Underground Read Free Page B

there.”
    â€œYou might tell your brother that I could put him in an advanced Classics class here, if he wants. It might be safer. The new regime doesn’t like priests much.”
    â€œHe always wanted to be a priest. He’s like a bird who only knows one song.”
    â€œWe’ll all have to learn to sing new songs now. Get to that archive. I have someone to help you.”
    Rimantas was a student as well, a year younger than Lukas and a year behind in his studies. Rimantas was reedy and tall and walked with a slight stoop, as if to minimize his height. He had a pale, scholar’s face, and the habit of chewing on the inside of his right cheek, which gave him a twisted, comical look.
    â€œI’m glad they’re sending us to the archive,” said Rimantas.
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œWe’re literature students, aren’t we? I haven’t read anything decent for months. Maybe we can borrow something. Have you read anything good recently?”
    â€œWho’s had time to read? I had to help with the farm work over the summer, and spent my nights hiding from the Reds.”
    Rimantas nodded skeptically. “True enough. But I can’t stand doing nothing with my mind. I waited for two hours for my turn with the officer who stamped our exemption papers. I was dying of boredom. No newspapers in the waiting room. Everyone a stranger. I tried to compose poetry in my head because I didn’t have any paper to write on, but I couldn’t even settle on a single couplet.”
    For all the bustle at the university, Rimantas seemed lethargic. Having him around was like dragging a reluctant, talkative donkey. “Poets need to suffer,” said Lukas.
    â€œYes. They say the best always need to suffer. Is that a homespun shirt I see beneath your tie?”
    Lukas reddened. Homespun was a sign of country folk, looked down upon by the sophisticates. Lukas had been proud of his homespun shirt, made from flax grown in the family fields, but it would do no good to defend farm values against Rimantas.
    Although Lukas had been attracted to the idea of café society in the city, he found Rimantas a little too artistic for his taste. Rimantas had stood out in university by wearing dramatic clothing in his first year, a long black raincoat, too hot in the fall and too thin for the winter. For a while he’d even worn a beret. His mother was a minor opera singer, so Lukas forgave him his pretensions, believing that a child raised in cafés was bound to be different from one raised on a farm.
    A collapsed arch blocked the entranceway to the courtyard in which the library archive lay. The front of the building had been either shelled during an artillery barrage or blown up by the retreating Germans, although it was unclear what military significance it might have had. The young men searched through the alleys before they found another way into the courtyard. Cigarette butts, papers and tins lay on the cobblestones, and the door to the archive was locked. But the bars on the window to the right had been torn off and the glass was broken. Lukas reached inside, opened the window latch, and the two clambered in.
    Someone had been in before them. Hundreds of books lay open on the floor, some of them burned and some of them ripped. To see such destruction of expensive books troubled Lukas more than the sight of the ruined buildings in the streets.
    The archive was uncannily quiet. Dust motes rose into the air and hung there in the shafts of light that came through the small windows. All of Kaunas was dusty from the earth churned up by military vehicles, from mortar and stone and soot particles that rose up after explosions and hung in the air for days and weeks at a time before settling on the city, ready to be stirred again.
    Lukas and Rimantas talked quietly to one another, as if a stern librarian might appear at any time, and yet they were possessed by an unexpected sense of adventure, never