Antanas Sileika - Underground

“I could, but I don’t have a typewriter.”

“We have a typewriter.”

“But I couldn’t very well type at home. Someone would hear the machine and get suspicious, and I don’t have a permit for a typewriter.”

“If we found a place for you to type up these articles, would you do it?”

“Of course I would. I want to make myself useful to the cause.”

Lukas left him where he was and walked out to talk to Lakstingala. Resources were few, but Lakstingala agreed that Rimantas could use the fallback bunker to type. It was dangerous to give up the place, but they had to find somewhere for Rimantas to work, and it would lift the spirits of the partisans and the people if Rimantas wrote out one-page articles that could be circulated.

“Congratulations,” said Lukas when he went back to see Rimantas, “you’ll be writing notes from the underground. You’ll be our partisan Dostoevsky.”

“Let’s not get carried away with our admiration for Dostoevsky,” said Rimantas. “He had his shortcomings.”

SPRING 1950

THE MUD of a Lithuanian spring was legendary, marooning farmers at their homes because the roads were impassable, leaving children barefoot when their boots became stuck in the mud on the way home from school, sinking the horses of reckless riders to the stirrups. No cars ventured into the country. It was a very boring time of year for those who were tired of the winter, but on the other hand it promised weary farmers a little relief from the visitations of government officials, who were well on their way to eliminating the last of the private farms.

Lukas’s hideaway was near a forest, and once the snow was off the ground he could walk there without fear because the bed of needles both supported his weight and then sprang back to wipe out any sign of his passage. Even the barren woods and fields of early spring were fascinating to eyes accustomed to the gloom of a bunker or the single view available from the bunker’s passageway.

Some little movement was happening in the animal kingdom: rats ran above the earth and moles dug a series of tunnels, their underground paths now visible on the earth as humps on the grass, and the magpies and ravens called their harsh warnings in the air. In one place, his eye attracted by a slight reflection, Lukas came upon a tiny spider spinning an optimistic web for insects that were barely awake yet.

By moving from copse to copse, by following overgrown fencelines where the bushes were high, as he ranged a little farther each day Lukas began to understand better where Lakstingala had hidden him, especially when he came upon the farmstead of the American farmer, the traitor who had attempted to drug the partisan Anupras. Lukas watched this place from a distance, and when he moved cautiously forward it became clear that the house was abandoned. No animals moved about the yard and the barn door hung open. The windows at the back of the house were broken and inside he could see smashed bottles and loose papers scattered about.

Nearby was the place where he and his brother had first started their underground lives, and like a man returning to childhood haunts he found the places he remembered much diminished by time. This wreck of a house was the place where he had sat with Flint and the drunken forger to plan his trip to meet Elena.

Twice during his rambling, Lukas caught sight of Rimantas in the distance. The poet had not been shown Lukas’s bunker, but he must have divined it was not far from the place where he was typing the newspaper in his own tiny burrow. Just as soon as the earth dried out a little, Lukas and Lakstingala would need to decamp and dig new bunkers somewhere else. Old bunkers attracted bad luck— sooner or later the Cheka dogs sniffed them out no matter how much lamp oil was sprinkled around.

Upon his cautious return from one such walk, Lukas saw movement near his bunker, and he hung back in the trees to see who was there. From a distance one of the men looked like Lakstingala, but he was not alone. There were some people whom Lukas could trust, and Lakstingala was one of them, but it was good to be cautious just in case Lakstingala himself was being duped. Lukas drew closer with his assault rifle at the ready, but when he was within thirty yards he recognized the unmistakably turned-out ears of the second man and he went to them.

“I was afraid I wouldn’t find you alive,” said Lukas.

“I told you once before, they can’t kill me. They’ve tried again and again. Besides, what kind of a host would I be if I weren’t around to welcome you after I invited you? So you made it into the country all right?”

Lozorius’s colour was very poor. He was like a frog coming out of hibernation, pale, almost translucent. But for all his bad colour, by virtue of being alive, Lozorius was still on a winning streak.

They went inside the bunker and closed the lid behind them. The upper bunk was hopelessly wet, but they could lay their jackets and arms on the lower one and sit around the small table with their feet in a shallow puddle of water.

“Lozorius was almost impossible to get here,” said Lakstingala. “When I finally found him, he grilled me up and down about you. Then he didn’t want to come here, and he wouldn’t let me bring you to his own bunker.”

“What’s this all about?”

“I transmit from my bunker. I run the radio antenna up at night and I send out messages. I also receive. As far as I know I’m the only free radio sending information out of this country, and if the Cheka gets me, the last bit of light will stop escaping from here. No one comes to my bunker.”

There was a flash of the spirit that Lukas remembered, the confidence that made Lozorius so attractive.

“Don’t you give yourself away if you keep transmitting from the same place?” asked Lukas.

“Not if I’m very brief and infrequent. Did you bring a radio?”

“Not me personally. The others I came with might still have theirs, but I don’t know what happened to them.”

“I do. At least one of them is working for the Cheka, but I don’t know if he was always with them or if he was forced into this only after you landed.”

“How can you know that?”

“Because he’s sending information to Stockholm that contradicts mine,” said Lozorius. “He’s trying to undermine my credibility.”

“The Cheka know about you?”

“Of course they do. They’re looking for me so hard I’m afraid to breathe. I’m the last free transmitter in this country—they need to close me down. And here is the irony: I know your compatriot is compromised, and so is Stockholm, for all the good it does me. The villains know I’m here and I know about the villains, but those who might still be honest back in Stockholm can’t tell us apart.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying there is a hole in security somewhere. I had a farmer up in Palanga freelancing for me personally. The forest was full of Cheka troops before you landed, so you were expected. They set a trap for you, but you still managed to slip out. I’m amazed you got away.”

“I was lucky,” said Lukas.

“I hope that’s true.” Lukas looked at him, not quite understanding what he meant at first. “Don’t look so shocked, my friend. You can’t trust anyone anymore, unless it’s someone you’ve known for a long time, and even then you can’t be sure. But Lakstingala is not only lucky, he has a good nose. I knew he’d sniff you out if you were a smiter. I’ve known for a year that there were leaks on the other side.”

“What kind of leaks?”

“The Reds have penetrated either the British or the Swedish secret services. I don’t know which one and I don’t know who betrayed us. It might be Zoly himself, but I don’t think so. He’s too much the diplomat and he doesn’t like to risk himself, so he probably wouldn’t take the chance of playing a double game.”