That fascinated Inna, who demanded to know everything about Karen’s boyfriend. Karen then learned that the root of Inna’s Bolshevik fanaticism wasn’t her love for the Communist Party; it was her obsession with a boy named Sasha.
Sasha Portnov was a member of the Komsomol, a Communist Party–sanctioned youth group. He was also an aspiring novelist. Inna and Sasha had known each other from childhood, and she had fallen in love with him when she was six. He’d joined the Young Pioneers, which was the Soviet version of the Boy Scouts, so Inna had joined, too, just to be close to him. When he graduated from that organization and moved on to the Komsomol, so did Inna. Sasha was always happy for Inna’s company, and he respected Inna’s dedication to radical Communist ideals. But Inna feared he thought of her more like a sister than a girlfriend.
Karen helped Inna make Sasha change his mind about that. She convinced Inna to drop the affected filth and intentional ugliness of a Bolshevik radical. Inna absolutely refused to drape herself in the “shameful” bourgeois fashions of the West, but she did allow Karen to lend her individual items from her wardrobe to create a more flattering image. A neat, tailored jacket pulled tight against Inna’s bosom revealed the feminine rise of her chest. A thick leather belt buckled around her waist looked like part of a paramilitary uniform, as did tight sand-colored breeches and calf-high riding boots. But they also successfully showed off Inna’s developing figure. Karen washed, combed, and clipped Inna’s hair, transforming the boyish cowlicks into the shaped bangs of a bob cut that framed Inna’s piercing blue eyes. The net effect was to transform Inna from a dirty street urchin into a cute but dangerous young militant. And the true miracle of the transformation was that nothing about Inna’s new appearance suggested anything less than complete dedication to the Communist cause. The uniform worked. Within weeks, Sasha and Inna were dating.
Despite Karen’s affection for Inna, she felt uncomfortable around Sasha. He didn’t seem to trust Karen, and even before the German invasion, he was always criticizing America. That criticism grew louder as the Germans marched toward Leningrad. He resented the fact that America remained neutral, and Sasha once told Karen to her face that, since she was American, she might as well be a German collaborator. After that, Karen stopped visiting Inna at the Komsomol clubhouse. She knew what happened to German collaborators—they were hung. She didn’t think Sasha meant it that way, but she also knew better than to take any chances.
Then America did enter the war, and Sasha finally began treating Karen with respect. After Karen’s father died, she began to realize that she needed the Komsomol. Karen ingratiated herself further with Inna’s friends by parroting back to them their Communist propaganda. To hear her at the clubhouse, one would have thought she was as radical as Inna. But Karen hadn’t really changed her political views. She was just being practical. The Bolshevik fanatics in the Komsomol might have information Karen could use to escape Leningrad. She had already noticed that although the Red Army soldiers manning the trenches and bakeries never talked to her, no matter how hard she tried to talk to them, they often chatted and traded gossip with Inna.
This was how Inna found out about the potato field where Karen found herself now, facedown on her stomach and freezing. It was also how Inna had gotten hold of the shovels.
They were military shovels, so-called entrenching tools distributed to the soldiers along with their uniforms and rifles. And the soldiers didn’t willingly part with them. Inna’s sister, a machine gunner, explained the importance of the shovel before she relinquished it to them. She described how she had been admonished about the lifesaving qualities of her humble shovel during her time with the training battalion. “When given the order to halt,” her instructor had howled at her, “you must lie down and immediately start digging!” In three minutes she was expected to dig deep enough so that she was lying flat, and enemy bullets would whiz harmlessly over her head. But that wasn’t good enough. Unless given the order to advance, she was expected to keep digging, so that eventually she could kneel in her trench and then stand. Even then, if not given the order to advance, she had to keep digging, always to her left, never to her right. Every member of her squad was taught to dig left so that they wouldn’t interfere with each other’s labor. Eventually all that digging would result in communications trenches connecting her comrades’ foxholes to her own. It was in that manner that the trenches protecting Leningrad had been dug. And Inna’s sister knew that if her superior officers ever caught her without her shovel, she could be beaten or worse.
But the promise of potatoes was too great a temptation even for soldiers. When Inna promised her sister’s fellow soldiers a share of the harvest, they agreed to lend her their precious shovels. They had to be returned, of course; nothing as valuable as a shovel could simply be given away in Leningrad. Inna distributed the shovels to Sasha and Karen, keeping one for herself. Then they began to plan the raid, referring to one another as the First Potato Army.
It was a dangerous raid. The potatoes were behind German lines. Karen, Inna, and Sasha didn’t only have to cross under the German guns covering no-man’s-land; they also needed to sneak past German patrols. They had waited for a moonless, overcast night.
The darkness was their only advantage. They’d spent so much time without electricity in Leningrad that they were used to seeing in the dark. The Germans, however, seemed entirely dependent on machines and electric light. Karen, Inna, and Sasha had seen the headlights of their Opel trucks long before they heard the engines. That had given them plenty of time to jump off the road and roll into a frozen ditch, where they hid until the trucks passed.
Then, finally, they reached the potato field unseen. It was time to get digging, and they worked with all they had. Until they heard something and crouched in the dark.
German soldiers were coming their way. They nearly walked right into Karen, Inna, and Sasha—almost catching them by surprise, but the crunch of their boots on the icy topsoil gave them away. Karen and her friends immediately stopped digging and dived onto their bellies, onto that frozen ground, where Karen wondered and worried how long they could hold out, facedown, the heat draining from her.
CHAPTER 8
THE ORGAN-GRINDER
“What do you intend to do after the war?” The question came from Jillian Croogar, a young American newspaper reporter working for the Los Angeles Times. Miss Croogar had been allowed access to Petr while the Soviet Union’s newest hero was recovering in a field hospital.
It was now January of 1942. Native Russian reporters had already visited him. Desperate for good news, they interviewed him for Pravda, Russia’s mouthpiece for Soviet propaganda. The story they wrote had made Petr out to be a supersoldier, a warrior so dedicated to his great leader, Stalin, that he fearlessly held back an entire German tank battalion and destroyed two of the Wehrmacht’s most expensive war machines.
The Pravda story made Petr famous. Even this American reporter had heard of him, so Soviet propaganda ministers directed her to his bedside. “Get married, perhaps?” the reporter suggested. “Start a family?”
Petr stared at Jillian. The answer was so obvious that he didn’t quite understand the question. “After the war?” he repeated, making sure he understood just what the reporter was asking.
“Yes, after the war.” Miss Croogar nodded, her pencil hovering over a steno pad. “You got a sweetheart back home waiting for you?”