A little under a year before, Lukas and Monika had been married just around the corner, in the massive Église St-Paul–St-Louis. They had been lucky to get this apartment, a place once rented by Monika’s uncle but vacated when he moved to America at the beginning of 1949. The entire émigré government-in-exile had moved to America, and as many DP camp residents as could were flying away to the U.S.A., Canada, Australia and even New Zealand. Like birds restless for migration, once the first ones took flight, the rest of the flock followed.
But not all. Lukas and Monika were still in Paris with no plans to go anywhere else, at least for now. Monika had to finish her studies and Lukas was not quite ready to abandon Europe.
A sense of unease had come over him once the weather became fine the previous spring, and it grew all that summer. The world was changing again, but it was hard to tell how it would all turn out. The Reds won in China and Mao Zedong came to power. The Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb, helped by Red spies in America who had shown them how to do it. Nobody talked anymore about what good allies the Soviets had been during the war. Maybe the climate for the Lithuanian partisans was getting better, but now that Lukas had been gone for close to two years it was hard to know what their situation might be. World events seemed farther away now. Like anyone else, Lukas thought of his day-to-day life. He had no cause for unease, unless he was unaccustomed to so much stability and happiness. He had put on weight and his clothing was too tight.
Over the past half decade Lukas had never lived in one place for any length of time, and now that he had been living in the apartment for eight months he felt strangely vulnerable, as if he were back at war and his tranquility in the apartment were a trap. Anyone who looked for him would find a sitting target rather than a moving one. Yet who would be looking for him now that he was a private citizen?
Monika was a full-time student in nursing, very busy. The émigré government had asked Lukas to write a book about the partisans, was paying him a little to do it, and he was working away slowly on that, writing for at least the fourth time the story of what he had done after the war. Since he worked at home, he was the one who went out to buy food for dinner after the stores reopened in the late afternoon, and he was the one to clean the place because he was there anyway and Monika was always studying.
This day, Lukas took his shopping basket, stepped out and went down the steps and out into the courtyard and then onto the street, as usual.
If anyone worried him, it should have been the French. Before moving to America, Monika’s uncle had come to explain that the government was filled with Reds and the SDECE was therefore insecure, even dangerous. Sharing information with them was as good as betraying his comrades back in Lithuania. Thus the man who got Lukas into the French secret service in the first place now convinced him to get out. It was an abrupt turn. Dizzying.
They had not taken kindly to Lukas’s withdrawal in January 1949, threatening him, insisting that he would be expelled from the country. But since Monika was permitted to live in France and she and Lukas had been married the previous fall, the authorities had no grounds for expulsion. True, Lukas’s residency paperwork was laborious, but it was hard to tell if this was due merely to bureaucracy or to the active mischief of his vindictive SDECE handlers.
Lukas was free of them now, but he was barely employed and did not know what to do with the rest of his life. For the time being he scratched away at his memoirs.
He walked up to the rue St-Antoine, where the street was filling with children let out from school and women buying their supplies for dinner. He walked on the sidewalk, between the fruit and vegetable carts on the street and the food stalls of the shops, as women shouted out encouragement to buy their goods. He did not like to be out in crowds like this, where he could not keep track of who was behind him.
And yet what did he have to be afraid of here, in Paris? The French would not kill him. The Soviets might have tried something like that right after the war, if he had been operating somewhere like Berlin or Vienna, but they would do nothing here. He was too small a fish. They might not even know he existed. And yet his old partisan sixth sense told him to be wary.
Lukas stopped to buy beets. Fresh beets in late summer were a gift and he felt a need for borscht, the food of his homeland. Paris had everything, they said, and that was somewhat true, but it still was not home. That place needed to be evoked in other ways.
Lukas felt disconnected, adrift in life. The English had wanted him so badly, but he had turned them down. Now he was a little sorry he had. He had turned down the French as well. With the émigré government in America, he felt like an anachronism, someone who stayed on in school after all the others had left.
Paris could never be home for simple reasons. It did not have sour cream, for one, which was slightly annoying because it was an essential ingredient of proper borscht. France had crème fraîche but it tasted different. Lukas would need to buy unpasteurized cream and sour it himself, but that would take overnight and would not be ready in time for this evening’s dinner. It didn’t matter. He could make a large pot of borscht today, enough for two days, and eat it properly on the second day.
Aside from his memoir writing, he was unemployed and just scraping by. They could not afford much cheese or meat, but there were certain cuts the French did not value, in particular spare ribs, and so they were cheap and he could boil them in the soup.
Baguettes were delicious propositions, but sometimes Lukas missed the taste of the bread of his homeland, so he cut across the rue St-Antoine and went up the side streets where there were some Jewish shops that carried dark rye bread. Borscht and baguette would have been unthinkable. Finally, on the way back to his street, he stopped to buy a litre of everyday wine, a vin gris that Monika liked.
Back at the apartment, Lukas opened the bottle and poured his first glass as he put the beets on to boil. An hour later he poured off the hot red water, watching carefully to make sure he did not drip it on his shirt, and then peeled the beets, slipping their skins off, and grated them. He put the grated beets into the pot, ran cold water over his fingertips to lighten the stubborn stains, and then cut the slab of ribs into pairs and immersed them in the pot, adding chopped carrots and onions as well. He waited until the pot came to a boil, took the bottle of wine and a glass, and went to sit by the courtyard window to watch the children play down below before their parents called them in for dinner.
Two girls and a boy played quietly down there, either so terrorized by the concierge that they did not shout and run, or so much products of generation upon generation of Parisian children that they took their confinement in stride. Even in the parks the children barely seemed to run about. They were like prematurely old men, standing with arms crossed as they talked to one another.
After an hour, Lukas went to check on his borscht, found it to his liking, and turned off the pot and set it aside and peeled potatoes and put them on the burner. He set the small table and brought over the wine bottle, then saw that only a glass remained in it. He finished that glass, turned the potatoes down to simmer, and went back outside to the wine merchant to get another bottle.
He met Monika coming down the street from her classes at the institute, a satchel in one hand. Her hair was pinned back, the way she kept it during the day for her studies, exposing her face, which was light gold in the late afternoon sunlight. She had slightly thick lips, soft lips, which turned up in a smile as soon as she saw him. She waved with her free hand.