“Maybe he just uses it for special occasions,” said Shimkus, smiling at his own joke.
“What did you think?” Lukas asked Rudis, trying to mollify him.
“I don’t see why he’d lie to us. I think the greater danger comes from the farmer.”
They radioed Stockholm again to say they had made contact with a partisan code-named Karpis. Unsure of his own intuition about Karpis, Lukas asked for instructions. Six hours later the reply came in, terse, the exasperation clear even in the brevity of the message: Follow the plan. Use partisan contact to gain access to Lozorius.
Karpis did not return the next day as planned, but all plans were contingent. They changed the placement of their camp and permitted themselves a small fire, which Rudis tended, breaking sticks into shorter and shorter pieces until they could not be made any smaller. Lukas cleaned his gun, sensing Shimkus’s eyes on him.
Lukas tried to be calm and methodical for the sake of the two men, but it was hard to keep up appearances. One was too nervous and the other was undisciplined. In his other partisan bands he had relied on the men with him, but these men did not fill him with confidence. And he could not forget Karpis’s long coat.
“We could just go across country on our own,” said Lukas.
“Why would we want to do that?” asked Shimkus. Rudis just looked at him, his eyes giving away his alarm. Lukas did not press the matter.
That night Lukas offered to take second watch. When Shimkus woke him at one in the morning, he put the strap of the rifle across his shoulder and walked out beyond the perimeter of firelight. He waited there a half-hour until he was sure Shimkus was asleep, and then he came in closer, lifted his knapsack and carried it a little farther away where no one would hear him rustling through it. He unpacked whatever he considered too heavy, leaving the radio and most of his ammunition. He dabbed the soles of his boots with lamp oil. He checked the map in the campfire light, took a compass bearing and walked to the edge of the forest before cutting across country on his own.
When Karpis appeared the next day, he came with five other men dressed in short woollen jackets with turtlenecks underneath and woollen caps on their heads. They carried a variety of sidearms and two types of light automatic rifles—the kind with the banana clip below the barrel and the kind with the round pan above. None of these weapons was of much use because they found Shimkus covering Rudis, who was sitting on the ground, his jacket pulled behind his back pinning his arms, and his hands tied at the wrists for good measure. His hat was askew and his pretty hair spilled down one side of his head. He had a bump on his forehead and was bleeding from it, the blood running down over his eye.
“Thank God you’ve arrived,” said Shimkus.
“Where’s the other one?” Karpis asked.
“He took off in the night without any warning.”
“Why didn’t you go with him?”
“I would have, but he didn’t give me a chance. This one wanted to follow after him this morning, but we don’t even know what direction he headed in, and he left the radio behind. This one is the radio operator. We can use him.”
Karpis swore. “It would have been better to stick with the other one. He’s the big fish. Then we would have taken both of them.”
Moscow was going to be unhappy about this, and unhappy Moscow put pressure to bear on Vilnius, and they would put pressure on him.
Karpis hated this kind of work. One more prize like Lukas and they might have let him retire, but now he would have to keep this up, risking his neck again and again when he wished he could just sit by the fire once the cold winds blew in.
TWENTY-ONE
LITHUANIAN SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLIC
DECEMBER 1949
FIRST THE CEMETARY in the Jewish Pine Forest had been rendered unneeded when most of the Jews were slaughtered in 1941, and now, eight years later, the cemetery was rendered derelict by the absence of their progeny. A stone-and-board fence had surrounded the old cemetery. The fence was a wreck, the boards gone and the graves inside overgrown and untended. The brick gatehouse was burnt out, the roof gone and the windows empty of both glass and frames. There was a small chalked X by the gatehouse entranceway where double doors had once stood. Checking to make sure no one saw him, Lukas took the piece of chalk he had carried from Sweden and put a circle beside the X.
He found a copse of trees and tall grasses and hid his pack, and then carefully made his way to a vantage point where he could see the village of Rumsiskes. From a distance it looked completely unchanged. If he suspended his knowledge for a moment he could imagine going into town to visit the market and some of the Jewish shops. He knew the illusion required distance, and he had no desire actually to descend into the town.
Then he made his way to the other side of the hill to look for the family farm, but could not find it. Unsettled by its absence, he thought he was confused, and checked his bearings again. He went back into the forest and recognized the dune where he had played as a child. Many things were pretty much unchanged, though the trees were taller and the light fell through them in a different way, making them strange. When he went back to look for the farmhouse, it still did not appear. The house, the outbuildings, the fruit trees and the currant bushes were all gone. Even the fences had been torn up. In their place lay plowed land, the furrows crooked in places.
If ever there was a time when he felt his days were as grass, this was it. A wind had descended on the land and all those he had known were gone, and many of their works as well. Unnerved for the first time since his return, Lukas went back to the place where he had stowed his gear and waited through the night.
In the morning, he set himself up in the scrub undergrowth where he could watch the burnt-out gatehouse to the cemetery. A pair of boys came through that day, young vandals who knocked down a couple more headstones. They depressed him, but he could not go out and chastise them. Two more days passed until a shepherd came by, looked over the gatehouse and walked on. He did not have a flock with him but did carry a stick. Lukas shadowed him for a while, and when the man sat down with his back to a tree, still within the Jewish Pine Forest and still at a distance from any houses, Lukas approached him where he sat with his cloak thrown over his head against the cold.
“Did you hear a nightingale?” Lukas asked.
Lakstingala lifted the cloak off his face. “Where?”
“In the copse of trees across from the gatehouse.”
Lakstingala looked at him hard, and then rose and threw his arms around Lukas and embraced him tightly. Lukas could feel the rifle under the cloak as well as Lakstingala’s thin body.
“I’m glad my letter reached you and I’m pleased to find you alive,” said Lukas. For the first time since he had arrived in Lithuania, he was in the company of a man he could trust. But if he had not known it was Lakstingala, he wouldn’t have been able to recognize him from a distance. He had always been a small, tough man, but he seemed to have shrunk. Although it was only early winter, his face was pale, his eyes watery.
“I’m the last of the old partisans in our group,” said Lakstingala.
“Flint is dead?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me how.”
“I don’t know much. He loaned me to another group of partisans and I barely saw him anymore. They say they took him by ambush last spring when he was out gathering wild strawberries. He didn’t even have any weapons and he was dressed as a civilian. The Cheka troops were lying on the forest floor under the ferns, and they rose up and started to fire without any warning. Two others were killed and he was badly wounded, but taken alive.