“It stung the bastards a bit. But as for your regret, that’s what makes you different from Lozorius. Don’t worry about him. If something happens to you, I’ll change his diaper for him. Anyway, listen, I’m sick of this ‘end of days’ talk. I have another bottle of liquor waiting for us on the table back at the bunker—homebrew, but not too bad. Go find Elena now. See how things are. Then, when you come back, we’ll drink and talk it all through.”
There was nothing more to say. They embraced. Lukas had an assault rifle under his long coat, a revolver in one pocket and a hand grenade in the other. It was still too bright, but he had to leave now. He picked his way carefully across the wet field to the edge of town, stood beside a house and waved to Lakstingala, who waved back and then stepped into the forest and disappeared.
Lukas stood at the side of a house and cleaned the mud off his boots before he went into the town proper.
Bearing a sheaf of poems, Rimantas had come looking for Lukas a while earlier. He went to the bunker where Lukas lived and called out his name but didn’t hear any response. He listened by the lid and heard snoring, so he tapped lightly on the door and then opened it to see Lozorius stretched out on the lower bunk, sleeping. There was an empty bottle on the small table and the bunker smelled of liquor.
Rimantas knew who Lozorius was, remembered him from their school days. He knew a great deal more than people gave him credit for.
Rimantas opened his briefcase and set his poems down on the small table. He had intended to read them to Lukas; maybe Lozorius would like to hear them instead. Rimantas sat down on a chair, intending to wake him up gently, but he hesitated. If he felt the least threat, a man like Lozorius would start shooting as soon as he opened his eyes.
Rimantas had a hand grenade and a pistol in his briefcase beneath the place where his poems had lain. He closed the briefcase.
Rimantas sat for a while and studied Lozorius’s face. Like Lukas, Lozorius had been abroad and chose to return. What a fool. He should have stayed away while he could. Rimantas himself wished he had chosen to emigrate, but he was a poet and one could not pick up a new language so easily as to be able to write verses in it. What a shame that poetry was not valued very much under the present circumstances, when collectivization and industrialization were all the newspapers talked about.
Rimantas looked at the sleeping Lozorius, the man who had killed dozens of Chekists and slayers if the legends were true. He did not look all that powerful while he was asleep. He looked rather vulnerable.
But that was probably an illusion. Lozorius was a wild man, and the more Rimantas thought about his reputation, the less comfortable he felt sitting in the same bunker with the sleeping man. Maybe Lozorius was only feigning sleep. The more Rimantas thought these thoughts, the more nervous he became. He could not stay there.
Rimantas collected his poems, crept out of the bunker, closed the door and stepped in among the trees to consider his options. His heart was beating madly and he needed to calm down.
He was irritated by the situation he found himself in. These men, Lukas and likely Lozorius, were the only ones who might understand his poetry. They were exactly the kind of intellectual audience he wanted. Not Lakstingala, of course. He was a peasant through and through, sturdy but with practically no subconscious to speak of.
Things were not going according to plan. His instructions were to go with Lukas and Lakstingala to find out where Lozorius was hiding. The authorities wanted to take the radio as well as the three men. The second-best plan was to discover when Lozorius came to this bunker. Rimantas was to inform the authorities so all three could be taken. Now Lozorius was here, but Rimantas did not feel inclined to inform the authorities of anything. Something was up in Merkine. There was a suppressed buzz in the town.
The Cheka workers were of very low calibre. Most of them did not even have a high school education, and half of them were alcoholics. If Rimantas had had any ambition in that way, he could have made quite a career in the Cheka. But the Cheka men were idiots and, worse, boring, and he had no interest in spending his life with boring men and drunks. He had a higher calling. In a better world he would have been left alone to work on his poetry. In the Middle Ages he might have been a monk of some kind.
Rimantas wanted to write and to publish, but the authorities would not let him do that unless he paid for his sins. They knew all about him and his anti-Stalinist poetry during the German occupation. Therefore, he was doomed to work for them for a while. But he still might be redeemed, and he wanted to shake off his obligations as soon as possible.
Now that the Reds had been in power for six years, they were building their ideological infrastructure. There was a new children’s publishing house opening up soon. He could be the publisher there and still have time to do his own writing. He had imagined a more illustrious life for himself, something a little more bohemian. Rimantas hated the world he lived in. But what could he do?
He had intended to buy his freedom with Lukas, but they had not been content to take only Lukas. No, they wanted him and Lozorius together, and so gave Rimantas an impossible task. How was he to get both of them?
The odds were very poor, but perhaps he had stumbled upon a solution to all of his problems by finding the sleeping Lozorius. If he gave Lozorius to the Cheka, they would be grateful to him. He would have fulfilled his part of the bargain. And if he gave them Lozorius in a way that blew his own cover, he would be out of a job with the Cheka and permitted to get back to work on his writing. In a way, this plan saved Lukas; Rimantas would be doing him a favour.
Rimantas’s plan, such as it was, was risky. But everything was risky now. In a world of many bad options, he had to take the one that seemed the least bad. He looked inside his briefcase. The grenade and the pistol were at the bottom.
He studied the landscape thoroughly. No one seemed to be around, but one could never tell. Worst of all would be to be caught by Lakstingala and Lukas. Neither would show mercy.
Rimantas walked over to the bunker and listened. The snoring was still very loud. He looked about one more time, pulled the pin of the grenade, waited a few seconds, wrenched open the lid, and threw the grenade inside. Then he closed the lid again and ran, pistol in one hand, briefcase in the other.
The grenade seemed to take a very long time to explode, blowing the hatch off the bunker. Rimantas waited a little, looked around, and then saw to his horror that Lozorius was crawling out of the bunker.
“You can’t kill me!” Lozorius shouted. “I swore that nobody could kill me!”
Whether the grenade had rolled under a table or gone into a corner or been deflected, Rimantas did not know. All he knew was the dreadfulness of a dead man rising to chase him. Rimantas had never been so frightened in his life. He fired off a few ineffectual shots from his pistol and began to flee across the fields. But the earth was muddy and the going impossibly slow. The faster he tried to run, the faster the mud adhered to his shoes. He heard Lozorius fire behind him and fell to the earth, trembling with terror, afraid he might have been shot.
Lozorius had awoken to the explosion, ears ringing, brain rattling, with a pain all down his left side where wood splinters had driven into his skin. But through the smoke and confusion and the ringing in his ears, he could see the square of light of the blown-out doorway. Freedom lay where the light was, so he took his pistol and charged out, firing.
Once outside, Lozorius had stood there, dazed. He shouted that he could not be killed, and then heard a few shots. He could not see properly—blood was running in his left eye—but there was a figure in the field, a figure that fell to the earth when he fired at it.