The reception took place in a big bunker, one with two rooms, three hatches, stools and benches, and dug so deeply that a short man could stand upright inside. The air was good because the bunker had been built with clay-pipe ventilation holes, unlike some of the other places where a candle would go out from the lack of oxygen. It was too dangerous to have a bonfire aboveground as they used to in the old days, but they could have a few candles and a little low singing. Flint cut slices from a side of smoked bacon; Lakstingala had brought a loaf of heavy black bread. In addition to the litre of samagonas that the forger had for himself and his wife, he had managed to bring a bucket of milk. They all drank, and then laughed at one another’s white moustaches as if they were children. They sang a few songs together and ate the rest of their food, and then there came an awkward moment when there was not much more to do.
“Come on,” said Lakstingala, “your wedding gift is a night in a special bunker.”
The others hooted, making jokes about checking up on them, and encouraging them to go straight to sleep and get a good night’s rest.
The gift of privacy was the best wedding present they could receive. The moon was far below its zenith, below the treeline, and so the light was not quite as terrible as it had been earlier. Lakstingala led them through some reeds and into a spot with a high riverbank. Then they walked for a long time until they came to the edge of a wood where it met some farm fields. Beside a large stump stood a small pine. Flint lifted this sapling, moved some mosses and opened a hatch.
“Get inside,” he said. “I’ll replace the moss and tree once you’re in there. You can’t budge during the day without messing up the entrance, but the advantage is that they’d need to look very hard to find you here.”
Lakstingala shook Lukas’s hand and kissed Elena on the cheek. She held him for a moment, hugging him.
“Thank you,” she said.
They crawled inside a short passageway and could hear Lakstingala covering up the hatchway behind them.
They came into a room much smaller than the massive bunker they had left behind, actually not much bigger than a large closet turned on its side. It held two narrow bunk beds and two stools. The ceiling was so low that the person on the upper bunk would have difficulty turning himself on his side without scraping the top. Lukas lit a candle stub and found some gifts placed on a stooclass="underline" a small square of chocolate, some kind of liqueur in a tiny bottle and some dried flowers in a glass.
The fall rains had already begun and the bunker smelled damp. Even so, they had not lived in this kind of luxurious privacy since they had met again in Kazlu Ruda.
Elena lifted the small bottle and turned it every which way, and then laughed. “It’s an Eiffel Tower, filled with cognac.”
It was many years since anyone could have gone to Paris to pick up such a souvenir. Either it had belonged to a German during their occupation or it had come to Lithuania a very long time before that. Someone had been saving it, and now that someone had given it to them as a wedding present.
“Let’s taste it,” said Lukas.
The cognac was not the best ever made, just brandy designed for tourists to take back home, but neither Elena nor Lukas had tasted liquor for a long time, and what they had tasted was all home brew or rough vodka. To them it made the dream of Paris into something real. If there was still cognac, there must still be France as well as Paris.
“Should we eat the chocolate?” Lukas asked.
“Let’s save it for later.”
They rearranged the bunker so the straw pallet from the upper bunk lay beside the lower one, enlarging their bed to make room enough for two. Elena undressed and Lukas did the same, and they kissed for a while before making love.
TEN
DECEMBER 1, 1947
TO THE PACING SLAYER, the forest floor seemed undisturbed, a thick bed of pine needles overlaid with curled leaves of ash and poplar. He looked up. A lone rowan stood at the edge of the forest, its red berries bright against the grey sky, the leaves of the tree all fallen now. The December branches were awaiting snow—bones awaiting cover.
Beyond the forest lay a pair of farm fields, one an abandoned tangle of weeds, its owners either fled or shipped away, the other planted with winter rye by an owner who might not live to enjoy the fruits of the harvest.
The slayer was studying the forest floor for some sign. It was hard to see how the ground cover could be so untouched. No ants stirred on the knee-high anthill, all aslumber for the season in their tiny burrows.
Winter was coming, and the slayer had not even been issued a decent pair of boots. And his employers knew he suffered more than others when it was cold. Slayer, he thought, such a dramatic title for someone who wore such poor clothes. Looking down, he could see the grey sock where it protruded at the split seam of one of his miserable shoes. The locals despised him for taking up arms for the Reds. Not that the Reds treated him particularly well. They seemed to believe that his bourgeois background made him untrustworthy. His uniform was cobbled together from an assortment of clothes: an army tunic, his own linen shirt beneath it, and a baggy pair of trousers, the last remains of a good suit he had once owned.
His face was scratched along the right side, small scrapes from a drunken fall onto a stony road. He had never been much of a drinker before, but now drink was the only consolation when his clothes were too thin, his stomach half empty and his tobacco in short supply.
The slayer felt his grievances keenly. They did not even let him carry his rifle on this particular mission. A rifle in his hands would have been another consolation.
They were a Cheka lieutenant and twenty-three internal army soldiers in two rings around this patch of earth, the second ring all the way at the forest’s edge, by the farm fields. No one was sure exactly where the bunker was, and his examination of the forest floor had not revealed anything. The Cheka lieutenant did not speak Lithuanian, and so the slayer had been sent out to reconnoitre. An excuse, he thought. He was being used as bait. If the partisans decided to fight, he would be the first one they killed.
Empty of birds, the forest was very quiet except for the squeak of leather on leather and the occasional rustle of forest debris as the soldiers shifted in their positions. The soldiers were as dangerous to the slayer as anyone underground. What if a trigger-happy soldier was hungover, or needed a cigarette, or was nervous and suspicious of him?
The crunch of the leaves beneath his feet was unnaturally loud. He could use a drink, but he had been given two mouthfuls before he stepped out onto the forest floor and there would be no more until his job was complete. He looked to the lieutenant and shook his head to show that he had found no telltale signs. The lieutenant signalled that he should talk.
The slayer sighed. The partisans would know what he was as soon as he opened his mouth, perhaps even who he was, and they hated his kind more than they hated the Reds. It was so unfair to be treated like this. He was as much a prisoner of circumstance as they were—he’d rather be doing anything but this. He would need to find some common ground with those hiding down below.
“Brothers,” he said loudly, and waited a moment. At least no one was firing at him yet. “Here we are, you below and me above. Let me tell you, it’s better up here than down there. I know. I’ve been there. I’m twenty-six years old. Don’t do anything hasty. Listen to me.”