MARCH 1945
THE TRAVELLING SHOEMAKER from Merkine warily approached the wooden footbridge on his way out of town.
He watched for movement on the country road on the far side of the river, high now with chunks of ice and spring runoff. He had heard gunfire upstream and did not want to run into a firefight or a group of drunken soldiers trying out their new weapons.
Gunfire in the countryside was as common as the cries of ravens. Rifles, hand grenades, pistols and bombs littered the forests and fields; one could find them in blueberry bushes, under stones or at the bottoms of rivers among the crayfish. The previous year, children had gone looking for them after the wild strawberry and mushroom seasons, when the ferns began to curl in the frost and revealed the scattered arms below their withered fronds. The children amused themselves by firing these weapons, sometimes shooting one another or blowing themselves up when trying to fish with grenades.
The lost and discarded firearms had lain hidden by the snow over the winter but were reappearing with the irregular melts of early spring, only to be hidden again at the next snowfall. The harvest of firearms was so common that no one remarked on the occasional gunshot or explosion in the forest or fields.
A red rocket arcing across the sky, on the other hand, festive as Stalin’s birthday fireworks, was a signal to Cheka troops that a major concentration of partisans had been found and help was needed. Sustained bursts punctuated by single shots from various types of arms, as well as explosions of grenades or tank rounds, meant that a fight was going on. The partisans fought pitched battles across the country that winter and spring, taking on troops by the hundreds. The Reds ruled the cities and towns, but much of the countryside and some of the villages went back and forth between the hands of the partisans and the Reds.
The gunfire the shoemaker had heard was prolonged. It was a battle, but not a large one. He listened carefully before risking the narrow bridge where he would be exposed as he crossed six or seven metres in full spring flood, but he heard nothing more and stepped onto the boards. He stopped midway to look at the swollen stream, filled with clumps of ice and clods of earth. Something white was floating on the water, bumping against the far bank. The shoemaker hurried to the far side, found a stick and pulled the item to shore.
It was a prayer book, opened in the middle. He read the pages there, in particular the prayer for the dead: Raise your eyes to the heavens and pray for me, for though my body has been consigned to the underground, we will rise again together in a better life.
The book had not been in the water very long; the middle pages were not yet thoroughly soaked. Flint would want to see this. The shoemaker made his way onto the forest road and began to take various paths. He stopped from time to time to listen for the snapping of branches that would signal he was being followed, but heard none.
His home base was Merkine, but he did not spend much time there. The ancient town had once been a city, swept over by so many armies that military buttons from various centuries lay in strata in the fields nearby. The hill town at the confluence of the Merkys and Nemunas Rivers had an ancient church with a steeple, a wooden Russian Orthodox church from the time of the czar and even a stately red-brick high school, two storeys high. It had once been a Jewish school, but since their murder no more Jews were left to fill it. The town was now a patchwork of a few old brick or stucco houses and many wooden ones.
The itinerant shoemaker had worked out of Merkine for over thirty years, walking to the farms within a radius of fifteen kilometres of his home, leaving the town trade to his lifelong competitor, a richer but older and stouter man who did not like to walk. With any luck the older town cobbler would die soon and the shoemaker could take over his trade. The travelling shoemaker was getting too old for so much walking, and it had become dangerous since the war started.
Someone had denounced him as a spy, and Flint had ambushed him on the road and taken him deep into the forest for interrogation. The partisans were ferocious with spies, who sometimes lay in ditches to watch the comings and goings of partisans and then sold the information to the Cheka. The shoemaker protested his innocence and even offered to fix the partisans’ shoes to prove his good intentions. Luckily for the shoemaker, he had a straightforward manner, and some of the partisans had been in the forest for a year with the same boots.
The shoemaker had intended to stay in Flint’s camp for a week at most, but he had so much work that he remained into December. He would have been working even longer if it hadn’t been for the coming snows, which made the partisans stay close to their winter bunkers. The Cheka loved the snow, and awaited it with all the joy of a hunter anticipating the opening of his season.
It would have been better if the partisans had had wings to take them through the trackless sky. In that case they might have flown up to see that they were deep, deep in the Red-controlled zone, and there seemed to be no massing of American and West European troops coming to free them.
This lack of troops would have been perplexing. The French and English had gone to war over Poland, so why did the Westerners let their young men die if not to save that country? Surely the next to be liberated after Poland should be Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which thought of themselves as part of the European family.
No one else did. The English had decided to give the three Baltic countries to the Soviets if they ever asked, but the Reds never bothered. They believed they didn’t need to. Had the partisans been birds, one of them might have perched on a branch in Yalta, where Roosevelt told Stalin he could keep the Baltics as long as he was discreet. As for Ukraine, where the partisan movement was much bigger and fiercer, Roosevelt did not even think it was worth mentioning.
And if the partisans could have looked into the future as well as into the distance, they would have seen a fog descending over Eastern Europe, a haze of ignorance in which much of what the Reds said was believed in the West. Anyone who had run away from the place, the Reds claimed, must have been a Nazi, and anyone who stayed behind to fight must have been one too. As the old archives were locked up, no respectable historian would write about the place because no respectable historian would work from secondary sources. As for what the partisans and émigrés wrote or said, their words could not be taken seriously. They were at best just pawns in a game they could not see properly, and at worst an entire race of criminals who hid out in the forests because they had nowhere to flee with their crimes.
But the partisans, of whom Lukas was now a member, were confined to the time they lived in, to the earth they walked upon, often living beneath it in bunkers, where the papered walls grew mould in the corners, the ceilings leaked drops in every thaw, and the air was thin during the day because it was dangerous to put in too many air vents, which gave off steam in the cold. The bunker was a home and a trap, safe if secret, but deadly if found out.
Now that the spring thaws had begun, the partisans could come out of their burrows from time to time, and the shoemaker could visit them. The shoemaker did not mind staying with the partisans as long as there was enough to eat and the men appreciated him, admiring his work and thanking him extravagantly, far more than customers who paid for their repairs with money. It was almost like being with a hunting party. The shoemaker spent his time more happily among these men than he had anywhere in years, even though his wife would scold him for being away so long and coming home with no money.
At his house in Merkine, his wife kept the vegetable garden, a cow and a goat, and he returned every week or two, depending on the season and his business. She was the only person who made him hesitate about retiring in town once the other cobbler died. Sometimes there were moments of tenderness when he returned from a long walk among the farms and hamlets, especially if he brought home a little money. What would happen to those moments of tenderness if they lived together all the time?
After finding the prayer book in the river, the shoemaker took half a day of circuitous forest travel to reach Flint’s camp. He told Flint his story and gave him the prayer book, and then set himself up by the fire, opening the wooden box he carried on a leather strap over his shoulder. Soon he was working on a pair of boots that needed new heels, and three men waited their turn, having no other shoes but the ones they wore on their feet.
Flint sent a pair of scouts to find out how a prayer book had ended up in the river, and they came back with news soon enough. Three partisan couriers had stumbled upon a Cheka ambush and there was a firefight. The partisans withdrew as far as the river, and when their ammunition ran out, they opened their packages and flung their documents, letters and belongings into the river to keep them out of enemy hands, and continued to fire until they ran out of ammunition altogether. Then they blew themselves up.
Flint reflected on the news as the men stood about, downcast. “Did they manage to destroy their faces?” Flint asked the scout.
The families of dead partisans were singled out for harassment, sometimes for prison or deportation. Those killing themselves tried to destroy their distinguishing marks, particularly their faces, but whether the faces were destroyed or not, the Chekists set the bodies up in the marketplace as a kind of display. The Chekists took away their shoes and socks so the bodies looked poor, and sometimes they ordered people to beat the dead bodies with sticks.
The Lithuanians were somewhat used to these types of displays. As far back as 1863, when Murayev “The Hangman” had been sent by the czar to suppress rebellion and the dead were permitted to rot on their nooses, displaying corpses was a means of inflicting terror. The Chekists watched to see who reacted.
The job of identifying the dead was often left to old women, bobos, kerchiefed grandmothers, widows or beggars. Not even the Cheka bothered to imprison or deport them. Grandmothers knew the bodies of the young men well; they had taken care of them since childhood. A mole on the palm of the hand, a signature scar, a deformed thumbnail—any of these signs was enough. But how was an old woman to keep from crying out in grief if she saw such a sign?
Flint did not know these particular partisan couriers; his men were all accounted for. They must have belonged to a neighbouring band.
He couldn’t let the spring begin like this, with a defeat within his territory. It would not do for morale. And the thought of the bodies lying in the town square was unpleasant.
“This is so very sad,” Flint said to the men gathered around for a meeting at the camp where Lukas and Vincentas had first met him. “But being sad all the time won’t do us any good. I think we should teach the Cheka some respect.”
Lukas agreed along with the others that it would be good to act. He had not been away from the camp since the incident on the road. His study of English was not going well. Sometimes Flint would come to the communications bunker and listen to the French news, which he understood, and then translate it back to Lukas. But Flint wanted the BBC news. He believed that hope lay with the Anglo-Saxons, who were closer to the Americans.
And it would be good to get out for the sake of Vincentas, who was spending more and more of his evenings praying. Maybe this was natural for a man who intended to be a priest, but Lukas wondered what he could say to God over two hours that couldn’t be said in half that time. Or less.
Lukas missed his home, but he missed his university residence and his student friends even more. He had been on the brink of a new and better life, but that life had receded from him now. The only hope of ever bringing it back was to fight.
It took a day to make contact with the neighbouring partisan bands and draw up plans to seize Merkine. It would show the Chekists they could not act with impunity. Six bands would attack different objectives simultaneously, and an assassin would shoot the two most ardent Reds in town. Others would bring back the bodies in the marketplace.
Flint sent the shoemaker home to Merkine and told him to take his wife to another town and visit relatives for a few days. The shoemaker tried to do as he was told, but when he got home his wife was not tender at all, and she was in no mood for travelling on the muddy roads of spring. She called her husband a fool to his face for trying to get her to travel. She repeated her complaints about her husband to the women she saw every day after morning Mass, and word of his pressing need to leave town began to filter through to his neighbours.
Vincentas and Lukas were in a small band of six men led by Lakstingala. Their job was to destroy the stone and stucco house that served as the main office of the slayers, and to make sure they could complete the task, they had been issued a panzerfaust, a rocket launcher to be fired by Ungurys. Lakstingala saw the prayer-obsessed Vincentas as the weak link in the group, and assigned him the job of runner, whose responsibility it was to get news to Flint’s group, which was going to take the police station across town and destroy the records there.
The six men in Lakstingala’s group stood behind a grove of pines on the edge of town, the first houses visible fifty metres away. It had been snowing, and there were already ten centimetres on the ground, which would make running hard, but if the snow kept up, at least it would mask their footprints when they retreated.
Lakstingala and Ungurys each wore white camouflage, but there had not been enough to go around for the others. The men had been standing in their positions since before dawn, waiting for the firing on the other side of town that would be their signal to attack. Lukas’s feet and fingers were cold. He kept his hands tucked under his armpits, but he could do nothing about his feet.
A few shots came from the other side of town. These were followed by sporadic automatic fire. Finally the rate of fire picked up and a couple of grenades went off in the distance. Three hundred metres to the right, Flint and a dozen men began to run across the open ground toward the edge of town, hunched over and with their rifles and light machine guns in their hands.
“This is it. Forward!” said Lakstingala.
They were barely out of cover when the flash of gunfire from the window of a wooden house started up, and snow flew as the bullets struck about their feet. They were expected.
“Down,” shouted Lakstingala.
The men were each a few metres apart and fell into the snow, and then began to crawl forward, returning fire.
In his grey woollen coat, Lukas felt all too visible against the snow. Some of it had flown up his nose, and the snow beneath him was so wet that he would be soaked if he lay there long. At this rate it would take many minutes before the others were close enough to throw a hand grenade into the open window, and even lying flat they would be all too easy for the sniper to pick off.
Lakstingala read the situation the same way, and called out Lukas’s name while telling the others to hold their fire and so provoke the sniper to fire more often.
Lukas raised his rifle and aimed at the window. At the next muzzle flash, even before he heard the report, he fired, and then heard the incoming shot and a grunt from inside the house. Hearing the grunt, Lakstingala rose, struggled through the snow up to the house and threw a hand grenade inside.
Lakstingala waved them all over. None of the men had been shot, but Vincentas looked frightened. “They knew we were coming,” said Lakstingala breathlessly, wiping the sweat and melted snow from his face. “Watch all the windows as you go into town. The doorways too. And don’t bunch up. Now come on, Flint is far ahead of us and I don’t want to fall behind.”
By the time they made it onto the street, the inhabitants, both guilty and innocent, had taken shelter and hunkered down. Most of the shutters were closed; there was no movement except for a man in what looked like a uniform running toward the slayer headquarters. Without thinking, Lukas raised his rifle to his shoulder, aimed and shot the man in the back.
Vincentas looked at him and shook his head. Amid the tension and confusion, Lukas permitted himself a moment of exasperation for his brother and swore he would do nothing more to protect him. There was no time for other thoughts.
Lakstingala’s group ran up to the dead man and identified him as indeed a dead slayer, his dropped rifle at his side.
“Take the rifle,” Lakstingala said to Vincentas, “and check for grenades. Take those too. You,” he said to Lukas, “hang back last and keep your rifle up. Cover us as we move forward.”
Lukas did as he was told. The men went up to a crossroads with wooden houses on all four corners. The baroque church with its stone wall, iron gate and steeple stood nearby.
Lakstingala looked both ways and made it across, but the second man was hit by a burst of automatic fire. There was a machine gun up in the church steeple. The church was manned as a defensive position.
Lukas could not get a good shot at the steeple without exposing himself, and so stood little chance of hitting the man in there, but he harassed the sniper with short, three-round bursts of fire as often as he dared until the others made it across the open space. There was no one to cover him. He waited a few moments and then ran across, a burst of machine gun fire clipping at his heels until he made it to safety.
Lukas stood leaning against the wooden wall of a house, breathing hard, when the shutter creaked, opened, and a rifle barrel came out. Lakstingala fired two shots from across the road and the rifle clattered onto the cobblestones outside. Without pausing to consider if the man who had stuck out the rifle barrel had hidden himself among women or children, Lukas tossed a hand grenade into the room and waited for the explosion before looking to Lakstingala for further orders.
“Take the fallen rifle too,” said Lakstingala to Vincentas.
“I can’t carry all this.”
“Just sling it over your shoulder.”
There was no time to go back for the fallen partisan at the crossroads. He was not moving anyway, and he lay in the line of fire of the sniper in the church steeple. Intensely aware of not making themselves visible from the steeple, Lakstingala’s men threaded their way to the one-storey stucco headquarters of the slayers in a small square not far from the centre of town. Along the way they came upon an overturned Studebaker, empty, with a leaking gas tank that had spilled fuel across the entire road.
“Be careful not to set the gasoline on fire,” said Lakstingala, and the men walked through it gingerly, though Ungurys slipped and went down on his side before rising again.
By now sounds of rifle shots and machine gun fire came from many different places. The resistance of the Reds was sporadic, most of the local Communists having fled to cellars and pantries. The church steeple needed to be avoided. Whenever Lukas could see it from some new vantage point, he fired upon it in order to make the sniper more frightened, less vigilant in taking opportunistic shots at the partisans.
The slayer headquarters had a heavy wooden door. The building was full of men, with at least two rifles at every window. Lakstingala’s band could not draw closer than the trees at the perimeter of the yard. One of the partisans had a heavier machine gun with a tripod, but even those bullets could not pierce the thick walls, and there was no way to get a good position to fire upon the wooden doors.
Lakstingala studied the building. “Concentrate your fire on the two windows on the east side,” he said. “Don’t waste all your ammunition, but try to shoot out all the glass and take out the crossbar of the window frame. I don’t want any obstructions.”
The five men fired upon the windows furiously, and soon they were only empty openings. They received no return fire while they were shooting, the men inside likely lying on the floor to protect themselves.
The partisans had to keep up sporadic fire to permit Ungurys the time to come to a kneeling position with the panzerfaust on his shoulder. It was a single-shot weapon, and they did not have another. It was essential that he shoot into the window to achieve maximum damage, and to do it quickly before the men inside had time to position a machine gun at that window.
“Remember that the men inside killed our partisans a couple of days ago,” said Lakstingala. “Show them no mercy. Kill anyone who escapes.”
Ungurys braced himself with this left shoulder against a tree and stayed within close coverage of the wall of the house behind him to protect himself from the sniper in the church steeple. Lakstingala had the others spread out to kill any survivors who might escape from the door or windows after the rocket was fired.
The missile entered the window perfectly, struck some obstruction inside, and exploded so strongly that all the remains of the other windows and the door blew out.
There were no survivors.
The partisans would have cheered, but they turned at the screams of Ungurys. None of them had fired a panzerfaust before, and none had been aware that the back flash was murderous if there was any obstruction behind the shooter. By staying close to a wall to keep out of sniper range, Ungurys had permitted the back flash to ignite him, and the gasoline he had trod through now burned as well. Lakstingala moved forward to knock him into the snow, but the church steeple sniper saw Ungurys and shot him.
Lakstingala and the three other men fell back into the cover of a house when Ungurys went down. His clothes continued to burn, but he did not move.
The smouldering hair and flesh smelled bad.
Lukas and the others watched helplessly for a few minutes until the snowfall began to thicken. It mixed with smoke that was rising from fires around the town. Then Lakstingala, masked from the steeple by the falling snow, stepped forward and patted down the flames that still burned on Ungurys’s body. Lukas joined him and together they dragged the body within the protection of the wall.
Though he was tired and frightened, Lukas felt a pang for Elena, who had loved Ungurys so well.
Lukas had been sweating, and now he could feel the sweat cooling on him, making him shake a little. His brother’s face was covered with dirt and soot and he looked stunned. Lukas would have liked to rest a little, but Lakstingala gave them no more than a few minutes.
The snow began to fall more thickly. With nothing in particular to shoot at, the sniper in the church steeple fired in short, random bursts, putting the men on edge. Although the sniper could not see them, they could no longer see him either and could never be precisely sure when they might fall in the line of fire.
They went back to the crossroads where the first partisan had fallen, and then they dragged the bodies of their two dead comrades to the town square. The three men killed days earlier were lying there too, their bodies sheathed in snow. Lakstingala tried to wipe down their faces to look at them, but the faces were just masses of ruined, unrecognizable flesh. One had a rosary draped around his neck, a form of mockery.
Intense gunfire came from two other quarters of the town.
“What do we do next?” asked Lukas.
“Flint was supposed to rendezvous with us here,” Lakstingala said. “We were going to retreat with the bodies on a cart, but now I don’t know if he’ll make it. Lukas, go and see if you can find a sled or Flint. Come back with whichever one you find first. Vincentas, leave the extra rifles and go in the direction of the gunfire and see what you can scout. If you don’t see anything, come back in ten minutes and we’ll retreat with the bodies.”
Each man did as he was told.
Vincentas did not know the town at all, and the smoke and snow made it very hard to see anything. He tried to keep closest to the walls of houses that came between him and the church steeple, but the town was not densely built and there were yards and other gaps that he had to run across.
He checked his ammunition and saw that he had not fired a single shot. And yet he remembered pressing the trigger. He examined his rifle and saw that he had never even taken off the safety. Some soldier he was turning out to be.
Vincentas wanted to pray as he walked into the obscurity, but it seemed obscene to pray with a rifle in his hands. And the intermittent sound of the sniper in the steeple enervated him, even though the gunfire was muffled by the falling snow.
He shivered. His boots, for all their good repair, were soaked right through and his fingertips were so cold he was not sure he would be able to pull the trigger even if he had to.
A burst of machine gun bullets hit the house behind him, and unsure of their origin he turned around the corner of the house, ran into a yard and then ducked around a couple more buildings. He listened for firing from the church steeple, but it had fallen silent.
Now he could not orient himself. The gunfire at the opposite end of town was diminishing and moving. He was lost, unsure how long he had been gone, unsure of which way to go back. He stumbled against a low fence and just managed to keep himself from falling into the unshuttered window of a house. Before he pushed himself away, he saw inside. Their shoemaker was there, sitting in the corner by a candle with his wife. They both looked up at him through the glass, fear on their faces.
They should have left town, as Flint had told them to do. Flint would have been suspicious of their presence, and all the more so because the partisan attack had seemed anticipated. The old couple were lucky Vincentas was the one who stumbled upon them. He waved through the glass, but they did not recognize him.
Vincentas walked on, found a road and followed it, but the snow was thicker, the visibility diminishing. He was afraid he might come across the Reds, but he came instead to the high school, a two-storey red-brick building. He was very tired and cold. He would step inside for just a moment. Two of the three classrooms on the ground floor were empty, but not the third. He found a senior class of high school students and their teacher, all lying on the floor. One of the young men jumped to his feet when he saw him.
“You’re a partisan!” he said. “Have you come to liberate us?”
“Get back on the floor,” said the teacher.
But the young man was not to be stopped. He wore thick glasses and a homespun suit, and was therefore from a poor farm. Vincentas smiled a little to see a younger version of himself.
“The boys in this room are ready to join you,” he said. “We’ll kill the Komsomol girl here and help save the country.”
Poor boy. He would come to regret his words after the partisans withdrew and the Komsomol girl carried home news of what he had said. A harder man, someone like Lakstingala, might shoot the girl to save the boy’s life. Vincentas could not do that, but he tried to do something.
“The partisans don’t need your help now,” said Vincentas. “You can serve your country by finishing your studies and learning how to be good men and women. And the first thing you have to learn is not to betray one another. You, young woman, is it true you’re in the Komsomol?”
She could not reply. She was weeping.
“Well, it doesn’t matter. As long as you never intended to hurt anyone. And even if you have joined the Komsomol, you must love your classmates. How can you love your country unless you love the people in it? Study hard, and be good students.”
Vincentas suddenly became aware of himself, a dirty, wet man with a rifle in his hand giving a small sermon to the boys and girls. How long had he been gone from Lakstingala’s band? He wasn’t sure. He had to get out of there. He told the high school students to stay on the floor and listen to their teacher and not move until all the firing in the town had stopped.
Back out on the street, he heard very little gunfire. It occurred to him that the partisans might have retreated without him. Flint had drawn a rough map of the town and made them memorize it, and now that he knew he was at the school he might be able to orient himself and find his way back to the square.
But the snow and the smoke were bewildering, and soon he lost his orientation again. Two figures in white appeared in front of him, both of them dressed in battle gear, as Lakstingala and some of the others had been. He raised his hand to wave to them, and realized too late they were Reds. He raised his rifle at them and pressed the trigger but had forgotten to take off the safety. Rather than reach for it, he muttered the opening words of the last act of contrition.