“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
THE 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.