Imbrasas watched this activity with growing impatience. They were behaving as if nothing were wrong, as if they were not aware of their debt to him, or if they were aware of it, they were ignoring it. He was particularly incensed by Vida, who remained silent as her husband talked about the weather and the farm, his animals and the crops, the only safe subjects in a politicized world.
But not safe enough.
The baby sensed Imbrasas’s mood better than her parents, and she began first to whimper and then to cry. Vida gave the hanging crib a push so it began to rock gently, and the baby quieted for a moment.
Almis poured out two small glasses of home liquor, and Imbrasas did not even wait for an invitation but drank up. He had been drinking all afternoon. Each man chased the liquor with a piece of bread and a little smoked meat. Almis could see that Imbrasas was following every move his wife made, and he tried to distract the man, but there was nothing much he could do about him because Imbrasas was implacable in his strange silence and brooding eyes.
The baby cried out and would not be stilled, even when Vida pushed the hanging crib again.
Almis poured another glass of liquor and invited Imbrasas to drink. In such circumstances the best strategy was to make the visitor drink a great deal and hope that he became drunk enough to pass out before he did any harm.
As the baby would not stop crying, Vida took her out of the crib and held her in her left arm as she worked at the stove with her right hand. She was all too aware of Imbrasas’s silence and her husband’s inability to do anything about it.
Vida went to the pantry and brought out a cup of flour, which she poured into a bowl, and then returned to get a cup of milk and two eggs, which she mixed with the flour to make into a batter. She tried to pacify the baby, who was wailing inconsolably now, sensing the tension in the room.
She put a large cast-iron frying pan on the wood stove and a minute later dropped a pat of butter into the pan, where it sizzled and sputtered.
“Comrade Imbrasas,” she said, “it’s a terribly cold and wet day, and the only way to comfort oneself on a day like this is the way our mothers comforted us when we were small—with crepes. I’ll fry up a batch of them and soon you’ll see how much better you feel.”
Vida was trying her best to help her husband, but she could not read the mind of Imbrasas, who had never been comforted as a child by his alcoholic mother. She had beaten him and starved him and his father had not been much better. Worse, Vida could not know that in his mind the offer of crepes was as good as an insult, a paltry compensation for his heroic efforts to save them from deportation. Here they were, warm and happy when so many others had been sent away, and all she could offer in thanks was a plate of pancakes. Such an insult was unbearable.
“Bourgeois capitalists, the both of you,” he spat. “I’ll show you comfort.”
Imbrasas snatched the baby from Vida’s arms and laid her on the sputtering frying pan, holding Vida off with his free hand. Handled roughly and thrown about, the swaddled baby wailed, but not so loudly as she would wail when the heat of the pan burned through to her tender skin.
The fat in the pan sputtered and snapped as it did when a piece of meat was put upon it. Above all this the mother shrieked and the baby wailed, but Imbrasas held Vida off and reached for his sidearm to keep Almis away as he fried the baby on the pan.
Lukas slammed open the door at the first screams, and Imbrasas looked at him in surprise, frozen for a moment. Almis moved quickly. Snatching up a dinner fork from the table, he drove the tines into the neck of Imbrasas before the slayer could get a proper hold of his pistol. Vida snatched the baby off the hot pan.
Imbrasas’s face twisted in pain and fury and he reached for his throat to staunch the blood, and Almis grabbed the man’s head and pressed his face onto the hot pan, where his cheek sputtered in the grease. Imbrasas screamed, but rather than inciting Almis’s pity, the cries excited his anger. He lifted Imbrasas’s head by the hair, pulled the pan off the stove and, lifting the stove lid to expose the burning wood beneath, pushed Imbrasas’s face into the fire. Imbrasas was down on his knees in a moment, flailing.
“Don’t shoot or the soldier outside will hear the gunfire,” said Lakstingala.
Lukas took the frying pan from the floor and banged it hard against Imbrasas’s head, which was sandwiched between the frying pan and the metal stove. Imbrasas slumped, and Almis released him to fall onto the floor. The room smelled of singed meat and hair.
Almis turned to Lukas and Lakstingala. “Get the other one in the car outside.”
Lakstingala nodded and the two men went out.
The soldier in the car had not heard anything from within the house, but he saw them coming and tried to get out of the car to free his rifle. They shot him through the door and the window before he could escape.
Daylight was fading, and no one would come out looking for the dead men that night. Lukas and Lakstingala dragged out Imbrasas’s body, fired a few rounds into his neck to make it seem that bullets had killed him, and then put both bodies in the back seat of the car.
“Let us rest for a couple of hours,” said Lakstingala, “and then we’ll drive far away with the bodies. No one will even know they were here. The rain will wash the tracks away from the lane.”
“But what if he told someone where he was going?” asked Vida. She would not let go of the baby. It had been swaddled and had made no direct contact with the frying pan, though the edges of the cloth had been singed, but she had unwound the cloth and swaddled it anew. The baby was strangely quiet now. Vida, on the other hand, was not calm.
“It’s unlikely he told anyone he was coming here, but even if he did, we’ll drive the car back in the direction he came from for a few kilometres and then set it on fire in the forest. It will look like they were ambushed before they got here. If you’re lucky no one will even ask you about them.”
“But what if they do?” She turned to her husband. “You’ll go to the district committee this week and you’ll sign up to join the collective farm.”
“My father left this farm to me,” said Almis. “I can’t just give it away.”
“You can and you will. Your father would prefer you alive rather than dead.” She turned to Lakstingala. “It hurts me to say this, cousin, but I don’t want to see you at our door anymore. One of these days they’ll make us talk somehow, and I’d rather not be the one who has to give you up to the Cheka.”
“These are the men who saved us!” said Almis. “What about the soldier back in the car? What would we have done about him?”
“I could have killed him myself. In any case, it doesn’t matter. The regime wants us to give up our land. We’ll do that, and we’ll be safe for a while. We’ll keep our heads down and wait for better times.”
The partisans dried out their clothes as best they could in two hours. Almis scrubbed the floor where Imbrasas had spilled his blood. Then he packaged up the bread and meat that he had portioned out for the dead man. Lakstingala and Lukas took one half-bottle of liquor against the cold, as the rain had not let up outside. Vida went into the next room and did not come out again, even after the men slept for two hours and then rose to take away the car and the bodies.
Almis walked them out sheepishly into the yard. “I’m sorry for what she said.”
“It’s all right,” Lakstingala replied. “But try to keep the spirit of resistance in you even if you do join the collective farm. No one owns your spirit if you don’t let them.”
“No, but they do put your spirit on a grindstone here. They begin to wear it away.”