Chad Thumann - The Undesirables

Petr wished he still had his PTRD rifle. It was too big a gun for deer hunting, but the little Tokarev pistol was too small.

He and Duck had been stalking a deer for hours. The young buck was running them in circles. Before they could get close enough for a pistol shot, the deer would hear them and bound off into the forest, well out of sight. They’d caught back up with it twice, largely thanks to Duck’s keen sense of smell, but once again they’d spooked it before they got close. If he’d had the big PTRD, or better still, a simple Mosin-Nagant bolt-action rifle, Petr was sure he’d have bagged the buck an hour ago. Instead, he was considering giving up.

Normally, Petr would have thrown in the towel. He’d never been particularly resolute. When something proved too difficult, he would move on to some new, less onerous, task. But for some reason he dreaded returning to the hunting cabin empty-handed. Why? It wasn’t as if he needed the food. They had plenty of macaroni; they wouldn’t starve, not anymore. Meat was purely a luxury. Most of it would go bad, anyway, before he, Karen, and Duck ate it. So why did it matter so much to kill this deer? He wasn’t doing it for the food, he realized. He was doing it to show off.

When Petr realized this, he gave up the hunt immediately. Why should he care about impressing some strange American girl? She wasn’t even particularly pretty. No, that was a lie. She was skinny and filthy, and you couldn’t even see much of her under her thick sweaters and fraying coat. But her eyes were beautiful. He’d never seen such intense eyes. To look into them was to be captivated by them. He couldn’t look away. The dark-brown irises and deep-black pupils were mesmerizing. There was a saying that eyes were the window to the soul. If that were the case, Karen’s had to be the purist soul in existence.

But the saying was a lie, too, because Karen’s soul was dark. Petr had seen what she’d done to the NKVD man. Not that Petr had much love for NKVD men. They were the ones who’d taken away his father, and Petr knew his father had been extraordinarily lucky to escape that arrest with his life. Very few people returned from an NKVD interrogation alive.

Petr’s father had never talked about what he’d been forced to endure during that interrogation. Petr had been afraid to ask. But he could imagine that, if given a chance, his own father, a normally peaceful mathematics professor, would have smashed in the brains of an NKVD man with just as much ferocity as Karen.

Maybe she didn’t have that dark a soul, but neither was she pure. She was certainly no angel. That was part of what he liked about her, Petr had to admit. He couldn’t trust her, not completely, and yet he felt some overwhelming desire to make her trust him. Hunting the deer was more than just showing off to a pretty girl. He wanted to demonstrate to her that he could find food. He wanted to prove to this girl, who he knew had almost starved to death, that he could provide for her, that she could trust him.

Well, he thought to himself, he would just have to find some other way, because the hunt had been a failure.

Petr marched through the snow, too lost in his thoughts to pay much attention to Duck. But when they neared the hunting shack, Duck suddenly halted and dropped to his stomach. Petr instinctively did the same, falling prone beside the big dog and drawing the pistol from his coat pocket.

They both lay there a moment, trying to control their breathing, Petr grasping the pistol with two hands and aiming it in front of him. He tried to ignore the discomfort of the cold seeping from the snow through the front of his uniform. He peered past the pistol’s steel gun sight and focused on the shack. The front door was open.

The front of Petr’s uniform was getting wet, his body heat melting the snow beneath him, but he resisted the urge to climb into a crouch and instead wormed his way forward—an awkward, uncomfortable, and excruciatingly slow way to maneuver. But it made him a small and very difficult target. The ground is the infantryman’s best friend, Petr’s drill instructor had often insisted, and Petr had learned that lesson well.

Eventually, now shivering with snow down his pants, Petr reached the shack. He had angled his approach to veer right of the doorway. Anyone inside peering out wouldn’t have a direct line of sight to him. But neither could Petr see inside. So he wrapped his fingers around the bottom of the doorjamb, tightened his knuckles, and pulled himself forward silently until he could peer inside.

The shack was empty.

Petr immediately saw that he’d been the victim of one clever girl, and he felt the hot shame of gullibility. Karen hadn’t cared about the venison. She’d just acted impressed as a way to encourage him and Duck to leave. She’d wanted to be rid of them so she could steal all the macaroni for herself. Maybe he shouldn’t have given up on that hunt, after all, because Karen had just stolen his food and left him to die.

Despondent, he climbed to his feet and tromped into the shack. Snow fell from his clothes onto the wood-plank floor. He began to disrobe, throwing his uniform in a heap in the corner. Duck trotted into the shack behind him. Petr was down to his underwear when Duck decided to shake, spraying Petr with wet snow. Petr yelled and leaped away in shock. Duck pulled his ears back in apology and nuzzled his snout up to Petr’s hand. Petr scratched the big dog behind his ears. He was cold, but not angry—at least not angry at Duck. It wasn’t Duck’s fault the girl had left them. Petr remembered how Duck had rolled over this morning, letting Karen scratch his belly. “She tricked you, too, didn’t she?” he muttered to the dog.

Then, almost absentmindedly, Petr walked over to the cabinets and pulled them open, hoping Karen had missed some morsel of food. What he saw shocked him: two bags of macaroni, neatly stacked for him, maybe enough to survive the journey to Tikhvin. But that wasn’t all. Slid between the bags was a train ticket. Karen had left him her most valuable possession. She hadn’t left him to die, after all.

Petr wanted to go after Karen immediately. He felt irrationally compelled to get dressed, pocket his gun, and head back out into the woods. They were behind enemy lines, at the mercy of German patrols, and Karen was unarmed. He felt an overwhelming desire to protect her. But his clothes were still wet, and he couldn’t risk building a fire, not until after dark, or the Germans would see the smoke and send a patrol.

Petr decided he would have to wait until morning. He tried to reassure himself that this was not unreasonable. Karen was far from helpless. She could take care of herself. She’d proven that again and again. She’d survived starvation, she’d escaped Leningrad, and she’d even escaped from him. But when night finally came and he lay down beside the warm stove, he couldn’t sleep. All he could think about was that moment he’d first met Karen. He remembered the NKVD man and his Tokarev pistol. He’d had it pointed at Karen. If Petr hadn’t arrived, and Duck hadn’t attacked, Karen would be dead. She’d needed him then and, he worried, she might need him now.

Almost a week later, Karen didn’t sleep, either. She didn’t want to. If this was going to be her last night alive, she wanted to experience it. She was locked in a storage closet, in the dark, so there wasn’t much around her to experience. She was cramped and uncomfortable.

But so long as she lived, she still had her memories. Memories of her father, of New York, of Leningrad during the previous summer, of Inna, and, most of all, of Bobby. Those were the memories she wanted to cherish above all. But something strange kept happening. Whenever she tried to envision Bobby, she saw the face of the boy soldier instead. Her mind kept drifting to him, and even to his dog. She wondered if he hated her. She’d have hated her if she were him. She’d betrayed him. And she wondered if he really had managed to kill a deer.

The storage closet had no windows. But it was getting brighter. The shapes of the empty shelves were turning gray. She wondered what time it was. It must be well after dawn; the sun would have to be high and bright if its light was managing to penetrate this dark place. Karen wondered how much longer she had left alive. She’d been told she would be executed at noon. That couldn’t be very far off.

Karen knew there was no point in resisting. These men weren’t with the NKVD. They were Germans. They were the enemy. If she told the truth, they would execute her. If she lied, they would execute her. There was no story, no matter how preposterous, imaginative, or believable, that could save her life. All she could hope for was to minimize the torture and die with her dignity intact. That, at least, she had achieved.

They had beaten her, of course. That went without saying. The Germans never would have believed her story if she hadn’t made them beat her. As a result, her fat lip and black eye throbbed, and her ribs ached. But there was a big difference between being beaten and being tortured. She’d discovered that difference in the company of the NKVD man. He hadn’t beaten her; he hadn’t even left scratches or bruises on her body. But what he had done to her, even just for a moment, was ten times worse than what the Germans had done.

Karen had denied being a Russian partisan. So the Germans started beating her. After receiving a few licks, Karen let her Russian falter, revealing a foreign accent. This aroused their interest. They started paying attention to what she had to say. Karen had confessed that she was American and asked to be taken to the embassy. That was a ridiculous request, of course, because America had declared war on Germany. So, after a few more punches in the stomach, she asked to be taken to a prisoner-of-war camp and held until the end of hostilities. The Germans didn’t take that demand seriously, either. Only soldiers were granted the right to be captured as prisoners of war, and Karen wasn’t a soldier. If she was, she’d be wearing a uniform. So, when they started punching her in the face, Karen “confessed” that she was a spy.