Markulis had been a small landholder, ten acres and two children, both of whom worked as hired labour as soon as they were old enough to shepherd geese, and then pigs, and finally cows. Markulis hired himself out too. He had been an angry man, prone to getting into fights, perpetually frustrated by his poverty. Joining the slayers had given him a regular income and kept his son out of the draft. It was a dirty business, but he had helped slaughter pigs and spread manure, so he was used to dirty work.
And now this.
“I’ve known you since you were a boy,” said Markulis. “I remember you as a child on market days, chewing on bagels.”
“Did you remember Algis too?”
“He should have given himself up long ago. He let two amnesties pass. Armed resistance just brings down the wrath of the Reds. You have to play along with them in order to survive.”
“What about your country?”
“That’s over now, and if you think it isn’t, passive resistance is the thing.”
“That’s not resistance at all.”
“You mean you’re loyal to that bourgeois dictator who ruled before the Reds came?”
“There’s more to a nation than the man who rules it.”
Markulis rested his spade for a moment. Lukas kept his distance. The safety on his rifle was off.
“There’s no one but the Reds now. The czar ruled here for a hundred years. The Reds are going to rule here forever, and we’d better get used to it.”
“The Germans said they’d rule forever too, and look how long they lasted. You haven’t even matched their record yet. What do you think is going to happen to you when the Reds fall?”
“They’ll never fall. If I believed they would, I wouldn’t be here.”
“Get back to work,” said Lukas. “I want to be done before dawn.”
Lukas had brought linen sheets from his mother’s house. He had the Markulis father and son wrap each body, place it in a grave and cover it over. His brother’s body caused some problems because it was in two pieces, but he tried not to dwell on that.
When they were done, he told them to stand beside the empty grave. The boy was crying now. His father put his arm over his shoulder.
“This is your grave,” said Lukas, “waiting for you if anything happens to my family or anyone else in this town. Now fill it in.” He took a deep breath. “And remember, it will be easier to dig out a second time.”
Markulis looked up with relief that changed to confusion as he first felt the bullet rip into his stomach and then heard the report of Elena’s rifle. He looked to his son and saw the red stain spreading across his chest. The two slumped awkwardly at the side of the grave, not falling in. Neither was dead yet, each moaning in the tangle of arms and legs. Elena walked around closer to them and fired a bullet into the head of each.
“I was going to let them off with a warning,” said Lukas.
“If there’s to be no amnesty for us, let there be no amnesty for them.”
“We kill only when we have to.”
“Think of your brother, cut in two. Think of my brother, and of your father’s grief. I will forgive no one who strikes at my family.”
“I never knew you could be so cruel.”
“I am cruel. And you helped to make me this way.”
“But someone may have heard the shots.”
“Leave the bodies here, where they are. Let them take care of their own dead.”
NINE
NOVEMBER 1946
THE MOON shone so intensely through the clear church windows that the priest could read the marriage ceremony from the book in his hand. The wedding party huddled by the south wall, avoiding the skewed columns of light that lay across the nave. These guests were always wary of exposure, careful of the cool radiance inside this small church in the remote village parish of Nedzinge, in a forgotten country.
To the priest, this midnight marriage was just the latest sign of the world turned upside down. In his darker moments he wondered if this inversion of custom could be a sign of the Second Coming. The priest had heard that some of the evangelical Protestants believed the good would be taken away to heaven in rapture before the physical end of the world while the others were left behind. Was this withdrawal of good people into the darkness a sign? Stalin was said to have a diabolical sense of humour. Certainly the people running the country were imps, small demons, servants of Stalin, the village bullies and drunkards now ruled the streets. One sort of village tough had served the Nazis and now another sort rose up to strip the farmers of their land, the shopkeepers of their shops, the religious of their God and the patriots of their country. What kind of people would be left once this work was done?
The priest looked at the couple before him. A young man filled with the ecstasy of love, a little nervous, trembling even, at the gravity of the marriage act. The woman was beautiful in the way of young women, glowing as if she were going to move to a new life in a safe home.
The priest’s thoughts made him stumble through a few of the Latin phrases he should have known so well. He was more than a little anxious himself. If the Reds discovered this marriage, he would be shipped out in a cattle car. A third of the parish priests were already dead or in the North, and the priest himself was a little ashamed not to be one of them, but also terribly grateful. He tried to shift his thoughts away from himself and onto the couple before him. Poor young man and woman, he thought, in love while the world lay in ruins.
He glanced up at the guests. Pale, pale, the faces of the wedding guests—Lakstingala, who had left his automatic outside in deference to the church but was nervous without it; tearful in the darkness, the drunken forger and his wife, extra burdens to the partisans because drunkards did not travel well; fearful the American, as farmers did not go out at night. And Flint, who crossed his arms and then uncrossed them, ill at ease in the knowledge that they would have to make their way back to their bunkers in this full moonlight, which he had always avoided and had warned his men to avoid as well.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Flint had asked Lukas. “It will only make life harder. It will only make the pain worse if something happens to one of you.”
They were sure. Against all the odds, both Elena and Lukas had survived this long, through firefights, betrayals by partisans who were giving up the fight, and winters without enough food.
Flint had so many things on his mind. The partisans would need help soon. None of the foreign radio programs mentioned Lithuania or the other two sister Baltic States. They had disappeared so thoroughly from the Western public eye that soon no one would know they ever existed, and whatever happened in a land that did not exist did not matter. Unless the situation turned around, all of the men and women in that church would soon be as inconsequential as the ghosts of Vilnius.
As for the couple up at the altar, they were not thinking of strategies or politics at all. They were only thinking of one another and of some of those who could not be with them. How much Lukas would have liked his brothers and sister and parents and all the tribe of uncles and cousins to be there, but half of them were certainly dead and the others so far away, maybe dead as well. He would have liked to swell the numbers in the country church, to fill the nave with dead souls. As for Elena, her dead had died earlier, and so she did not think of them as much as she did of the man beside her, the one who was so in love with her. She loved him too and needed him and could no longer distinguish between the two.
The nighttime ghost of a ceremony was comforting to Elena. It was the remains of something normal, a shadow ceremony but at least a shadow—something, instead of the blasted nothingness of the new world outside. The future did not bear consideration. She had only this moment on the altar with him. No rings, just a moment’s security as they held each other’s hands.