Antanas Sileika - Underground

“I didn’t see anything. What are you talking about?”

“Vinskis suspects me. He must have said something to Gedrius.”

“Do you want to get out of here?”

“Vinskis and Gedrius are by the door.”

“Say you’re going to the toilet.”

“They might not let me pass. Do you want to wait in here?”

“No, I promised I’d help you. I’m going with you.” Her willingness made him feel warm toward her, but the emotion was brief. He had other things on his mind now.

“Do you have your handbag?” asked Lukas.

“Under the table.” Elena reached beneath the table and withdrew her bag. Inside the other room, the accordionist started up another tune. “Be careful of my sister.”

Lukas nodded and reached into his pockets. He held the Walther PP in his right hand because it was heavier and had eight rounds. The lighter PPK with seven rounds was in his left. Elena had one in her handbag as well.

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.

LITHUANIA

SUMMER 1944

THE 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.