Chad Thumann - The Undesirables

This left Karen with only one conclusion: the old woman had chosen the fountain for the very reason that it was grand. She knew people looked at the fountain, and she knew people would be forced to see her dead body. She wanted people to see.

But why did she want them to see her body? Karen couldn’t figure it out. The woman had died to make a statement. Karen felt stupid that she couldn’t understand what that statement was. Every time she looked at the corpse and failed to understand, she felt like she was letting the old woman down.

So for the tenth day in a row, Karen turned and walked on, all the more frustrated. After two more blocks, Karen should have reached her third landmark. This, too, was a dead body: an old man who must have stumbled and never gotten up. But today she saw no sign of him.

Panic crept into her mind. Had she taken a wrong turn? Should she have turned right instead of left at the fountain?

No, this was the correct corner. She was able to pick out other details that confirmed it: the metal pole for the missing street sign—stolen for firewood—was bent at nearly a forty-five-degree angle, just as Karen remembered. The storefront beyond it, once boarded up, now had broken windows bare to the elements. The glass shards still sprinkled the sidewalk in exactly the pattern she recalled. This was definitely the right place. Someone had finally cleared the old man away, that was all.

As Karen continued her journey back home, she discovered that other bodies had disappeared, too: the fat wine seller crushed under his storefront, the woman hit by a tram and left in the street, the child fallen from a rooftop while watching the sky for German bombers. Each of these dead bodies had served as a gruesome signpost for her, points on a map telling her how much farther she had to walk to get home.

And now they were gone.

Karen was so happy not to have to see them anymore that she turned around and walked back to the State bakery. Soldiers were there, standing uncomfortably on their skis, banging their forearms against their chests to keep warm. They weren’t just male soldiers. In Stalin’s Russia, women could fight, too. Inna’s older sister was there, her machine gun slung over her shoulder. Karen smiled and waved as she approached.

“Thank you, comrades, for finally clearing the streets!”

Even though Karen had grown up in New York, her Russian was so good she could often pass for a native, especially since plenty of citizens didn’t speak perfect Russian. Although she couldn’t quite pass as a full-blooded Russian, her exotic accent, dark hair, pale skin, and haunting eyes left many Leningraders thinking when they first met her that she came from one of the Soviet Union’s far-flung republics—from Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan or Turkmenistan. Karen had gotten her dark features from her father, but she’d learned Russian from her mother, who’d been a Russian ballerina. They’d spoken to each other exclusively in her mother’s native tongue until Karen was ten. Then her mother had abandoned her. But Karen’s knowledge of the language had not.

The soldiers stopped flapping their arms and eyed Karen. “What are you talking about?” asked Inna’s sister.

“The bodies,” Karen explained, still smiling. “You removed all the dead bodies.”

Inna’s sister shook her head. “Why would we do that? We’re too busy guarding the food and the trenches to bother cleaning up bodies that stay frozen until spring anyway.”

Karen’s smile fell. “So you didn’t remove them?”

Inna’s sister shook her head. “It wasn’t us, Comrade.”

Karen nodded and turned to leave. She hurried back to her apartment, carefully counting the city blocks until she reached the fountain where the old woman’s body had been. She jerked to a stop. The old woman was gone, too.

Now Karen felt even more confused. The corpse had been there only ten minutes ago. But if the soldiers hadn’t moved her, who had?

Then she smelled something delicious. It was like a smell she remembered from New York, an aroma she associated with Thanksgiving or Christmas. Not quite the same—not roasted chestnuts—but similar. It made her mouth water.

Someone, somewhere, was cooking, and not just one person, lots of people. Karen desperately wanted to find out where, find out who. She followed the aroma through the snow. She was no longer careful to follow the route she knew. The scent of cooking proved too strong a lure to resist. She wasn’t just hungry; she was starving. Her bread rations should have provided enough calories for her to survive, but the government had been replacing some of the flour with sawdust. As a result, the population was slowly dying.

Karen followed her nose through bombed-out buildings, across streets pitted with shell holes into frozen courtyards and through snowy alleyways. In one of those alleys she finally found what she was looking for. Men and women were crowded around a trash can. A fire burned inside it, and over the fire was meat.

But it didn’t look like Christmas. The men and women didn’t look like Santa Claus. Their cheeks were drawn, their eyes sunken, their teeth gapped and sharp. They carried pieces of metal pried from concrete rubble or busted street signs. And when they saw Karen, when they turned toward her, they gripped those clubs in both hands as if threatening to use them.

Karen ran. She shouldn’t have had the energy to run, but somehow she found it. She was younger than they were, and they couldn’t catch up, at least not at first.

She bounded across a street and rounded a corner, her breath puffing steam. She glanced over her shoulder and saw two men still chasing her. She reached the bank of the Neva River, and still the men chased her. She was losing energy fast. Even if she kept running, they would catch her. And no one else was out in the freezing cold, just her and her two pursuers. So she swallowed her fear and raced straight out onto the river’s ice.

The Neva was spotted with dark holes where people had broken the ice to draw water. As a result, the river’s surface was precarious despite the cold. Every time Karen stepped near one of the holes, the ice began to splinter.

But, as it turned out, starving had one advantage. Karen was seventeen but weighed only as much as she had when she was twelve. The ice didn’t break under her. The men pursuing her weren’t so lucky. Barely had Karen reached the far shore when she heard a loud crack. She glanced over her shoulder to see the two swallowed by the icy current.

Karen closed her eyes in relief. She knew what would have happened if they’d caught her. They would have eaten her. Where else could they have gotten the meat? Anyone who had meat would’ve eaten it months ago. And no fresh meat was coming into the besieged city, only sawdust-filled bread. There was a reason the bodies had disappeared from the street. And Karen was no longer happy they were gone.

She wished she had a gun. But at least now she had a shovel. Now she could start a summer garden. Now she wouldn’t starve to death.

That same day, December 9, 150 miles away, the Red Army was preparing for battle.

“Ready to fire!” yelled Petr. He was nineteen years old and tall for his age, with a boyish face and a military haircut that made him look even younger. Petr had been thin before he was drafted, but constant marching and digging had filled out his muscles, so he had a boy’s face on a man’s body.

Petr had been drafted from a little village east of Moscow. Now he was in the woods, outside the industrial town of Tikhvin, an important railroad hub for the historic city of Leningrad. The Germans had captured Tikhvin a month ago. Petr’s unit had been sent to take it back.