The Undaunted (Book 2 of The Undesirables)

Chapter 27: The Cellist

The basement of Pavlov's house had become more than an orphanage and a medical clinic – it had also become a theater.

Anton had cleared a corner of rubble and constructed a little platform stage out of empty ammunition crates and broken boards salvaged from the apartment's multiple ruined floors. Lighting was provided by the same assortment of home-made lanterns that had illuminated Karen's makeshift operating table: wicks sputtering from empty spam cans, vodka bottles, or upside-down Red Army helmets filled with oil or fat.

Anton didn't care that the stage was uneven and that the lamps cast more shadow than light, in fact he proclaimed it to be the "perfect theater", and often referenced Brecht's "alienation effect." "This stage hides nothing!" Anton proclaimed with gleeful self-satisfaction. "It is built from the war and will be performed on during the war for an audience of those affected by the war!"

Anton's audience was the Stalingrad orphans, for whom he constructed puppets out of dead men's socks to represent the various animals in Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.

Karen supplied the music. She had played the piece, popular with children all over the world, enough times during her summer tours through New York and New England, that she mostly remembered the score. Her bow needed rosin so badly that it was practically useless, so she was forced to perform Peter's theme pizzicato, plucking the music out of the violin with her fingers. She whistled the theme of the birds, but the other woodwinds, like the duck's oboe part or the grandfather's bassoon, were too low for Karen, so Anton sang those parts.

The star of the show was Petr. He knew the piece well enough, from his own teenage years, that he volunteered to narrate. During their first performance, much to Karen's surprise, Petr suddenly started pouncing around the stage, acting out the part of the wolf. When he jumped up and swallowed the duck, the children gasped, and the youngest, a boy named Mikhail, about four or five years old, even began to cry. But when Petr pantomimed getting his tail trapped in a noose and began to howl, little Mikhail, along with all the other children, laughed and clapped his hands in joy.

That night, when they lay together after making love, Karen asked Petr how he'd learned to act like a wolf.

"I pretended to be Duck," Petr explained, referring to the mine-dog he'd rescued on the Leningrad front. "It's a fun way to remember him," Petr admitted.

Each time they performed Peter and the Wolf the crowd got a little bit bigger. It wasn't just the children watching, now, but members of Pavlov's combat platoon. Anyone who wasn't on active sentry duty was now watching the show. And Sergeant Pavlov rotated sentry duty so that those forced to miss one performance could be sure to see the next one.

It was a bizarre audience, made up of children and grizzled war veterans pretending, for a few moments, to also be children. This time when Petr pretended to be the wolf, jumped up, and swallowed the duck, little Mikhail didn't cry. Instead, the four year old leaned over to Boris, a rifleman who'd been wounded and was growing out his beard to cover his facial scar, and whispered: "Don't worry, the duck isn't dead, he's still alive in the wolf's tummy."

It was a bizarre audience for a bizarre performance. There was still a part of Karen that was a music snob. She never could have imagined performing an entire piece with nothing but a violin she didn't even really know how to play. But she had to admit Anton was right. What the performance lacked in technical acumen, it more than made up for in audience appreciation and participation. When the music or narration faltered, the audience's imagination took over and mended it. And at the end of every performance Karen, Petr and Anton received a standing ovation.

This night, the night of their fourth performance, Natasha raised her hand when the applause finally died down. Anton, unable to resist his training as a schoolteacher, called on her. "Do you have a question, Natasha?"