AUGUST 7, 1945
THE WAR had ended for the Westerners in Europe on May 8, 1945, after which Germans and Americans, English and French and others all laid down their arms and began the hard road to peace, the rebuilding of ruined cities, the denazification that would clear away the old enemies, and the counting of the dead that would lead to an understanding of the horror that innocent people had suffered through.
But in the East, no such end came. Instead, in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, in Ukraine and Byelorussia and parts of Poland, the war went underground. For a while the partisans fought pitched battles from fixed positions, but now that Germany was defeated, the Reds could turn and devote their strength to making the new lands conform to their plan.
In the West, the demobilized soldiers went home to build homes and garages and to fill them with refrigerators, washing machines, televisions and cars. In the East, the project begun in the Soviet Union twenty years earlier was continued, and the farmers were stripped of their land. The mass deportations began in earnest again, the cattle cars rolling northeastward with hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, many to be starved, frozen or worked to death. Whole categories of people were doomed: school principals, former government bureaucrats, former army officers all the way down to sergeants, policemen, train conductors, nuns, monks and many priests, shop owners, and any farmers rich enough to have had hired hands.
The Reds could sweep the countryside and hold it as long as they were present, but as soon as they left, the partisans came out of their bunkers again to assassinate the local Reds whose job it was to collect requisitions, police the streets and, in particular, check the myriad documents that the regime began to issue. These documents multiplied till they became like the strips used to wrap mummies, and with the same effect: the immobilization and entombment of the bodies of the inhabitants.
By now, Lukas was accustomed to sleeping outside day or night, in the rain or snow, to eating whatever he had foraged, from a fish found frozen in the ice to spring sorrel. He could sleep in the branches of a tree if he had to. He could shoot a slayer dead at a hundred metres, if he had the right weapon, or blend so thoroughly into the landscape that a Red could pass right by him and not notice he was there.
Since the death of his brother, Lukas had learned to bury all feelings as deeply as possible, although they sometimes rose up and clutched at his throat. Tears ambushed him when he was alone on sentry duty or scouting the fields for roving bands of slayers. These eruptions did not relieve his sense of loss, or help him in any way to come to terms with his new life. They only made him feel worse, and he did all he could to keep his untamed emotions buried.
He struggled with this project of turning himself into an automaton. On the one hand, he did not want to think about his lost brother, whose body was never found, and he did not want to humanize his enemies, because those kinds of feelings would make him weak in the work he must do. On the other hand, if he had no emotions at all, he would not love his parents or his country or any-one else. He began to understand poor Ungurys a little better now. He had been taciturn in the extreme, but his sister, Elena, was warm. Ungurys must have shared some of this warmth until his life in the partisans hardened him. And yet it was strange that love of country should make one a killer, that love should lead to its opposite.
The longer the partisans lived in the countryside, the more feral they became; a bookbinder, a teacher or a carpenter ceased to be any of those people in the forest and became another creature instead.
The genus Partisan adapted and differentiated according to the places where the fighters found themselves. Flint’s band belonged in the species of Field Partisans. It consisted of foxes that ran along the roadsides, among the brambles and through woodlots to dart into the fields and granaries when opportunities presented themselves. Visiting farmhouses at night, they knocked on the shutters to ask for food and news of slayer squads and Cheka interior army forces. If their luck was bad, the field partisans found their enemies on the other side of the shutters.
When the Cheka interior army hunted them with hounds, the field partisans dabbed their shoes with lamp oil to throw off the dogs, and slunk into thickets or underground bunkers, some cavernous and others no bigger than burrows. They built hideaways whose entrances were halfway down wells, under woodpiles or haystacks, or right out in the open fields. They fought viciously when cornered.
Field partisans ate better than the other species because they ventured out among people so often, but sometimes they did not return from their sorties. Their bodies joined masses of carcasses thrown into the marketplaces, shoeless and bloody, heaped up like Red trophies of the hunt.
Flint’s band was attending a parliament held in the forest, an attempt to forge an alliance among the last free beings in the land. It was safer for partisan bands to be free-standing units because they were less likely to be traced, but they also needed to know what the other bands were doing. Somewhere far away, Lozorius was reputed to be working to keep open the lines of communication among them, but no one was sure what he was doing or even if he was alive. He was like a miracle, more an article of faith than a fact.
The summit was hosted by the Pine forest Partisans, who carried themselves far less watchfully than their field cousins. The deep pine forests covered the poorest, sandy land in Lithuania, where farmsteads were few and the Cheka rarely dared to sweep. Whole forest counties remained untamed by the Reds, whose quislings slept together in fortified houses in towns by night, and went out by day only in armed bands.
Tanks could not pierce forests, and rocket flares did nothing to illuminate the deep shadows of the woods. As a result, these forest partisans held themselves more upright in stature. They were lively and good-natured by the massive bonfires they built at night, secure in their forest cover.
But for all their humour and easy-going nature, they were a hungry lot because there was so little food to feed them, and they had to rely more heavily on the few farmers nearby, who were not well fed themselves. Pine forest partisans foraged for wild strawberries and mushrooms, grazing on wild greens when they could find them.
The forest partisans were wood bison, a little slow and heedless, but well defended by their horns whenever they came under attack. Always slightly hungry, they forayed out in groups to strike at remote food warehouses or railway lines.
The Bog Partisans were yet another species, men who lived on secret islands in the swamps. The bogs were vast and deadly to those ignorant of the underwater bridges that the partisans had built. The bog partisans were beavers, industrious in their engineering. They hid in the reeds, kept boats among the bushes, and saved ammunition by leading their enemies into sinkholes of mud, where a fully armed Cheka soldier might descend into the bog to join bodies that had been resting there since the Iron Age.
But the bog partisans paid the same price for their security as the pine forest partisans, namely hunger. They fished when they could, cut down trees in which ravens had built nests, and snared whatever rabbits lived nearby. Their damp surroundings and lack of food made them pale and watchful. Persecuted by mosquitoes, they either grew indifferent to their bites or went mad.
The bog and forest partisans preyed on caravans heading east. Now that Germany was defeated, the Reds were stripping it to feed their own people. Disassembled German factories rolled by on trains, as did houses, including doors and windows and even nails, straightened by prisoners of war before being set in boxes. Food went the same way. No one thought too much about what the remaining Prussians would eat. They were going to be driven out of the country anyway, and if some died, there would be fewer to move.
At present the local partisans had robbed a food train of sugar, and sprinkled it on everything the other partisans had brought, from barley soup to cucumbers. A year later, when the sugar had all been eaten, they would regret the lack of partisan dentists, and cure themselves with pliers.
Lastly there were Town Partisans, but these were few. They lived legally, or semi-legally with false documents, and helped to bring word of army movements and deportations, as well as lists of traitors who had signed up to become slayers or Red functionaries. The city partisans were mice, secretive and silent, but susceptible to capture in the traps set for them.
Elena was a town partisan, an underground courier who had come into the realm of the forest partisans first in order to visit her brother and then to collect copies of the underground newspaper to circulate back in her hometown. Now that Ungurys was dead, her visits to the free realm of the countryside were coloured by melancholy.
She slowly became aware that her workplace lay in the heart of an experimental agronomical project, an attempt to uproot the native growth and to sow the land with seeds that made a new sort of person. But the uprooting was an ongoing problem. The native growth was stubborn. And she came to realize she was an ally in this project of uprooting, or, if not an ally, then at least a functionary in the apparatus of destruction.
She would have to get out. She hated them all, from the affable but slovenly Gedrius, who was to be avoided in the cloakroom, to her roommate, the born-again Komsomol girl. It amused her sometimes that so many important officials of the new regime did not know they had an enemy in their midst, the quiet woman working the abacus and adding columns of numbers.
At first she had enjoyed the thought that her brother fought against these people in the forest. After his death, her loathing of the functionaries grew so much that she knew she wouldn’t be able to disguise it much longer.
Elena had very large brown eyes and was aware that men found her eyes attractive, but she usually masked them with unnecessary glasses when she was at work. In any case, she did not normally look up very much, because her workplace was full of wolves that could tear her apart. Even Antanas Snieckus, the chairman of the Lithuanian Communist Party and a hard-core Stalinist if ever there was one, the man who had deported his own brother to Siberia in 1940, the man whose own mother fled Lithuania in 1944 before he returned with the Reds—even he had paused to look at Elena’s eyes during an official visit.
Now she was sorry she had not taken the opportunity to kill him.
Elena’s gentleness and simplicity were fading, and she was transforming into something different, hardening around the lips. She kept her shoulders square and wore a working woman’s business suit and carried a leather satchel, altogether like a secretary on her way to work.
The partisan newspaper that Elena was supposed to pick up was three days late due to a lack of ink for the rotary printer, and the parliament of partisans was four days late because the bog partisans had had to make it through two separate swarmings of Chekists.
The parliament gathered in a forest meadow with a few trees inside the clearing, and in the shade of one of these Lukas was running off the last of the newspapers and laying them out in the sun to dry. He worked with the radio on a stump beside him, listening to the BBC, much of which he could now understand after a winter and spring of study with the American farmer. Nearby on the grass sat Ignacas in a jacket with a ripped collar and only one button. He had a switch in his hand and was idly whipping it back and forth in the air to keep off the flies. The BBC announcer said something in a voice slightly more inflected than the usual monotone.
“What did he say now?” asked Ignacas.
“Nothing much.”
“But what nothing in particular?”
“They were announcing the scores of the British football games.”
Ignacas sighed, partially in resignation and partially in envy. There were no football games in this part of Europe, not even high school against high school. The football coach might have been deported to Siberia, a child’s parents might have fled to the West, and countless others had simply disappeared. Ignacas wished he could disappear as well.
He was hopelessly inept and never sent out on missions. He was not a good writer, dithering over his sentences too much to be of any use on the partisan newspaper. Worst of all, he was perpetually hungry and had been reprimanded once for stealing food from the stores. One more such incident and he might get court-martialled, which could lead to only two possible results: a further reprimand or execution by firing squad. And yet he considered himself a patriot.
Lukas pitied Ignacas and helped him when he could, but the man had become mournful unless he was eating, and Lukas could listen to only so much misery without having it weigh him down.
Ignacas looked about them to make sure no one was within earshot. “There are a few more days to go until the amnesty runs out,” he said.
The Reds had declared an amnesty after the war ended in Germany, and many partisans had taken up the offer. Some of the bands forbade it, but Flint let his men make their own decisions. The only rules were that they leave behind any good weapons they might have and take poor ones, and that they not betray their old comrades. The first part was easy, but not the second. How was one to placate a new master without betraying a former one? Lukas asked him this very question.
“Here’s my plan,” said Ignacas. “I’ll wait until this parliament is over and then I’ll slip away. When I turn myself in, I’ll do it in some village, where it will take a while for them to work their way up to the proper authorities. Then I’ll bring them here as a sign of my sincerity. But all of you will be gone, you see? I’ll have betrayed nothing.”
“The Reds aren’t stupid. Do you think they’ll believe that?”
“I’m a good liar.”
“Even under torture?”
“They wouldn’t torture me, would they?”
“They do sometimes.”
“But not ones who give themselves up. I don’t think they do. But even if they did rough me up a little, by the time I told them anything, all of you would have moved on.”
“Except yourself.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know they never keep their promises. You know your father owned too much land. You’re an enemy to them by category—anything you say won’t change that.”
“I can’t think like that. I need to believe in something, and I need to believe they’re at least partially sincere. They’re building a new world, but they’re still fighting a war with people like us. They’ll become gentler over time.”
“You’re sounding more and more Red with every sentence. Maybe you do belong with them.”
“Oh, come on, don’t turn on me like that. You knew me back in school. You knew what I was like then. But let’s face it—I’m useless as a partisan. I wasn’t meant for this kind of life. It’ll kill me in the long run.”
“If they don’t kill you first.”
“I never realized you were such a hard-liner.”
“I’m not. I’m just cornered. I know I have to fight because I have no other choice.”
“You do have a choice, and so do I. Why should our generation be sentenced to death? What did we do? We need to find some way to live, some way to go on.”
“Taking amnesty won’t do it.”
“Maybe not for you, but what about me? Would you hold it against me?”
“Each of us has to do what he must.”
“But will you tell Flint about my plans?”
“What you just told me isn’t a plan, it’s an idea. And I don’t want to hear any more about it.”
Ignacas nodded, seemed about to speak again, but decided against it and turned to waddle away. He was no longer a fat man, but he still carried himself as if he were. No matter how much he gave in to them, the Reds would find he stank of “bourgeois.”
Elena made her way past a small group of older partisans by a smokeless fire where Flint was speaking with the leaders of the other bands. They fell silent as she passed. Farther on, a trio of young men sprawled on the grass, two cleaning their rifles and a third writing a letter. They tried to engage her in banter, but she did not have time to talk. She was looking for the latest newspaper and sought out Lukas among his newspapers laid out on the grass.
Absorbed with his work, Lukas did not look up from the press he had been cleaning. He had his sleeves rolled up and wore an apron to protect his clothes from the ink. Sensing someone nearby, he began to speak without glancing up. “I didn’t have enough alcohol to thin the ink properly. It’s still sticky, and I’m hoping the sun will dry it out. It would be a waste to let the newspapers smudge after all this work.”
Lukas’s hair was long, curling over his ears. Like the other partisans, he was a little feral, but he wasn’t coarse. He looked swift and comfortable, though there was trouble on his face. When he finally did look up at her, the trouble evaporated and his beautiful mouth broke into a smile.
“It’s you,” he said.
They had not seen each other since early spring, just before the seizure of the town of Merkine.
“I was afraid you might not come anymore,” said Lukas, “after you lost your brother. I’m very sorry about that, but I’m glad to see you here. I lost my brother that day too.”
“You did?”
“Yes.”
She had hardened her heart to help get over the loss. She had thought she could get on with things now, but when she heard of Lukas’s loss it reminded her of her own and she could barely speak. Lukas sensed her feelings and came forward and took her hands in his. She looked down, surprised yet gratified, and saw that the ink of his hands had smudged onto hers.
“My brother’s real name was Tomas,” she said finally, squeezing his hands before letting them go. “I didn’t like his code name—it made him sound slippery and cold. He wasn’t like that at all, at least when we were younger. After he went into the forest, he changed and started to become taciturn. I think he was killing his old self in a way because he was afraid of being soft. I never had a chance to see him much in the winter because it was so hard to get around. And then the next thing I knew, I received word that he was dead. Now I wish I’d tried harder to see him.”
“How could you have known? None of us knows when our time is coming.”
“No. You say you were with him on the final mission?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me what happened?”
It was not that Lukas didn’t want to be with her, but he wished they could talk of something else.
“Lakstingala was there and they’d been friends for a long time. Why don’t you ask him?”
“I already have. He told me in his rough, country way, his soldier’s way.”
“What do you expect me to add?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you just tell me what it was like?”
“All right.”
Lukas took off his apron and they sat down on the grass. The radio was playing on the stump nearby, and the conversation of men murmured indistinctly at the other end of the clearing like the sound of a brook.
“Do you have a cigarette?” she asked.
“I gave them up. The smell of tobacco smoke carries quite a distance, and I didn’t like the cravings for it when we were on a mission and I couldn’t smoke.”
“Then tell me what happened.”
Lukas stretched out, leaning on one elbow, and related the day’s events in Merkine. He trod carefully through the story, leaving out the part about Ungurys catching fire. He told Elena he was shot cleanly by the sniper and died before knowing what hit him.
“And you retrieved his body?”
“Yes. We buried him a few kilometres away, in a forest.”
“How did you dig the earth in the winter?”
“We used an old bunker.”
“I would like to visit that place someday.”
“I could show you, if you like.”
He looked at her then and thought he would like very much to travel with her to that place, sad though it might be. A pair of bees flew slowly about the field flower she held absently in her hands, and she observed them for a moment, and when she looked up, she caught him staring at her face. He was embarrassed, and she blushed in turn.
“Did you bury your brother near mine?” she asked.
“No, we couldn’t get the body. I didn’t even know he was dead for a couple of days. I kept waiting for him to find his way back to me.”
“Are you sure he wasn’t captured?”
“It doesn’t seem likely.”
“Miracles happen sometimes. I’ve heard of people surviving and showing up much later. I almost wish I knew less about the death of my brother, just so I could have a little hope. Lakstingala tells me I should be very proud of him. Everyone knows about the day the partisans took Merkine. There are stories about it all across the country. He’s some kind of hero, I guess.”
“Of course he is, but that doesn’t make it any easier to live without him. Life is hard.” He hadn’t meant a great deal by the statement, but it seemed to strike her in some way. She let the flower drop and reached forward and took his hand and squeezed it. For a moment he was afraid he might burst into tears. He crushed the emotion.
“Yes, it’s very hard,” she said. “Sometimes I think it’s unbearable and there’s no escape from it. I feel like I’m in a vise that’s being tightened by a quarter turn each day.” She let go of his hand and looked away to the newspapers lying in the sun. “If the ink won’t dry, why don’t you blot the sheets?”
“Paper is scarce and I can’t be wasting every second sheet.”
“I had farm cousins,” said Elena after a while. “Their mother laid out linen on the grass to bleach it in the sun.”
“My mother used to do that too. Maybe she still does,” he added.
“You haven’t seen her for a while?”
“About a year now. Not the rest of the family either.”
“At least you still have them. I just have my sister.”
This was the sort of conversation she could never have in the city anymore. There it was unsafe to say too much, but here she could say whatever she pleased.
“What happened to your family?” asked Lukas.
“Our house took a direct hit when the Reds were coming in the second time. My mother died right away and the house was destroyed.”
“And your father?”
“The Reds took him the first time they came.”
“So they deported him to the North?”
“I think so. He was in prison in Kaunas for almost a year. I know they knocked out his teeth. His body wasn’t there with the others the Reds shot when they pulled back before the Germans, so they probably took him to Siberia.”
Or they might have shot him on the way, but Lukas did not say this. “He must have been important.”
“He was a high school principal, but his brother owned a car dealership in America. It was enough. They took him in the first days. Then, when the deportations started, my mother and I went to Kaunas and walked out among the boxcars to look for him. There were a lot of people like us, carrying packages with clothes or food for the families stuffed inside the cars. We called up to the air holes, where there was always someone listening. But we never found him. It was a hot day and the guards were getting irritated. They threatened to put us on the trains if we stayed around any longer.”
Elena was going to say more, but Lukas heard something and rose to go to the radio and bent over to listen.
“What is it?” asked Elena.
“Be quiet a moment.”
She watched him listen, two furrows of concentration forming between his eyes. “Get me a pencil,” he said, and she went to the partisan who had been writing the letter when she first arrived. When she returned, Lukas took the pencil and began to make notes.
“Well?” she asked, but he shushed her and continued to make notes until the radio broadcast ended.
“Good news,” he said. “I’ll tell you later.”
“Tell me now.”
“I have to speak to Flint first.”
He walked to where the partisan leader was talking with the others, and the two of them conferred. A little breeze came up and stirred the newspapers laid out on the grass. Elena tested the ink to see if it had dried. It had, and she stacked some of the sheets carefully, leaving others to dry more.
Flint called the men together and all came around except for the sentries. Flint gave the floor to Lukas, who stepped forward and spoke from his notes.
“The Americans have dropped a bomb on a city in Japan,” he said. He repeated what he had heard in the broadcast. “It’s a very big bomb. It destroyed everything.”
“How big?” one of the men asked.
“Half a city was wiped away.”
“What do you mean, ‘a city’?”
“I don’t know, but the radio said over a hundred thousand dead.”
“That’s impossible. A bomb that big could never be loaded into an airplane.”
The men broke in with many technical questions, most of which Lukas could not answer. He knew only what he had heard on the radio.
Elena was unsure of what to make of the news, but the same was not true of the other partisans. Once they had understood properly what Lukas had said, they took the explosion of the atomic bomb as very good news, the best news they had heard in a long time. They began to cheer and applaud.
Elena elbowed her way through them to Lukas. She took him by the sleeve and pulled him aside.
“What are they so happy about? Think of all those dead civilians.”
Lukas was flushed and happy. “We hoped the Americans would go to war with the Reds once the Germans were beaten, but they didn’t. Probably this means they weren’t strong enough to finish off the Japanese while taking on a new enemy. But now they are. Now that the Americans have this bomb, they can destroy the Reds. They can beat them back. We might be on the verge of freedom.”
“In that case, God bless the Americans.”
He looked at her and found her beautiful. How had he missed this before? All it took was a moment of hope and he could see clearly again.
“Do you think you could help me?” Lukas asked.
“To do what?”
“You work in an office. Your typing is probably better than mine. If I wrote out the news story, could you type it up on the stencil for me?”
“Yes, I can do that.”
Elena waited as Lukas wrote out his summary of what he had heard on the news. The entire camp was buzzing with conversations about the announcement and how soon their lives would be changing. She listened for a while to the news from Warsaw, but there was no mention of the bomb on that station. Moscow said nothing about the bomb, but it did repeat word of its declaration of war against Japan.
Elena typed out the stencil with a typewriter set on the stump, with Lukas hovering over her. He was so anxious about getting the words right that he kept suggesting changes to his own handwritten article. She drove him away until she was done. When he returned, he read over her work carefully.
“I’ll start printing these up now,” said Lukas, and then he paused, slightly unsure of himself. “Will you wait? If you do, I can walk you to the train station.”
By the time Lukas finished the printing and set the newspapers out to dry, evening was drifting into night. The men who had been scanning the radio stations for fresh news had heard nothing and tuned back to Warsaw, which was playing popular music, a foxtrot with a fast beat.
Lukas felt regret that he could not quite understand when another man asked Elena to dance. There were no other women in the camp, but three other couples formed, the men dancing the women’s roles, hamming up their femininity, others waiting their turn as the only woman was passed from one partner to another through foxtrots, polkas and waltzes until she broke the heel of her shoe and had to sit down to rest. Lukas would have liked to dance with her too, but there were too many men who wanted her attention.
Soon it would be dark and the dew would settle on the newspapers Lukas had printed. He walked over to where they lay in the fading light, like rectangles of snow on the grass. The ink was not as dry as he would have wished, but the papers had been printed on one side only, so he stacked them back to front, trying hard not to shuffle them so they wouldn’t smudge. He put the typewriter back in its case and cleaned the press.
Euphoric, the partisans celebrated by building a bonfire. They sang and danced like a forest hunting party, wishing they could drink as well. Lukas was just finishing when Elena came to him, limping slightly on one foot.
“Are the papers ready?”
“Do you still want them?” he asked, unable to keep out of his voice his envy of the men who had danced with her.
“Of course I still want them. Do you still want to walk with me to the train station?”
“You’re limping.”
“I broke my shoe, but I can go barefoot if you come along with me.”
His envy evaporated in a moment. “You city people aren’t used to walking barefoot, especially at night. I have a pair of bast slippers I could give you.”
“But how would I return them?”
“They’re made out of bark. You could throw them away, or you could return them to me when you come back.”
“Do you want me to return?”
“I do.”
“Then I will.”
Lukas brought the bast slippers for her, but she was unaccustomed to bark shoes and, sitting on the stump in the darkness, could not see how they were fastened.
“Let me help you,” said Lukas. He knelt at her feet. The slippers were too large, but he could fold them in a way that would do to get her back to town. The straps were of bast as well and needed to be wound in a particular way to hold the slippers tight.
Lukas felt a slight tingle as he handled her feet. She was shy of her feet, but Lukas delighted in their touch. “How do the slippers feel?” he asked when he was done and she stood up in them.
“Very well. Thank you.”
Lukas told Flint his intentions and received reluctant approval to walk Elena back to the train station as long as he stayed off the main road and did not approach the station itself. Like a shepherd, Flint liked to keep his flock close; Reds and slayers prowled day and night.
It was not good to speak while travelling at night because one needed to listen for the snap of branches under other feet, and to keep one’s own feet as quiet as possible. But they talked a little in murmurs when they passed running water, which helped to cover the sound of their voices and the noise of the forest floor underfoot.
It was hard to see because there were only stars in the sky and no moon. Elena put her free hand under Lukas’s arm and he pressed it to his side. He had not been touched in a very long time and he enjoyed the pressure of her hand on his arm.
“I’m very happy about the news of this gigantic bomb,” whispered Elena, “but I hope they use it soon. I can’t go on like this much longer.” She stepped on a branch that broke with a loud crack, and the noise set off the baying of a farm dog somewhere not far away.
Lukas touched her shoulder to make her stand still as he listened for other sounds. She stirred and he touched her again to keep her still. He removed his rifle from his shoulder and waited, listening intensely, but after the dog stopped howling all he could hear was the sound of her breath in the night, and he stood still a little longer in order to drink in the sound. He bent toward her to tell her quietly that they could go on now, but as he moved forward she turned her face up to him, and with her lips so close to his he kissed her.
He set the rifle against a tree and she put down her sack and leaned back against another tree. The touch of her felt very fine, the smell of her hair something vaguely sweet and feminine mixed with woodsmoke from the fire and the outdoor smells of leaves and grass. They kissed for a long time, and he let his lips go across her cheek and up her neck to her ear.
“Let’s sit down,” he said.
It was dry on the earth and for a moment he wondered if she would permit him to continue to kiss her. She did, and more than that, she put her arms around him and they lay side by side, sometimes kissing and sometimes just holding each other. After a while he shifted a little, but she pulled him in tight.
“Don’t let me go,” she said.
“I won’t.”
He squeezed her very hard and she did the same, and something about the tightness squeezed out some of the pain of the death of his brother.
“Let’s sit up now,” she said after a while.
“Be very quiet. We’re not far from the road.” And then, after they had sat up, “Can you stay here a little longer?” he asked.
“Not much. There’s only one more train to Marijampole tonight.”
“Go tomorrow.”
“No, I can’t stay. I wish I could, but I have to be at work in the morning and I need to leave these papers at home.”
“When will you come back?”
“As soon as I can.”
Time was running out. They stood and she brushed herself off. He took her in his arms one more time, kissed her, and let her go.