Antanas Sileika - Underground

Monika’s sister, Anne, was a university student studying chemistry and working in the evenings as a receptionist at a clinic, and she was always in a rush, like the other two. Lukas divined that one of the young medical students at the clinic was interested in her, and she returned his attentions.

After dinner, Lukas rode back across town with Monika on the metro, and this trip to the Alliance for her evening classes was filled with talk of their day. He had a few questions about French grammar— such as why they needed two past tenses, the imparfait and the passé composé . Wouldn’t it have made more sense to have only one? And why one set of verb past tenses for speech and another for writing?

She laughed at him then and asked him if he knew how strange their own language was—how it had two plurals, one for numbers from two to nine and another for ten and above; how it did not distinguish between a hand and its arm, a foot and its leg; how it had no word for “bidet.”

Monika had lived long enough in Paris and her uncle long enough in France that the place seemed ordinary to her, whereas to Lukas it was still exceedingly exotic. Monika was his guide in this world, and the possessor of a larger constellation of friends, a group of Lithuanian castaways. All but the ones who had been raised in France were in transition, and had been for years, dreaming of America, Canada and Australia.

Monika kissed him in the corridor of the Alliance before she went into class. They kissed often these days, whenever they could. He settled in to wait for her in the Alliance student café. He was happy to have spent time with her and her family, happy to expect her in two hours, and glad for the book, Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de Nuit , to practise his French.

Therefore he was surprised to feel his mood shifting as he waited for Monika in the Alliance café. She was only in class for two hours, but quickly the shadows in the corridor began to grow long. As his mood thickened, he could no longer read. He tried to write, but there was something about the shadows that made him gloomy. This happened sometimes, more frequently than he liked to admit. The memories rose in him and troubled him.

It crossed his mind that since he never saw the body, maybe Vincentas had just been wounded and captured after all. They would have tortured him if he survived, maybe even shot him after they had squeezed whatever they could get from him. On the other hand Vincentas might have been deported to Siberia and still be alive there. Which would be the worse fate, to be alive in Siberia or dead? Probably alive, because one died alone, whereas if one survived, he took others to their deaths with his information.

Lukas heard laughter from the courtyard outside the café, from young people talking. He envied them their lightheartedness. He could not seem to regain his own lightheartedness, the contentedness of an hour ago. Where had it gone?

And so he brooded for the two hours she was in her class. When she came out, she looked at him and saw immediately that something was wrong.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I wonder if you know how hard things can be for me sometimes.”

“I think I know.” She studied him carefully. He did not ordinarily speak like this.

“And yet my suffering has brought me to you, for which I’m grateful.”

He didn’t go on, but she could tell there was more to say, so she waited. The corridor had emptied of students and the guardian would be skulking nearby somewhere, waiting to lock up and go home.

“But if it was my fate to be brought to you, why did so many have to die to get me here?”

It was an impossible question. Europe was full of people who could ask that same question, but they must not ask it; they were in danger of getting lost among the ghosts if they did.

PARIS

SEPTEMBER 1949

THE RUE DES LIONS ST-PAUL was an exceptionally quiet street in the Marais district of Paris, not far from where Lukas had first spoken to the émigré community almost a year and a half earlier. Between the passage of schoolchildren eastward in the morning and westward in the afternoon, no more than a dozen pedestrians passed below Lukas’s second-storey study. When they did come, he could tell by the clicking of their heels on the narrow sidewalk.

Since the street window faced north, it did not receive much light anyway, and so, having finished his work for the day, Lukas pulled shut the shutters and locked them. The only other windows in the apartment faced the courtyard, where children were sometimes permitted to play if they did not get too loud and irritating to the concierge. The concierge or her husband was almost always at the window in the passageway downstairs.

A little under a year before, Lukas and Monika had been married just around the corner, in the massive Église St-Paul–St-Louis. They had been lucky to get this apartment, a place once rented by Monika’s uncle but vacated when he moved to America at the beginning of 1949. The entire émigré government-in-exile had moved to America, and as many DP camp residents as could were flying away to the U.S.A., Canada, Australia and even New Zealand. Like birds restless for migration, once the first ones took flight, the rest of the flock followed.

But not all. Lukas and Monika were still in Paris with no plans to go anywhere else, at least for now. Monika had to finish her studies and Lukas was not quite ready to abandon Europe.

A sense of unease had come over him once the weather became fine the previous spring, and it grew all that summer. The world was changing again, but it was hard to tell how it would all turn out. The Reds won in China and Mao Zedong came to power. The Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb, helped by Red spies in America who had shown them how to do it. Nobody talked anymore about what good allies the Soviets had been during the war. Maybe the climate for the Lithuanian partisans was getting better, but now that Lukas had been gone for close to two years it was hard to know what their situation might be. World events seemed farther away now. Like anyone else, Lukas thought of his day-to-day life. He had no cause for unease, unless he was unaccustomed to so much stability and happiness. He had put on weight and his clothing was too tight.

Over the past half decade Lukas had never lived in one place for any length of time, and now that he had been living in the apartment for eight months he felt strangely vulnerable, as if he were back at war and his tranquility in the apartment were a trap. Anyone who looked for him would find a sitting target rather than a moving one. Yet who would be looking for him now that he was a private citizen?

Monika was a full-time student in nursing, very busy. The émigré government had asked Lukas to write a book about the partisans, was paying him a little to do it, and he was working away slowly on that, writing for at least the fourth time the story of what he had done after the war. Since he worked at home, he was the one who went out to buy food for dinner after the stores reopened in the late afternoon, and he was the one to clean the place because he was there anyway and Monika was always studying.

This day, Lukas took his shopping basket, stepped out and went down the steps and out into the courtyard and then onto the street, as usual.

If anyone worried him, it should have been the French. Before moving to America, Monika’s uncle had come to explain that the government was filled with Reds and the SDECE was therefore insecure, even dangerous. Sharing information with them was as good as betraying his comrades back in Lithuania. Thus the man who got Lukas into the French secret service in the first place now convinced him to get out. It was an abrupt turn. Dizzying.