“I laid him in a hollow and took away any identifying papers then covered him with mosses and pine needles. I sprinkled the area with lamp oil and tobacco to confuse the dogs, and then swam across a nearby river to see what would happen from a hiding place on the other side.
“The Chekists arrived soon enough, three cars of men and dogs. They searched high and low, but they didn’t find him. Later the next day Anupras woke up and crawled out of his hollow. His face was dirty and his pants were torn. The soldiers were still around, but they were looking for an armed man, and Anupras was not just unarmed but also disoriented, like some sort of village idiot. He wandered around until he came across a farmer who knew him and managed to get him back to the partisans.”
“It sounds like some sort of fairy tale.”
“More like a horror story. Anupras said he’d had a few glasses of milk. The sleeping potion must have been poured into the milk, but the fat in the milk inhibited the effect of the drug.”
“Did you get the farmer?”
“He ran away somewhere, but not to America.”
“America? Why do you say that?”
“He was the American farmer. You remember him?”
“He helped to teach me English.”
“Well, if you ever run across him again, shoot him.”
“What happened to Anupras?”
“He was never the same after that. His mind had been damaged. We managed to get him into a mental institution where they have others like him.”
The weather was terrible. When they reached the outskirts of their old district six days later, the duel between rain and snow had settled into a compromise of freezing rain. By then they had been cold and wet for so long that they barely remembered what it meant to be dry.
Lakstingala knew a farmhouse where the owners were friendly, but he hesitated to go there because the farmer was under suspicion of the Cheka, and Lakstingala did not want to get him into trouble or stumble onto a closely watched site.
“It’s a risk,” he said to Lukas as they stood outside the house of squared logs and thatch, “but we’ll die of pneumonia if we don’t dry out and warm up for a while, and it doesn’t look as if anyone’s around. You wait here.”
Lakstingala knocked at the door as Lukas squatted among the gooseberry bushes, intensely aware that the cover of bushes was poor in the winter. A young woman with a thick, dark braid met Lakstingala at the door. They spoke for a moment and a man joined them, and then Lakstingala waved Lukas over.
It was a small house, deliciously warm inside, just a vestibule and two rooms. A new baby was in a basket hanging from a beam in the combined sitting room, dining room and kitchen, swinging gently from side to side. The farmer was a young man named Almis, and his wife was Vida. They both knew Lakstingala and took no notice of his regret at bothering them, being distant cousins whose sense of hospitality had not yet been destroyed by the times.
Almis and Vida charmed Lukas, and gave him a whiff of melancholy as well for the life he might have had in a different time. He had vaguely hoped to have children one day, and the sight of the baby, swaddled and with a knitted cap on her head, awoke the old desire in him. But it did not do to have such thoughts. They could only make his heartache worse if he dwelled upon them.
He and Lakstingala went into the other room to change out of their wet clothes. There was a ceramic wall shared by the two rooms, a built-in wood-burning furnace that was warm to the touch. Lukas hung his clothes from nails nearby and then leaned against the tiles for the warmth that radiated through his back. Soon he would turn to warm his other side.
There was a noise outside and shortly after that the door to their room opened and Almis poked his head inside.
“Some slayers just pulled up in the yard in a car.”
“How many?” Lakstingala asked.
“Just two. But one of them is a drunkard named Imbrasas who keeps coming here to threaten us and to make eyes at Vida.”
“I can deal with them for you, if you want,” said Lakstingala.
“No, please. We have a baby in there and Vida’s sensitive. They’re not here to search the house. They come for alcohol and food and to terrorize us a little. Just be very quiet in here and they might go away after they’ve eaten and I’ve given them a little liquor for the road.”
Lakstingala nodded. He put a revolver in his pocket and stood by the wall on the other side of the ceramic oven with his assault rifle in his hands at the ready. Lukas prepared himself for a fight as well, crouching behind the door to look through the keyhole into the next room.
The sergeant who came in with his escort was stout, his hat tipped back slightly on his head so the bill pointed up jauntily. His uniform was a little too tight and one button of his tunic was undone over his belly. He carried only a sidearm, but his soldier had a rifle in his hands. Slayers had not dared to travel in pairs in the past, before Lukas had left Lithuania. Back then they had moved in packs. It was a depressing sign of their new-found confidence that the two came as they did, unescorted.
“You can wait in the car,” said Imbrasas.
“It’s safer if we stay together,” said the soldier.
“Afraid?”
“For your safety, yes. This is a lonely place.”
“I know what I’m doing. Get out there, and I’ll bring you something to make it worth your while.”
The baby in the crib cried out once as the driver left, but then settled back to sleep when Vida pushed the cradle and it began to swing from the beam again.
Imbrasas, the slayer who remained behind, had been to the house many times before, sometimes with the troops and sometimes on his own. He kept a flock of farmers like these, small landowners who hadn’t been collectivized yet, ones who could be visited in a circuit for food or liquor. He considered himself their protector, for he was important enough as a slayer to hold off others of his kind, and even had a little influence among the lower levels of the Cheka, where he hoped to make a career.
His protected herd of farmers was milked in rotation, with one exception: Almis, or more precisely his wife, Vida. He developed an interest in her that grew to fondness and blossomed into obsession through her pregnancy, and this passion continued to grow after she gave birth. His attraction was foolish, and he knew it and tried to suppress it by any means possible, primarily alcohol.
But the alcohol didn’t really help; it merely changed the nature of his fixation. When he drank, Imbrasas began to feel underappreciated for all the help he had given her against the baser elements in the Cheka. Most of the farms in the district had been collectivized already, but not the one belonging to Almis and Vida. If he had been like some of the grosser slayers, he would have had the husband deported and kept Vida for himself.
Imbrasas congratulated himself for not having done so, but the drunker he became the more he began to feel offended that his good works had not been recognized. How the young couple should have known what he had done for them and how they should have paid him back was unclear to him, but the sense of injustice remained in his mind and grew.
Almis went to the pantry and brought out three half-litre bottles of samagonas, one to drink from and two to give away. He cut a piece of smoked pork and wrapped it in a newspaper. He carved off a kilo of bread and brought it in as well. Vida had set out plates and cups and butter. She put fresh kindling into the cookstove and set the kettle on top.