“Your parents?”
“Yes.”
“Does that mean you want to marry me?”
“Yes.”
She laughed a little sadly.
“What’s wrong? I thought you’d be happy.”
“Oh, I am. I need a new family. I’ve been thinking of you for months, ever since the night we shot all those people in my room in Marijampole. I shudder to think of that now.”
“Do you regret it?” Lukas asked.
“Yes.”
He misunderstood and was stung. “What part?” he asked.
“I shot two men that night. Two on my first night. Imagine! I’ve killed more since then, but that was at a distance, in firefights. I’m not the same anymore. That night changed me forever.”
“None of us chose this. It was thrust upon us. What else do you regret?”
“What we did to my sister. I thought the authorities would grasp that she wasn’t involved with the executions. If she had known, we wouldn’t have left her behind. But now she’s been deported to the Komi Republic.”
It was a bad place—very cold, worse than Siberia.
“And is there anything else you regret?”
“I don’t regret anything else, no.”
Lukas kissed her again.
“Do you really want to marry me?” Elena asked.
“What a strange question.”
“I mean, where will you find a priest to do it?”
“I know one in a small parish in Nedzinge.”
“I have another idea as well.”
“What is it?”
“There’s a new amnesty coming out. Stop! I know what you’re going to say, that the Reds can’t be trusted. But listen to me. If we married first and took the amnesty, and if they did betray us and deported us, at least we’d be together.”
“The men and the women who were deported in 1941 were separated,” said Lukas. “It takes cattle cars a month to reach Siberia. Some of them would have been dead before they got there.”
“But we don’t know what happened to them. Maybe they were reunited in the North. Maybe the labour camps are not as bad as we’ve heard. And who knows, the amnesty might even be real.”
“But we’d have to betray all the men we’ve been fighting with.”
“They could take amnesty too.”
“Elena, listen to me. You and I shot a roomful of Red commissars. They will never forgive us for that, you understand? They won’t just deport us.”
“Lukas, I love you, but the future doesn’t look very bright for you and me. We could throw in our lot together. I’d be like your wife and you could be like my husband. We could sleep together. We could even tell the others we were married secretly. Wouldn’t that be good enough?”
“Why are you saying this? Why don’t you want to marry me?”
“I do, I do. But we live with violence, you and I. Our relationship started with violence and it will end that way too. Maybe it’s better if we’re not married.”
“How is it better?”
“We wouldn’t bring bad luck upon ourselves.”
“I don’t believe in luck. Besides, what we did wasn’t a crime. We were striking back at enemies.”
“I know, I know. But it was horrible. I keep picturing Vinskis. Earlier that night he’d said someone’s head was going to roll for mistakes at work, and then I can see his head dropping after you shot him through the neck.”
“Why are you reminding yourself of these terrible things? Put them out of your mind.”
“I wish I could put them out of my mind. I wish I could wash my mind of that whole night, but it keeps coming back to me, especially the picture of poor Stase in the moments before you shot her.”
“If I hadn’t done that, they would have executed her.”
“I don’t sleep well anymore. I thought I would go out into the countryside and live free, but it feels as if the Reds have captured my soul.”
“All the more reason to marry me, then. I’ll take care of you.”
“Listen, Lukas, you’ve made me a good offer. But I’ve made you a good offer too. We could live together as man and wife, no strings attached. We’d be free as long as we could. But if I married you, you would be responsible for me and I would be responsible for you. If you were captured alive and imprisoned, I would die trying to free you, and you would have to do the same for me.”
“I would anyway.”
“Maybe you would and maybe you wouldn’t. But if you were married to me, you’d need to act against all reason.”
“You make marriage sound so difficult. I think it’s more difficult to live without you.”
“We’d be living on the run.”
“That’s the way we live anyway.”
“We’d have hardly any time alone. We’ll be in bunkers with other men.”
“But at least we’ll be together. I’ve been thinking of you since we first met, and then again from the moment I put the bast slippers on your feet. Even in the presence of other men I can at least touch your hand.”
“And what about the battles we might fight? Don’t you think Flint will be unwilling to have a couple fighting with him? We’ll be a weak link.”
“Flint would let us fight together again. We’ve proved ourselves once. Now stop raising all these objections. What about me? Do you love me?”
“I do.”
“Then that should be enough.”
There was no way they could travel by train together, so they made their way overland toward the Jewish Pine Forest, skirting the villages and towns and staying as close to the woodlands as possible. Elena had given a rifle to Lukas, and they each carried a pair of grenades.
It felt good to have Elena at his side. She had been in the forest long enough to know how to carry herself. And whenever they settled down in a quiet spot at dawn, in a thicket of bushes or tall grasses, they made love again and again, delighting in the discovery of one another’s bodies. Then he would watch over her as she slept first, studying her in the quietness of the morning, secure in the knowledge that she would do the same when he slept later.
They searched for a long time before they found a rowboat to carry them across the Nemunas River. Once safely across on the fourth morning of travel, they made their way into the Jewish Pine Forest.
Lukas scanned the town of Rumsiskes with his binoculars, making sure that no sunlight reflected off the lenses to give him away. The town looked peaceful enough at this distance, though there was a red flag on one of the buildings by the market square. The square was too quiet for this time of day. Something was up.
When he was a child, Lukas had gone to the square with his father on market days, to be treated to bagels or “sailor” candies with a picture of a sailor on the wrapper so attractive that he pinned it up on the wall in his room. When they’d return from the market he’d tell his mother about all the things he’d seen: the farmers selling eggs or piglets off their wagons, the horse market, and the fights between the men who spent their profits in the tavern.
Lukas scanned the square again with his binoculars.
“What do you see?” asked Elena.
“I can’t make out much—just two men in the marketplace, leaning up against a wall. Drunks, I think.”
As they made their way through the sand dunes of the Jewish Pine Forest, Lukas recounted his childhood memories to Elena, about a fort in one tree, a goat caught with horns tangled in a thicket in another spot. It felt good to talk to her about his life before the time with the partisans. He wanted to remember himself in his childhood, a time not that long ago yet utterly remote, a time before the war, which had been going on for his entire adult life.
They made their way down to the perimeter of the forest. All was quiet on his father’s farm and near the house. A single cow was chained in a field, slowly grazing in the range of its reach.