“It’s for the priest.” I wouldn’t accept a book from Lukas even as I was considering turning him in for handing out books.

  But Lukas pushed it toward me again. “This book is for someone who wants to read in her own language. Someone like you.”

  “This is an illegal book! Doesn’t that bother you?”

  “Just because it’s a law does not make it right. This is how we fight the Russian Empire, Audra. Words are our weapons, and protecting these books is a noble defense of our country. Join us, or don’t, but at least understand what we’re fighting for, and why.” He dropped the book in my lap, then jumped from the wagon.

  He and Ben began hauling books where the priest directed them, covering each stack with the straw so that it would blend in with the stables. I merely sat in a corner of the wagon, turning the book from Lukas over in my hands, unsure of what to do.

  Since coming to Milda’s, I’d tried to figure out what made these books so important. There wasn’t much to them, merely a stack of pages with letters scrawled onto them, bound into a soft leather or fabric cover.

  For books like these, the tsar of the Russian Empire condemned people to death or to a lifetime of imprisonment. I wondered how many hundreds—maybe thousands—of smugglers he’d punished.

  And despite that, year after year, the smuggling continued. I couldn’t understand why.

  Nothing in these pages could be that wonderful, that satisfying. If it were, then of all the books my parents smuggled, why had they never kept a single copy in our home? If it was so important, shouldn’t they have enrolled me in a school like Milda’s? Shouldn’t my parents have allowed me to work with them?

  I knew the answer, of course. They’d already told me why. They wanted to keep me safe. “One more year, Henri.” That had been my mother’s plea. One more year before telling me the truth about anything. One more year before putting a book in my hands and explaining why it mattered to them, why it should matter to me. Always one more year. All to keep me safe.

  And now, here I was. Could I do what was necessary to make them safe again too?

  The priest rested a small stack of books on the side of the wagon, getting my attention. “Thinking about your parents?”

  I nodded. There were no words in my language, or the Russian language, to describe how much I missed them. The closest phrase we had was aš labai pasiilgau tavęs, which failed to express my utter emptiness without them.

  The priest continued, “I never met them, but I’ve heard stories of their work. Your mother collected orders for books and passed the information to your father, who would secretly cross the border into Prussia. We have printers there who gladly take our money to make the books for us. Then your father smuggled the books back here into Lithuania. Their work was exceptionally dangerous, but if they were anything like Ben and Lukas and the other carriers I work with, then I understand why they did it.”

  I stared back at him, hoping he would explain further. Because I desperately wanted to know the answer. Yes, I had felt the rush of excitement in getting a single book past that soldier in town, but what did that matter? I’d failed in my attempts to smuggle since then and it had left a horrible pit in my gut all day.

  The priest smiled. “Your parents must have loved you very much to care so deeply about your future. They hoped to give you the chance of growing up in a Lithuania that was free, that belonged to our own people.”

  I glanced down. Maybe that was true. But if my parents loved me so much, why couldn’t they have made choices to keep us together? Of course I wanted my country to be free, as much as anyone, but no matter whether Lithuania was free or occupied, I’d still rather have had the chance to grow up with my family at my side.

  The priest must have sensed my feelings because he added, “Your parents couldn’t stand by and watch our light be extinguished by the occupation. If our country ceases to exist, then who will you be? An orphan to a nameless people, not Lithuanian, not Russian, not anything.”

  That was exactly the problem. I would become an orphan … unless I helped Rusakov. Helped him destroy the very thing my parents had worked so hard to protect.

  “I found a book in our home once,” I said, keeping my eyes down. “Years ago, but I still remember it. Mama snatched it from my hands and told me books were dangerous.”

  Lukas was passing by to get another load of books. “Your mother was right. Books can be exceptionally dangerous.”

  Now I looked up. “How?”

  The priest picked up a book from the wagon, one in a simple leather binding with letters on the cover that meant nothing to me. “This book speaks of what Lithuania might have been now if we’d been left on our own. Read it and you will see that what the Russians have stolen from us is so much greater than simply our land and our lives.”

  “What good does it do to wish that things were different?” I asked. “The Cossacks are here to stay. A few words of protest in a book won’t change that.”

  Lukas took the book from the priest and widened it to show me the pages inside, as if that would matter. “It’s not just wishing, Audra. This is a book of ideas. Someone thought the idea and put it into words on paper. That became a seed, and every time someone reads those words, the seed is planted in their mind, too, and it grows and spreads and soon that tiny seed of an idea becomes belief, and belief becomes a plan, and those plans begin to change the world. Control the books and you will control the people.”

  I smiled as I began to understand. “Give them books, and the people will control themselves.”

  “Control their own future!” Lukas added.

  He started to leave, but I said his name, and when he turned back to me, I asked, “With enough books, could we control our future enough to get the Russians out of Lithuania? Isn’t that the purpose of the book?”

  Ben had been listening to us and now ducked in. “The book gives knowledge, but don’t expect freedom from it. The Russians have been here a very long time now.”

  “But could it happen?”

  “In other words, is there any chance for your parents to come home again?” Ben frowned. “I already answered this. In my lifetime, I’ve never once seen anyone come back from Siberia.”

  A tear escaped my eye, leaving a wet trail down my cheek. If that were true, then I really had no choice. I couldn’t let my parents die in Siberia, not for a few books. I knew what I had to do.

  Lukas had been gathering another stack of books in his arms and now lowered them again to face Ben. “That’s not what you’ve told me before. You’ve said—”

  “Don’t get her hopes up. We’re not doing this to make Lithuania free. We do this just to preserve the idea that Lithuania exists at all.”

  “No, Ben!” Lukas shouted the words, then calmed himself with a deep breath before adding, “I know what you’ve always said, what you really believe. That books themselves are freedom. Freedom to think, to believe, to dream.”

  Ben had been nodding as Lukas spoke, then said, “Put a thousand more hosts of Cossack soldiers on our roads if that’s what the tsar commands, but if I have a book in my hand, I am free. Now, I’d appreciate it if you’d get several books in your hands and help this old man unload the wagon.”

  Lukas grinned playfully, and as he began piling a stack into his arms, he glanced over at me. “I warn you that once you start carrying, you won’t be able to go back to who you were before. Will you help us, then?”

  His simple question seemed to choke me, too much for an honest reply. Whatever I did next, it would feel to them like I was helping, but the truth was just the opposite. I had to meet Officer Rusakov in two days and tell him how to find Lukas. I just had to. Slowly, I nodded.

  “No, she won’t help,” Ben countered, then faced me directly. “A book carrier’s work is dangerous, her life is at risk at all times, even in the moments when she’s not carrying books. Just as it was for your father.” I winced, and Ben continued, “You’ll sleep in cold ditches, run when your heart threatens to burst from your chest, go hungry, and be lonely and more afraid some nights than you can possibly imagine. And more than once, you will ask yourself why you are doing all of this.”

  On the other side of me, Lukas said, “Smuggling is in your blood, Audra. Adventure is in your blood. If all you want is a simple life, then forget everything you have seen and everything you’ve already done. You can grow up without ideas or dreams or knowledge of a world any bigger than your own home. Do you want that, a life of small, safe dreams?”

  “She wants to live!” Ben scowled. “Stop filling her head with hope. Her parents kept her away from all of this for a reason and we should respect that.”

  I stared down at the book in my hands, the one with the A on the cover. Was that all I’d ever be, just that single scrawled letter? Perhaps the simple life I had laid out for myself wasn’t really the life I wanted. “That’s the first letter of my name,” I mumbled. “The only letter of my name that I know.”

  “The rest is inside that book.” Lukas smiled as if he had won some sort of contest against Ben, when in fact, it wasn’t about either of them. It was about me.

  Was it enough for me to simply be a letter A? Maybe it had to be enough. I wasn’t ready to risk my life to know the letters that followed it.

  “You can finish the job we’re on now,” Ben said. “But this life isn’t for you. If your parents had taught you better, encouraged you to read rather than hiding information from you, then you might have made a very good book carrier. As you are now, I do not think you are up to the task.”

  “I am,” I mumbled. And when he didn’t seem to hear me, I looked up. “I can do this, Ben.”

  Or at least, I had to. Just until I got my parents back.

  After that, I could return to the life I’d had before. The one where my mother insisted on protecting me from the world beyond my home, where my father believed I knew and understood less than I truly did. I could return to being a girl who stared at the first letter of her name and wondered if there was anything more to her.

  And that was the problem. More than anything in the world, I wanted my parents back. But I did not … could not … return to being the same girl they had left behind.

  I closed my eyes and tried to contain the emotions rising in me. I’d seen a glimpse of myself as I wished to be, a reflection of who I might become if I allowed courage to enter my heart, or ideas to enter my head. I saw myself as the girl who defied any hold on her future because she refused to acknowledge the limits others placed on her.

  When I imagined the girl I wanted to be, it was the girl who smuggled books.

  I looked down at the book in my hand.

  “What do you think?” Lukas asked Ben. “We really could use her help, and she was good back there on the road, you know she was.”

  “She was,” Ben grunted at me. “But I still don’t like this one bit.” He hesitated a moment longer, rubbing the scruff on his chin as he considered what to do, then said, “Until I can get you back to Milda’s, I suppose you’re a smuggler now.”

  We slept in the church that night, each of us taking a separate pew with a blanket and a bundle of my fabric scraps for a pillow against the hard wood seats. Ben fell asleep immediately, but I rolled until I caught an angle of my book against the moonlight streaming in through the church’s tall arched windows.

  My book was meant for a much younger person, but I was unable to sleep and had nothing better to do, so I began thumbing through the pages. They listed thirty-two letters, each letter making a different sound. Combining the sounds completed a word. So all I had to do was figure out the sound associated with each letter, and the word would unfold before my eyes.

  Each page had a series of pictures and the words to describe each one below it. Well over an hour later, I had made out the first three words on the page.

  Vaikas. Child.

  Namai. Home.

  Motina. Mother.

  I stopped there and closed the book, my heart pounding as if I’d just finished a race. My mother was so much more than a series of six letters. It didn’t describe her enough, didn’t identify her in any way that contained the uniqueness of how she spiced a beet soup, the warmth of her smile, the tender touch of her hand on my back when I needed her most. Ben was wrong. There was no power in a word that failed to encompass who my mother really was.

  I looked over to the pew where he slept to ask him about that, and only then noticed how low the candle had burned. I should have been asleep myself. I dropped the book on the floor, frustrated by how those words simplified the clash of emotions inside me when I thought about my mother. How I missed her, loved her, desperately wished for any news of whether she was safe, whether she was afraid of going to Siberia. But I was also angry that she had kept a secret life so separate from her life with me, never once letting on what she was doing, never once trusting me to help her, or now, to save her.

  And for all those thoughts, the only word the book offered me was “motina.” Little comfort as I finally closed my eyes.

  I couldn’t have been asleep for long when the doors of the church burst open and a man ran through the door, calling, “Kunigas, Kunigas!” for the priest to come.

  Both Ben and Lukas bolted straight up from their benches and Ben tore off his blanket to rush over to the man. Although he asked the man to lower his voice, the tall open ceilings of this room created an echo, making it easy to hear their conversation.

  “A search is coming,” the man said. “They’re looking for you. By morning, the Cossacks will be here. Are there any books in this church?”

  Ben glanced at Lukas. “Get the priest.” Then to me he said, “Gather up our blankets. We must leave at once.”

  I began stuffing the fabric scraps back into my sack, then folded up the blankets, pulled my boots on to my feet, and followed Ben and the man who’d come out of the church and into the stables.

  Ben began hitching up the horses while I started loading books back into the wagon as quickly as possible.

  “No.” Ben held up an arm, but it was the tension in his voice that stopped me in my tracks. “They know a wagon brought the books into the town. They’ll watch for wagons to be leaving the town. We must go other ways.”

  “I have a cart with me,” the man said. “If you and your carriers will take the extra books and leave town, I’ll take all the books that were meant to be distributed here and get them delivered by morning.”

  By then, Lukas and the priest had joined us. The priest helped load books into the man’s cart while Ben gathered me and Lukas around him.

  “How many can you carry?” he asked Lukas.

  Lukas looked over the pile. “A dozen, I think.”

  Ben nodded at him, then turned to me. “How many?”

  “A dozen.” Ben started to object, but I added, “If Lukas can, then I can.” I began pulling the fabric scraps from my sack to make room for the books. Ben counted out twelve books and handed them to me, though I noticed they were thinner than what he handed to Lukas. I stuffed them deep within my sack, pushing the fabric scraps around the edges so that my sack would look rounded rather than square.

  “Fabric scraps won’t do.” The priest held a finger to his temple. “Wait a bit.” He hurried back toward the church, returning a few minutes later with some maroon tube-shaped flowers that somehow smelled like raw meat. I cocked my head away from them as he stuffed them into the top of my sack. “What is that?”

  He smiled. “Birthwort. If you don’t like the smell, then neither will the occupiers. Tell them it was your mother’s favorite and you’re going to lay them at her grave.”

  I stiffened. “My mother is still alive.”

  The priest drew back. “Oh, yes, of course! But that is a good excuse for why you might be carrying them.”

  “If I’m stopped, I won’t use that excuse.”

  “Tell them anything you want,” Lukas said, stuffing a canvas sack with his own books. “Better yet, don’t get stopped.”

  “We’re leaving together.” I looked from him over to Ben. “Aren’t we?”

  Ben shook his head. “Three of us together will draw too much attention. We should take separate routes toward Šiluva. Have you heard of that place?”

  Of course I had. That was the closest town to where I’d lived my entire life. But I barely knew where I was now, so I had no idea how to get back there. I desperately wanted to return to Šiluva, though, just to see what was left of my home … if anything was left of it.

  “I don’t dare to draw you a map,” Ben said. “If you’re caught, it will lead them to all of us.”

  “Do you have any paper?” I asked the priest. “And a little milk?”

  The priest’s brows knitted together, but he nodded and excused himself, returning a minute later with both items I’d requested, which he gave to me.

  I passed them to Ben and said, “Dip your finger in the milk and draw me a map on the paper.”

  “With milk? No one will be able to see it.”

  “Exactly!”

  “Not even you, Audra. What good—”

  “Please, Ben, just trust me!”

  I doubted Ben had the capacity to trust me, but hopefully he’d decide it was easier to do as I asked so that we could all get on our way. Whatever his reasons, he drew the map and passed it back to me with a huff. I waited for the paper to dry, then carefully folded it and put it in an inside pocket of my apron. If I was caught, all they would see was a blank paper. It occurred to me that maybe we should print all our books this way.

  When I’d finished, Ben said, “You’ve had a little practice at smuggling, and you’ve done well, but this will be more difficult, for we’re headed into a city where there are more watchful eyes. Our people will not trouble you—if anything they will greet and protect you as a hero—but there are Russian civilians in the cities. Speak Russian to everyone you meet, for they will expect that, and keep these books hidden until I find you in Šiluva.”

  “Where should I go there?”

  Ben smiled. “If your invisible map works, then you’ll end up at a secret school hidden in a barn near the church. It has a large Russian flag painted on the east side. Go inside there and wait for me.”

 

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