Antanas Sileika - Underground

“Remember when I said my uncle was in the diplomatic corps before the war? He still knows some people here. He told me you made a good impression on him and he asked me to speak to you about something.”

She had become very still. His head was totally clear now and he felt as if he perceived her more intensely than ever before.

“The Deuxième Bureau might be interested in you, and the French have a tradition of helping refugees. I could speak to him if you think you might like to stay here.” The Deuxième Bureau had been the name of the French military intelligence before the war, now changed to the SDECE.

Lukas weighed the proposition. It did not take long to come to a conclusion. He was marooned, and who would have guessed that exile so far from home could be so good as this?

“I think I would like it very much if you spoke to him,” he said.

There was an awkward moment. He lighted a cigarette and smoked it, and they made a couple of attempts at conversation, but they could not find it in themselves to spend what remained of the afternoon over their cups of coffee, so Lukas paid the bill.

“Do you still have time to walk?” Lukas asked.

“I do.”

They crossed the Seine at the Pont des Arts and began to walk along the narrow sidewalk toward the boulevard St-Germain. At one especially tight spot a car was coming, and he fell behind her. The street was empty and the shadows were already beginning to lengthen. As he stepped back, his hand brushed hers, and thinking it was a sign of some kind, after the car passed, Monika turned around to look and see what he wanted. He was right up close to her, not having expected her to turn, and in this proximity it seemed as if the right thing to do was to kiss her.

She did not seem startled, although he had surprised himself. The touch of her lips was so pleasant that he wanted to kiss her again. She did not seem startled the second time either.

PARIS

JULY 1948

LUKAS LINGERED in Paris, sleeping in a Lithuanian radio repairman’s shop by night and hoarding his dwindling cash reserves. Monika urged him to be patient, as her uncle tried to get him a meeting with someone from the SDECE.

The world that her uncle operated in, one of back-channel French contacts, moved very slowly. And even after it began to move, it sputtered to a stop again because few seemed to be very interested in Lithuania, let alone the Lithuanian partisans. And those who were interested had their own reasons. The French, it turned out, were not all that different from the British.

Wheels turned within wheels in France: the Communists had been important in the French underground, and they resented the concept that “resistance” could be attributed to anyone but them, or that the enemy could be anyone but the Nazis, as they called them here, to distinguish them from the Germans. It was confusing as well to the French that the crime of collaboration could be extended to those such as slayers, who worked for the Reds. Weren’t the Reds anti-fascists? If so, Lukas had to be an anti-anti-fascist, which made him a fascist.

And who could tell, as far as the French were concerned, which of these émigrés from the East was a former ally of the Germans? Hadn’t some of the Lithuanians greeted the Germans with flowers in 1941? It would have been preferable if they’d greeted the Red Army with flowers.

Already a kind of amnesia about Eastern Europe was setting in. One forgot about the place altogether, or muddled it so that Ukrainians, Estonians and Byelorussians were all the same, no more than renegade Russians. And to be Russian was to be Soviet. Anyone who opposed them was an old-fashioned white, a reactionary of the kind that filled Paris back in the twenties.

Lukas was confused by French politics and perplexed by this hostility to his nationality. People in France sometimes seemed angry with him because he insisted that his people existed. As one man in a café said to him, “All of you people from nowhere insist on your nationality more than anyone I know.” Lukas’s people were an inconvenient people.

Until they became convenient.

Forces that were as far removed from Lukas as the stars needed to align in his favour, and on June 24, 1948, they did. The Soviets closed down road entry to West Berlin to the British, French and Americans. The Soviets intended to starve them out, but the Allies began an airlift of food and fuel into the city. The operation was chaotic at first, with plane crashes, fires, and logjams of bread, gasoline and small-arms ammunition. To have someone from behind Soviet lines might be a good thing after all, and so Lukas became useful and the French noticed that he existed.

The transformation of his fate happened very quickly. Where initially his interviews had started late, making the point that he was an afterthought, or were cancelled altogether, making the point that he was expendable, suddenly higher officials in more pleasant offices were meeting him on time. The gnomes who peopled these offices began to consider him useful.

Soon after the airlift to Berlin began, the French government gave Lukas a visa, a generous salary and a room in a small residential hotel off the boulevard Montparnasse. Since his French was not particularly good, they registered him in a course at the Alliance Française on the boulevard Raspail, and there he spent four hours each morning working on his grammar, his future imparfait . He was promised further training in ciphers, radio, Morse code and skydiving, but those courses would come only after his French was good enough.

There had been a great rush to sign him up, so much so that he thought he might be back in Lithuania within weeks, and then the gnomes disappeared and there seemed to be no hurry at all. The bureaucrats had put him in a drawer and they would open it when they needed him. Every week an envelope with cash awaited him at his hotel desk, and his room and his courses were paid for. So he began his French domestic life; he had not lived so normally since before the war.

Late one afternoon, Lukas walked out and strolled along the street before the shop windows, studying the tins of food in the displays, the incredible variety of items he had never imagined. Prunes in Armagnac were familiar enough, but chestnuts remained a romantic mystery to him. They fascinated him because a childhood poem had mentioned the scent of chestnuts roasting in the streets of Italy. The Jambon de Bayonne, the dried ham hanging in the charcuterie window, fascinated him as well, for the meat was not smoked and he did not see how it was possible for meat to dry without going bad unless it spent some time in a chimney. He had never seen sea urchins or oysters, eaten asparagus or artichokes. Even the horse butcher provided him with a kind of dark fascination.

He walked through the Luxembourg Gardens. It seemed that everything cost money in Paris, but the park was free and the exotic palm tree in front of the palace by the fountain was a reminder of the unlikelihood of his existence in France. From there he made his way down the boulevard St-Michel and across the Seine toward the Bastille, to the small apartment shared by Monika, her mother and her sister in the Marais district, a decidedly less exotic part of Paris, the former Jewish neighbourhood now filled with working people and immigrants from Eastern Europe.

Dinner was always rushed. Monika’s cheerful mother hurried them along through a light meal because she would soon have piano students in the apartment all evening. They ate bread and butter, and a bowl of vegetable soup on the side—not cabbage soup, because it made the apartment smell bad and some of the students did not like it. Lukas brought slices of ham to put on their bread.