Read Online Underground by Antanas Sileika - Free Book Online Page B

misery.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œIf you feel so bad, you should shoot him.”
    â€œVincentas is new,” said Lakstingala. “He still has scruples. You can shoot him yourself.”
    â€œThe machine gun isn’t accurate at this distance, and I’m not about to go down and up this hill in knee-deep snow just to save some slayer a little pain. You, Vincentas, shoot the man.”
    Vincentas blanched and shook his head.
    â€œI told you to shoot him.”
    â€œThere’s no need.”
    Lakstingala now sided with Ungurys. “You brought up the subject. Anyway, he’s your enemy. He’s probably condemned priests to death. You’d better shoot the slayer or Ungurys will have you up before Flint. He said you were supposed to be baptized, so get on with it.”
    â€œI won’t do it,” said Vincentas. Lukas noted a sudden change in his tone, a supercilious air that might provoke a man. Lakstingala noticed it too, the arrogance of the superior man, the intellectual who will not stoop so low as others.
    â€œ Won’t do it?” asked Lakstingala. He was the more civilized of the two, the more genial, but a partisan was a soldier. Soldiers followed orders and expected others to do the same, especially unbaptized partisans.
    Lukas looked at his younger brother in wonderment. Did Vincentas not see what he was doing by this outright refusal? And couldn’t he hear himself talking down to these men?
    â€œStop this nonsense,” said Lakstingala, his voice as cold as the winter day. “I order you to shoot the slayer.”
    In one smooth action, Lukas lifted his rifle, sighted and fired, the crack of the gunfire a blow to the ears, the smell of cordite immediate.
    Lukas lowered his rifle. The slayer had been shot in the chest and went straight down. Vincentas looked at him in horror.
    â€œLukas, how could you do it?”
    â€œI put him out of his misery.”
    Lukas said the familiar words to calm his brother, but they did not reflect his own feeling, the strangeness of having committed an irreversible act. Before that moment he had been a student hiding out in the woods. Now he was something else, but the sensation was so new that he didn’t yet know the creature he’d become.
    Neither Lakstingala nor Ungurys was entirely happy about the way the morning had played out, but as the slayer was dead, there was no point in making Vincentas shoot him again. But Ungurys was still irritated, and he made Vincentas come up last behind them and reprimanded him twice for being sloppy in masking their footprints with the pine branch he was forced to carry.

FIVE
    MARCH 1945
    T HE 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,