Chad Thumann - The Undesirables

This was a quality common among socialists, Bobby would learn later. They preferred to share credit, so it was a perverse act of love when the conductor interjected to correct Bobby that Karen was no prodigy—talented, yes, but she still had a lot to learn—and in any case, she was fifteen, and in the world of music one could hardly call a fifteen-year-old a prodigy.

Karen ignored her father. She looked up at Bobby with those deep, black eyes and allowed a smile to cross her red lips. “I’m Karen Hamilton. So what sort of prodigy are you?”

Bobby explained that he was only seventeen but already a sophomore at Columbia. That led to a longer discussion about New York and how it compared to Minneapolis, which led to a lengthy report on his family and its history. How his grandfather had emigrated from Ireland, developed a hardy strain of strawberry resistant to frost, and made a fortune in manufacturing jam.

Bobby had always been an easy conversationalist, but he wasn’t generally a braggart. Pride was the deadliest of the seven sins, and he’d studied enough history to know that even the pagan Greeks counted hubris as dangerous. But he also had an overwhelming feeling that this might be his only chance to impress this girl and that he needed to impress her. She stirred something in him that made him want to be his best.

He found himself walking beside Karen and her father, still talking, describing how proud he’d made his parents and teachers, when Karen interrupted.

“Do you think your grandfather made his own parents proud?” she asked him.

Bobby hesitated, confused. “My grandfather?”

Karen nodded. “Wasn’t he the one who made your family’s fortune? Wasn’t he the one who emigrated from Ireland? What must his parents have thought when he abandoned them?”

Bobby was befuddled. He admitted that he had never considered this, but Karen didn’t let it go. “So now that you are considering it, what do you think about it?”

Bobby didn’t even understand the question. All he could do was stare. They’d arrived at the conductor’s apartment, a modest building on the Lower East Side. Bobby looked up at the building’s dirty facade, hoping to find some direction, some answer, in the lines of its brickwork.

The conductor came to his rescue. “What I think my daughter is saying,” he suggested, “is that sometimes it is more important to follow your heart than to do what others expect of you.”

Karen nodded. “What is it you want to do? What is it that your heart desires?”

Bobby stared at her a moment longer. Then he told her the truth. “I don’t know.”

Karen smiled again. It wasn’t a joyous smile, and it wasn’t mirthful or even polite. It was the worst kind of smile—a pitying one. “When you do find out,” she said, “you tell me.”

Bobby’s heart was sinking fast. He had failed to impress this girl. His bragging hadn’t elicited interest; it had brought out only charity. He’d been given his one chance, and he’d fallen flat on his face.

But then Karen did something unexpected. She stepped forward, took his hand in both of hers, stood on tiptoe, and brushed his cheek with her lips. “Good night,” she said before ascending the steps to her building with her father.

“Good night,” Bobby responded, in a daze. And as he watched her disappear into the dark foyer and watched the door shut behind her, he suddenly knew the answer to her question. He knew what his heart desired.

It desired her.

While Karen bartered for a shovel, while she trudged back and forth to the bakery, her father stayed home at his piano, gnawing down the point of his last pencil and continuing to compose music.

Karen hated her father. He was the reason they’d left New York in the first place. He was the reason they’d traveled across the Atlantic and then up through the Baltic Sea to this beautiful but isolated port city of ice towers and blue skies. Leningrad was where Dmitri Shostakovich lived and worked, and Karen’s father lionized the Russian composer, who was perhaps the most famous composer of the twentieth century. Shostakovich was only thirty-one years old when his Fifth Symphony had become a worldwide success.

Karen’s father had conducted that symphony in America, and Shostakovich was so impressed by the performance that he invited him to join the orchestra in Leningrad. He even offered Karen, a budding cellist, the opportunity to study with him at the Leningrad Conservatory.

Karen’s father jumped at the chance. Despite Karen’s wishes, he dragged her with him across two oceans and an entire continent, leaving her boyfriend, Bobby, behind. When she left New York in 1939, Karen was fifteen. She’d been gone for only a year and a half, but it seemed like a lifetime now.

Mr. Shostakovich wasn’t only the reason they came to Leningrad. He was also the reason they didn’t flee in June when the Germans invaded. Their work here was too important, Mr. Shostakovich claimed. The defenders needed music, and the world needed music, because Shostakovich was working on a new composition, a Seventh Symphony written in Leningrad, for Leningrad. He told Karen’s father that the symphony would be performed all over the world, a firm declaration that Leningrad was besieged but not broken, that one European nation at least was able to stand up to the German war machine, take the worst that it could offer, and remain unconquered.

It was a beautiful sentiment, one that Karen’s father, with all his impractical romanticism, fully believed in. He joined the civilian corps that helped build the trenches and antiaircraft pits surrounding the city. He volunteered for the conservatory’s fire brigade so that he could stand and serve beside his hero, Dmitri Shostakovich.

Every single day, as the ground froze and food grew scarcer, Karen’s father walked to the conservatory and helped Mr. Shostakovich work on his new masterpiece. And every single night, after returning to the apartment, Karen’s father transcribed the day’s progress, tried out experimental elements on his piano, and wrote down the ones he liked.

Shostakovich had abandoned them in September of 1941, hypocritically escaping Leningrad on a plane to Moscow. Even after that, Karen’s father still worked on the symphony. He never stood in the ration lines with Karen. He never helped her scrounge for wood or food. He just worked all day and all night on the symphony and criticized her for not practicing the cello.

Karen hated Mr. Shostakovich. She hated him almost as much as she hated her father.

Her father even refused to wear gloves because he could not play the piano with gloves on. Karen begged him to give it up. Nobody cared about the stupid symphony. Her father wasn’t even Russian. But he didn’t give up. He just kept on working, finally having agreed to wear gloves a few days earlier. But they were thin women’s gloves, not warm at all. Yet he had absolutely refused to wear anything thicker—until today.

When Karen arrived home with her shovel, she was overjoyed to see her father wearing his mittens. He had finally taken her advice. She was so happy that she didn’t even mind picking up the paper and pencil and writing down the last few notes as he dictated them to her. She didn’t question why he didn’t write them himself. Together they ate the last of their bread ration and went to sleep, huddling together for warmth.

Karen woke up cold. She was confused. She expected to feel cold, of course, but not so frigid. Why was there no warmth under the blanket? And then, with horror, she realized why. Her father’s body was not producing any heat. She shook him. He wasn’t asleep. He was dead.

And Karen feared that she suddenly knew why. Filled with dread but needing to know the truth, Karen pulled off her father’s mittens. His fingers were black and rotting from the inside out. One after the other they came off in her hand, rotten from frostbite. That’s why he’d worn his mittens—not to keep warm, but so that Karen wouldn’t see his fingers.

In that moment, Karen hated her father more than she ever had before. He had nothing to worry about anymore, nothing to accomplish, no responsibilities. He’d abdicated it all, leaving all those burdens to Karen. He’d gotten her into this mess, and now she was the only one left who could get herself out.

She dragged her father’s body into the courtyard, where Mrs. Kudaschova used to tend her summer flowers. The flowers were long dead, and, as Karen expected, the soil was frozen solid. She knew she couldn’t break that soil, but she had to try. She knew what would happen to her father’s body if she didn’t bury it—it would meet the same fate that had befallen the old woman at the fountain and the dead child and the wine seller. She smashed at the frozen soil, trying desperately to chip away a hole. Her shovel broke. She tried not to weep, but the tears came hot and thick, and despite her best efforts, uncontrollable sobs followed. Now there would be no garden. Not without a shovel. One more reason to hate her father. It was his fault.

She was no idiot. She knew better than to try digging in the courtyard in the middle of winter. She knew the frozen soil was as hard as rock. But what choice did she have? She couldn’t just wait until summer. Her father’s body lay beside her, already frozen stiff, his face calm, his eyes open, serene in death. She glared at the broken shovel on the icy soil. And she gave up. She just covered her father’s body with snow.

Karen dragged herself back to the apartment. She smashed her father’s piano to pieces. She smashed her cello next. Then she fed both to the fire, using photographs of her boyfriend, Bobby, as kindling. In her fit of rage, she almost threw her father’s compositional notes into the fire as well, but she stopped herself. She folded the papers inside her coat. She cried, then, and she didn’t stop crying until she fell asleep.