Antanas Sileika - Underground

“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.