The Undaunted (Book 2 of The Undesirables)

Chapter 38: The Cellist

It had been over a week since the Germans had mounted their last attack. The guns to the west had gone quiet – Operation Uranus was over. The bad weather had brought a blizzard that covered the scars of war with a blanket of virgin white snow. Now the clouds had cleared and silver moonlight glistened off the ice.

It was Thursday. It was November 26.

It was Thanksgiving.

And for the second year in a row, Karen spent Thanksgiving with nothing to eat. Last year she'd been in Leningrad, slowly starving while the government cut her daily supply of bread. This year Pavlov's platoon remained cut off from supplies, the Volga River still impassible.

The soup she had stolen from the Germans had run out days ago, and thanks to the success of Operation Uranus, the Germans were cut off just like she was. She couldn't steal food anymore, because there was no food to steal.

You never got used to hunger. Just because Karen had been through it before didn't mean she could survive it any more easily than her compatriots. In some ways it was worse for her, worse because she knew what would come next. She knew the desperation that would grip them, the desire to try anything, find anything that they could put in their mouths. She knew they'd boil their boots and suck on the leather, she knew they'd mix plaster dust in water and try to eat the paste. She knew some people would find dead bodies, cadavers bloated from the sun and then flash frozen in the recent blizzard. She knew they'd carve those cadavers up and roast human meat. And she knew the rotting flesh would make them sick.

Thousands would succumb to disease. And she knew those who didn't would get too weak to fight, too weak to even move. She knew eventually they would all just lie down and die.

She also knew there were ways to cope, though, ways to forget about the pain in her stomach and spending another Thanksgiving hungry. She had a violin. So she played.

She was on duty: sentry duty. But that didn't matter. She could play while she kept her look out. It wasn't like she was giving anything away; the Germans knew she was here.

Karen played Shostakovich's 9th Symphony – the so-called Leningrad Symphony – which he had composed for the men and women starving in that northern city, trapped by a German siege, even now.

Karen had been trapped there once not too long ago, and it seemed like a miracle that she had managed to escape. Her father had helped with the 9th Symphony, he'd died for it, and Karen hadn't played it in months. But now it seemed appropriate, a way to reach out and connect with other people in another city, people who were suffering and starving just like she was.

Karen wasn't a violinist. She was a cellist. But she was also a natural musician. And she'd had enough practice now that while she didn't consider herself good, she wasn't bad, either. And the night had that unique quality that snow and frost often bring – a silence against which her singing violin carried loud and clear.

Petr, who wasn't on sentry duty, woke up to the sound. He sat up and listened, silent and intent. He loved Karen's music, she knew, so much that he never interrupted when she played. She had grown to love her music more because Petr loved it. She used to resent it, resent all the practice her father forced on her, resented the constant travel and concerts, resented being relocated from New York to the Soviet Union, all in the pursuit of improving her musical talent. But now that she heard that music through Petr's ears, she was proud of it. She was proud that he loved it.

Other Russian soldiers in other locations throughout Pavlov's House were sitting up and listening, too. Were the Germans listening? Karen didn't know; she had no way to be sure. In Leningrad she had sung as loud as she could to make sure the Germans could hear her. In Leningrad that singing had been an act of defiance, an attempt to tell the Germans that their siege was failing, that Leningraders hadn't all starved to death like the Germans had hoped. But on this Thanksgiving her playing wasn't an act of defiance. She didn't feel particularly defiant. In Stalingrad, after all, the Germans were trapped, too.

Then, when Karen paused between movements, she did know. The Germans were listening. She knew because she heard another violin, clear from the other side of the park, from the buildings that marked the German lines. He was good, whoever that German violinist was, he was very good, better than Karen.

Karen wondered if he was a professional musician before the war, and how someone with that much skill and talent could end up in Stalingrad.

The German was copying her, learning the piece from her, learning the Leningrad Symphony. Karen played a few bars and listened to the German repeat them. Then she played a few more and listened again

The German learned quickly. Soon he was no longer echoing her, he was playing with her. They were separated by hundreds of yards, but they were playing together.

Karen loved sharing that experience. It had been months since she'd played with anyone, and far longer than that since she'd played with someone as skilled as this German. The symphony sang from both of their bows and the sound met in the middle of the park, somewhere over the head of Lenin's titanic statue.

It didn't last, it couldn't last, nothing beautiful lasted in war. Their music was interrupted by the sound of airplane engines – large engines, growling and monotonous, not the fine-tuned scream of fighters.

"Bombers!" Karen gasped, dropping her bow. "We have to get to the basement."

But Petr wasn't panicking. He crawled up next to her and peered out the shell hole they used as a lookout. "I don't think so," he said. "They're too high. And it's night, they can't see us well enough to bomb accurately."

Petr had worked in a Katyusha battery early in the war, and he'd been the target of constant German bombing, so he knew what he was talking about.

Petr's confidence calmed Karen down. The airplanes were getting louder, but she couldn't see them. "Where are they?" she asked.

Petr pointed almost straight up and to the west. "You can see moonlight reflected on their wings. But not if you look right at them."

It was an odd trick Petr had taught to Karen. The corners of your eye were the most sensitive parts. You could see things from the edges of your vision that would be completely invisible if you tried to focus on them. She turned her head and tried to trick her brain, scanning the dark sky with a mere glance.

There – she saw it – moonlight flashing where there was no moon. Petr was right, they were high, so high that the Russian anti-aircraft batteries didn't even shoot at them. And then she saw something else. White shapes dropping. She turned her attention and focused. But the shapes disappeared. And then, slowly, they re-appeared as they got closer and her direct vision could finally work them out. They were parachutes, floating over the German lines and descending toward the park.

Panic struck her once more. Was this a new German strategy? Were they sending paratroops to take Pavlov's house? Or to take the katyusha and anti-aircraft batteries across the river?

But as they got closer she realized they weren't paratroops. There weren't men on the ends of the silk balloons; there were boxes.

"What is it?" she asked in a whisper, confused.

"Supplies," Petr responded, awe in his voice. "German food and ammunition." And then he began raising the alarm.