The Undaunted (Book 2 of The Undesirables)

Chapter 44: The Cellist

Karen pressed her cheek against Bobby's chest and inhaled. The smell of his perspiration mingled with that of his leather flight jacket created an unfamiliar musk. But beneath it all Karen's senses could detect another, deeper scent, a scent that brought her back three years and thousands of miles to New York.

She'd grown up there; she had spent her entire life there, mastering the cello under her father's tutelage and showing off her talent all across the eastern seaboard. She had thought she knew everything New York had to offer; she had become jaded by familiarity.

But when she'd met Bobby and fell in love, she began to see the city through new eyes. Their dates were explorations of both each other and the city in which they lived. No longer was it the familiar and boring place in which she had grown up, now it was the city that never slept, a magical place that offered both exotic and subtle pleasures to those with the desire to seek them out and appreciate them.

And now, as Bobby's scent brought all those memories flooding back to her, she saw New York with a new mind's eye, too. It wasn't just her place of birth, it wasn't just the exotic and exciting city that never sleeps, it was also a city of peace.

Karen had spent a little over a year in cities of war: first Leningrad and now Stalingrad. She'd spent over fifteen years in New York, the city of peace. And yet war felt more real and familiar and permanent to her than peace. In war, every moment was a struggle for survival. Seconds felt like minutes, minutes like hours, hours like years.

Her time in New York felt surreal by comparison. The people she had known there haunted her memory like ghosts, no more real than spirits. And yet here was Bobby, solid and real. Her eyes told her so, her arms, her cheek, her nose.

He was a physical and emotional reminder that her sense of reality had been warped by violence. She felt as if that person she had once been, that person who didn't worry about daily survival, who didn't murder her best friends to spare them from pain, was someone entirely different, not herself, but some sort of character she had once portrayed in a school play. And now, as she held onto Bobby, as she inhaled his scent, she realized how desperately she wanted to play that role again. It wasn't her true self, her true self was shameful and a murderer. But it was a mask she felt she could happily wear forever.

"How did you get here?" Karen asked.

"That," sighed Bobby, "is a long story."

It was, however, a story that Bobby preferred to tell in private. For the moment, he lied. Or perhaps he wasn't lying, but Karen could sense he wasn't telling the full truth.

Bobby described how he and Jack had grown bored with their role in Alaska and so had defected. They wanted to fight Germans, Bobby claimed, not guard supply lines, and so they had flown across the Bering Strait to Russia.

He admitted that Jack had ulterior motives, that he'd fallen in love with a Russian woman – the same woman they'd all come to know as the Bell Over Stalingrad – and that he'd wanted to fight beside her.

That was certainly something Karen could relate to, but that wasn't a fact she gave voice to. She knew her own decision to stay with Petr in Russia had hurt Bobby and she didn't want to re-open old wounds. "How is he now?" she asked, instead, stealing a glance at Petr and dreading the moment she would have to mourn his death, too.

"Not good," Bobby admitted. He didn't elaborate. He didn't have to, because there was nothing more that needed to be said.

But there was a great deal more that needed to be said about what really brought Bobby to Stalingrad. Karen could feel it. Curiosity grew inside her, and that curiosity helped banish the dark thoughts that had been paralyzing her. Instead of dwelling on the lives she had taken, and in particular the life of an artist who, at the time, had offered no threat to her, she concentrated on what might really have brought Bobby across the ocean.