The basement of Pavlov's house had become more than an orphanage and a medical clinic – it had also become a theater.
Anton had cleared a corner of rubble and constructed a little platform stage out of empty ammunition crates and broken boards salvaged from the apartment's multiple ruined floors. Lighting was provided by the same assortment of home-made lanterns that had illuminated Karen's makeshift operating table: wicks sputtering from empty spam cans, vodka bottles, or upside-down Red Army helmets filled with oil or fat.
Anton didn't care that the stage was uneven and that the lamps cast more shadow than light, in fact he proclaimed it to be the "perfect theater", and often referenced Brecht's "alienation effect." "This stage hides nothing!" Anton proclaimed with gleeful self-satisfaction. "It is built from the war and will be performed on during the war for an audience of those affected by the war!"
Anton's audience was the Stalingrad orphans, for whom he constructed puppets out of dead men's socks to represent the various animals in Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.
Karen supplied the music. She had played the piece, popular with children all over the world, enough times during her summer tours through New York and New England, that she mostly remembered the score. Her bow needed rosin so badly that it was practically useless, so she was forced to perform Peter's theme pizzicato, plucking the music out of the violin with her fingers. She whistled the theme of the birds, but the other woodwinds, like the duck's oboe part or the grandfather's bassoon, were too low for Karen, so Anton sang those parts.
The star of the show was Petr. He knew the piece well enough, from his own teenage years, that he volunteered to narrate. During their first performance, much to Karen's surprise, Petr suddenly started pouncing around the stage, acting out the part of the wolf. When he jumped up and swallowed the duck, the children gasped, and the youngest, a boy named Mikhail, about four or five years old, even began to cry. But when Petr pantomimed getting his tail trapped in a noose and began to howl, little Mikhail, along with all the other children, laughed and clapped his hands in joy.
That night, when they lay together after making love, Karen asked Petr how he'd learned to act like a wolf.
"I pretended to be Duck," Petr explained, referring to the mine-dog he'd rescued on the Leningrad front. "It's a fun way to remember him," Petr admitted.
Each time they performed Peter and the Wolf the crowd got a little bit bigger. It wasn't just the children watching, now, but members of Pavlov's combat platoon. Anyone who wasn't on active sentry duty was now watching the show. And Sergeant Pavlov rotated sentry duty so that those forced to miss one performance could be sure to see the next one.
It was a bizarre audience, made up of children and grizzled war veterans pretending, for a few moments, to also be children. This time when Petr pretended to be the wolf, jumped up, and swallowed the duck, little Mikhail didn't cry. Instead, the four year old leaned over to Boris, a rifleman who'd been wounded and was growing out his beard to cover his facial scar, and whispered: "Don't worry, the duck isn't dead, he's still alive in the wolf's tummy."
It was a bizarre audience for a bizarre performance. There was still a part of Karen that was a music snob. She never could have imagined performing an entire piece with nothing but a violin she didn't even really know how to play. But she had to admit Anton was right. What the performance lacked in technical acumen, it more than made up for in audience appreciation and participation. When the music or narration faltered, the audience's imagination took over and mended it. And at the end of every performance Karen, Petr and Anton received a standing ovation.
This night, the night of their fourth performance, Natasha raised her hand when the applause finally died down. Anton, unable to resist his training as a schoolteacher, called on her. "Do you have a question, Natasha?"
"I have a question for Angel," she said, using Karen's nickname.
"Okay," Karen replied, somewhat surprised. "What would you like to know?"
"I was wondering..." Natasha hesitated, embarrassed.
"What were you wondering?" coaxed Karen.
"I was wondering," Natasha continued, "if Peter ever gets married."
"Ooooh!" cried out the other children, almost in unison, giggling.
Karen didn't really understand the question. "I don't think...I mean, he's just a boy..."
"But when he gets older," Natasha persisted. "Does he get married when he gets older?"
Petr cut in, suddenly realizing what Natasha was really asking. "I think if he met a girl that he really loved, and then yes, he would get married."
"But he has met a girl that he really loves," Natasha accused.
Karen's heart suddenly stopped, and her face turned beet red.
But Petr remained cool as a cucumber. "Then, if there was no war, then yes, I'm sure Peter would get married."
"But you can get married whether there's a war or not. That shouldn't stop him," Natasha insisted.
"But there is no priest or public official to preside over the ceremony and make it official," Petr contradicted.
"Sergeant Pavlov can make it official," Natasha proclaimed with confidence.
Sergeant Pavlov suddenly looked up, confused. "Me?" he asked.
"Of course, you," Natasha insisted. "Like a captain on a ship at sea."
Sergeant Pavlov raised the eyebrows of his moon-shaped face and shrugged. "If you say so," he conceded.
"Then I'm sure," Petr conceded, "that whether there was a war or not, Peter would ask that girl to marry him." He looked directly at Karen.
"And I'm sure," Karen replied, her voice weak with fright, "that if Peter really loved that girl, then she would say yes."
"He really loves that girl," Petr assured her.
"Then she says yes."
"And in that case, I declare you man and wife!" shouted Sergeant Pavlov.
Everyone, soldiers, children, everyone, leapt up in a cheer. Anton started dancing and clapping and singing a wedding song. Soon everyone was dancing, and Karen felt people closing in on her and hands pushing her toward Petr. "Kiss the bride! Kiss the bride!" She felt herself pressed up against Petr and then she felt his lips on hers. "Hooray!" came another cheer as they kissed, and then the heard glass smashing.
Karen looked up to see several of the soldiers smashing the empty vodka bottles that had once been lanterns. "It's tradition," Petr told her, still holding Karen in his arms, "the more shards of glass the more years of happiness we will share together." Karen thought that an unlikely superstition – Stalingrad was littered with millions of shards of shattered glass, but it would have to take a miracle for them to survive even a single year in this city. She kept the morbid thought to herself.
Then suddenly the cheering stopped. A sentry had stomped down the stairs and run over to Sergeant Pavlov. Someone was saying "Shh! Shh!" and all eyes turned to Pavlov. Were the Germans mounting another attack?
But when Pavlov looked at the children and his men, his eyes were sparkling and his mouth smiling. "Do you want to see fireworks?" he asked.
"Yes, yes, fireworks!" shouted the children.
"Then come on!" encouraged Pavlov, and he led everyone up the stairs.
* * *
The "fireworks" were a Katyusha rocket battery firing from the opposite side of the Volga River. They had heard of Pavlov's heroic resistance against multiple German attacks and had sent word to his radio-operator that they would support his defense by bombarding the Germans across Lenin Square and warned of the exact time the bombardment would begin.
That gave everyone in Pavlov's house time to lie down on the second and third stories, peering through cracks and broken windows at the German front line. They didn't dare stand on the roof – it was too exposed and dangerous.
The Katyushas began to fire at three a.m. Since everyone in the house was looking toward the west, they couldn't see the rockets launch across the river to their east. But they could hear the odd whistling and moaning of the rockets – the eerie sound that had motivated the Germans to nickname the weapons "Stalin's Organ". And they could see the fiery plumes of the individual rockets as they arced overhead and descended toward the other side of the park.
And they certainly could both see and hear the impact of each rocket's high explosive warhead. There was so many landing at once that they exploded into a blooming curtain of fire. Karen reached out and held Petr's hand.
The bombardment lasted ten minutes, and Karen had to admit the night felt like a real wedding, and not just any wedding, the wedding of a millionaire or princess. Who else could afford to celebrate their marriage with actual fireworks? It was beautiful and glorious...
...so long as Karen avoided thinking about the fact that these fireworks were killing people.