“That’s not true,” Petr responded. “I can see you.”
Karen turned her head and saw that he was looking right at her. The movement caused her wool cap to pull sideways. Petr reached out to push it back on, but his fingers got distracted by her dark hair.
She enjoyed the feel of his touch. She wondered whether Duck felt like that when she petted him.
“What did you want?” she asked. “Before the war, before everything changed. What did you want to be?”
“Happy,” Petr answered.
Karen thought he was teasing her. “Of course,” she said, “everyone wants to be happy.”
“No, they don’t,” Petr replied. “If everyone just wanted to be happy, there wouldn’t be a war.”
“The war must make somebody happy,” Karen suggested.
“Who?”
“I don’t know. The generals, maybe. Hitler. The men who work for the companies that make guns and planes and tanks.”
“It makes them powerful, it makes them rich, it makes them famous,” Petr admitted. “But that’s not the same thing as happiness.”
“Then what is it?”
“Ambition,” Petr stated.
“Ambition leads to happiness.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Petr replied as if the statement were self-evident.
“Then what does it lead to?”
“More ambition.”
Karen conceded the point. “All right, then, what leads to happiness?”
“Right here, right now. This is happiness.”
Karen blushed again. She pulled her hat back over her ears to stay warm, and Petr moved his hand away. And then she turned over, her back to him. “Good night.”
“Good night.”
Karen had trouble falling asleep. She wanted to turn over, take Petr in her arms, and cuddle him close. She couldn’t be sure, but she suspected he wanted the same thing.
She tried to think of Bobby. She’d asked Bobby the same question when they’d first met, what he wanted. She asked a lot of people that question. She’d always thought of it as a trick to get to know someone, a way to move beyond small talk. But now she was realizing that wasn’t her fascination with the question at all. She realized that she asked because she truly was curious. She wanted to know what others wanted because she wasn’t sure herself.
Karen knew what she didn’t want. She didn’t want to be a musician. She didn’t want to be a socialist. She didn’t want to live in Russia. But there was a big difference between knowing what you don’t want, and knowing what you do want.
She had loved Bobby’s answer. It was flattering, hearing that he wanted her. So flattering that she decided she wanted that, too: love. And so she had fallen in love with Bobby.
But now Petr had given her a different answer, an answer both simpler and more complex. It was an answer she’d never heard before. Most people answered by describing their ambitions. Even Bobby’s answer had been about ambition, in a way. He wanted her to marry him.
Disturbed, Karen turned back over. “Why? Why are you happy right now?” she asked, waking Petr up.
“Aren’t you?” Petr asked.
“Yes,” Karen admitted. “But why is that? I’m cold. I’m hungry. I’m scared. How is it possible that I’m happy?”
“Because it’s not food or warmth or security that makes someone happy.”
“Then what does?”
“People.”
Karen thought for a moment. “That’s not true.”
“I think it is.”
“If that were true, no one could ever be happy alone.”
“Of course they could be.”
“How?”
“By enjoying being with themselves.”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“No, it’s not easy. Sometimes I don’t even realize that I’m happy. That’s why, when you feel it, it’s so important to recognize it. And sometimes, some things make you happy that shouldn’t.”
“Like what?”
Petr didn’t answer. He was thinking of the moment when he’d rushed inside the cottage, when he and Duck had killed the Germans. He’d been happy in that moment. He’d felt a strange ecstasy, a bloodlust, as he’d hammered the second blow of his spade.
He was ashamed of that feeling, so ashamed that he couldn’t tell anyone, not even Karen. “I don’t know,” he lied. And suddenly he felt like changing the subject. “I think we should get some sleep.”
Eventually they did fall asleep, but it was a troubled sleep, for both of them.
Karen woke feeling guilty and disloyal to Bobby.
Petr woke feeling ashamed of keeping a secret from Karen.
They ate their breakfast in silence. And then they set out for another day’s march.
Gone was the joyful conversation that had characterized the previous day. But Petr didn’t seem bothered by the quiet. Karen now realized that what she’d mistaken for gullibility or patriotism when she first met him was simple optimism. Petr had the ability to pick out the little joy details that surrounded them. He pointed out tiny animal tracks in the snow, stopped to appreciate melodious birdcalls, and even took off his cap and helmet to feel the warmth of the sun on his hair.
Karen was once again reminded of Bobby, of the letters he’d sent describing magical little details of New York. She loved those letters. Just as she loved being with Petr right now. As the sun warmed the forest, so did her mood. Soon she was chatting again, like a schoolgirl.
Petr was growing more confident that they’d finally passed through the German lines. They even risked coming out of the forest and returning to the road. There, they discovered that rough-hewn logs had been dropped lengthwise along the melting snow. It was an age-old Russian solution to muddy spring roads, and Petr said it confirmed that they’d crossed into Russian territory.
The logs provided a secure platform for their continued march and seemed to double their progress. Sure enough, no later than three o’clock in the afternoon, they approached a Red Army checkpoint. Sentries challenged them in Russian but let them pass. Petr and Karen were fed and given a basin of clean water to wash up. They were brought to the Red Army captain in charge of this forward position for a debriefing.
Petr took the lead in the conversation, claiming they had both been part of the ill-fated Second Shock Army. The Germans had surrounded their unit, and Karen had been captured. That explained her black eye and the loss of her military uniform. Karen lied that she escaped and found Russian clothes before meeting Petr and making their way through enemy territory back to the Russian lines.
The captain believed their story; he confirmed that the Second Shock Army had been cut off and surrounded, and even admitted that it was slowly being destroyed. Refugees from the fighting were occasionally finding their way back, as Petr and Karen had.
He asked them to describe what they’d seen of German military strength and to point out on a map the village with the bridge across the Neva. Then he gave Karen a new uniform and let them go, recommending they reach the retraining battalion as quickly as possible. Rumor had it that Stavka was preparing a new spring offensive, this time in the Ukraine near the city of Kharkov. They needed every soldier they could muster.
Petr and Karen thanked the captain and continued on their way. Karen had no intention of joining the retraining battalion, of course, or of fighting in Kharkov. She was still headed for Moscow by way of Tikhvin.
As they entered Tikhvin, they saw that the town had been bombed and shelled into a broken landscape of blackened timber and cracked concrete. Unlike Leningrad, its military value was too high to allow it to simply rot and die. The Wehrmacht and the Red Army had struggled against each other here in bitter street-to-street fighting—first Germany winning and then the Red Army taking it back in December. Red Army engineers wasted no time erecting hastily built shacks to shelter soldiers, and they jerry-rigged machines to keep the trains running, the supplies moving, and the reinforcements coming. The little city looked like an Old West boomtown built atop ancient Roman ruins.