He had enjoyed the strange meat sandwich. It was a little gelatinous and pleasantly salty. He was surprised by many of the foods he found in Germany, the powdered milk and cornbread and the various tinned foods. American cigarettes were a novelty too, for both their taste and their ability to function as alternate currency.
A priest from the émigré government was explaining that it would take time for the Pope to respond to the letter from the partisans, but Lukas was only listening with half an ear. He excused himself and walked over to Monika.
“How are you today?” he asked.
No emotion of any kind showed on her face. “I’m as fine as I was yesterday. This is my sister, Anne.” She was maybe a year older than Monika and looked vaguely familiar, another one of the girls from the street of his university residence.
“I thought I might have offended you,” said Lukas.
“You seem to find women’s opinions unserious.”
“I take women very seriously.”
“Do you? It didn’t sound like it.”
“Women in the underground were everything from couriers to machine gunners. We couldn’t have got by without them.”
Suddenly he could not speak anymore. The talk of women in the underground made him think of Elena. Her image rose up in his mind so strongly that he could almost see her, almost believe that if he looked across the room she would be sitting there with the others, wondering why he was talking to this woman.
Lukas stopped speaking and looked up at Monika in panic, afraid he might begin to weep in public, in the middle of a crowd. He excused himself. He tore down the steps of the cafeteria to the ground floor, conscious of the clatter of his shoes and the well-wishers who were trying to say things to him as he ran past them on the steps.
As the hero of the resistance, he was the centre of attention. People looked at him, trying to understand the meaning of this sudden flight. Even out in the yard he could not contain himself, and he walked away from the camp into the town, and then beyond it onto a road in the countryside that led from the plain up toward the nearby mountains.
He walked fast, hoping that if he moved quickly he might even be able to escape from himself.
Most of the snow was gone from the road and the fields, though there were still dirty banks at the roadside and against the fence rails; icy water ran in the ditches from the melt higher up on the peaks. In places there were pools of water on the dirt road and he had to step carefully around them to avoid sinking into the muck. No automobile or cart hazarded the mud on this particular road, and so he was alone. Even the fields were mostly empty, with only some faraway cows nudging the earth to look for grass shoots, their bells plinking irregularly in the distance.
He kept walking until he felt his shoulders stop shaking and the tears dried from his face. He did not understand how this could be happening to him. He faced losses no worse than many other people had suffered, and they had seemed to survive. What right did he have to be overcome in this way? The whole room he had spoken to, the whole DP camp, had stories of loss; it was the responsibility of every man and woman to keep up morale, not to let depression get to them. Not everyone could. Some were taken away to psychiatric hospitals, and others hanged themselves in the night. Still others walked around with smitten looks, or went on drinking binges that lasted for days.
To fall into despair was to become a casualty of one kind or another, a victim of Red success, and he was damned if he would let himself become one. But he did not know how to stop these unbearable emotions from washing over him.
He walked for a long time. The April sun felt warm on his face, although the angle was beginning to change and the colour of the fields around him yellowed in the late afternoon light. It was time to turn around. When he did so, he saw a distant figure approaching along the road. He feared it might be Monika, and his fears were confirmed when she was close enough to be made out. There was no way to avoid her.
She had tied her hair back in a scarf, though a strand of it showed on her forehead. There was a thick streak of dirt on her coat and on the sleeve as well.
He spoke out first. “You’ve fallen in the mud. I’m very sorry.”
“It’s nothing.” She was searching his eyes and put her hands out toward him as soon as she was close enough. He took them in his, startled at her sudden proximity.
“I must have embarrassed you back at the cafeteria,” Lukas said.
“No, I’m the one who’s at fault. I was making fun of you in a way, I suppose, and you shouldn’t make fun of some things.”
“It’s not that. You triggered a very strong memory in me. I’ve had some losses, you know. Not more than anyone else, but still.”
“Yes, I know about your wife.”
He was stunned. “How can you know about her? I didn’t think anyone knew about her.” He had to hold himself back or the tears would well up again.
“Word gets out.”
Now Lukas was mortified. All this time, while he had been on his lecture tour talking about the suffering of the people left behind, the audience must have known about Elena. The sympathy they had lavished upon him was therefore partially due to his own story. This public knowledge of the grief he had held back from himself was completely unbearable. Where he came from, a man did not parade his feelings. There were too many feelings to be had during the war, and the agony of one person did not deserve precedence over the agony of others.
Monika let go of his hands and slipped her arm through his, as if they were old friends. “May I walk back with you?” she asked.
“Of course. I promise I won’t break down like that again.” He was not actually sure he could keep his promise.
“It wouldn’t matter to me if you did.”
They began to walk back toward the town.
“Tell me about where you grew up,” said Lukas. He wanted her to talk as much as possible in order not to have to talk himself.
“I was a city girl, growing up in Kaunas with my sister. My father was in the ministry of education, but his parents and my mother’s parents both came from farm families. It’s funny, but when I think of Lithuania, I don’t think of the city where I spent most of my time. I think of the two farms where we spent the summers. One was a combination farm and mill with a great millpond where we swam all summer long and our grandparents spoiled us. We didn’t have to do anything at all. We were terrible. We’d stay up late, flirting with the farmhands, and then we’d sleep in in the mornings while they had to get up at dawn to go to work.”
“And your parents?”
“My father was taken in the first round of deportations in 1940. They would have taken my mother and us too, but we were vacationing at the farm while he had stayed behind to work in town. He never actually said anything, but I suspect he knew what was coming because he sent us off to the countryside before school was out.”
The Reds had taken many thousands of people right up to the first weeks of June 1941 and shipped them off to the North. When the Germans attacked, the Reds took some of their remaining prisoners with them as they retreated, but many were executed. For all the rush to retreat, some of those the Reds killed were tortured first and their mangled bodies left behind in heaps as lessons to the Lithuanians about anyone who chose to be anti-Soviet. Many of the Jews were immediately massacred by collaborators and Nazis when the Germans came a week later, and most of the rest were killed afterward.