Antanas Sileika - Underground

“I can get out the way I came, by boat.”

“Maybe. I can’t say if that’s possible or not.”

“If worse comes to worst, I can get false papers and live legally.”

“How easy do you think that would be? If it were possible, a lot of others would have done the same thing.”

“Lakstingala, my friend, your song is as bad-tempered as ever. I have every intention of finding Lozorius to determine if my wife is alive. You can help me if you like or you can go back to your bunker and stew all winter long.”

“Oh, I’m coming along. I have a soft spot for love stories. But don’t expect any sympathy from me if it’s all a lie.”

THE WEATHER turned against them as Lukas and Lakstingala made their way south to search for Lozorius. It snowed by night and rained by day, and all across the country the roads and paths were full of Cheka cars and Cheka troops, as well as slayer units swarming like bees.

“Is it always like this?” asked Lukas when they had hidden among thin winter bushes yet again for a couple of hours while water dripped down their collars.

“Not usually quite this bad. They must know you’re here and they’re turning the country upside down.”

“I’m hundreds of kilometres away from where we landed.”

“Maybe your friends were caught. Maybe Lozorius gave you away somehow. You’re a bit of a legend and word of you must have got out.”

“Legend? I’d rather be invisible.”

“Well, a legend helps to raise the morale of the people, but it also raises the bounty on your head.”

The danger passed, and they came out from behind the bushes to walk through the rain, in one way better than the snow because they left no tracks, but in another way worse because the mud adhered to their boots and they had to stop every fifteen minutes to scrape it off.

Partisans had become like wolves whose pelts brought income to bounty hunters in a hungry country.

“Has the number of collaborators risen so high?” Lukas asked.

They were standing among the cows in a barn by night, hoping to borrow a little heat before moving on.

“Collaborators,” said Lakstingala ruefully. “What a funny word. We don’t use it anymore. You only call someone a collaborator if you’ve defeated him. If the Germans had won, there wouldn’t have been any German collaborators either—the very idea would have seemed odd. Now the Reds are winning, so there can be no Red collaborators. Anyway, as time goes by, more and more of our people have to find a way to survive.”

“I never thought you’d have sympathy for traitors.”

“I don’t, but I need to understand them if I hope to live on. When you were last here it was so much simpler. In those days they simply tried to kill partisans, but now they try to capture us and turn us and send us back to smite our former friends.”

“ Smite ? That’s an unusual word. It sounds medieval.”

“Coined by the Cheka. They call the turned partisans ‘smiters.’”

Lukas laughed. “Yet another way of getting us.”

“Partisans are the last free people, and it gives me some satisfaction to know we can still irritate the Reds even if we can’t defeat them. But every day we have to be more and more wary. They’ve become subtle in getting co-operation from the farmers. We don’t eat with the farmers much anymore, not unless we know them very well.”

“Why not?”

“Another one of the new tricks they brought in after you left the country. The Cheka handed out sleeping potions to farmers and told them it was their responsibility to trap us. If partisans came asking for food, the farmers were supposed to put the sleeping potion in it. Some of our people just disappeared that year because the farmers were afraid to make the potion too weak, so they made it too strong. Nineteen forty-eight was the year of sleep, and some of our partisans haven’t woken up to this day.”

“What farmer would do that?”

“You’d be surprised. One day I went out with a partisan called Anupras to get milk from a certain farmer. We needed to keep shifting around so we weren’t asking the same people for food all the time. We were being careful, so I waited for him in the forest when he went to the farmhouse, but he was taking a long time. I went looking and finally found him, wandering along the path, falling down and getting up and then falling again. He’d lost his firearm. I could tell by his eyes that he was drugged, and pretty soon he passed right out. We were on our own, and knowing the Cheka wouldn’t be far behind I dragged him off the path as far as I could.

“I laid him in a hollow and took away any identifying papers then covered him with mosses and pine needles. I sprinkled the area with lamp oil and tobacco to confuse the dogs, and then swam across a nearby river to see what would happen from a hiding place on the other side.

“The Chekists arrived soon enough, three cars of men and dogs. They searched high and low, but they didn’t find him. Later the next day Anupras woke up and crawled out of his hollow. His face was dirty and his pants were torn. The soldiers were still around, but they were looking for an armed man, and Anupras was not just unarmed but also disoriented, like some sort of village idiot. He wandered around until he came across a farmer who knew him and managed to get him back to the partisans.”

“It sounds like some sort of fairy tale.”

“More like a horror story. Anupras said he’d had a few glasses of milk. The sleeping potion must have been poured into the milk, but the fat in the milk inhibited the effect of the drug.”

“Did you get the farmer?”

“He ran away somewhere, but not to America.”

“America? Why do you say that?”

“He was the American farmer. You remember him?”

“He helped to teach me English.”

“Well, if you ever run across him again, shoot him.”

“What happened to Anupras?”

“He was never the same after that. His mind had been damaged. We managed to get him into a mental institution where they have others like him.”

The weather was terrible. When they reached the outskirts of their old district six days later, the duel between rain and snow had settled into a compromise of freezing rain. By then they had been cold and wet for so long that they barely remembered what it meant to be dry.

Lakstingala knew a farmhouse where the owners were friendly, but he hesitated to go there because the farmer was under suspicion of the Cheka, and Lakstingala did not want to get him into trouble or stumble onto a closely watched site.

“It’s a risk,” he said to Lukas as they stood outside the house of squared logs and thatch, “but we’ll die of pneumonia if we don’t dry out and warm up for a while, and it doesn’t look as if anyone’s around. You wait here.”

Lakstingala knocked at the door as Lukas squatted among the gooseberry bushes, intensely aware that the cover of bushes was poor in the winter. A young woman with a thick, dark braid met Lakstingala at the door. They spoke for a moment and a man joined them, and then Lakstingala waved Lukas over.

It was a small house, deliciously warm inside, just a vestibule and two rooms. A new baby was in a basket hanging from a beam in the combined sitting room, dining room and kitchen, swinging gently from side to side. The farmer was a young man named Almis, and his wife was Vida. They both knew Lakstingala and took no notice of his regret at bothering them, being distant cousins whose sense of hospitality had not yet been destroyed by the times.

Almis and Vida charmed Lukas, and gave him a whiff of melancholy as well for the life he might have had in a different time. He had vaguely hoped to have children one day, and the sight of the baby, swaddled and with a knitted cap on her head, awoke the old desire in him. But it did not do to have such thoughts. They could only make his heartache worse if he dwelled upon them.