Antanas Sileika - Underground

“Are you from Rumsiskes?” he asked.

“No, Kaunas. My parents had a house on the same street as the university residence, and I would see you and the other students going to lectures when you were in your first year. My sister and I were still schoolgirls and we used to admire you all from a distance.”

“Admire us? What for?”

“Because you were older and seemed so sure of yourselves. We didn’t even know what we wanted to do yet, and there you were, you and your friends, sailing along on the journey of life.”

That period seemed utterly remote to him now. “What’s your name?” Lukas asked.

“Monika, but sometimes they call me Monique, since I live in France.”

Lukas had been approached like this many times in the last few weeks, and although it was flattering to have admirers, they made him feel awkward. They considered him many things: a hero, the embodiment of their anger, and a symbol of the life of resistance that they had not chosen because they had fled. He felt like a fraud in all these roles and he longed sometimes for the old friends who knew him from before. And yet that person was gone.

In the eyes of the young people in particular, those his age, he seemed to represent what might have been. They were bored, these DP camp residents, over three years in barracks, some of them, caught between worlds and still unsure of the future. Some of the teenagers who had been schoolchildren when their parents fled now wanted to go back with him to fight.

The poor darlings. No one needed teenagers in the partisan fight, and in any case there was no easy way to get back there.

“I wonder,” said Monika, “if you have any information about those who were deported to Siberia in 1940.”

“Not in particular. None of them ever came back as far as I know, and a lot more followed them.” He hated to disappoint Monika, but there was no use in raising false hopes.

She nodded sadly. “I wanted you to know that I found your talk very moving. I’m very impressed by everything you’ve done.”

“Thank you very much.”

She hesitated and then went on. “I don’t mean to be unfriendly when I ask this—I didn’t want to say anything during question period—but do you think it’s right to continue fighting?”

“What do you propose instead?”

“A whole generation is being cut down. Who will be left in the country in the long run if all of them are killed? Wouldn’t passive resistance be better than fighting?”

“You’re not the first person to say that.”

“I never claimed I was original. I was just wondering.”

“It’s the line that the Chekists try to sell. They keep apologizing for the ‘excesses’ and telling us we should lay down our arms if we really love our country.”

She reddened. “So you think I’m a Chekist too?”

“I didn’t say that. I’m sure your ideas are sincere.”

“But naive?”

“Completely. If you repeat the party line of the Cheka, then you’re helping them whether you know it or not. You must never become confused about your enemies.”

“Maybe it’s no longer a time to kill. Maybe it’s a time to heal.”

“Are you a Catholic?”

“I’m not really all that religious. In my own way I’m a doubter. It’s the more honest reaction, don’t you think? Because if you are a true believer, your cause is assured. It gives you peace of mind.”

“What a ridiculous statement. I’ve had no peace of mind for years. I’ve watched my generation die out in the forests in order to save those behind us. Don’t make me seem like a simpleton.”

She was going to respond, but the door was thrown open and two men came out. “Lukas,” one said, “you can flirt all you want later. But now you have to come back inside and answer more questions.”

Regretting his sharpness, he turned to offer softer words, but Monika had slipped away.

Lukas spent the following morning in a meeting with the émigré government, establishing the groundwork for their relationship with the partisans. There was a shortage of coal in the camp and so the room was very cold, all of them working at the table in their coats and hats, the recording secretary wearing gloves with the fingers cut out. Twenty men representing the various pre-war political parties worked together uneasily, intensely competitive among themselves.

All the discussions about future governments of Lithuania had an air of unreality about them, of detachment from anything that might happen any time soon. Lukas felt ungrounded, as if he were floating in a sea of words.

When the morning meetings ended and Lukas was eating canned corned beef sandwiches with the others, he looked up from his long table in the cafeteria and saw Monika talking by the exit door with another woman her age, a similar-looking woman who must have been her sister. Both had light brown hair and something French about them, a hint of style in the way they wore their scarves.

He had enjoyed the strange meat sandwich. It was a little gelatinous and pleasantly salty. He was surprised by many of the foods he found in Germany, the powdered milk and cornbread and the various tinned foods. American cigarettes were a novelty too, for both their taste and their ability to function as alternate currency.

A priest from the émigré government was explaining that it would take time for the Pope to respond to the letter from the partisans, but Lukas was only listening with half an ear. He excused himself and walked over to Monika.

“How are you today?” he asked.

No emotion of any kind showed on her face. “I’m as fine as I was yesterday. This is my sister, Anne.” She was maybe a year older than Monika and looked vaguely familiar, another one of the girls from the street of his university residence.

“I thought I might have offended you,” said Lukas.

“You seem to find women’s opinions unserious.”

“I take women very seriously.”

“Do you? It didn’t sound like it.”

“Women in the underground were everything from couriers to machine gunners. We couldn’t have got by without them.”

Suddenly he could not speak anymore. The talk of women in the underground made him think of Elena. Her image rose up in his mind so strongly that he could almost see her, almost believe that if he looked across the room she would be sitting there with the others, wondering why he was talking to this woman.

Lukas stopped speaking and looked up at Monika in panic, afraid he might begin to weep in public, in the middle of a crowd. He excused himself. He tore down the steps of the cafeteria to the ground floor, conscious of the clatter of his shoes and the well-wishers who were trying to say things to him as he ran past them on the steps.

As the hero of the resistance, he was the centre of attention. People looked at him, trying to understand the meaning of this sudden flight. Even out in the yard he could not contain himself, and he walked away from the camp into the town, and then beyond it onto a road in the countryside that led from the plain up toward the nearby mountains.

He walked fast, hoping that if he moved quickly he might even be able to escape from himself.

Most of the snow was gone from the road and the fields, though there were still dirty banks at the roadside and against the fence rails; icy water ran in the ditches from the melt higher up on the peaks. In places there were pools of water on the dirt road and he had to step carefully around them to avoid sinking into the muck. No automobile or cart hazarded the mud on this particular road, and so he was alone. Even the fields were mostly empty, with only some faraway cows nudging the earth to look for grass shoots, their bells plinking irregularly in the distance.