Antanas Sileika - Underground

He kept walking until he felt his shoulders stop shaking and the tears dried from his face. He did not understand how this could be happening to him. He faced losses no worse than many other people had suffered, and they had seemed to survive. What right did he have to be overcome in this way? The whole room he had spoken to, the whole DP camp, had stories of loss; it was the responsibility of every man and woman to keep up morale, not to let depression get to them. Not everyone could. Some were taken away to psychiatric hospitals, and others hanged themselves in the night. Still others walked around with smitten looks, or went on drinking binges that lasted for days.

To fall into despair was to become a casualty of one kind or another, a victim of Red success, and he was damned if he would let himself become one. But he did not know how to stop these unbearable emotions from washing over him.

He walked for a long time. The April sun felt warm on his face, although the angle was beginning to change and the colour of the fields around him yellowed in the late afternoon light. It was time to turn around. When he did so, he saw a distant figure approaching along the road. He feared it might be Monika, and his fears were confirmed when she was close enough to be made out. There was no way to avoid her.

She had tied her hair back in a scarf, though a strand of it showed on her forehead. There was a thick streak of dirt on her coat and on the sleeve as well.

He spoke out first. “You’ve fallen in the mud. I’m very sorry.”

“It’s nothing.” She was searching his eyes and put her hands out toward him as soon as she was close enough. He took them in his, startled at her sudden proximity.

“I must have embarrassed you back at the cafeteria,” Lukas said.

“No, I’m the one who’s at fault. I was making fun of you in a way, I suppose, and you shouldn’t make fun of some things.”

“It’s not that. You triggered a very strong memory in me. I’ve had some losses, you know. Not more than anyone else, but still.”

“Yes, I know about your wife.”

He was stunned. “How can you know about her? I didn’t think anyone knew about her.” He had to hold himself back or the tears would well up again.

“Word gets out.”

Now Lukas was mortified. All this time, while he had been on his lecture tour talking about the suffering of the people left behind, the audience must have known about Elena. The sympathy they had lavished upon him was therefore partially due to his own story. This public knowledge of the grief he had held back from himself was completely unbearable. Where he came from, a man did not parade his feelings. There were too many feelings to be had during the war, and the agony of one person did not deserve precedence over the agony of others.

Monika let go of his hands and slipped her arm through his, as if they were old friends. “May I walk back with you?” she asked.

“Of course. I promise I won’t break down like that again.” He was not actually sure he could keep his promise.

“It wouldn’t matter to me if you did.”

They began to walk back toward the town.

“Tell me about where you grew up,” said Lukas. He wanted her to talk as much as possible in order not to have to talk himself.

“I was a city girl, growing up in Kaunas with my sister. My father was in the ministry of education, but his parents and my mother’s parents both came from farm families. It’s funny, but when I think of Lithuania, I don’t think of the city where I spent most of my time. I think of the two farms where we spent the summers. One was a combination farm and mill with a great millpond where we swam all summer long and our grandparents spoiled us. We didn’t have to do anything at all. We were terrible. We’d stay up late, flirting with the farmhands, and then we’d sleep in in the mornings while they had to get up at dawn to go to work.”

“And your parents?”

“My father was taken in the first round of deportations in 1940. They would have taken my mother and us too, but we were vacationing at the farm while he had stayed behind to work in town. He never actually said anything, but I suspect he knew what was coming because he sent us off to the countryside before school was out.”

The Reds had taken many thousands of people right up to the first weeks of June 1941 and shipped them off to the North. When the Germans attacked, the Reds took some of their remaining prisoners with them as they retreated, but many were executed. For all the rush to retreat, some of those the Reds killed were tortured first and their mangled bodies left behind in heaps as lessons to the Lithuanians about anyone who chose to be anti-Soviet. Many of the Jews were immediately massacred by collaborators and Nazis when the Germans came a week later, and most of the rest were killed afterward.

But the fate of many others, including those taken in the first Red deportations, was unclear. They were simply gone. Monika’s father might have died in the cattle cars, or made it to Siberia or the Komi Republic and died there, or survived and be working in a labour camp with no chance of communication. Thus all losses that were indefinite provided seeds of hope. Or of despair, the result of hope that could not be sustained.

“And how did you get to Paris?” asked Lukas.

“My uncle was the military attaché in Paris before the war and he stayed there. He took us in quite early, at the beginning of 1944. We were lucky to be there to see the Liberation. Since then, my mother gives piano lessons and my sister and I have given up our restaurant jobs, but we’re looking for something better now.”

“How is life in Paris?”

“Most people would prefer to go to America. Except for the artists and philosophers—they would prefer to stay in Paris.”

“What would you prefer?”

“My situation is very particular. I can’t leave my mother alone and I don’t know what other country will want to take a middle-aged widow, if she is a widow. And she doesn’t want to go anywhere in case my father does show up somehow. I won’t leave her alone to live on bread and marmalade in some freezing seventh-storey room. I think I’ll have to make my life in France, unless some other opportunity opens up. I’d rather go home, but I’m beginning to think that will never happen.”

They had walked back into the town now. It was late afternoon and the shadows covered the narrow street entirely. It was pleasant walking with Monika. Being with her was like being on a vacation from himself. They were still some distance from the DP camp gates when a young man in eyeglasses, a functionary with the exile government, rushed up to them. Monika let go of his arm, which she had been holding all this time, and stood a little apart from him.

“There is a man who needs to see you at the camp director’s office.”

Lukas turned to Monika. “Thank you for coming out to look for me.”

“Do you think you could make it to Paris to speak to the refugees there?” she asked.

“Who doesn’t want to see Paris? And besides, I’d do it for you.”

“How will we get in touch?”

“The meeting is very important,” the functionary said, pushing his eyeglasses up by the crossbar and peering through them like a fish through a glass bowl.

“Wait for me by the steps to the office,” Lukas said to him. “I’ll meet you there.”

The functionary seemed disappointed in Lukas, but he did as he was told. Lukas turned back to Monika and took her hands in his.

“You’ve lifted my spirits in a way I haven’t had them lifted for a long time. How much longer are you in the camp?”

“We leave by train this evening. Our papers were only for a short visit, to hear you speak. But I can write down my address if you like.”