And then it was Bobby’s turn to be surprised. Lenka wasn’t letting go. And a part of him didn’t want her to let go. He’d never been kissed like this before. Lenka wasn’t just older, it turned out; she was far more experienced. She used her lips and tongue in inventive ways that Bobby would never have imagined.
Lenka would have made out with Bobby for hours. That was the Russian style, kissing in full public display. When Bobby had first seen a couple making out like that right in the middle of a speakeasy, he’d been shocked. But Lenka made fun of his prudish ways, and eventually Bobby got used to it, though he never thought he’d ever engage in such public displays of affection.
And yet here he was, kissing this girl at a packed party, with no regard for the spectacle he was causing. She didn’t even notice the spectators around him. But he did. They made him uncomfortable, and he immediately regretted the kiss. Before things could get out of hand, he peeled the giggling Lenka off his lips, and he said good-bye.
He headed to the airfield.
Karen had to spend one more night alone with the youth orchestra. After their arrival in Chelyabinsk, she and Petr had been separated. The male and female musicians bunked in different dormitories, separated from one another by a thin wall.
Petr had been allowed to stay with the male musicians until he could find the apartment of his fictional father. In the chaos created by Chelyabinsk’s rapid expansion, finding anyone was difficult. So, while Karen rehearsed in the days before the summit, Petr did his best to find Inna’s father. The perfect cover, he’d decided, was actually to perform the task he was pretending to do. Fortunately for him, he failed at that task.
It meant he could continue to spend his nights close to Karen. They’d both chosen bunks pushed against the wall that divided their rooms. They couldn’t kiss anymore, let alone talk, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t communicate. Late at night, until this one, when Karen could tell that everyone else was asleep by their breathing, she would tap three times on the wall to represent three words: “I love you.” A moment later she would hear a response from Petr: four taps.
After the first time this happened, when they found a moment alone together, Karen asked Petr what his four taps had meant. “I love you more,” he answered.
Karen was astonished. She had never told him what her three taps had meant, but Petr had instinctively known and responded with the same code. They used that code every night thereafter, whenever they felt lonely, whenever they couldn’t bear to be so close to each other, yet separated by that thin wall. Karen would tap “I love you,” and Petr would respond, “I love you more,” and it gave them both the comfort to sleep.
But on the night after the concert, after their chance encounter with Bobby, Karen tapped “I love you,” like she always had. Petr never tapped back.
Karen had never felt so alone in her entire life.
She’d arranged to meet Petr early the next morning when it was still dark. They were to sneak out of their respective dorms separately and meet on a street corner three blocks away.
Despite the early hour, the city wasn’t dark.
Here in Siberia the July summer sun hadn’t let the city slumber in full darkness for long. In the early light, the street lamps still blazed, and electric light spilled from factory and apartment windows as if dawn had not yet come. After Karen’s long months without power, in the deepest darkness of Leningrad nights, the streets of Chelyabinsk seemed brighter to her now than anything she’d ever experienced.
It didn’t brighten her dark mood. Petr was late, and she was worried. Had he changed his mind? Is that why he hadn’t tapped his usual response back to her? Had he stopped loving her? Had he decided not to come with her to America, after all?
She had once felt so confident. She had always trusted herself. It was other people, like her father and Sasha and even Inna, whom she didn’t trust.
Leningrad had done terrible things to her, but it had never broken her confidence. Even in her most trying moments, when she was burying her father, when she was being led back to NKVD headquarters at the Smolny, when she was watching her friends die—she’d felt let down by others, never by herself.
Now, for the first time, that confidence was gone. If Petr had changed his mind, only one person was responsible: Karen. She hated herself. She had somehow won the love of two remarkable men. But she had squandered that love. She couldn’t help but fall in love with Petr. Like Bobby, he was one of the few people she knew she could count on. She trusted him as she used to trust herself. But she should have been satisfied to keep that love unrequited. She should never have allowed Petr to fall in love with her; she should never have led him on.
It had been a betrayal of Bobby, and now it was a betrayal of Petr. It served her right that Petr had stopped loving her. She didn’t deserve to be loved by anyone. He probably even hated her now, with good reason. He hated her and couldn’t bear to be near her. So he’d miss this one opportunity to escape. He’d be forced back into the Red Army, and he’d be killed. This was the truest source of her anxious worry. She worried now that her own failures would lead to Petr’s death. Karen had made him hate her, and that hatred would cost Petr his life.
Then she saw movement in the distance. A man was walking toward her. He was too far away for her to see his face. But she recognized Petr instantly from the way he moved, the way he walked. There was no doubt in her mind. So she ran to him. And she didn’t stop running until she’d wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in his chest.
“Thank God,” she said. “Thank God.”
Petr held her stiffly, as if being forced by etiquette to hug a stranger. Then he unwrapped his arms and stepped back.
“We’re going to miss our flight,” he warned, his voice icy.
Karen nodded and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. She’d been right all along. He’d stopped loving her. That was proper; that was what she deserved. But was he such a good man that maybe he didn’t hate her? Even if he did, by coming with her now, he wasn’t letting that hatred destroy his life. He was still the Petr she’d fallen in love with, the Petr she could rely on. He was still a survivor.
They turned and walked together in silence. It was a long walk, all the way past vast blocks of apartment buildings and huge factories and endless motor pools of lifeless tanks. The city was still asleep, its factory-worker residents catching the last few hours of slumber before their shifts began.
It was a sorrowful walk. Karen desperately wanted to take Petr’s hand, as they’d done so many times before. It seemed they’d marched across half of Russia holding hands. But she knew that this time she couldn’t. She kept stealing glances at his hands, lamenting inside that she’d never hold them again.
CHAPTER 42
THE CELLIST AND THE ORGAN-GRINDER
Twenty years before, Shagol Airport had been rolling pasture for heavy oxen and shaggy steppe ponies. Then, with the construction of Chelyabinsk, those rolling pastures were bulldozed into runways to service the new industrial center of Siberia. Still, air transport was expensive and rare, so the new airport sat mostly idle.
Then the Germans invaded. Once the industrial cities like Leningrad with munitions factories vital for the war effort were threatened, Stalin made the decision to evacuate Russia’s industrial might east.
But the trains were too slow, the advancing Wehrmacht too fast. The evacuation had to be by air. So, in the summer of 1941, sleepy Shagol became the busiest airport in Russia.