Every single day, as the ground froze and food grew scarcer, Karen’s father walked to the conservatory and helped Mr. Shostakovich work on his new masterpiece. And every single night, after returning to the apartment, Karen’s father transcribed the day’s progress, tried out experimental elements on his piano, and wrote down the ones he liked.
Shostakovich had abandoned them in September of 1941, hypocritically escaping Leningrad on a plane to Moscow. Even after that, Karen’s father still worked on the symphony. He never stood in the ration lines with Karen. He never helped her scrounge for wood or food. He just worked all day and all night on the symphony and criticized her for not practicing the cello.
Karen hated Mr. Shostakovich. She hated him almost as much as she hated her father.
Her father even refused to wear gloves because he could not play the piano with gloves on. Karen begged him to give it up. Nobody cared about the stupid symphony. Her father wasn’t even Russian. But he didn’t give up. He just kept on working, finally having agreed to wear gloves a few days earlier. But they were thin women’s gloves, not warm at all. Yet he had absolutely refused to wear anything thicker—until today.
When Karen arrived home with her shovel, she was overjoyed to see her father wearing his mittens. He had finally taken her advice. She was so happy that she didn’t even mind picking up the paper and pencil and writing down the last few notes as he dictated them to her. She didn’t question why he didn’t write them himself. Together they ate the last of their bread ration and went to sleep, huddling together for warmth.
Karen woke up cold. She was confused. She expected to feel cold, of course, but not so frigid. Why was there no warmth under the blanket? And then, with horror, she realized why. Her father’s body was not producing any heat. She shook him. He wasn’t asleep. He was dead.
And Karen feared that she suddenly knew why. Filled with dread but needing to know the truth, Karen pulled off her father’s mittens. His fingers were black and rotting from the inside out. One after the other they came off in her hand, rotten from frostbite. That’s why he’d worn his mittens—not to keep warm, but so that Karen wouldn’t see his fingers.
In that moment, Karen hated her father more than she ever had before. He had nothing to worry about anymore, nothing to accomplish, no responsibilities. He’d abdicated it all, leaving all those burdens to Karen. He’d gotten her into this mess, and now she was the only one left who could get herself out.
She dragged her father’s body into the courtyard, where Mrs. Kudaschova used to tend her summer flowers. The flowers were long dead, and, as Karen expected, the soil was frozen solid. She knew she couldn’t break that soil, but she had to try. She knew what would happen to her father’s body if she didn’t bury it—it would meet the same fate that had befallen the old woman at the fountain and the dead child and the wine seller. She smashed at the frozen soil, trying desperately to chip away a hole. Her shovel broke. She tried not to weep, but the tears came hot and thick, and despite her best efforts, uncontrollable sobs followed. Now there would be no garden. Not without a shovel. One more reason to hate her father. It was his fault.
She was no idiot. She knew better than to try digging in the courtyard in the middle of winter. She knew the frozen soil was as hard as rock. But what choice did she have? She couldn’t just wait until summer. Her father’s body lay beside her, already frozen stiff, his face calm, his eyes open, serene in death. She glared at the broken shovel on the icy soil. And she gave up. She just covered her father’s body with snow.
Karen dragged herself back to the apartment. She smashed her father’s piano to pieces. She smashed her cello next. Then she fed both to the fire, using photographs of her boyfriend, Bobby, as kindling. In her fit of rage, she almost threw her father’s compositional notes into the fire as well, but she stopped herself. She folded the papers inside her coat. She cried, then, and she didn’t stop crying until she fell asleep.
Meanwhile that fire blazed. And for the first night in weeks, she felt truly warm.
The next morning, Karen went out to the courtyard. The snow mound had been dug up. Her father’s body was gone. She knew she couldn’t wait any longer. Even if she could find another shovel to start a garden, it would be pointless, because she wouldn’t survive until summer.
She no longer needed a shovel. She needed information. She needed to know where the Germans were, the location of the nearest unoccupied town, and how to reach it. She needed food so that she could travel. She needed identification papers that would allow her to pass Red Army checkpoints. And most of all, she needed a weapon and the courage to use it.
Karen didn’t know how she would get any of those things. Even finding a simple shovel had been difficult. But she promised herself to find a way, because without them she would never escape Leningrad.
CHAPTER 5
THE ORGAN-GRINDER
A sort of madness had come over Petr. His heartbeat had slowed. It seemed to him that the woods had grown quieter. They had grown much louder, in fact, as the German panzer tanks neared and their guns fired more often. It only seemed quieter because Petr’s mind was focusing on the stalled truck, on the missile rack in its bed, on the Katyusha launcher, and the hump-backed stone bridge that rose like a steep hill almost directly before the truck. The sound of the guns and the tank treads meant nothing in Petr’s mind, pushed back to his subconscious.
Petr began to manhandle the launch rack, lowering it farther than he’d ever done so that the rocket tips practically rested on the top of the truck’s cab. Then he crawled up underneath the rockets to peer through the cab’s rear window, over the driver’s seat and steering wheel, and through the windshield.
The German tanks were coming into view. These were the twenty-five-ton Panzer IVs, pride of the Wehrmacht—the German Army. Their wide, boxy frames were slung low to the ground, and they squeezed between the bare birch trees, knocking down trunks where the passage was too narrow. A short howitzer protruded from each tank’s turret like the chunky nose of a prizefighter. Their three-inch-wide shells could reduce concrete fortifications to rubble, Petr knew, and the machine guns extending from their lower hulls added deadly firepower. Petr had to admit that a panzer had a terrifying beauty, like a Siberian tiger.
Here he was, finally seeing his first Germans. The infantry ran beside the tanks, keeping pace, and carrying rifles, machine guns, and boxes of ammunition. The German soldiers’ uniforms seemed designed to intimidate. Their steel helmets angled slightly backward, framing each man’s head in a way that suggested the sharp beak of an eagle. Long, gray coats were draped over each soldier’s smart gray-green uniform and knee-high black leather boots. They looked like stern school headmasters, industrial foremen, or even politicians. They gave Petr the uneasy feeling that they were men born to command—to expect and demand obedience from all they faced.
Petr noted with satisfaction, however, that the Russian winter had already begun to degrade the psychological impact of that carefully designed German uniform. The soldiers’ heavy gray coats tangled their legs, slowed their pace, and sopped up the wet snow. Their boots looked soaked through and caked with ice. Their eaglelike faces were pale with cold, and the misty breaths that puffed from their mouths showed their mounting fatigue.
The lead panzer rumbled up to the other side of the bridge, its black exhaust climbing behind it into the still air. Then it paused, Petr heard ice cracking, and a hatch swung open on top of the tank’s turret.
A soldier pulled himself up and half-out of the hatch. He wore a black leather jacket and a peaked cap, and he looked both warm and calm. He lifted a pair of binoculars to his eyes and began to scan the area across the river.