Underground (20 page)

“I tell you, you won't get any support unless you offer them something.”

“Like what?”

“Information. Red Army troop disposition, airfield locations, fuel dumps, the number of ships in port and where they're from, train schedules, economic news, lists of names and command structures . . .”

“We don't have any of that.”

“What did you bring?”

“A letter to the Pope from the partisan command. Photographs of dead bodies laid out in marketplaces. Rough numbers of deportees. There have been thousands sent away, tens of thousands. We have identity card samples and various other blanks—passports, police identification, as well as samples of stamps of all sorts.”

“That's not bad. That's a good start. I like the letter to the Pope, a nice touch. But then, the Pope doesn't have any divisions, does he?”

An appeal to the Pope as the highest moral authority had seemed to make perfect sense in Lithuania, but now Lozorius made it sound naive. Lozorius saw Lukas's discomfort and made him swallow another glass of vodka.

“So what exactly do you intend to do out here?” asked Lozorius.

“To represent the partisans to the Lithuanian government-in-exile, to get help, to raise funds.”

“I'm already doing all that. Too bad communications are so poor—they could have saved the lives of some good men if they hadn't tried to get you out without checking with me. I could use your help here, of course.”

He let the moment hang in the air. Lukas sensed there was a control issue here. He didn't care.

“That's what I'm here for,” said Lukas. “To help.”

Lozorius nodded, accepting the concession.

It was late at night by the time Lozorius finally stood up to go. He left two fingers of vodka in the bottle.

Lukas was tired and this was the first good bed he had been offered in some time, but after Lozorius left he hesitated to lie down until he was sure he would fall asleep quickly. Otherwise, Elena would visit him in his mind. She wasn't the only ghost—an entire trail of dead had somehow brought him to this comfortable cot in a Polish coastal town. He could not quite understand why they had died and he had lived.

He drank the last of the vodka, took off his shoes and lay down on the bed. But when he closed his eyes, sleep did not come for a long time. Elena was there, always there. First in his waking mind and then in his dreams, until he mercifully fell into unconsciousness.

In the four days that followed, Lukas was visited often by Lozorius as well as by a mute nun who brought him trays of food. Once he had eaten he felt restless, and so Lozorius took him for long walks by the winter sea.

They talked about how long the partisans could hold out. Of the importance of contacting the Ukrainians and other Baltics, the Estonians and Latvians. Of the Polish resistance. Of the terrible killers of Jews, collaborators who had tarred the reputations of their own countries in the West. All of this until the wind off the seas became too much and they returned to drink tea in Lukas's room.

At the end of the fourth day, Lozorius told him to be ready to leave the next morning. “Write a letter to go back into Lithuania. We'll drop it with the Dombrowskis.”

“The Dombrowskis asked me not to go there. They said they were being watched.”

“Bakers are nervous types. I'll do the drop-off on the way to the harbour.”

The following morning, they boarded the train and rode back to Gdynia. Lukas was to wait on a street corner as Lozorius took his letter to the Dombrowskis, but from the distant corner Lukas could see that the door of the shop was locked.

“What does it mean?” Lukas asked when Lozorius returned.

“Who knows? It's odd to close a shop on a Tuesday, though. I'm going to drop this off at the post office.” He left Lukas at a tea shop and then returned half an hour later and they headed out into the port.

“How is this ‘leaving the country' done?” Lukas asked.

Lozorius laughed. “Simple. Just watch me.”

It was a windy day, and although the harbour had not frozen in, there were lumps of ice in the eddies around the piers and slick spots on the quays where an unwary walker could slide under the chain at the edge and into the sea. The pier Lozorius took him out upon was empty of people, but there were two ships tied up a hundred yards apart. Lozorius led Lukas up to the second one.

“This is it,” he said.

“You know someone on board?”

“No, but it's a Swedish ship and it will be going back there eventually. We'll just set up under a tarp and wait until we get there.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

The drop down to the ship was over three metres, and Lozorius went first so Lukas could drop his backpack down to him. After they had scouted around to make sure no one was looking, they made their way under a tarpaulin on the deck that covered odd pieces of heavy machinery.

“Now we wait,” said Lozorius. “I hope you remembered to put on your long underwear.”

TWELVE

SWEDEN
FEBRUARY 1948

T
HE LARGE
twin-funnelled ferry upon which they had stowed away sailed from Gdynia in Poland to Trelleborg in Sweden, hauling rail cars and trucks. The winter wind seemed to find every gap between the tarp and the deck, and the rocking of the ship made Lukas sick. Lozorius did not seem to be affected, or he didn't show it. The journey lasted only twelve hours but it felt much longer, and Lukas could barely straighten out his legs for their numbness when it came time to disembark.

The guard at the gangway in Sweden seemed unsurprised when two half-frozen men with large knapsacks appeared at the bottom of the gangplank. Lozorius addressed him in Swedish and the guard escorted them to a small, self-contained room at the customs shed onshore and locked the door behind them.

The whole process had seemed very relaxed, but Lukas did not like being locked up.

“Don't worry,” said Lozorius. “These are all formalities.”

“In the old days you didn't like being locked up either.”

“You're in a new place and you have to adapt to it. The dangers out here are not the same as they were back home.” Lozorius smoked cigarettes and looked out of the window as they waited.

Lukas studied the man across the room from him, draped comfortably across a bench as if between trains in a railway station. Lukas had not known him well when they were students, and it seemed odd that this slight and unpretentious man should have developed such a reputation among the partisans. Maybe it was his very ease in unfamiliar circumstances that gave him his standing. Lozorius knew he was being looked at, but it didn't seem to bother him. He even seemed to enjoy it.

A policeman came and Lozorius surrendered a revolver he had in an inside pocket of his coat. The policeman set the revolver on a desk and wrote out a receipt for it. A woman appeared with two tin cups of sweet tea and a ten-pack of cigarettes, and then locked them in again.

“What a country,” said Lukas, looking at the burning end of the cigarette. Even the paper seemed fine, almost too fine to burn up. Everything back home was coarse in comparison.

Another policeman came and took Lozorius away for a while.

Lukas had felt comfortable enough in Poland—it was a neighbouring and familiar country—but Sweden was completely unnerving. He was in a foreign country where the rules were utterly unknown to him. The calm proceedings to deal with stowaways seemed odd and a little intimidating, as if he had stumbled into a country of lords and ladies where his peasant background would make him seem uncouth. He was accustomed to watchfulness and danger, yet even when there was no danger the habit of vigilance would not leave him. He felt restless and uneasy. Some part of him wished he could withdraw to the underground again.

Lukas looked out upon the port from the very small window. There was not much to see; a series of carts on steel wheels blocked his view. Sweden was a good country, he hoped, but he really didn't know.

Two hours later, the door was unlocked and the tea lady took him through the blustering winter wind to a long black car with a driver, where Lozorius was waiting in the back seat. When Lukas got in, he found a boxed lunch with sandwiches and a Thermos of tea as well as a small bottle of aquavit on the seat between them. It was a right-hand-drive car, the first that Lukas had ever seen.

“How did you manage this?” Lukas asked as the driver put the car in gear and drove away.

“They know me here. We're in for a long drive to Stockholm. Have something to eat and then try to get some sleep. We'll be driving through the night.”

Not for the first time that day, Lukas wondered how he ever would have managed without Lozorius.

Lukas intended to stay awake, but once he had eaten, it became dark, the fantastically early night of the northern latitude. Then he drank some aquavit and fell asleep with the taste of caraway on his lips. It was a flavour very common in this part of Europe, one that reminded him of home.

Lukas spent the next eight days in an empty warehouse on the waterfront of Stockholm, writing reports about the political, economic and social conditions in Lithuania. Lozorius would take the papers he had written and disappear for hours, sometimes overnight, and then return with questions or requests for rewrites.

“Why is this taking so long?” Lukas asked.

“You arrived from
terra incognita
. They need to figure out the place you come from and what kind of animal you are and if they can trust you.”

“Couldn't you just vouch for me?”

“It's not so simple. They never trust anyone completely. And people change. The man you knew a year ago might be a different man today.”

“I haven't changed. I'm still the son of a farmer.”

“Don't pretend to be simpler than you are. You're the one who took part in the seizure of Merkine. The one who shot down a whole tableful of dinner guests. The one who evaded capture for two years while others were dying or being taken prisoner, and then crossed the border successfully. You're almost too good to be true.”

“What does that mean?”

“Just that you're quite a prize. You even make me look good. I was getting a little stale for them.”

“Stale?”

“I've been here for a long time now. I haven't had much new news since Lithuania's been closed up tight. Just the odd letter was coming out before you appeared, and I couldn't find a way back in. You've given me a new lease on life.”

The warehouse where Lukas lived was at least a hundred years old, all weathered red brick. He had a bed and a table in a corner of the vastness of the space. When he turned the light off, the interior was as dark as any bunker. He felt the vertiginous emptiness of the warehouse, whereas in the bunkers he had felt the oppressive closeness of the earth.

A small door led out to the street, with a canal on the other side of the road. Lukas could walk around all he wanted, but the city was a confusing arrangement of bridges and islands, a metropolis that stymied him. Twice he had become lost for well over an hour, wandering deep into the suburbs. He could not make himself understood to the locals when he asked for directions. He asked Lozorius to write down the warehouse address, and he tried showing this paper to pedestrians whenever he was lost, but he could never understand their explanations. Finally he lost the scrap of paper and reconciled himself to going astray each time he went out.

The city was old and unbombed, a novelty of preservation. Compared to Gdynia it was a museum, with charming old parks and cafés, picturesque in a storybook way. But it was also impenetrable. The people who walked the streets did not seem to have any problems, or at least no problems that showed on their faces. Lukas stared at them intently, as intently as he dared, but he could not see through their strangeness. On the fifth day he was caught staring at a young mother and she looked back at him angrily in a manner that made him understand
he
was the strange one, not they.

He had no money. There was no lack of food or drink back at the warehouse, and he found a new suit of clothes and a fresh pair of shoes laid out for him one day on his bed when he returned from a walk. Yet it felt odd to be unable to buy the simplest things, a coffee or a newspaper. Was he being sent a message? The shoes and suit fit perfectly, which was both comforting and a little disturbing.

On the eighth day he returned to find a man with steel-rimmed glasses and swept-back hair sitting at his table and smoking a cigarette. He seemed to be in his mid-thirties but could have been older. The man rose as soon as Lukas came in and extended his hand and addressed him in Lithuanian.

“Hello. My name is Zoly. Just my nickname, really, short for Pranas Zolynas. I hope I can call you by your first name?”

“Who are you?”

“A friend of Lozorius. Yours too, I hope, in the long run. We're on the same side. I worked with the Lithuanian embassy here before the war, and the Swedes took me in after it was all over.”

“That was kind of them.”

“In a way, yes, but the Swedes don't waste their kindness. Let's not forget, the Swedes immediately recognized the incorporation of Lithuania into the Soviet Union and gave our embassy to the Reds. That wasn't so kind. They put me out of a job in the first place. Since that time I've tried to be useful to the Swedes in small ways, and they are useful to me in return.”

“Where's Lozorius?”

“Not in Sweden at the moment, I'm afraid.”

“What? He didn't tell me he was going anywhere.” Lukas felt abandoned.

“He does that all the time. One is always happy to see Lozorius, but one should never expect him to be around for long. Like the Holy Spirit, he moves in mysterious ways.”

Zoly smiled and Lukas realized he had made a joke. Lukas was unaccustomed to this kind of playful talk except in the presence of women.