Mother Courage (Axis Powers Hetalia, Lithuania, Prussia) [2]
Back to Part One
And here's part two! (Like I said, this thing. Um. Maybe I should've called it the Lietdammerung.)
On January thirty-first of the new year, Lithuania stares at the wireless. He can’t identify the symphony playing, some somber adagio movement, but the music is less important than the announcement.
Prussia surrendered at Stalingrad. Russian victory.
And to hear this news over the state radio and not from anyone in one of the resistance movements starting to spring up, people with ties to sources outside his borders…Lithuania shakes his head, almost in disbelief. What happened there?
Prussia doesn’t tell him when he staggers into Lithuania’s office a week or two later. Lithuania starts to see him: his skin and hair are the same ash-gray, and his uniform hangs loose on him. It’s almost like he’s sinking into the black folds, shrinking into them. “Water,” he croaks, “water, dammit.”
Wordlessly, Lithuania offers him a glass. Prussia swills it down, slams it on the desk when he’s drained it. The parts of his hands he hasn’t bandaged are flayed red and raw, and the edges of his nails have blackened. “What are you staring at?” Prussia asks, and Lithuania averts his eyes.
“Fucking Russia-fucking winter-fucking everything.” Prussia shudders. “Shooting us down from the rubble of his own streets, is there anything that crazy bastard won’t do? It doesn’t matter,” he says before Lithuania can answer. “We’ll shore up our line. We’ll take Kursk. We’ll get the initiative back. We did it in the Great War, we can do it again. The plan’s in my head, I just need time to-time to thaw out, jesus fucking christ…”
“The radiator broke two days ago,” Lithuania says, pulling his jacket over his shoulders and shrugging deeper into it. “I’m afraid we haven’t had time to fix it yet, so you won’t do much thawing in here.”
“Is this place good for anything?” Prussia shouts to the ceiling. He shoves the cup back towards Lithuania, paces around the room, blows on his hands and winces when the air gets too near his lacerations. “Goddamn-you know what? You’re giving me a Waffen-SS legion.”
“…what?”
“Latvia did, Estonia did. Your turn. I need the men, okay?” he says, rounding on his heel. “Half my army’s dead from frostbite or Russia or-it’s the same thing, isn’t it? No wonder he’s so fat, he needs all that bulk for insulation…” Prussia punches his bandaged palm, apparently before he can think better of it, because he bellows “fuck!” soon after. “Anyway. Tell your boys to volunteer. I’ll treat ‘em good. I’ll treat ‘em a hell of a lot better than Russia ever did.” He flips a fraying strand of hair out of his eyes, and Lithuania scrutinizes him again, sees how far that fraying extends: to the hints of shadows under his eyes, the way the bones in his wrists stand out, the way he holds his neck. He’s not as thin as Lithuania is, and maybe he won’t ever be, but Lithuania wouldn’t wish that on him, despite everything.
“Where will you send them?” Lithuania asks.
“Where I fucking need them, what do you think?”
“No,” Lithuania says, and from the look on Prussia’s face, he’s almost as startled to hear it as Lithuania himself is.
“Sorry, did you just say no? ‘Cause I thought I heard no.”
“No,” he repeats, and crosses his arms over his chest. It traps the warmth closer, in addition to everything else. “If you want me to raise that kind of unit, it’s under my command, not yours. And I only want it deployed within my borders, not outside them.”
Prussia blinks and contorts his face into a few interesting shapes before he settles on laughing incredulously, short sharp pants that don’t resemble laughter much at all. “Oh, this is great. This is just great. I’m out there freezing to death so I can keep Russia off your ass and when I ask for just a little help so he doesn’t come blowing down your door next, you say no, you think you know more about handling an army than fucking Prussia.”
“I know my land,” Lithuania says, “and I know my people.” And he knows he isn’t going to throw any more of his people in Russia’s direction and expose them to Russian gunfire or Russian winters. It’s as simple as that, really. Enough of his men and women and even children are languishing in Siberia, and he isn’t adding to their count.
“And I know that you’d better start rounding up volunteers, ‘cause you don’t want me short on troops any more than I want me short on troops.” Prussia glares at him, says “Got it?” before slamming the door behind him. Lithuania can hear “son of a bitch!” from the other side of the door; Prussia must have gripped the knob too hard.
That night, Lithuania makes his way through abandoned buildings and hidden basements, seeking out resistance cells-from any of the resistances, it doesn’t matter. “Prussia wants us to send more of our men to die for a war we never asked for,” he tells them. “He won’t even let us guard our own land; we’re to take his orders, and go where he wants us to.”
Angry murmurs break out, and on some level, Lithuania’s glad to hear them. “We’ll refuse the call,” a barrel-chested man says. “They’ve got no right to demand more from us.”
“No, they haven’t,” Lithuania says. “We’re agreed?”
And everywhere he goes, he hears the same yes: quiet, often whispered in unison instead of shouted, but resounding all the same.
“No,” he tells the recruitment officers politely when they knock on his door (his actual front door, not the door to the cellar, even though that’s where he really lives these days). “I’m sorry, but I don’t think volunteering is in my best interest.” When they start to sputter in protest, he closes the door with as much delicacy as he can muster. He hasn’t invited them into his house.
Nor has he invited Prussia into his office, but Prussia never has needed an invitation.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“I’m doing all right, thank you.” The food shortages are leaving him a little dizzy these days, and he’s washed the same three shirts so many times that they’ve all been stained the same dishwater gray, but when he closes his eyes he can hear his people saying no-usually quiet, sometimes not spoken at all but implied when they elect not to show up at local government offices or town meetings, but firm all the same-and that shores him up more than the best food could.
“Yeah, well, good to hear someone is. Do you really not care, Lithuania? Do you really not care how close Russia is right now?”
“The wireless tells me your troops are doing a fine job of holding him back at Kursk,” he says.
The color drains from Prussia’s lips, and really, Lithuania shouldn’t be as pleased to see that as he is, and he does hate that he, well, doesn’t hate it, but his people are standing together again and it feels as though they haven’t been for so long.
“Fine,” Prussia snaps. “You want to play that game? We’ll play that game. If your boys are too busy to go to war, they’re too busy to go to school. I’m shutting down the universities.”
“What do the universities have to do with any of this?”
“You think I don’t know what goes on in universities?” Prussia counters. “I’ve had ‘em at least as long as you have-longer, probably. Nests of subversives, all of them.”
“And it’s where I get my leaders,” he says. “It’s not as though I have an army now, where else am I going to pull them from?”
“Nowhere, if you keep this up.” Lithuania thinks Prussia’s hands have healed since Stalingrad, since he’s pounding his fist against Lithuania’s desk, though it’s hard to tell since Prussia never takes off his gloves these days. “You give me those men or I swear to god I’m going to put every able-bodied citizen you have into a place where I know they’ll do the work I need them to.”
It’s summertime now, but Lithuania feels a chill crawl up his spine. He takes a deep breath in, lets that chill dissipate. “I think I’ve made my conditions clear,” he says. “It’s got to be a force I lead that only acts in my territory.”
“How does that help me?”
“You can transfer your troops away from here,” Lithuania points out. “You wouldn’t need to use them for police or security forces. You can send them to Russia, to reinforce the line.”
“No. Not good enough. You want that kind of thing, you make me trust you.”
What more do I have to do to earn your trust? Lithuania wants to shout, but refrains. He’s seen his lands stripped, his buildings bombed, and god knows how many of his people slaughtered. If that isn’t enough for Prussia, nothing will be, and he’s beginning to suspect that nothing ever will be enough for Prussia. “It doesn’t look like we’ll be able to reach a consensus like this.”
“There is no goddamn consensus,” Prussia says, and leans over the front of the desk, seizes Lithuania by his collar and hauls him up; his elbows thump into the wood and scatter his papers to the ground and he clasps his hands around Prussia’s wrists to force them far enough away so he can breathe, think, respond. “Choose, okay? Me or Russia, choose!”
And Lithuania says, “No.”
***
The attempt to take Kursk fails, Russia begins to push back, and Lithuania barely sees Prussia these days-he’s bolting from one command post to another, scouring the streets for soldiers he might be able to send to bolster the front and snapping out orders to those he can’t spare, telling them how to shore up home defenses.
“We’re going to need to start evacuating people to the countryside,” he says, more to the wall than to Lithuania. “Not now, but soon. Russia’s bringing his bombers with him, they’re going to go after the cities.”
“The countryside is fine,” Lithuania says. His partisans are used to operating from the forests, and if Russia does see this initiative through, does-does end up invading him again, at least his resistance will have well-established bases to work from. That’s what’s important now. They might even be able to start stockpiling food, because he hasn’t been able to squeeze any extra from Prussia’s men and he certainly won’t expect anything of the sort from Russia. There have to be some farms in the countryside that haven’t been picked clean yet, he can feel it: a faint stirring in his breast, tiny threads of life starting to take root and grow again. “If I had a defense force…”
“I’ll think about it,” Prussia says, which is better than go to hell or no.
Russia continues to roll forward, and Prussia’s lines buckle and break all across the front. Lithuania knows how it feels to be caught in one of his advances: the slow steady crush of his armies once they mass and begin to move, the weight of his winters wiping out legions without firing a shot. Prussia’s telegrams grow clipped, wild as he requisitions anything he can find, anything that might help.
“A defense force here might help relieve the pressure,” Lithuania suggests after Russia retakes Smolensk. “We could stall him here-”
“If I can’t stop him, what makes you think you can? I mean, I’m gonna stop him,” he adds hurriedly. “I’ve got plans. My panzers can still outflank his any day, they just need room to move, time to circle him-then I’ll lure him in, and he’s toast. Bam. Just like that. He’s slow, he’s clumsy…I’m faster than he is.”
Kiev falls next.
Lithuania tries to rest his hand on Prussia’s shoulder, as he’s easier to negotiate with when he isn’t shaking and frothing at the mouth like this, but Prussia nearly bites it off at the wrist. “Fucking Ukraine!” he snaps. “You know what, fine, she can run off and cry to Russia, fine. I tell you, is this the kind of thanks I get for pushing that bastard out of everyone’s house? It’s not like he’s gonna leave! What, you think America and England’ll make him? Fuck no, they don’t want another war-”
“I know,” Lithuania says quietly, and shaping those words almost hurts, but…well, even if England and America can’t interfere directly on his behalf, they’ll send help, won’t they? Or they’ll tell Russia that he can’t keep everything he’s taken during this offensive, even Russia might listen to America. He might. Lithuania continues, “If I had a defense force…”
“Weren’t so eager to volunteer earlier this year, were you?”
“-we wouldn’t interfere with the larger war effort,” he says, ignoring Prussia, “we’d keep to our own lands…”
“Your own lands, that’s a fucking joke. When’s the last time they’ve been yours, huh? Really yours?”
Lithuania’s silent for a minute, just looking at him, at the sweat beading on his forehead, at the gaunt lines of his cheekbones. “You’re a state inside Germany, aren’t you, Prussia? No,” he says, thinking about it, “there was that act in 1934, if I’m remembering correctly? Germany’s boss dissolved and consolidated all the states, didn’t he?”
“…nah,” Prussia says, straining to smile, “it just looks like that if you don’t know any better. We’re just working together, that’s all. We’re real tight. You know, like with you and Poland way back when.”
He remembers. Well, he remembers doing all the work Poland didn’t want to do, and there was rather a lot of that. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I must have read it wrong.”
“Yeah. Totally wrong. Hell, Lithuania, if they dissolved me, would I still be standing here? Well-maybe I would, right? ‘Cause I’m just that awesome?”
There’s something almost pleading about the way he smiles.
“I can’t say.” Lithuania clears his throat. “But the defense force…”
“Just-gimme a little time. Okay? Got a lot of things to think over. Big war to plan. Stuff like that.”
When Russia breaks the siege at Leningrad, Prussia approaches him, his skin the color of chalk.
“So,” he says, looking at a spot about a meter to the left of Lithuania’s head, “about this defense force thing.”
“They’ll defend my territory,” Lithuania replies, “under my command, wearing my insignia.”
Red’s started to seep into the whites of Prussia’s eyes, Lithuania notices. Has he been sleeping lately? When would he have had time to, now that Lithuania thinks about it? “Jesus, you ask a lot of a guy.”
“No,” Lithuania says. “I’m only asking for what’s mine.”
***
On February sixteenth on the wireless, Lithuania asks for ten thousand volunteers for the Territorial Defense Force. He gets at least ten thousand more volunteers than he bargained for: men flood his office with calls and visits in person, and he even spots some of them lurking around the perimeters of the proposed training grounds in Marijampolė, standing as military-straight as possible when he passes them. He stresses the same thing to each man he sees, that the Lithuanian Territorial Defense Force is theirs. “Prussia might be supplying us with munitions, but he’s not in command, and he never will be.”
(He does make sure to say that last part quietly, though, as he’s fairly certain Prussia’s inserted spies into his ranks. It’s what Lithuania would do in the same situation, at any rate.)
He’s still exhausted-Russia hasn’t stopped advancing, not that Lithuania expected him to, and bands of Prussia’s men are raiding the countryside now, snatching up chickens and clothes and whatever else they can find. They’ve moved another family into his cellar in Vilnius, a grandmother and a young couple and their baby, and Lithuania’s spent the past few nights rocking the child to sleep and singing him lullabies, because his mother’s too sick to, and her husband spends most of his time tending to her and shooting pale frightened looks at the Germans upstairs. “Don’t worry,” Lithuania tells him, “you won’t have to serve in their army. I’ll make sure of it.” And when the couple smiles at him, he can believe it, and that keeps him awake for another hour, alert enough to slip out of the cellar and travel through the sewer tunnels under Vilnius; he’s memorized the route to the resistance headquarters by now, knows every twist of his tunnels and turn of his streets. They gather in a basement near the ghetto, white-faced and thin-lipped, poring over maps and lists of names and passing around coffee made from week-old grounds. It’s foul, but it keeps them sharp.
“Does Prussia know what we’re up to?” one of the oldest men present asks him. He rubs a puckered gash on his thigh-“The first war,” he says when he notices Lithuania looking at it. “The great one.”
Lithuania nods. “Thank you for your service. Thank you-thank you all for that.”
His people’s smiles flicker in the thin light, but Lithuania knows they’re holding steady beneath that, and that warms him more than the coffee does.
He continues: “I don’t know if he knows the extent of what we’re planning, but he doesn’t trust us. I think he’s going to try to absorb our forces into his-and we won’t let him,” he adds, tries to cut off the shouts before they start, they really can’t afford to be overheard right now. “The instant we receive those orders, we’ll disband, which means we’re going to need places to return to. Some of you were active the first time Russia invaded…”
“Russia’s coming back?” someone else asks-a girl, she can’t be older than fourteen.
Lithuania nods. “For a little while. Please, please don’t shout,” he says, holding up his hands before the arguments start to swell again. “I don’t want him here either, but…that’s why we need to get ready now, so when he does-when he does come back, we’ll be organized. We’ll be ready to fight.”
“What do you need us to do, Lietuva?” he hears, and in spite of the damp soaking through his shirt, in spite of the fact that he hasn’t eaten meat in at least a week and perhaps longer than that, in spite of the knots in his back and shooting pains in his leg, he beams. He’s asking so much of them, he knows, he feels how thin the years have worn them, but they’re before him now, listening, rubbing his shoulders and readying…
“I love you,” he whispers. “I love all of you so very much. Please stay safe.”
“Free Lithuania is being restored,” someone says, and the rest of his people take up the whispered chant: Free Lithuania is being restored.
The thought of that buoys him when he makes lists of Lithuanian Territorial Defense Force officers the next day and of the regions they come from-not for Prussia’s sake, but to see who might best be suited to organize his growing underground army in Kaunas, Panevėžys, Šiauliai, Vilnius. He chews on the end of his pen, frowns. Most of the old forest bases should still be intact, Russia never got around to destroying them. The entire resistance can’t flee to the forests, of course, but the men in the LTDF will probably need to stay there for some time…
“Lithuania,” Prussia says, “this is taking entirely too goddamn long.”
There’s a twitch starting under Prussia’s eye, a bad one. Lithuania tries not to stare. “I haven’t had an army in years,” he says. “We’re still forming the detachment, training our officers…”
“I already have places where you can do that.”
“They’re your places, though.”
“Dammit, Lithuania, I want your men mobilized!” Prussia shouts, and slams his hands down on the desk hard enough that it shakes, spills papers to the ground.
“And I’m sorry,” Lithuania says, his voice even, “but I need more time.”
“We don’t have time. Christ, Russia’s taking back the Crimea, we’re barely holding him off at Tallinn-Estonia’s cooperating, he’s giving us conscripts-”
“I can’t speak for Estonia. Only for myself.”
“Well, speak for yourself and tell your people to get a move on. They were jumping up to join your defense force, we can take some more of ‘em into the regular army…”
“How many?” Lithuania asks, though no’s the first thing to spring to mind, but he doesn’t like the way Prussia is pacing, snarling, staring at the walls of Lithuania’s office as though he wants to burn them to the ground.
“Seventy, eighty thousand?”
“Prussia, I can’t commit that many men,” he says as his mouth dries, “I don’t know if I have that many men to send-”
“You’re not the only one who’s lost people in this!”
“I’ve lost enough,” he says quietly.
“Fuck,” Prussia says, and “fuck” again. He slumps into a chair, the one whose back he splintered last week when Lithuania refused to send any more of his men into Germany to work. “I need coffee.”
“I don’t have coffee.” Or eggs, or flour, or milk, or meat. The list goes on, and Lithuania’s afraid to tally it.
“You don’t have anything,” Prussia says. He straddles the chair so his arms drape over the broken back, rests his chin in the cradle his elbows form. “You’re goddamn useless, you know that?”
Lithuania lets his eyes close briefly; he’s past the point where words can wound him. “I don’t know what you expect from me.”
“Competence. Some indication that you care.”
“I do care.”
“Then why are you letting Russia-”
“I’m not.” Lithuania stands, pushes his chair in. He doesn’t feel like doing more desk work today, he thinks. He has a shift at the metalworks factory coming up in two hours or so, but he doesn’t feel like punching in there, either. He should see how the training’s progressing in Marijampolė, how many weapons they’ve managed to stockpile and ship out to the country by now, and after that he really ought to see if he can find milk on the black market for the poor baby living in his cellar, his mother’s too sick to give any. When was it that he last slept? He rubs his eyes, tries to remember. It doesn’t matter; he’s animated by something else now, some other force that keeps his back straight and his eyes open and his head up for once, up and looking at his people, his country, the world.
“Look, if I can’t stop him-and I’m not saying I can’t,” Prussia adds, though without much conviction, “then how the hell can you?”
“Because there are more ways to stop him than beating him on the battlefield,” Lithuania says. “And you’ve never understood that.”
Prussia scowls, pulls a sheaf of papers out of the breast pocket of his coat, and flings them at Lithuania’s chest. “Your mobilization orders. And I expect these conscripts to show up or I swear to God, I’m sending you all to Germany.”
“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t take the Lord’s name in vain.”
“Fuck God.”
“You used to be His champion.” Lithuania pockets the papers. “I wonder what happened to you?”
He expects the swing: Prussia tangles himself in the chair when he tries to rise from it, which slows him. Lithuania ducks under his arm and scampers out the door, but he can’t hear Prussia’s bootsteps behind him, for once. He looks at the papers, pulls out a pen, and writes in neat code at the bottom that the orders are to be ignored.
***
Prussia finds out, of course, but by then Lithuania and his men have abandoned Marijampolė and taken to the forests. Not all of them escape; Prussia catches and disarms four of his battalions and deports or executes other soldiers who didn’t make it out in time-not the majority of Lithuania’s forces by far, but still too many for his liking after how many he’s already lost. He feels their absence worming inside them, clutches his stomach.
They don’t dare light a fire on the first night, as Prussia’s still scouring the forests for them even if he doesn’t know them nearly as well as Lithuania and his men do, but once they’ve set up camp in the thick trees and established guards at the perimeter, they gather in a loose circle and pray for their companions trapped in the cities or stuck in trains bound for German camps. Lithuania stays kneeling longer than the rest and offers his own litany of names: the ones who died of starvation and sickness, collapsed from exhaustion; the ones deported at the beginning of the occupation and the people who fought back then, even if they were trying to help Russia, because he’s run across some of them in the days since and knows they wanted the best for him; all those people that were-no. He swallows. All those people he gunned down in the first few months, hundreds of thousands that he’ll-that he’ll never see again-
He stays kneeling until dawn breaks over the forest and sends pink light filtering through the canopies. A vigil, he thinks to himself. He hasn’t performed a vigil in…oh, years. It isn’t enough, he knows that in his heart, but as his men begin to emerge from their bunkers and tents, he knows how much more he has left to give. He starts the fire for breakfast and assembles as many ingredients for soup as he can; one of his men gives him a handful of edible mushrooms he found, and another passes a few wildberries his way. A leaf falls into the stew pot, and his men burn their fingers trying to fish it out, laughing as the leaf keeps slipping from their grasp. Lithuania finally fishes it out with a ladle, his men applaud him, and he holds as many of them in his arms as he can and whispers thank you, thank you.
He stays in the forests drilling with his men, venturing into the countryside proper for supplies, and hiding from Prussia’s scouts until he jolts awake one night towards the end of July, his skin burning-“Russia’s here,” he gasps to the troops who’ve rushed to his side. “He’s bombing Kaunas-”
“We’ll fight him off.”
“I know,” Lithuania says, and squeezes the hand of the man who spoke. “We’ve-we’ve been preparing for this. We’re ready. We know how he operates. Please spread the word that we should start targeting his supply lines soon. He tends to overextend himself.”
Bleak chuckles all around.
“I have to go back,” he says, raises his hand to silence the protests. “Not forever, but for now. It’s how these things work, I can’t really explain it much more clearly than that.”
“You’re not thinking of surrendering to him, are you?” one man asks, the youngest in this detachment. He must not have been with them during the first Russian occupation, he doesn’t know. Lithuania won’t fault him for that.
“Of course not. I’m just going to be fighting him a little differently for a while, that’s all.” He does his best to smile. “I trust you. And I’ll be back.”
He doesn’t quite remember how he gets to Kaunas-it’s one of the vagaries of traveling the way he does-but he remembers standing in the middle of a street hollowed out by bombs, the sidewalks streaked with rubble and the buildings slumped to one side or the other. The air is crackling, charged as though the sky’s about to open up again, and the scent of ozone sears his nose. He wouldn’t call it quiet-German soldiers and his people alike pick themselves out of the debris and scurry away, flee to cellars and sewers or to the gates of the city that Russia hasn’t reached yet-but he gets the feeling Kaunas is sucking its breath in, holding, watching. Some gunshots punctuate the silence, but not many of them, not as many as Lithuania would have thought. It looks like Prussia’s cutting his losses and leaving the city, then.
-well. Perhaps not. The figure tearing through the alleys on his left looks awfully familiar. Lithuania darts down a side street in time to intercept him and does, shoves his shoulder into the fleeing man and sends him sprawling. It’s Prussia, and Prussia is panting and glaring and far too thin for his own good.
“Happy?” he asks, drags himself back to his knees.
Lithuania looks at the rubble this section of Kaunas has been reduced to and shakes his head. “I wouldn’t say that.”
“Well, he won. I lost. There, I said it.” Prussia spits blood onto the ground, wipes the back of his hand across his mouth.
“I’m sorry,” Lithuania says, and means it.
“Not as sorry as you’re going to be. You have any idea what he’s going to do to you?”
Lithuania’s chest constricts, but he manages to say, “Some idea, yes. But I’ll withstand it. I’ve held out before, I can hold out again.”
“You lost.” Prussia climbs to his feet, works his shoulder, winces. His uniform’s too caked with dust and grime to gleam black now, even though the sun’s beaming down on both of them. “He owns your ass.”
“Sometimes,” he says, “living is enough of a victory.”
Prussia says nothing until another burst of gunfire shatters the silence. “Whatever.”
“You should leave before he catches you.”
“Oh, I’m out.” His mouth twists into something that’s almost a grin. “Be nice to see my home again, huh? Looks like I’m gonna be stuck there for a while, defending it.”
More gunfire sounds, and Prussia mutters “shit” and tears down the street, sprinting to the gates after his soldiers. Lithuania watches him run until he ducks behind a hollowed-out building and vanishes. He imagines this won’t be the last he sees of Prussia, no matter what the outcome of this is.
Lithuania gets back on the main street just in time to see Russia’s tanks rolling down it. They’re too big for this, and clip sidewalks and protruding facades as they grind forward, towards him. He swallows, stands his ground. They’ll notice him soon enough. He’s not going anywhere.
The tank in front slows, stops, and Russia emerges from the hatch, his scarf fluttering. “Ah, Lithuania,” he says. “I had hoped to find you here. I have missed you very much.”
His fists tremble; he presses them to his sides. He says nothing. He won’t say anything.
“We have so very much to do, yes? But I think we are equal to this task. Come with me, and I will tell you all about it.”
He could almost laugh. He has no idea why this giddiness is overtaking him, making him dizzy and light and uncurling all the knots in his chest-after everything, and after everything Russia’s going to put him through-but he is, and he’s here, and he’s alive, and he can say no, and so he does.
And even as Russia’s face falls, something in Lithuania’s heart soars.
***
It’s another year before he sees Prussia again: Prussia thinner than ever, not much more than skin stretched over bone, his arm in a sling and a bruise purpling on his cheek. There are more bruises and wounds peeking from the collar of his shirt, the cuffs of his sleeves.
“Lithuania,” Russia says, “this is the German Democratic Republic. He will be living with us now. Please clean him up for me; he has had a very long trip.”
Lithuania nods; Russia smiles. Prussia says nothing, not until Russia’s wandered off to another part of his house, searching for a different toy.
“…well,” he rasps, more blood flecking his lips as he speaks, “I’m fucked, aren’t I?”
“How?”
“I get all the people who hate me looking after me.” He closes his eye, the one that hasn’t swollen shut. “I must’ve…pissed off someone pretty bad, huh?”
“I’d say so,” Lithuania says. He crosses to the sink, picks up a clean washcloth and begins to soak it. He should clean all those wounds before he bandages anything.
“How about you?”
“Hm?”
Prussia manages to pull himself onto the bed and sprawl across it, though for the life of him Lithuania can’t figure out how he does it, but that’s Prussia for you, he supposes. “Did I piss you off?”
“Yes,” he says; there isn’t much of a point in lying about it now, is there?
“Heh. Guess you hate me, too.”
Lithuania closes his eyes, turns off the tap. “I try very hard not to hate anyone.”
“Doesn’t mean you don’t.”
“I know.” Wringing the washcloth is almost soothing. It occupies his hands, warms them, and it might be the middle of the summer but he’s living in Russia’s house now and he savors every bit of heat he can get.
Prussia’s silent. It’s strange for him. “Why are you doing this?” he finally says.
“Helping Russia,” Lithuania asks, “or helping you?”
“Both. Whichever.”
“I’m not helping Russia.” Lithuania walks over to Prussia, washcloth draped over his wrist, and starts unbuttoning his shirt briskly, before Prussia can voice any objections on the matter, which he doesn’t, thankfully. Long red lines score his ribs, and bruises spot his chest, some darker than others. Lithuania winces just to look at it. “My partisans still have control of part of the countryside. They’re fighting him off. I’m publishing underground newspapers in the cities, passing information to England and America through hidden channels, seeking diplomatic recognition abroad…I told you, there’s more than one way to fight him.”
“So why’re you helping me?”
“Because I want you to fight him, too,” Lithuania says, and sighs. “And I’m carrying enough grudges and wounds right now, I don’t need another one.”
“They’re gonna dissolve me.” Prussia swallows as best he’s able. “As a state.”
Lithuania says nothing, begins to sponge some of the blood from his chest.
“I thought…you know, I thought after the first war, ‘that’s it, can’t get worse than this. Only place to go is up.’” Prussia’s laugh sounds more like a croak. “Don’t tempt God, huh?”
“No,” Lithuania agrees, “you shouldn’t.”
“…Lithuania?”
“Yes?”
“What’s gonna happen? To me, I mean?”
Lithuania could fill his head with horror stories of Siberia, of the deportations, of the secret police Russia himself cringes from and how every smile is suspect, might be put there to mask someone’s true intentions. But it’s no way to live, and he won’t become that kind of person, so he tells Prussia, “It isn’t anything you can’t handle.”
“Right.”
And Lithuania’s smile, at least, is real. “Hold still.”
--------------------
So this is one of the longest things I’ve undertaken, and footnoting this entire thing would take ages, so I’ll try to provide a few general bits of information.
Germany started Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Soviet Union, on June 22, 1941. When the news reached Lithuania, which was at that time occupied by the Soviet Union, they began the June Uprising against the Red Army and declared the establishment of an independent state again. Germany had other plans, and initial collaboration between Germany and Lithuania collapsed when Lithuanians realized that Germany wasn’t going to grant them the autonomy they’d hoped for. The Provisional Government lasted only a few weeks, after which German civil officials took control of the administration of the region, though Lithuanians filled a lot of the lower-ranking offices simply because there weren’t enough Germans to staff the entire civil structure.
1941 also saw the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Jewish Lithuanians-a feat accomplished with the aid of some, but not all, ethnic Lithuanians. This article and this article have more information; suffice to say that World War II didn’t make anyone look good, and that Lithuanian scholarship is only now starting to address exactly what happened to Lithuania’s Jews during the war.
Armed resistance to German occupation never really arose in Lithuania, but as the occupation dragged on, Lithuanians took to passive resistance: publishing their own newspapers and boycotting the call for a Lithuanian division of the Waffen-SS, for example. The Lithuanian Territorial Defense Force was established in early 1944 and dissolved as soon as the SS tried to issue orders to its officers. General Plechavičius, who spearheaded its formation, found ways of avoiding German demands (and of organizing an underground army that would later form the basis of Lithuanian armed resistance against the Soviet Union) until ordered to recognize the direct authority of German command, at which time he disbanded the LTDF and told his men to disappear into the forests with their weapons, which they did.
Russia recaptured Kaunas on August 1, 1944.
As far as I know, nothing significant occurred between Poland and Lithuania during the December 1942 (though the relationship between the two nations could best be described as poor during that time); that passage is of my own invention. I also tweaked the order of events in early 1944, mainly by compressing the timeline and combining the demands German officials made of the LTDF into one event. I hope that any liberties I’ve taken haven’t distorted the events in question, and that though this is historical fiction, it’s true to the spirit of the times it portrays.
The title is a Brecht reference, because that’s how I roll. Also, Mother Courage is not Lithuania.
.
And here's part two! (Like I said, this thing. Um. Maybe I should've called it the Lietdammerung.)
On January thirty-first of the new year, Lithuania stares at the wireless. He can’t identify the symphony playing, some somber adagio movement, but the music is less important than the announcement.
Prussia surrendered at Stalingrad. Russian victory.
And to hear this news over the state radio and not from anyone in one of the resistance movements starting to spring up, people with ties to sources outside his borders…Lithuania shakes his head, almost in disbelief. What happened there?
Prussia doesn’t tell him when he staggers into Lithuania’s office a week or two later. Lithuania starts to see him: his skin and hair are the same ash-gray, and his uniform hangs loose on him. It’s almost like he’s sinking into the black folds, shrinking into them. “Water,” he croaks, “water, dammit.”
Wordlessly, Lithuania offers him a glass. Prussia swills it down, slams it on the desk when he’s drained it. The parts of his hands he hasn’t bandaged are flayed red and raw, and the edges of his nails have blackened. “What are you staring at?” Prussia asks, and Lithuania averts his eyes.
“Fucking Russia-fucking winter-fucking everything.” Prussia shudders. “Shooting us down from the rubble of his own streets, is there anything that crazy bastard won’t do? It doesn’t matter,” he says before Lithuania can answer. “We’ll shore up our line. We’ll take Kursk. We’ll get the initiative back. We did it in the Great War, we can do it again. The plan’s in my head, I just need time to-time to thaw out, jesus fucking christ…”
“The radiator broke two days ago,” Lithuania says, pulling his jacket over his shoulders and shrugging deeper into it. “I’m afraid we haven’t had time to fix it yet, so you won’t do much thawing in here.”
“Is this place good for anything?” Prussia shouts to the ceiling. He shoves the cup back towards Lithuania, paces around the room, blows on his hands and winces when the air gets too near his lacerations. “Goddamn-you know what? You’re giving me a Waffen-SS legion.”
“…what?”
“Latvia did, Estonia did. Your turn. I need the men, okay?” he says, rounding on his heel. “Half my army’s dead from frostbite or Russia or-it’s the same thing, isn’t it? No wonder he’s so fat, he needs all that bulk for insulation…” Prussia punches his bandaged palm, apparently before he can think better of it, because he bellows “fuck!” soon after. “Anyway. Tell your boys to volunteer. I’ll treat ‘em good. I’ll treat ‘em a hell of a lot better than Russia ever did.” He flips a fraying strand of hair out of his eyes, and Lithuania scrutinizes him again, sees how far that fraying extends: to the hints of shadows under his eyes, the way the bones in his wrists stand out, the way he holds his neck. He’s not as thin as Lithuania is, and maybe he won’t ever be, but Lithuania wouldn’t wish that on him, despite everything.
“Where will you send them?” Lithuania asks.
“Where I fucking need them, what do you think?”
“No,” Lithuania says, and from the look on Prussia’s face, he’s almost as startled to hear it as Lithuania himself is.
“Sorry, did you just say no? ‘Cause I thought I heard no.”
“No,” he repeats, and crosses his arms over his chest. It traps the warmth closer, in addition to everything else. “If you want me to raise that kind of unit, it’s under my command, not yours. And I only want it deployed within my borders, not outside them.”
Prussia blinks and contorts his face into a few interesting shapes before he settles on laughing incredulously, short sharp pants that don’t resemble laughter much at all. “Oh, this is great. This is just great. I’m out there freezing to death so I can keep Russia off your ass and when I ask for just a little help so he doesn’t come blowing down your door next, you say no, you think you know more about handling an army than fucking Prussia.”
“I know my land,” Lithuania says, “and I know my people.” And he knows he isn’t going to throw any more of his people in Russia’s direction and expose them to Russian gunfire or Russian winters. It’s as simple as that, really. Enough of his men and women and even children are languishing in Siberia, and he isn’t adding to their count.
“And I know that you’d better start rounding up volunteers, ‘cause you don’t want me short on troops any more than I want me short on troops.” Prussia glares at him, says “Got it?” before slamming the door behind him. Lithuania can hear “son of a bitch!” from the other side of the door; Prussia must have gripped the knob too hard.
That night, Lithuania makes his way through abandoned buildings and hidden basements, seeking out resistance cells-from any of the resistances, it doesn’t matter. “Prussia wants us to send more of our men to die for a war we never asked for,” he tells them. “He won’t even let us guard our own land; we’re to take his orders, and go where he wants us to.”
Angry murmurs break out, and on some level, Lithuania’s glad to hear them. “We’ll refuse the call,” a barrel-chested man says. “They’ve got no right to demand more from us.”
“No, they haven’t,” Lithuania says. “We’re agreed?”
And everywhere he goes, he hears the same yes: quiet, often whispered in unison instead of shouted, but resounding all the same.
“No,” he tells the recruitment officers politely when they knock on his door (his actual front door, not the door to the cellar, even though that’s where he really lives these days). “I’m sorry, but I don’t think volunteering is in my best interest.” When they start to sputter in protest, he closes the door with as much delicacy as he can muster. He hasn’t invited them into his house.
Nor has he invited Prussia into his office, but Prussia never has needed an invitation.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“I’m doing all right, thank you.” The food shortages are leaving him a little dizzy these days, and he’s washed the same three shirts so many times that they’ve all been stained the same dishwater gray, but when he closes his eyes he can hear his people saying no-usually quiet, sometimes not spoken at all but implied when they elect not to show up at local government offices or town meetings, but firm all the same-and that shores him up more than the best food could.
“Yeah, well, good to hear someone is. Do you really not care, Lithuania? Do you really not care how close Russia is right now?”
“The wireless tells me your troops are doing a fine job of holding him back at Kursk,” he says.
The color drains from Prussia’s lips, and really, Lithuania shouldn’t be as pleased to see that as he is, and he does hate that he, well, doesn’t hate it, but his people are standing together again and it feels as though they haven’t been for so long.
“Fine,” Prussia snaps. “You want to play that game? We’ll play that game. If your boys are too busy to go to war, they’re too busy to go to school. I’m shutting down the universities.”
“What do the universities have to do with any of this?”
“You think I don’t know what goes on in universities?” Prussia counters. “I’ve had ‘em at least as long as you have-longer, probably. Nests of subversives, all of them.”
“And it’s where I get my leaders,” he says. “It’s not as though I have an army now, where else am I going to pull them from?”
“Nowhere, if you keep this up.” Lithuania thinks Prussia’s hands have healed since Stalingrad, since he’s pounding his fist against Lithuania’s desk, though it’s hard to tell since Prussia never takes off his gloves these days. “You give me those men or I swear to god I’m going to put every able-bodied citizen you have into a place where I know they’ll do the work I need them to.”
It’s summertime now, but Lithuania feels a chill crawl up his spine. He takes a deep breath in, lets that chill dissipate. “I think I’ve made my conditions clear,” he says. “It’s got to be a force I lead that only acts in my territory.”
“How does that help me?”
“You can transfer your troops away from here,” Lithuania points out. “You wouldn’t need to use them for police or security forces. You can send them to Russia, to reinforce the line.”
“No. Not good enough. You want that kind of thing, you make me trust you.”
What more do I have to do to earn your trust? Lithuania wants to shout, but refrains. He’s seen his lands stripped, his buildings bombed, and god knows how many of his people slaughtered. If that isn’t enough for Prussia, nothing will be, and he’s beginning to suspect that nothing ever will be enough for Prussia. “It doesn’t look like we’ll be able to reach a consensus like this.”
“There is no goddamn consensus,” Prussia says, and leans over the front of the desk, seizes Lithuania by his collar and hauls him up; his elbows thump into the wood and scatter his papers to the ground and he clasps his hands around Prussia’s wrists to force them far enough away so he can breathe, think, respond. “Choose, okay? Me or Russia, choose!”
And Lithuania says, “No.”
***
The attempt to take Kursk fails, Russia begins to push back, and Lithuania barely sees Prussia these days-he’s bolting from one command post to another, scouring the streets for soldiers he might be able to send to bolster the front and snapping out orders to those he can’t spare, telling them how to shore up home defenses.
“We’re going to need to start evacuating people to the countryside,” he says, more to the wall than to Lithuania. “Not now, but soon. Russia’s bringing his bombers with him, they’re going to go after the cities.”
“The countryside is fine,” Lithuania says. His partisans are used to operating from the forests, and if Russia does see this initiative through, does-does end up invading him again, at least his resistance will have well-established bases to work from. That’s what’s important now. They might even be able to start stockpiling food, because he hasn’t been able to squeeze any extra from Prussia’s men and he certainly won’t expect anything of the sort from Russia. There have to be some farms in the countryside that haven’t been picked clean yet, he can feel it: a faint stirring in his breast, tiny threads of life starting to take root and grow again. “If I had a defense force…”
“I’ll think about it,” Prussia says, which is better than go to hell or no.
Russia continues to roll forward, and Prussia’s lines buckle and break all across the front. Lithuania knows how it feels to be caught in one of his advances: the slow steady crush of his armies once they mass and begin to move, the weight of his winters wiping out legions without firing a shot. Prussia’s telegrams grow clipped, wild as he requisitions anything he can find, anything that might help.
“A defense force here might help relieve the pressure,” Lithuania suggests after Russia retakes Smolensk. “We could stall him here-”
“If I can’t stop him, what makes you think you can? I mean, I’m gonna stop him,” he adds hurriedly. “I’ve got plans. My panzers can still outflank his any day, they just need room to move, time to circle him-then I’ll lure him in, and he’s toast. Bam. Just like that. He’s slow, he’s clumsy…I’m faster than he is.”
Kiev falls next.
Lithuania tries to rest his hand on Prussia’s shoulder, as he’s easier to negotiate with when he isn’t shaking and frothing at the mouth like this, but Prussia nearly bites it off at the wrist. “Fucking Ukraine!” he snaps. “You know what, fine, she can run off and cry to Russia, fine. I tell you, is this the kind of thanks I get for pushing that bastard out of everyone’s house? It’s not like he’s gonna leave! What, you think America and England’ll make him? Fuck no, they don’t want another war-”
“I know,” Lithuania says quietly, and shaping those words almost hurts, but…well, even if England and America can’t interfere directly on his behalf, they’ll send help, won’t they? Or they’ll tell Russia that he can’t keep everything he’s taken during this offensive, even Russia might listen to America. He might. Lithuania continues, “If I had a defense force…”
“Weren’t so eager to volunteer earlier this year, were you?”
“-we wouldn’t interfere with the larger war effort,” he says, ignoring Prussia, “we’d keep to our own lands…”
“Your own lands, that’s a fucking joke. When’s the last time they’ve been yours, huh? Really yours?”
Lithuania’s silent for a minute, just looking at him, at the sweat beading on his forehead, at the gaunt lines of his cheekbones. “You’re a state inside Germany, aren’t you, Prussia? No,” he says, thinking about it, “there was that act in 1934, if I’m remembering correctly? Germany’s boss dissolved and consolidated all the states, didn’t he?”
“…nah,” Prussia says, straining to smile, “it just looks like that if you don’t know any better. We’re just working together, that’s all. We’re real tight. You know, like with you and Poland way back when.”
He remembers. Well, he remembers doing all the work Poland didn’t want to do, and there was rather a lot of that. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I must have read it wrong.”
“Yeah. Totally wrong. Hell, Lithuania, if they dissolved me, would I still be standing here? Well-maybe I would, right? ‘Cause I’m just that awesome?”
There’s something almost pleading about the way he smiles.
“I can’t say.” Lithuania clears his throat. “But the defense force…”
“Just-gimme a little time. Okay? Got a lot of things to think over. Big war to plan. Stuff like that.”
When Russia breaks the siege at Leningrad, Prussia approaches him, his skin the color of chalk.
“So,” he says, looking at a spot about a meter to the left of Lithuania’s head, “about this defense force thing.”
“They’ll defend my territory,” Lithuania replies, “under my command, wearing my insignia.”
Red’s started to seep into the whites of Prussia’s eyes, Lithuania notices. Has he been sleeping lately? When would he have had time to, now that Lithuania thinks about it? “Jesus, you ask a lot of a guy.”
“No,” Lithuania says. “I’m only asking for what’s mine.”
***
On February sixteenth on the wireless, Lithuania asks for ten thousand volunteers for the Territorial Defense Force. He gets at least ten thousand more volunteers than he bargained for: men flood his office with calls and visits in person, and he even spots some of them lurking around the perimeters of the proposed training grounds in Marijampolė, standing as military-straight as possible when he passes them. He stresses the same thing to each man he sees, that the Lithuanian Territorial Defense Force is theirs. “Prussia might be supplying us with munitions, but he’s not in command, and he never will be.”
(He does make sure to say that last part quietly, though, as he’s fairly certain Prussia’s inserted spies into his ranks. It’s what Lithuania would do in the same situation, at any rate.)
He’s still exhausted-Russia hasn’t stopped advancing, not that Lithuania expected him to, and bands of Prussia’s men are raiding the countryside now, snatching up chickens and clothes and whatever else they can find. They’ve moved another family into his cellar in Vilnius, a grandmother and a young couple and their baby, and Lithuania’s spent the past few nights rocking the child to sleep and singing him lullabies, because his mother’s too sick to, and her husband spends most of his time tending to her and shooting pale frightened looks at the Germans upstairs. “Don’t worry,” Lithuania tells him, “you won’t have to serve in their army. I’ll make sure of it.” And when the couple smiles at him, he can believe it, and that keeps him awake for another hour, alert enough to slip out of the cellar and travel through the sewer tunnels under Vilnius; he’s memorized the route to the resistance headquarters by now, knows every twist of his tunnels and turn of his streets. They gather in a basement near the ghetto, white-faced and thin-lipped, poring over maps and lists of names and passing around coffee made from week-old grounds. It’s foul, but it keeps them sharp.
“Does Prussia know what we’re up to?” one of the oldest men present asks him. He rubs a puckered gash on his thigh-“The first war,” he says when he notices Lithuania looking at it. “The great one.”
Lithuania nods. “Thank you for your service. Thank you-thank you all for that.”
His people’s smiles flicker in the thin light, but Lithuania knows they’re holding steady beneath that, and that warms him more than the coffee does.
He continues: “I don’t know if he knows the extent of what we’re planning, but he doesn’t trust us. I think he’s going to try to absorb our forces into his-and we won’t let him,” he adds, tries to cut off the shouts before they start, they really can’t afford to be overheard right now. “The instant we receive those orders, we’ll disband, which means we’re going to need places to return to. Some of you were active the first time Russia invaded…”
“Russia’s coming back?” someone else asks-a girl, she can’t be older than fourteen.
Lithuania nods. “For a little while. Please, please don’t shout,” he says, holding up his hands before the arguments start to swell again. “I don’t want him here either, but…that’s why we need to get ready now, so when he does-when he does come back, we’ll be organized. We’ll be ready to fight.”
“What do you need us to do, Lietuva?” he hears, and in spite of the damp soaking through his shirt, in spite of the fact that he hasn’t eaten meat in at least a week and perhaps longer than that, in spite of the knots in his back and shooting pains in his leg, he beams. He’s asking so much of them, he knows, he feels how thin the years have worn them, but they’re before him now, listening, rubbing his shoulders and readying…
“I love you,” he whispers. “I love all of you so very much. Please stay safe.”
“Free Lithuania is being restored,” someone says, and the rest of his people take up the whispered chant: Free Lithuania is being restored.
The thought of that buoys him when he makes lists of Lithuanian Territorial Defense Force officers the next day and of the regions they come from-not for Prussia’s sake, but to see who might best be suited to organize his growing underground army in Kaunas, Panevėžys, Šiauliai, Vilnius. He chews on the end of his pen, frowns. Most of the old forest bases should still be intact, Russia never got around to destroying them. The entire resistance can’t flee to the forests, of course, but the men in the LTDF will probably need to stay there for some time…
“Lithuania,” Prussia says, “this is taking entirely too goddamn long.”
There’s a twitch starting under Prussia’s eye, a bad one. Lithuania tries not to stare. “I haven’t had an army in years,” he says. “We’re still forming the detachment, training our officers…”
“I already have places where you can do that.”
“They’re your places, though.”
“Dammit, Lithuania, I want your men mobilized!” Prussia shouts, and slams his hands down on the desk hard enough that it shakes, spills papers to the ground.
“And I’m sorry,” Lithuania says, his voice even, “but I need more time.”
“We don’t have time. Christ, Russia’s taking back the Crimea, we’re barely holding him off at Tallinn-Estonia’s cooperating, he’s giving us conscripts-”
“I can’t speak for Estonia. Only for myself.”
“Well, speak for yourself and tell your people to get a move on. They were jumping up to join your defense force, we can take some more of ‘em into the regular army…”
“How many?” Lithuania asks, though no’s the first thing to spring to mind, but he doesn’t like the way Prussia is pacing, snarling, staring at the walls of Lithuania’s office as though he wants to burn them to the ground.
“Seventy, eighty thousand?”
“Prussia, I can’t commit that many men,” he says as his mouth dries, “I don’t know if I have that many men to send-”
“You’re not the only one who’s lost people in this!”
“I’ve lost enough,” he says quietly.
“Fuck,” Prussia says, and “fuck” again. He slumps into a chair, the one whose back he splintered last week when Lithuania refused to send any more of his men into Germany to work. “I need coffee.”
“I don’t have coffee.” Or eggs, or flour, or milk, or meat. The list goes on, and Lithuania’s afraid to tally it.
“You don’t have anything,” Prussia says. He straddles the chair so his arms drape over the broken back, rests his chin in the cradle his elbows form. “You’re goddamn useless, you know that?”
Lithuania lets his eyes close briefly; he’s past the point where words can wound him. “I don’t know what you expect from me.”
“Competence. Some indication that you care.”
“I do care.”
“Then why are you letting Russia-”
“I’m not.” Lithuania stands, pushes his chair in. He doesn’t feel like doing more desk work today, he thinks. He has a shift at the metalworks factory coming up in two hours or so, but he doesn’t feel like punching in there, either. He should see how the training’s progressing in Marijampolė, how many weapons they’ve managed to stockpile and ship out to the country by now, and after that he really ought to see if he can find milk on the black market for the poor baby living in his cellar, his mother’s too sick to give any. When was it that he last slept? He rubs his eyes, tries to remember. It doesn’t matter; he’s animated by something else now, some other force that keeps his back straight and his eyes open and his head up for once, up and looking at his people, his country, the world.
“Look, if I can’t stop him-and I’m not saying I can’t,” Prussia adds, though without much conviction, “then how the hell can you?”
“Because there are more ways to stop him than beating him on the battlefield,” Lithuania says. “And you’ve never understood that.”
Prussia scowls, pulls a sheaf of papers out of the breast pocket of his coat, and flings them at Lithuania’s chest. “Your mobilization orders. And I expect these conscripts to show up or I swear to God, I’m sending you all to Germany.”
“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t take the Lord’s name in vain.”
“Fuck God.”
“You used to be His champion.” Lithuania pockets the papers. “I wonder what happened to you?”
He expects the swing: Prussia tangles himself in the chair when he tries to rise from it, which slows him. Lithuania ducks under his arm and scampers out the door, but he can’t hear Prussia’s bootsteps behind him, for once. He looks at the papers, pulls out a pen, and writes in neat code at the bottom that the orders are to be ignored.
***
Prussia finds out, of course, but by then Lithuania and his men have abandoned Marijampolė and taken to the forests. Not all of them escape; Prussia catches and disarms four of his battalions and deports or executes other soldiers who didn’t make it out in time-not the majority of Lithuania’s forces by far, but still too many for his liking after how many he’s already lost. He feels their absence worming inside them, clutches his stomach.
They don’t dare light a fire on the first night, as Prussia’s still scouring the forests for them even if he doesn’t know them nearly as well as Lithuania and his men do, but once they’ve set up camp in the thick trees and established guards at the perimeter, they gather in a loose circle and pray for their companions trapped in the cities or stuck in trains bound for German camps. Lithuania stays kneeling longer than the rest and offers his own litany of names: the ones who died of starvation and sickness, collapsed from exhaustion; the ones deported at the beginning of the occupation and the people who fought back then, even if they were trying to help Russia, because he’s run across some of them in the days since and knows they wanted the best for him; all those people that were-no. He swallows. All those people he gunned down in the first few months, hundreds of thousands that he’ll-that he’ll never see again-
He stays kneeling until dawn breaks over the forest and sends pink light filtering through the canopies. A vigil, he thinks to himself. He hasn’t performed a vigil in…oh, years. It isn’t enough, he knows that in his heart, but as his men begin to emerge from their bunkers and tents, he knows how much more he has left to give. He starts the fire for breakfast and assembles as many ingredients for soup as he can; one of his men gives him a handful of edible mushrooms he found, and another passes a few wildberries his way. A leaf falls into the stew pot, and his men burn their fingers trying to fish it out, laughing as the leaf keeps slipping from their grasp. Lithuania finally fishes it out with a ladle, his men applaud him, and he holds as many of them in his arms as he can and whispers thank you, thank you.
He stays in the forests drilling with his men, venturing into the countryside proper for supplies, and hiding from Prussia’s scouts until he jolts awake one night towards the end of July, his skin burning-“Russia’s here,” he gasps to the troops who’ve rushed to his side. “He’s bombing Kaunas-”
“We’ll fight him off.”
“I know,” Lithuania says, and squeezes the hand of the man who spoke. “We’ve-we’ve been preparing for this. We’re ready. We know how he operates. Please spread the word that we should start targeting his supply lines soon. He tends to overextend himself.”
Bleak chuckles all around.
“I have to go back,” he says, raises his hand to silence the protests. “Not forever, but for now. It’s how these things work, I can’t really explain it much more clearly than that.”
“You’re not thinking of surrendering to him, are you?” one man asks, the youngest in this detachment. He must not have been with them during the first Russian occupation, he doesn’t know. Lithuania won’t fault him for that.
“Of course not. I’m just going to be fighting him a little differently for a while, that’s all.” He does his best to smile. “I trust you. And I’ll be back.”
He doesn’t quite remember how he gets to Kaunas-it’s one of the vagaries of traveling the way he does-but he remembers standing in the middle of a street hollowed out by bombs, the sidewalks streaked with rubble and the buildings slumped to one side or the other. The air is crackling, charged as though the sky’s about to open up again, and the scent of ozone sears his nose. He wouldn’t call it quiet-German soldiers and his people alike pick themselves out of the debris and scurry away, flee to cellars and sewers or to the gates of the city that Russia hasn’t reached yet-but he gets the feeling Kaunas is sucking its breath in, holding, watching. Some gunshots punctuate the silence, but not many of them, not as many as Lithuania would have thought. It looks like Prussia’s cutting his losses and leaving the city, then.
-well. Perhaps not. The figure tearing through the alleys on his left looks awfully familiar. Lithuania darts down a side street in time to intercept him and does, shoves his shoulder into the fleeing man and sends him sprawling. It’s Prussia, and Prussia is panting and glaring and far too thin for his own good.
“Happy?” he asks, drags himself back to his knees.
Lithuania looks at the rubble this section of Kaunas has been reduced to and shakes his head. “I wouldn’t say that.”
“Well, he won. I lost. There, I said it.” Prussia spits blood onto the ground, wipes the back of his hand across his mouth.
“I’m sorry,” Lithuania says, and means it.
“Not as sorry as you’re going to be. You have any idea what he’s going to do to you?”
Lithuania’s chest constricts, but he manages to say, “Some idea, yes. But I’ll withstand it. I’ve held out before, I can hold out again.”
“You lost.” Prussia climbs to his feet, works his shoulder, winces. His uniform’s too caked with dust and grime to gleam black now, even though the sun’s beaming down on both of them. “He owns your ass.”
“Sometimes,” he says, “living is enough of a victory.”
Prussia says nothing until another burst of gunfire shatters the silence. “Whatever.”
“You should leave before he catches you.”
“Oh, I’m out.” His mouth twists into something that’s almost a grin. “Be nice to see my home again, huh? Looks like I’m gonna be stuck there for a while, defending it.”
More gunfire sounds, and Prussia mutters “shit” and tears down the street, sprinting to the gates after his soldiers. Lithuania watches him run until he ducks behind a hollowed-out building and vanishes. He imagines this won’t be the last he sees of Prussia, no matter what the outcome of this is.
Lithuania gets back on the main street just in time to see Russia’s tanks rolling down it. They’re too big for this, and clip sidewalks and protruding facades as they grind forward, towards him. He swallows, stands his ground. They’ll notice him soon enough. He’s not going anywhere.
The tank in front slows, stops, and Russia emerges from the hatch, his scarf fluttering. “Ah, Lithuania,” he says. “I had hoped to find you here. I have missed you very much.”
His fists tremble; he presses them to his sides. He says nothing. He won’t say anything.
“We have so very much to do, yes? But I think we are equal to this task. Come with me, and I will tell you all about it.”
He could almost laugh. He has no idea why this giddiness is overtaking him, making him dizzy and light and uncurling all the knots in his chest-after everything, and after everything Russia’s going to put him through-but he is, and he’s here, and he’s alive, and he can say no, and so he does.
And even as Russia’s face falls, something in Lithuania’s heart soars.
***
It’s another year before he sees Prussia again: Prussia thinner than ever, not much more than skin stretched over bone, his arm in a sling and a bruise purpling on his cheek. There are more bruises and wounds peeking from the collar of his shirt, the cuffs of his sleeves.
“Lithuania,” Russia says, “this is the German Democratic Republic. He will be living with us now. Please clean him up for me; he has had a very long trip.”
Lithuania nods; Russia smiles. Prussia says nothing, not until Russia’s wandered off to another part of his house, searching for a different toy.
“…well,” he rasps, more blood flecking his lips as he speaks, “I’m fucked, aren’t I?”
“How?”
“I get all the people who hate me looking after me.” He closes his eye, the one that hasn’t swollen shut. “I must’ve…pissed off someone pretty bad, huh?”
“I’d say so,” Lithuania says. He crosses to the sink, picks up a clean washcloth and begins to soak it. He should clean all those wounds before he bandages anything.
“How about you?”
“Hm?”
Prussia manages to pull himself onto the bed and sprawl across it, though for the life of him Lithuania can’t figure out how he does it, but that’s Prussia for you, he supposes. “Did I piss you off?”
“Yes,” he says; there isn’t much of a point in lying about it now, is there?
“Heh. Guess you hate me, too.”
Lithuania closes his eyes, turns off the tap. “I try very hard not to hate anyone.”
“Doesn’t mean you don’t.”
“I know.” Wringing the washcloth is almost soothing. It occupies his hands, warms them, and it might be the middle of the summer but he’s living in Russia’s house now and he savors every bit of heat he can get.
Prussia’s silent. It’s strange for him. “Why are you doing this?” he finally says.
“Helping Russia,” Lithuania asks, “or helping you?”
“Both. Whichever.”
“I’m not helping Russia.” Lithuania walks over to Prussia, washcloth draped over his wrist, and starts unbuttoning his shirt briskly, before Prussia can voice any objections on the matter, which he doesn’t, thankfully. Long red lines score his ribs, and bruises spot his chest, some darker than others. Lithuania winces just to look at it. “My partisans still have control of part of the countryside. They’re fighting him off. I’m publishing underground newspapers in the cities, passing information to England and America through hidden channels, seeking diplomatic recognition abroad…I told you, there’s more than one way to fight him.”
“So why’re you helping me?”
“Because I want you to fight him, too,” Lithuania says, and sighs. “And I’m carrying enough grudges and wounds right now, I don’t need another one.”
“They’re gonna dissolve me.” Prussia swallows as best he’s able. “As a state.”
Lithuania says nothing, begins to sponge some of the blood from his chest.
“I thought…you know, I thought after the first war, ‘that’s it, can’t get worse than this. Only place to go is up.’” Prussia’s laugh sounds more like a croak. “Don’t tempt God, huh?”
“No,” Lithuania agrees, “you shouldn’t.”
“…Lithuania?”
“Yes?”
“What’s gonna happen? To me, I mean?”
Lithuania could fill his head with horror stories of Siberia, of the deportations, of the secret police Russia himself cringes from and how every smile is suspect, might be put there to mask someone’s true intentions. But it’s no way to live, and he won’t become that kind of person, so he tells Prussia, “It isn’t anything you can’t handle.”
“Right.”
And Lithuania’s smile, at least, is real. “Hold still.”
--------------------
So this is one of the longest things I’ve undertaken, and footnoting this entire thing would take ages, so I’ll try to provide a few general bits of information.
Germany started Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Soviet Union, on June 22, 1941. When the news reached Lithuania, which was at that time occupied by the Soviet Union, they began the June Uprising against the Red Army and declared the establishment of an independent state again. Germany had other plans, and initial collaboration between Germany and Lithuania collapsed when Lithuanians realized that Germany wasn’t going to grant them the autonomy they’d hoped for. The Provisional Government lasted only a few weeks, after which German civil officials took control of the administration of the region, though Lithuanians filled a lot of the lower-ranking offices simply because there weren’t enough Germans to staff the entire civil structure.
1941 also saw the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Jewish Lithuanians-a feat accomplished with the aid of some, but not all, ethnic Lithuanians. This article and this article have more information; suffice to say that World War II didn’t make anyone look good, and that Lithuanian scholarship is only now starting to address exactly what happened to Lithuania’s Jews during the war.
Armed resistance to German occupation never really arose in Lithuania, but as the occupation dragged on, Lithuanians took to passive resistance: publishing their own newspapers and boycotting the call for a Lithuanian division of the Waffen-SS, for example. The Lithuanian Territorial Defense Force was established in early 1944 and dissolved as soon as the SS tried to issue orders to its officers. General Plechavičius, who spearheaded its formation, found ways of avoiding German demands (and of organizing an underground army that would later form the basis of Lithuanian armed resistance against the Soviet Union) until ordered to recognize the direct authority of German command, at which time he disbanded the LTDF and told his men to disappear into the forests with their weapons, which they did.
Russia recaptured Kaunas on August 1, 1944.
As far as I know, nothing significant occurred between Poland and Lithuania during the December 1942 (though the relationship between the two nations could best be described as poor during that time); that passage is of my own invention. I also tweaked the order of events in early 1944, mainly by compressing the timeline and combining the demands German officials made of the LTDF into one event. I hope that any liberties I’ve taken haven’t distorted the events in question, and that though this is historical fiction, it’s true to the spirit of the times it portrays.
The title is a Brecht reference, because that’s how I roll. Also, Mother Courage is not Lithuania.
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