Antanas Sileika - Underground

“Go tomorrow.”

“No, I can’t stay. I wish I could, but I have to be at work in the morning and I need to leave these papers at home.”

“When will you come back?”

“As soon as I can.”

Time was running out. They stood and she brushed herself off. He took her in his arms one more time, kissed her, and let her go.

VILNIUS

NOVEMBER 1945

THE CITY OF VILNIUS, the new capital of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Lithuania, was a city of ghosts and a city of strangers. The ghosts originated with the Jews and the old Polish ruling class, dead or deported but haunting the city, alarmed by its drastic changes, not so much in architecture, although whole neighbourhoods had been bombed, as in the wholesale disappearance of survivors.

The Polish Home Army had helped seize the city from the Wehrmacht in 1944, only to be disarmed by the invading Reds and deported north to die for their trouble. The Reds gave the city back to the Lithuanians and deported whatever Poles remained to within the new borders of the new Polish state. The Jews, of course, were mostly dead already.

Vilnius had been a provincial city for three hundred years, but now it became a capital again. The Lithuanians who streamed into the city to work as teachers and bureaucrats functioned under the tight leash and watchful eye of their Red masters. The bureaucrats had jobs to do: counting the square footage of destroyed apartments, forming work brigades to clear the rubble where the city had been shelled, and removing religious paintings from the churches so the buildings could be changed into warehouses and museums. Much as the Vilnius residents despised their new overlords, they were under too much scrutiny to organize resistance. Opposition lay with the partisans in the countryside.

As for the ghosts, their sadness went unnoticed by the new inhabitants. If anyone knew about the sorrow of these ghosts, it was those who had managed to escape and live elsewhere, in New York, or Tel Aviv, or Warsaw. With no one to haunt properly, Vilnius’s ghosts were malnourished and sickly, doomed to fade more quickly than phantoms at other sites.

As a result of the war and the emptying of the old inhabitants, Vilnius was both a free city and a dangerous city, empty in so many quarters that a vagabond could live unnoticed for weeks in the rubble yet be subject to unpredictable sweeps by militia, Chekists and Red Army soldiers, who pointed their rifles first and asked for documents second. The detritus of the war, the widows and widowers, the orphans and the estranged, the hurt and the unhealthy, the angry and the mad—all of these pools of people appeared in the city as if from nowhere, speaking languages unrecognized locally and thus as lost as the ghosts.

For all the policing, the place was also full of thieves: desperate men, women and children who could not leave, because either they had no documents, or their offences were too well known, or they had a natural taste for crime and longed to be among others of their kind.

Lukas walked into the city just after dawn with a rough cigarette on his lips, a cap over his eyes and a basket that contained eight cooked beets in their shrivelled skins. He arrived unremarked, among country people who straggled into town to sell whatever they could spare in the marketplace or, better yet, to barter for things they needed.

He made his way across town, through the ruins of the larger Jewish ghetto and over toward the Dawn Gate, one of the medieval city gates where a miraculous painting of the Virgin hung in a shrine untouched by the Reds, the better to attract suspicious elements. Lukas ducked into a side street before he reached that choke point where there was bound to be a documents check. He had false documents, but he did not want to test them.

He walked through the first courtyard and looked for the chalked circle on the archway, found it as expected and then walked into a ruined building, following broken stone steps down to a closed cellar door.

When Elena opened the door, she didn’t recognize him at first, and spoke sharply in Russian and then Polish.

“It’s me,” said Lukas.

She pushed the cap up off his face to reveal his hair falling on his forehead. “Shame on you for frightening me like that.”

Elena pulled the hand-rolled cigarette out of his mouth and threw it on the landing outside before taking him by the sleeve and pulling him into the room. Then she took his face in her hands and pulled him forward to kiss him on the lips.

Each meeting was a gift now that they had found each other. But every joy was sharpened by the knowledge that it might be the last one. The sheer luck of their survival, to say nothing of the ability to meet, was like a small miracle. Lukas pulled away, put down the basket and held her in his arms for a while before kissing her again.

The cellar was dark and cool and smelled of mould. An artillery shell had come through the roof and both floors to embed itself unexploded in the cellar. It would lie there quietly until 1971, when an ambitious and ahistorical home renovator would tap its side with a hammer and blow up himself and the old woman living in the flat above. But for now it lay quiet, waiting.

The only light in the cellar came from the hole the shell had left in the floor above, a miniature skylight.

“No one else came with you?” asked Elena.

“No.”

“So what happened to that atomic bomb of yours? I haven’t heard anything about Moscow in flames, have you?”

“Not yet. That’s what this meeting is going to be about.”

“Do you think there’s still hope for a war?”

“Oh yes, eventually. We just have to keep our spirits up.”

“Easier said than done.”

It was hard to see Elena clearly in the dimness, especially with the light from the air shaft to her back, but he didn’t really need to see her face in detail. He felt her presence, her warmth, an emission of tenderness that needed no light to be seen.

“My spirits are good,” said Lukas. “If you feel bad all the time, the Reds have won. I want them to feel the sting of my whip on their asses. That uplifts me. When I looked around the city on my way into town, I saw nothing but downcast people on their way to work. We’re becoming a nation of serfs. I, for one, refuse to be downcast.”

Lukas looked at Elena, slightly embarrassed by this speech. She stood up on her tiptoes and kissed him. “You lift my spirits too, when we’re together. Sometimes I think we should make ourselves some very fine false documents and then find a forgotten corner of this country and settle down to live.” She said it quickly, knowing he wouldn’t like the idea.

“That would make me a deserter. If Flint or any of the others caught us, we’d be shot.”

“I know it’s impossible. But on the other hand, the partisans of one district never really know what’s going on in the next one. If we moved over two provinces, we might be able to do it.”

“To hide from the partisans and to hide from the Reds—we’d be double fugitives. What kind of life would that be?”

“At least we wouldn’t be doomed.”

“Doomed?”

“You can sting the Reds all you want, but they won’t go back home because of you.”

“Maybe not, but at least I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing they didn’t go unpunished.”

“That’s what I want too. When I think of my brother, and yours as well, I rage and rage, but feel impotent. Why are the Americans so selfish with their bomb? Why can’t they help us with it?”

“I don’t know.”

A table and four chairs stood in the corner of the ruined cellar, trash left behind by other scavengers. The chairs looked wobbly and mean. Lukas set his basket upon the table.