Underground (31 page)

“What farmer would do that?”

“You'd be surprised. One day I went out with a partisan called Anupras to get milk from a certain farmer. We needed to keep shifting around so we weren't asking the same people for food all the time. We were being careful, so I waited for him in the forest when he went to the farmhouse, but he was taking a long time. I went looking and finally found him, wandering along the path, falling down and getting up and then falling again. He'd lost his firearm. I could tell by his eyes that he was drugged, and pretty soon he passed right out. We were on our own, and knowing the Cheka wouldn't be far behind I dragged him off the path as far as I could.

“I laid him in a hollow and took away any identifying papers then covered him with mosses and pine needles. I sprinkled the area with lamp oil and tobacco to confuse the dogs, and then swam across a nearby river to see what would happen from a hiding place on the other side.

“The Chekists arrived soon enough, three cars of men and dogs. They searched high and low, but they didn't find him. Later the next day Anupras woke up and crawled out of his hollow. His face was dirty and his pants were torn. The soldiers were still around, but they were looking for an armed man, and Anupras was not just unarmed but also disoriented, like some sort of village idiot. He wandered around until he came across a farmer who knew him and managed to get him back to the partisans.”

“It sounds like some sort of fairy tale.”

“More like a horror story. Anupras said he'd had a few glasses of milk. The sleeping potion must have been poured into the milk, but the fat in the milk inhibited the effect of the drug.”

“Did you get the farmer?”

“He ran away somewhere, but not to America.”

“America? Why do you say that?”

“He was the American farmer. You remember him?”

“He helped to teach me English.”

“Well, if you ever run across him again, shoot him.”

“What happened to Anupras?”

“He was never the same after that. His mind had been damaged. We managed to get him into a mental institution where they have others like him.”

The weather was terrible. When they reached the outskirts of their old district six days later, the duel between rain and snow had settled into a compromise of freezing rain. By then they had been cold and wet for so long that they barely remembered what it meant to be dry.

Lakstingala knew a farmhouse where the owners were friendly, but he hesitated to go there because the farmer was under suspicion of the Cheka, and Lakstingala did not want to get him into trouble or stumble onto a closely watched site.

“It's a risk,” he said to Lukas as they stood outside the house of squared logs and thatch, “but we'll die of pneumonia if we don't dry out and warm up for a while, and it doesn't look as if anyone's around. You wait here.”

Lakstingala knocked at the door as Lukas squatted among the gooseberry bushes, intensely aware that the cover of bushes was poor in the winter. A young woman with a thick, dark braid met Lakstingala at the door. They spoke for a moment and a man joined them, and then Lakstingala waved Lukas over.

It was a small house, deliciously warm inside, just a vestibule and two rooms. A new baby was in a basket hanging from a beam in the combined sitting room, dining room and kitchen, swinging gently from side to side. The farmer was a young man named Almis, and his wife was Vida. They both knew Lakstingala and took no notice of his regret at bothering them, being distant cousins whose sense of hospitality had not yet been destroyed by the times.

Almis and Vida charmed Lukas, and gave him a whiff of melancholy as well for the life he might have had in a different time. He had vaguely hoped to have children one day, and the sight of the baby, swaddled and with a knitted cap on her head, awoke the old desire in him. But it did not do to have such thoughts. They could only make his heartache worse if he dwelled upon them.

He and Lakstingala went into the other room to change out of their wet clothes. There was a ceramic wall shared by the two rooms, a built-in wood-burning furnace that was warm to the touch. Lukas hung his clothes from nails nearby and then leaned against the tiles for the warmth that radiated through his back. Soon he would turn to warm his other side.

There was a noise outside and shortly after that the door to their room opened and Almis poked his head inside.

“Some slayers just pulled up in the yard in a car.”

“How many?” Lakstingala asked.

“Just two. But one of them is a drunkard named Imbrasas who keeps coming here to threaten us and to make eyes at Vida.”

“I can deal with them for you, if you want,” said Lakstingala.

“No, please. We have a baby in there and Vida's sensitive. They're not here to search the house. They come for alcohol and food and to terrorize us a little. Just be very quiet in here and they might go away after they've eaten and I've given them a little liquor for the road.”

Lakstingala nodded. He put a revolver in his pocket and stood by the wall on the other side of the ceramic oven with his assault rifle in his hands at the ready. Lukas prepared himself for a fight as well, crouching behind the door to look through the keyhole into the next room.

The sergeant who came in with his escort was stout, his hat tipped back slightly on his head so the bill pointed up jauntily. His uniform was a little too tight and one button of his tunic was undone over his belly. He carried only a sidearm, but his soldier had a rifle in his hands. Slayers had not dared to travel in pairs in the past, before Lukas had left Lithuania. Back then they had moved in packs. It was a depressing sign of their new-found confidence that the two came as they did, unescorted.

“You can wait in the car,” said Imbrasas.

“It's safer if we stay together,” said the soldier.

“Afraid?”

“For your safety, yes. This is a lonely place.”

“I know what I'm doing. Get out there, and I'll bring you something to make it worth your while.”

The baby in the crib cried out once as the driver left, but then settled back to sleep when Vida pushed the cradle and it began to swing from the beam again.

Imbrasas, the slayer who remained behind, had been to the house many times before, sometimes with the troops and sometimes on his own. He kept a flock of farmers like these, small landowners who hadn't been collectivized yet, ones who could be visited in a circuit for food or liquor. He considered himself their protector, for he was important enough as a slayer to hold off others of his kind, and even had a little influence among the lower levels of the Cheka, where he hoped to make a career.

His protected herd of farmers was milked in rotation, with one exception: Almis, or more precisely his wife, Vida. He developed an interest in her that grew to fondness and blossomed into obsession through her pregnancy, and this passion continued to grow after she gave birth. His attraction was foolish, and he knew it and tried to suppress it by any means possible, primarily alcohol.

But the alcohol didn't really help; it merely changed the nature of his fixation. When he drank, Imbrasas began to feel underappreciated for all the help he had given her against the baser elements in the Cheka. Most of the farms in the district had been collectivized already, but not the one belonging to Almis and Vida. If he had been like some of the grosser slayers, he would have had the husband deported and kept Vida for himself.

Imbrasas congratulated himself for not having done so, but the drunker he became the more he began to feel offended that his good works had not been recognized. How the young couple should have known what he had done for them and how they should have paid him back was unclear to him, but the sense of injustice remained in his mind and grew.

Almis went to the pantry and brought out three half-litre bottles of samagonas, one to drink from and two to give away. He cut a piece of smoked pork and wrapped it in a newspaper. He carved off a kilo of bread and brought it in as well. Vida had set out plates and cups and butter. She put fresh kindling into the cookstove and set the kettle on top.

Imbrasas watched this activity with growing impatience. They were behaving as if nothing were wrong, as if they were not aware of their debt to him, or if they were aware of it, they were ignoring it. He was particularly incensed by Vida, who remained silent as her husband talked about the weather and the farm, his animals and the crops, the only safe subjects in a politicized world.

But not safe enough.

The baby sensed Imbrasas's mood better than her parents, and she began first to whimper and then to cry. Vida gave the hanging crib a push so it began to rock gently, and the baby quieted for a moment.

Almis poured out two small glasses of home liquor, and Imbrasas did not even wait for an invitation but drank up. He had been drinking all afternoon. Each man chased the liquor with a piece of bread and a little smoked meat. Almis could see that Imbrasas was following every move his wife made, and he tried to distract the man, but there was nothing much he could do about him because Imbrasas was implacable in his strange silence and brooding eyes.

The baby cried out and would not be stilled, even when Vida pushed the hanging crib again.

Almis poured another glass of liquor and invited Imbrasas to drink. In such circumstances the best strategy was to make the visitor drink a great deal and hope that he became drunk enough to pass out before he did any harm.

As the baby would not stop crying, Vida took her out of the crib and held her in her left arm as she worked at the stove with her right hand. She was all too aware of Imbrasas's silence and her husband's inability to do anything about it.

Vida went to the pantry and brought out a cup of flour, which she poured into a bowl, and then returned to get a cup of milk and two eggs, which she mixed with the flour to make into a batter. She tried to pacify the baby, who was wailing inconsolably now, sensing the tension in the room.

She put a large cast-iron frying pan on the wood stove and a minute later dropped a pat of butter into the pan, where it sizzled and sputtered.

“Comrade Imbrasas,” she said, “it's a terribly cold and wet day, and the only way to comfort oneself on a day like this is the way our mothers comforted us when we were small—with crepes. I'll fry up a batch of them and soon you'll see how much better you feel.”

Vida was trying her best to help her husband, but she could not read the mind of Imbrasas, who had never been comforted as a child by his alcoholic mother. She had beaten him and starved him and his father had not been much better. Worse, Vida could not know that in his mind the offer of crepes was as good as an insult, a paltry compensation for his heroic efforts to save them from deportation. Here they were, warm and happy when so many others had been sent away, and all she could offer in thanks was a plate of pancakes. Such an insult was unbearable.

“Bourgeois capitalists, the both of you,” he spat. “I'll show you comfort.”

Imbrasas snatched the baby from Vida's arms and laid her on the sputtering frying pan, holding Vida off with his free hand. Handled roughly and thrown about, the swaddled baby wailed, but not so loudly as she would wail when the heat of the pan burned through to her tender skin.

The fat in the pan sputtered and snapped as it did when a piece of meat was put upon it. Above all this the mother shrieked and the baby wailed, but Imbrasas held Vida off and reached for his sidearm to keep Almis away as he fried the baby on the pan.

Lukas slammed open the door at the first screams, and Imbrasas looked at him in surprise, frozen for a moment. Almis moved quickly. Snatching up a dinner fork from the table, he drove the tines into the neck of Imbrasas before the slayer could get a proper hold of his pistol. Vida snatched the baby off the hot pan.

Imbrasas's face twisted in pain and fury and he reached for his throat to staunch the blood, and Almis grabbed the man's head and pressed his face onto the hot pan, where his cheek sputtered in the grease. Imbrasas screamed, but rather than inciting Almis's pity, the cries excited his anger. He lifted Imbrasas's head by the hair, pulled the pan off the stove and, lifting the stove lid to expose the burning wood beneath, pushed Imbrasas's face into the fire. Imbrasas was down on his knees in a moment, flailing.

“Don't shoot or the soldier outside will hear the gunfire,” said Lakstingala.

Lukas took the frying pan from the floor and banged it hard against Imbrasas's head, which was sandwiched between the frying pan and the metal stove. Imbrasas slumped, and Almis released him to fall onto the floor. The room smelled of singed meat and hair.

Almis turned to Lukas and Lakstingala. “Get the other one in the car outside.”

Lakstingala nodded and the two men went out.

The soldier in the car had not heard anything from within the house, but he saw them coming and tried to get out of the car to free his rifle. They shot him through the door and the window before he could escape.

Daylight was fading, and no one would come out looking for the dead men that night. Lukas and Lakstingala dragged out Imbrasas's body, fired a few rounds into his neck to make it seem that bullets had killed him, and then put both bodies in the back seat of the car.

“Let us rest for a couple of hours,” said Lakstingala, “and then we'll drive far away with the bodies. No one will even know they were here. The rain will wash the tracks away from the lane.”

“But what if he told someone where he was going?” asked Vida. She would not let go of the baby. It had been swaddled and had made no direct contact with the frying pan, though the edges of the cloth had been singed, but she had unwound the cloth and swaddled it anew. The baby was strangely quiet now. Vida, on the other hand, was not calm.

“It's unlikely he told anyone he was coming here, but even if he did, we'll drive the car back in the direction he came from for a few kilometres and then set it on fire in the forest. It will look like they were ambushed before they got here. If you're lucky no one will even ask you about them.”