“Flint broke her out. She’s in Lithuania, and she’s free, but she’s in hiding.”
Lukas stopped and looked at Zoly. They were almost at the Place de la République.
“When did you find out about this?”
“A couple of weeks ago, but I couldn’t get here any sooner.”
Lukas slapped Zoly across the face, so hard that his gold-rimmed eyeglasses and the cigarette he was about to raise to his lips went flying. After a moment’s shock Zoly tried to say something, but Lukas slapped him again. He was going to do it a third time but Zoly raised his hands to protect himself, and Lukas took him by the lapels and pushed him back against a tree and then pulled him down to the earth.
“Tell me everything you know.”
“That’s about all of it.”
“Who told this to you?”
“Lozorius.”
“How did he get word out?”
“It was in his last radio transmission.”
“What else did he say?”
“Just that he needed you and that your wife was still alive. He said the set was damaged by water. It wouldn’t work properly.”
“Any more transmissions?”
“Two garbled ones.”
“Is it really him?”
“The radio operator on this end says it’s him. He can tell. Each person develops his own style on the telegraph key and Lozorius has his. It can’t be copied.”
“Has he been captured and turned? Is it a trap?”
“We don’t know.”
“So it could be a lie.”
“Anything is possible. We don’t know.”
Lukas slapped him again.
“Why are you hitting me now? What was that for?”
“For lying to me.”
“Do you hit everyone who lies to you?” Zoly asked. He rose when Lukas released him and retrieved his eyeglasses, and once they were back on, a little crooked, he looked for the cigarette that had been knocked from his hand. He picked it up from the sidewalk, reached into his breast pocket for a box of matches and lit it. He looked up at Lukas. “It might be time to reconsider the various vows you’ve taken.”
NINETEEN
THEY SAT IN CHAIRS across from one another, a half-empty bottle of wine between them, but Lukas’s glass was untouched. The window to the courtyard was open and he could hear the children murmuring outside in the cobblestoned yard. What did children that age have to talk about so intensely and so quietly?
Secrets, probably, and confidences. From the very beginning one veiled and unveiled truths, and reality changed accordingly.
Lukas wanted the wine in the glass on the table before him, but he was resisting it. Already the luxury of wine seemed to belong to another world, a kind of dream world he had been living in until Zoly reappeared.
Lukas thought about things he had not thought about for a long time. Whether Flint and Lakstingala were still alive. Whether there was any news of his parents. Above all, how it was possible that Elena was still alive when Flint had seen her body lying on the earth outside the bunker.
What the Reds must have done to her after they took her to prison did not bear much thought, but he couldn’t help thinking about it. His one consolation was that they would not have tortured her if she was hurt badly. They would have tried to heal her first and only then begun to break her down again. And if they knew her as the killer at the engagement party in Marijampole, she could not have expected much mercy.
But maybe Flint had got her out in time.
One of the courtyard children cried out in pain. She had fallen and was sobbing as her friends tried to soothe her. He would have liked to have children sometime, to live in a time when children were possible.
Monika’s face was tear-stained, but she had calmed a little since the conversation had begun an hour ago. He started again.
“My duty is to my first wife. I have to go back to her. I made promises to others before I made promises to you.”
“Your first wife,” Monika said bitterly. “You’re making poetry out of my grief.”
Monika thought Lukas was referring to Lithuania as his first wife, making a metaphor, but he didn’t correct her. Lukas felt protective of Elena now, not wanting to talk about their lives together in the presence of another woman, not even this one. He was putting distance between them and already she was looking stranger and stranger to him, like someone from an accidental moment in his life.
Although he knew he had to make himself hard, Monika was still the woman who had come to him in the countryside in Bavaria, the one who had made life possible in the first confusing months in France. He loved her, but could not let this feeling dominate his thoughts. He had to drive her from his heart, but the necessity of the task did not make it any easier.
Lukas had not told Monika everything that Zoly had said, just that there was a new offer from the British for him to go into Lithuania and he was accepting it.
Monika reached for her glass and drank it down but did not refill it. “We’ve only begun our life together here,” she said. “We were on the way to building something. And now you want to throw it all away on some kind of adventure. You could have studied anything you wanted after you finished writing that book. Medicine, architecture. If the military appeals to you so much, you could have applied to French officers’ school.”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t returning.” Elena might be dead after all. Zoly might be lying to get him back inside to help Lozorius.
“Don’t try to soften what you’re saying. What are the odds, really? You might get killed on the way in, or you might get killed while you’re there. You’ll almost certainly never make it out again. It’s not called the Iron Curtain for nothing.”
“It’s risky, all right, but not impossible. I made it out once before. I could be back in a year.”
“It’s like going to the land of the dead. Think what you’re giving up. Do you love me so little?”
“I love you so much.”
“This makes no sense at all. You’re just a soldier who’s finding it hard to adjust to civilian life. You need to give it a little more time. You’re bored now, sitting at a desk and writing that book, and worse, in the writing you’re thinking about the past all the time, reliving your old battles. But you wouldn’t have to sit at a desk all day if you didn’t want to. You could be something else—a builder, a farmer like your father—I don’t know, a pilot.” Lukas said nothing to this. “Help me. I’m looking for the words that will make you stay.”
“You won’t find them. You knew this day might come. What did you think the SDECE was training me for?”
“That was all over. You quit all that. This strange idea of duty is going to undo both of us. What about your duty to me?”
Lukas looked out of the window and reached over for his glass of wine, but stopped himself. He was going to refill Monika’s glass and looked to her to see if she wanted more wine, but she shook her head furiously.
“Tell me this,” Lukas said. “How is it that you and Anne went to hear me speak in Germany?”
“We had heard all about you. We were homesick and wanted to hear about Lithuania.”
“Yes, but no one else came from another country. We barely had people from other occupation zones of Germany, let alone France.”
“Where are you going with this? Why does it matter now?”
He would not let it go. “How did you get the right to go to Germany?” “Anne and I applied for a visa. I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
“No one would ever have issued you a visa just like that, because you asked for it. Travel was restricted. Your uncle must have helped. Did he?”
“I suppose he did.”
“Or did he come up with the idea in the first place? Was he asking you to do a favour for him, for the SDECE? Were you supposed to lure me to France so they could make me an offer and keep me here?”