. You could be something else—a builder, a farmer like your father—I don't know, a pilot.” Lukas said nothing to this. “Help me. I'm looking for the words that will make you stay.”

“You won't find them. You knew this day might come. What did you think the SDECE was training me for?”

“That was all over. You quit all that. This strange idea of duty is going to undo both of us. What about your duty to me?”

Lukas looked out of the window and reached over for his glass of wine, but stopped himself. He was going to refill Monika's glass and looked to her to see if she wanted more wine, but she shook her head furiously.

“Tell me this,” Lukas said. “How is it that you and Anne went to hear me speak in Germany?”

“We had heard all about you. We were homesick and wanted to hear about Lithuania.”

“Yes, but no one else came from another country. We barely had people from other occupation zones of Germany, let alone France.”

“Where are you going with this? Why does it matter now?”

He would not let it go. “How did you get the right to go to Germany?” “Anne and I applied for a visa. I don't know. I can't remember.”

“No one would ever have issued you a visa just like that, because you asked for it. Travel was restricted. Your uncle must have helped. Did he?”

“I suppose he did.”

“Or did he come up with the idea in the first place? Was he asking you to do a favour for him, for the SDECE? Were you supposed to lure me to France so they could make me an offer and keep me here?”

“Maybe it was something like that. But I had no idea I would fall in love with you. I've never been false to you.”

“When I walked away from you that morning in Germany, you followed me out into the countryside. You convinced me to come to Paris. I'm not saying you lied. I'm saying things got out of hand. You brought me out of Germany for your uncle and the French secret service, and when you discovered you liked me, you asked if you could keep me. Your uncle managed it all for you as a going-away gift before he left for America.”

“So what are you accusing me of? Loving you too much?”

“I'm not accusing you of anything. You did what you believed was right. I'm doing the same thing.”

“But it's not right to choose death. Think how miserable I'll be as your widow. The Reds will kill you. Yes they will, don't deny it, and it would be better for me to die rather than to lose you. Your absence will be a wound that never heals. Take pity on me and don't make me a widow.”

“I can't shrink away from this now. I could never live with myself. I'd die of shame.”

“Shame before whom?”

“Both the living and the dead. My heart tells me to go back.”

“Then your heart has no place for me.”

“It does have a place for you, but not the way things are now. We could make a life here. People have left their homes since the beginning of time, and some have made better lives for themselves. But I can't stand the thought of being torn away from my country to be some kind of vagabond in the West. I feel worthless here. I don't care how rich these countries are—they'll never be mine. And I'll never be respected here. I'll be some kind of foreigner, a migrant, a hobo picking his way through the rich scrap heap of Western Europe or America. My dignity doesn't allow it.”

She said nothing. Lukas stood and went to her, but she turned away from him. He nevertheless crouched beside her chair and caressed her hair and tried to wipe her cheeks.

“I won't let anyone kill me so easily,” said Lukas. “I'll be careful. But we live in certain times and the times shape us in certain ways. I have to be what my time tells me to be.”

“Why are you invoking fate? Think of all those people who did their duty during the war and died for their trouble. Nobody believes in duty anymore. People matter now.”

“There are many things people don't believe in anymore, but that doesn't make them any less true. No one escapes his time, whether he's brave or a coward. No woman either.”

She refused to look at him. He knew he couldn't console her, so he stood and walked to the window to watch the children playing in the courtyard.

“Zoly promised to stay in touch with you and to help you with money. If you can, wait for me, but only for a while. If you hear nothing for too long, make another life for yourself.”

She didn't answer.

PART THREE

TWENTY

OFF PALANGA, LITHUANIAN
SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLIC
NOVEMBER 29, 1949

T
HE WIPERS
on the window at the bridge irritably slapped at the constant spray off the Baltic Sea. As the E-boat dipped and then rode up on the swell, Lukas made out on the right the glow from the Lithuanian resort of Palanga. A lighthouse blinked on the left, from the Latvian side.

“Is this the departure point?” Lukas asked.

The German captain pulled the pipe from between his teeth where he had held it for the last hour, long after it had gone out. “Still too far offshore. I'll come in closer, but you'd better go out to the raft now. And don't slip off the deck—we haven't got the time to go looking for you. Check to make sure the raft's inflated all right. You'll be on your own as soon as you touch the water.”

Lukas nodded to his two men, but neither one seemed all that enthusiastic now that they were so close. Rudis took a couple more puffs on his cigarette before dropping it at his feet without bothering to butt it. He adjusted his black cap so that each curl of blond hair was tucked beneath the cloth. He did not like to show loose strands. It was the sort of casual insolence that no partisan leader would stand for, but Lukas did not have much choice.

He didn't like either of his two recruits, but it had been important to get out before the winter in order to make the crossing of the Baltic, and there had been no time for a proper personnel search or training. Lukas had found Rudis waiting on tables in a restaurant. He had deserted from the Wehrmacht in Norway during the war and walked into Sweden. It was not much of a job history, but it did show he knew how to survive. He had been in Stockholm for five years and was still waiting on tables—no ambition to do anything but pick up women with his beautiful hair. To his credit, Rudis was good with a radio and could tap out Morse code at record speed once he had practised for a few days.

The other man, Shimkus, had been a sailor who could not see past his next shore leave. He was lean and agile, happy with a beer and a smoke, and might have been in it for the money—it was hard to tell. Shimkus smiled easily, though it was unclear if he did it from a sunny disposition or a mind free of excess thought.

Everything would be all right if the letter Lukas had sent through an old drop box in Poland made it to its destination.

The Americans were involved in the mission now, along with the Swedes and the British, and as a result Lukas, Rudis and Shimkus were carrying too much materiel: a radio each, MP-44 assault rifles, Walther pistols, ammunition, twenty thousand rubles, a thousand dollars, sleeping pills, cyanide, amphetamines, grenades, penicillin, morphine, aspirin, topographical maps, long folding knives almost as big as bayonets when opened, compasses and secret pencils that wrote in invisible graphite.

Dunlop had needed Lukas to run the mission, but having been spurned by him once, he was not entirely happy to have him back. “The only reason you returned is because of your Lithuanian wife,” he said, as if accusing Lukas of a crime.

They had trained out of a summer house on a fjord south of Stockholm, empty now that the summer was over. Dunlop still drank heavily, but his enthusiasm for it had evaporated. He had lost maybe thirty pounds, not so much that he was thin but enough that his skin looked slack.

“I disapprove of personal motivation,” he continued.

Lukas was practising with the secret pencil, drawing it flat against the sheet one way and then another, and then laying a sheet on top to write the invisible letters. “You're the one who passed on the message from Lozorius to me. If you didn't want me, why did you tell me Elena was alive?”

Dunlop had no answer to this. He was very drunk. “Personal motivation is fickle, like love.”

Lukas looked at him closely to see if Dunlop was making a disparaging remark about his two wives. “In the end, personal motivation is all there is. The best causes are the small, personal ones.”

“I wouldn't call those causes. I'd call them grudges. If everyone thought like you, we never would have defeated the Nazis. If everyone thinks like you, we'll never defeat the Reds.”

“If everyone thought like me, we wouldn't have either of those two to begin with.”

By midnight, the E-boat was fifteen-hundred metres from the beach, and the captain gave the order to launch the rubber dinghy. The offshore wind slowed them, but at least it would muffle the noise from the E-boat. Lukas worked the paddle hard, and when he first thought to look back for the E-boat, fifteen minutes had passed and it was already gone. It took two more hours to cover the distance.

The rubber boat was very heavy, so they cut it up at the water's edge and then pulled the pieces a hundred metres up the beach, where they hid them in the underbrush. Then they shouldered their fifty-kilo packs and, taking a compass reading, headed inland due east, avoiding farmhouses and crossing meadows where the grass stood bristling with frost. Three kilometres inland they found a forest with a cutline, as marked on their map, and they were deeply into it when dawn began to come up. They went in among some bushes to hide themselves during daylight.

Shimkus and Rudis fell asleep with their heads on their packs and Lukas took first watch. Even though it was November and the air was damp and cold, it felt good to be back. For all the freedom of France and Sweden, he had been a foreigner there. Now he was home.

Working in the Swedish summer house with Zoly, Lukas had analyzed Lozorius's messages out of Lithuania again and again. Why had the man called for Lukas in particular to return to Lithuania? Why not any agents the English could find? There were several possibilities, some better than others. Maybe Lozorius trusted Lukas the way he trusted no one else. Maybe, on the other hand, he wanted to entrap the most prominent representative of the Lithuanian partisans abroad. Some of the Ukrainian partisan spokesmen in Western Europe had already gone missing, and the same was true of the Estonian and Latvian partisans.

“What else has he been telling you in his radio broadcasts?” Lukas had asked Zoly.

“He writes that the underground has got weaker. The central control structure has collapsed and the local units barely have any contact with one another anymore. The senior partisans are mostly dead and the new ones aren't educated. They can't run the propaganda newspapers that they used to.”

This information was troubling to Lukas. He was relying on old ties to help him once he got back in. “How did the English like to hear that?”

“I keep telling you, they're Brits, not English.”

“They can't tell
us
apart. Why should I bother?”

“Anyway, the Brits didn't like Lozorius's news at all, and they're not the only ones. The Americans believe Lozorius may have been captured and turned.”