Underground Read Free

him and his younger brothers occasionally resented his care. The second son, Vincentas, had also been sent back from the seminary for his own safety, to wait out the passing of the front.
    The Petronis family had thought of withdrawing behind the German lines in the summer of 1944, but what would life be like in Germany? They would be refugee foreigners in a land under attack from two sides. Besides, staying might not be all that bad even if the Reds did come back. What did a farmer have to fear? Petronis owned a modest fifty acres of land, and a farmer was only designated an enemy of the people, a “bourgeois,” at seventy-five acres. He was safe as long as the category was not enlarged to include him.
    He was uneasy about that. The Reds had coined a new term: “debourgeoisation,” an excellent bureaucratic word for expropriation. A tailor could not have thought of a better term, because it was like a bolt of cloth that could be cut to fit any size. During the first Red occupation it had been applied to large landowners, policemen, government ministers, deputy ministers, assistant deputy ministers, people with relatives abroad, anti-government activists, school principals, and even the one-legged jazz saxophonist in the Metropolis Café in Kaunas, along with his wife, a hairstylist. One could not be sure the category wouldn’t be adjusted again.
    It was the end of July and very hot, but the windows were shuttered, an oil lamp on the table casting poor light and adding to the heat. The family was eating lunch at a long table. Above the thatched roof of the wooden farmhouse, German and Russian mortars crossed paths. Occasionally the distant sound of tank rounds was heard, as well as automatic fire. There was nothing to do but wait it out, so Petronis senior dipped his spoon into his bowl of beet greens soup and the others followed.
    Then they waited throughout the day, old man Petronis anxious in case the shelling lasted so long it kept him from milking his cows. Late that afternoon, the firing moved west.
    About an hour before sunset, the Jewish Pine Forest dune began to move, with wave upon wave of Red Army soldiers coming over the hill. Hundreds of them came on, their faces tired and dirty, their uniforms torn.
    They were hungry because the front lines travelled without field kitchens, so the men had to live off the land. Father Petronis sent his daughter inside and the three brothers brought out a table on which they cut up slices of bread and laid out pieces of sausage as well as poured out all the milk they had into jugs. About twenty of the soldiers ate there while others fanned out to neighbouring farms, but they did not stay long because they had to rejoin their units before nightfall.
    The first day had ended fairly well. The soldiers were just young men after all, tired and hungry. Maybe they were afraid too. Maybe things would turn out all right.
    The German lines stiffened near the East Prussian border, so the lack of Red Army field kitchens became a burden to the local farmers, especially those who lived near the main roads and whose farms were easily accessible. The Red Army rode about in Studebakers, Lend-Lease gifts from the Americans.
    Red soldiers believed that food, at the very least, was their due. Declaring themselves liberators and guests, they could show up at any time in groups of four or six. If food was a soldier’s due, liquor was his reward, and these same soldiers appeared with farm goods, guns, grenades, saddles and even horses, which they traded happily for buckets of home-distilled samagonas . A farmer’s joy at a good trade could be marred, though, when another farmer from a few kilometres away recognized his saddle or his horse and demanded its return.
    Once drunk, the soldiers reflected on the unfairness of their own poverty and that of their families back on the collective farms, and began to steal from the farmers at night. The barking of the farm dogs did not