Petr told her about his family. His youth was not so different from Karen’s, it turned out. His father was a mathematics professor, deemed brilliant by his colleagues not just in Moscow but all over the world. But then on April 17, 1937, Petr’s family history turned dark. Petr was out seeing a movie that night and returned to his apartment to find that the door had been kicked in, and his father was being escorted to an unmarked car by NKVD officers.
“Why?” asked Karen, horrified.
“Because of the purge,” Petr responded grimly. “Anyone who was too rich or too smart or too powerful… anyone who could criticize or threaten Stalin or his government—they were arrested and made to disappear.”
“And your father, he was critical of the government?”
“No,” Petr replied, exasperated, “he was too tied up in mathematics. He barely even knew the government existed.”
When Petr saw his father taken away, he tried to intervene, demanding that the NKVD officers release him. But his father told Petr to calm down, that it was all a misunderstanding.
Petr realized that his father was trying to save Petr’s life. If Petr had persisted in his protest, he, too, would have been arrested. So, with a heavy heart, Petr said good-bye to his father, who assured his son he’d see him again soon. Petr knew it was a lie.
Karen sensed Petr’s pain. “I’m sorry.”
Petr smiled and wiped the back of his hand across his face. “It’s OK, it turned out OK,” he assured her. Because, it turned out, Petr’s father had been right. The mathematics professor was so ignorant of politics that he befuddled his interrogators. Furthermore, NKVD investigators could never find evidence of a single incident when the math professor had criticized the government. As a result, Petr’s father escaped execution. He even escaped the Gulags, the frozen concentration camps where many of his university colleagues died.
“They just let him go?”
“Not exactly,” Petr admitted. “They agreed to let him go, but only if he proved his worth to society.” He had to stop theorizing, Petr explained, and start working. The Soviet Union didn’t need mathematicians, but it did need engineers. It needed railroads and bridges and factories and tractors. Surely a university professor, at the top of his field, could contribute to the greater good?
Unfortunately for Petr’s father, his genius was in his head, not in the real world. He was a magician with numbers but not with measurements. When he had to account for the margins of error inherent in the manufacturing processes, he failed. His designs didn’t fit together properly, and his bridges fell down.
Eventually he went into self-imposed exile, joining his brother-in-law, who ran a lumber mill in a small northern village. There, Petr’s father found employment teaching arithmetic to children. And there he was left alone. The Politburo, the men appointed by Stalin to govern the vast Russian territories, concluded that there he could do no harm.
Karen realized that she and Petr were both children of very bright men whom some might even have considered geniuses. But despite their intelligence, both fathers were as irresponsible as children. They cared not for the world around them; they cared only about their very limited and individual passions. For Karen’s father, that had been music. For Petr’s father, it was mathematics.
Petr agreed. When his father worked at the university, his deficiencies had not been so obvious. The university took care of him and, by extension, took care of Petr. When, thanks to the purges, Petr’s father lost his job and had to look after himself, he was helpless.
Petr sighed. “He often completely lost track of time. And when the first winter struck, he was completely unprepared. He worked on a math theorem for days, forgetting to feed or bring in the goat, who died. And he never bothered to cut new wood. I was forced to beg my uncle and neighbors to share their own provisions just so we could survive the winter.”
“The same thing happened to me!” Karen replied, amazed. “Well, not the exact same thing, but…” She described the day she was forced to confront bill collectors at her apartment door who were threatening to turn off the gas and electricity. Her father hadn’t failed to pay them because he was poor; he’d simply forgotten.
So Karen began to intercept the mail and pay the bills herself, taking the money from her father’s wallet or the stash he left in a desk drawer. “He didn’t even have a bank account. If we’d been robbed, we would have been destitute!”
“You were robbed though, weren’t you?” Petr replied. “By the Germans.”
“Yes, I suppose we were,” Karen agreed, looking into Petr’s eyes.
The girl and the boy soldier were sharing melancholy thoughts and disturbing memories, but these didn’t make them sad. Strangely, sharing their memories made them happy.
Karen realized then that she’d spent her entire life alone, trapped in her own head and her own emotions. She’d assumed that no one lived the way she did and that her life experience was unique. She never talked about it because she was ashamed of it.
Now that she was sharing her past, she felt an immense sense of relief. She wasn’t unique, after all. She wasn’t so alone. Here was Petr, half a world away, living a similar life, struggling with similar challenges. If Petr had done it, how many others had done it, too?
Suddenly Karen felt part of a larger community—a community of human beings stretching back through history. She hadn’t met any of them, but instantly she no longer felt alone.
As she sat cross-legged across from Petr, talking and listening, she recognized how grateful she was to have escaped that storage closet. If she’d been hung before learning to trust someone like Petr, she never would have had this conversation. She never would have realized that other human beings shared her experiences. She would have lived her entire life trapped inside her own soul, isolated and alone.
“Buried,” replied Petr, with a knowing nod. His eyes were clear and shining with interest.
Suddenly Karen realized that they were holding hands. Somehow, during their conversation, their fingers had reached out and interlocked. It was an unconscious gesture, her hands and arms acting as if they had a mind of their own. But when she noticed that they were touching, she felt blood rush warm into her cheeks. She knew she was blushing. Her embarrassment only made things worse. And yet, she didn’t want to let go. He was staring right at her. What would he think? She should let go of his hand, she should look away, but she didn’t want to.
“Buried,” Petr repeated, turning the word over in his mind. He glanced away from her for a moment, studying the barbed wire. “I think I know how to get through.”
“How?” asked Karen, both glad and disappointed that his eyes had left her own.
“We could dig under it, through the snow.”
It was so obvious. Petr still had his combat shovel. It wasn’t difficult or particularly time-consuming to excavate a trench through the snow under the wire.
With the barbed wire behind them, they continued their journey. They also continued their conversation. But they no longer held hands. That spell had been broken. Still, they were having fun, talking about their favorite foods or most cherished childhood toys. But it was the same sort of idle chatter Karen might have had with Inna, no longer accompanied by the deep revelations she’d experienced next to the barbed wire.
They marched and chatted until nightfall, when they allowed themselves to lie back and look up through the branches. Stars had come out, forming a huge dome over the night sky. “I love nighttime,” Karen whispered.
“Why?”
“Because in Leningrad, at night, with the electricity out and everyone indoors, all you can see are the stars. You can’t see the rubble or the dead bodies. Just stars. Beautiful stars.”