April 18, 1949

Dearest Poland,

It seems that all I have to tell nowadays are fickle stories, but I find this particular story to be worth the small indulgence of sharing. I've been spared enough empty time to pick up the pencil again; an infected gunshot wound caught up to me, in my lower torso near my left hip. I suppose I passed out from the pain one night because when I came to, Tom was trying to stick me with morphine and the entire company was in disarray. Now they won't let me move so much as my littlest finger in protest of resting.

They know I don't like being idle; I can bet you my best fountain pen that this is their way of punishing me for delaying treatment so long.

The night we took up Vakaris Straskauskas, he was mute with grief and so black with soot that we had to shine a torch on him to see what was man and what was forest, but we had known him long before that. I've already described him in one of my prior letters, and from the sketch you should know that he is thin, short, and wears round eyeglasses. For a few months in '45 he proffered up his small Vilnius apartment as a meeting place for the officers; we gathered in his kitchen every night and he gave us biscuits and tea, even though I knew he had none to spare for himself, given how barren his cabinets were.

Underneath his flat was a library - an old and elegant spiralling staircase led us to rich chambers of mahogany and leather and vellum. And surveying the territory between the flat and the library was Vakaris' only companion: a broad-faced Turkish Angora with moonlike, agile features and a cold expression. MÄ—nulis watched us from the crowns of carved shelves with the close eye of a bridge keeper.

Because he had refused to destroy a lengthy index of forbidden literature some months before, a list that would have comprised nearly half of the library, Vakaris was a primary suspect of the Gavlit; I wish I could say I was surprised when, one morning, all that remained of his elegant athenaeum, his entire antebellum existence, was a gaping black hole. And he was kneeling on the cobblestones, still grasping at the white, ashen pages that rose from that blackness and tumbled across the street like a flock of crippled birds.

I took him to our makeshift camp then, and Tom sponged away the black and the blood and the sweat. Every once in a while his mouth would gape in an agony brought on only by the anguish of a man's spirit. We wouldn't learn until much, much later that it wasn't the library he was so distraught over. The NKVD had emptied the entire street on the night prior, and he was convinced that it was his fault, for he had given a sizeable portion of his books to the neighbours that week and feared his actions had spurred over a dozen families' dismissal to Siberia. The poor man was inconsolable for days.

Of course, the NKVD needs to see only the slightest error to distribute their trademark tickets to hell. It is far more likely that they had seen us lingering on the outskirts of the city and some poor, innocent fellow had been accused of harbouring partisans, so they swept up the whole lot of the street.

Vakaris has been a permanent member of our section for almost 4 years now, and works closely with Titas to sketch out crude maps of our whereabouts. He still envisions travelling to Himachal Pradesh, an isolated, enchanted land in India where he can admire the great deodar forests and bask in the glory of God.

I wish I had time to share every man's story, they are each as unique as fingerprints.

Lietuvos