By the time she reached the trenches surrounding the dying city, Karen faced a new problem. She couldn’t just walk up to the Red Army sentries and announce herself; she’d be mistaken for a German infiltrator and shot on sight. She, Inna, and Sasha had worked out a signal with Inna’s sister, who would be waiting there for the “potato army.” They would whistle, wait until the machine-gun team returned the whistle, and approach the trench. But Inna’s sister expected three people: Inna, Sasha, and Karen. She might even have heard the Germans’ gunfire. How could Karen tell Inna’s sister that Inna and Sasha were both dead? She wished she didn’t have to talk to Inna’s sister at all. But it was that or risk getting shot.
Karen got down on her belly, crawled out from the edge of the woods, and whistled. Someone in the trench whistled back. Karen stood up and crept forward in a crouch. She reached the edge of the trench and jumped down beside a Maxim machine gun, its small, scalloped barrel protruding from a little trolley with spoked wheels. It looked like a toy. No wonder the Germans were winning, Karen thought—their weapons were so much more intimidating than the Russian ones.
Inna’s sister grabbed Karen’s hand. “Where are Inna and Sasha?” she asked.
“Just inside the woods,” Karen lied. The lie came easily to her—more easily than she expected. “They decided to cut some firewood. They’ll be here soon.” The lie made sense, Karen realized, because she herself should have cut firewood when she had the chance. Her military shovel was sharp enough to hack through dead tree branches.
Inna’s sister peered at Karen. “Why didn’t you stay with them?”
“It’s too cold,” Karen explained, reaching into her potato sack and pulling out the machine-gun team’s share. Once again, she knew Inna’s sister would accept the lie. Karen was American, so the Russians considered her weak. Of course they would believe that an American girl couldn’t endure a Russian winter. Besides, the machine-gun team was already eyeing the potatoes, their mouths watering. Karen twisted shut the sack and lay the shovel down next to the potatoes. She regretted giving up the shovel even more than giving up a share of the food. But she had no choice.
“Tell Inna I’ll meet her at the usual place tomorrow,” she added.
Inna’s sister nodded, but she wasn’t really listening. She took off her steel helmet and piled snow into it while a companion sparked up a fire. She placed the helmet on the growing flames and gazed at the concoction hungrily. Soon enough she would have boiled potatoes.
Karen grabbed what remained of her sack and climbed out the other side of the trench. Now on the outskirts of Leningrad, she knew better than to return to her apartment. Too many people knew her there. And for what she had planned, no one could know her.
She went to Inna’s apartment instead. Inna lived in a housing block down the street from the Kirov Tractor Factory, where her father used to work. It was in southwest Leningrad, much closer to the German lines and the German guns, and the tractor factory had been an important target for those guns, since it produced Russia’s impressive new T-34 tanks. The Germans had bombarded the neighborhood in an attempt to shut down the Kirov’s production. The bombardment had failed to destroy the factory, but it left Inna’s neighborhood a landscape of crumbling walls, broken pavement, and black craters. Vehicles could no longer pass through the rubble. Residents emerged from their homes only long enough to scurry to the bakeries or into work at the factory, afraid of getting caught in the open during the next German shelling. The broken streets were usually abandoned, which made Karen’s trek easier.
Despite the bombardment, Inna’s housing block was remarkably unscathed. The modest apartment was luxurious by Soviet standards, since it had two bedrooms. Inna’s father earned such luxury by being an udarnik, a “shock worker,” at the tractor factory in faraway Chelyabinsk. Shock workers set an example for other laborers with their enthusiasm, endurance, and superproductivity. His absence would help Karen.
It was a surprise to Karen that Inna’s apartment was a jumble of color and clutter. Inna’s mother had died when Inna was a baby, but her influence lived on in the apartment. Clearly, she had knitted the hundreds of colorful throw blankets, as well as the doilies under lamps and picture frames. Before living in Russia, Karen thought there was no such thing as property in the Soviet Union—that all items were shared. After all, her father told her that the Soviets had abolished all private property. What she didn’t understand at the time, and what she had soon come to learn, was that Russians distinguished between “private” property and “personal” property. Private property was defined as “capital,” which was anything that could be used to build or create something else. Factories were capital because they were used to build industrial goods. Farms were capital because their land was a productive source of food. Even a loom or a bicycle-repair shop could be considered capital. But personal items, like clothing and watches and radios and books, were commonly recognized as possessions.
Inna’s apartment was loaded with intensely personal items. Her mother’s smiling face was everywhere in those picture frames, standing beside sentimental souvenirs representing where each photograph was taken: the dried leaf from a birch tree in Moscow, a broken paving stone from outside the Winter Palace, ticket stubs from the State Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet. There were countless other tchotchkes that Karen didn’t recognize. She briefly wondered whether Inna would be given the same treatment, the same places of honor within her father’s apartment. But then she pushed the morbid thought out of her mind. She couldn’t think of Inna as dead. Inna had been her best friend—her only friend, really. But Karen couldn’t afford to mourn for her. Not yet. She had to trick herself into believing that Inna was still alive. And she had to study everything in this apartment. She had to learn as much about Inna, her father, her sister, and her dead mother as possible, because Karen had a plan.
She would become Inna.
CHAPTER 10
THE ORGAN-GRINDER
Petr took a good look at his new surroundings once he’d recovered from his savage fight to take the cottage. At the center of the open room was the hearth: a huge fireplace and chimney. Around it were cluttered benches and tables where the Germans had apparently slept in an effort to avoid the rats. Every crack in the doors, windows, and walls was stuffed with old newspapers in an attempt to insulate the building from the cold. That, combined with decades-old goop smearing the windows, left the cottage in perpetual twilight. The Germans had tried to fight off the darkness with improvised lanterns. Old mess tins, schnapps bottles, and even helmets hung from the ceiling were filled with grease, the twine wicks sputtering with weak flames. How could proud German soldiers live in such deprived squalor? At that moment Petr realized how precariously the Wehrmacht was holding on. Perhaps the Red Army could win this war, after all.
More gunfire and a series of explosions ripped Petr from his thoughts. He crept to a window on the opposite side of the cottage, smashed it with his shovel, and peered outside.