Antanas Sileika - Underground

He heard the farmer behind him and pulled away, embarrassed now in the moment after their embrace. She stepped inside and shut the door behind her.

“If I’d known you were here I would have come earlier,” she said, taking off her hat and shaking out her hair, “but I expected you two days ago and thought something had happened.” Every plan that the partisans made was contingent—on the ability to travel, on the local risk, on messages being delivered accurately.

The farmer was grasping his hand and apologizing. He had been warned not to give anything to suspicious men who appeared in the night. There were agents provocateurs among the Reds and the slayers, and he had assumed Lukas was one of them. His wife tried to make amends as well, heating the previous evening’s soup for them, cutting squares of bread and spreading them thickly with butter, making tea.

They talked of things in general over the table, of the harvest and weather, of politics and the trainloads of goods that chugged through the forest on the railway from Germany, where the Reds continued to strip the towns and cities to rebuild their own. The farmer listened attentively, trying to glean whatever information he could. There was no real news to be had in the ordinary way, so he tried to piece together details to create some picture of what the future might hold for him.

As for Lukas, he spoke in the optimistic, encouraging way of the partisans, who saw it as their duty not only to fight the Reds but also to preserve the morale of the people. Elena did not speak much. He sensed that the farmer knew her. He looked at Elena as much as he could but tried not to stare.

After they had eaten, Lukas and Elena went out to the garden and sat on a secluded patch of grass behind the currant bushes so they could speak freely. It was the season of grasshoppers, which leapt from the newly dried grass in the morning sun. Bees hummed around the flowers in the garden by the house, and a single cricket sounded from near the foundation.

Lukas looked closely at Elena. She did not have the worn, pale look of those who spent most of their time in bunkers. It was summer, and she must have been coming out to bask in the sun, which was good for her skin but bad for her life expectancy. He intended to admonish her, to beg her to take better care of herself for his sake, but when she looked up at him he lost all need to speak and laid one hand on her shoulder to hold her as he kissed her. He held her tightly against himself for a while, stroking her hair. She smelled good to him, and he lifted her hair to nuzzle up against the side of her neck. He had been away from her for so long.

“Is there a place where we can be alone?”

She took him by the hand and led him out through the gate in the yard. She led him down the lane toward the forest, and then across a piece of scrubland along the banks of a brook to a place where the bushes grew in a dense mass and the brook flowed into a small river. At a bend of the river they came upon a high bank with a beard of roots and grasses hanging down. Elena reached down and pulled aside a mat of branches that had been woven together to camouflage the hatch of a bunker, and then pulled open this door and motioned for him to go ahead of her.

The bunker was dark except for the light cast by the open hatch. It was tiny, a temporary hiding place for two with nothing more than a narrow wooden bed frame and a little space beside the bed for a table built into the corner and a stool beside it. The walls were rough boards papered over with newspapers to keep the grit from coming through inside.

“I didn’t realize bunkers could be private like this,” said Lukas. The life of partisans, for all its fugitive nature, was the life of people in groups. One was never alone.

“I’ve been expecting you. I made arrangements. Sit on the stool and take off your shoes.”

He set down his briefcase and did as he was told while Elena pulled the hatch shut most of the way, leaving it open a thumb’s width so a narrow crescent of light could seep in. He reached for her, but she squeezed his hand and pushed it aside. She pulled an open box with two down comforters from beneath the bed. One she placed on the bed frame as a mattress, the other she pushed to the far side of the bed so they could pull it over themselves later.

Lukas had taken off his shoes and now he reached up for her again, and she bent to kiss him. She undressed quickly, lay down on the bed and held up the comforter like a tent. The crescent of light fell across her face, barely illuminating her body. As Lukas climbed in beside her, she drew the comforter around themselves.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m nervous.”

“Are you afraid?”

“I’ve wished for this for a long time, but I might not be good at it.”

“Then we’ll practise together.”

Afterward, they lay quietly for a while.

“How was your life after you went underground?” asked Lukas.

“I missed you while we were apart,” said Elena. “At some of the harder moments I wondered if we would ever have a time like this.”

“Now we do.”

“At last. Before you came it was nothing like the day we met last summer, when the camp was big and the men sang and danced. The group of partisans who took me here were so worried about my safety that they kept me in a bunker for the first three weeks. They never let me go farther than a hundred metres away unless a pair of men escorted me. They were so careful with me that I felt like I was being smothered.”

“The Reds must have been combing the forests for you.”

“Oh, they looked long and hard for you and me, but the trail is cold and they have other things to worry about now. So do we, I might add. My band attacked a train. Eventually the slayers and the Reds will come through here, looking for revenge.”

“When?”

“No one knows for certain, but soon.”

“We’ll get going back to Flint’s when it’s dark. But along the way I need to look in on my parents by Rumsiskes. I want them to meet you.”

“Your parents?”

“Yes.”

“Does that mean you want to marry me?”

“Yes.”

She laughed a little sadly.

“What’s wrong? I thought you’d be happy.”

“Oh, I am. I need a new family. I’ve been thinking of you for months, ever since the night we shot all those people in my room in Marijampole. I shudder to think of that now.”

“Do you regret it?” Lukas asked.

“Yes.”

He misunderstood and was stung. “What part?” he asked.

“I shot two men that night. Two on my first night. Imagine! I’ve killed more since then, but that was at a distance, in firefights. I’m not the same anymore. That night changed me forever.”

“None of us chose this. It was thrust upon us. What else do you regret?”

“What we did to my sister. I thought the authorities would grasp that she wasn’t involved with the executions. If she had known, we wouldn’t have left her behind. But now she’s been deported to the Komi Republic.”

It was a bad place—very cold, worse than Siberia.

“And is there anything else you regret?”

“I don’t regret anything else, no.”

Lukas kissed her again.

“Do you really want to marry me?” Elena asked.

“What a strange question.”

“I mean, where will you find a priest to do it?”

“I know one in a small parish in Nedzinge.”

“I have another idea as well.”

“What is it?”

“There’s a new amnesty coming out. Stop! I know what you’re going to say, that the Reds can’t be trusted. But listen to me. If we married first and took the amnesty, and if they did betray us and deported us, at least we’d be together.”