Free Underground by Antanas Sileika Page B

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.
    â€œThis 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