The Madonnas of Leningrad

by Debra Dean

  One of the leaflets seesaws through the air and lands at their feet, and Tatiana snatches it up like a prize. Marina reads over her shoulder. Printed in bold typeset, it says, “Wait for the full moon!” In smaller type, the message warns the reader that Leningrad cannot be defended, that German troops will destroy the city “in a hurricane of bombs and shells.”

  “What does it mean about the full moon?” Tatiana asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Papa, what does it mean about the full moon?” Tatiana holds up her souvenir to her father, who has appeared through the crowd. Aunt Nadezhda lags a few steps behind, with the boy, Mikhail, in hand.

  Uncle Viktor’s face turns angry as he reads. “They think we are backwards, that we’ll be frightened by superstitious garbage.” He crumples it and throws it to the sidewalk, grinding it under his boot.

  Marina is surprised by the gesture. She has never heard her uncle so much as raise his voice with his children. But everyone is on edge these days, and unsuspected passions are flaring in the most unlikely of people. It has been a particularly trying day, and though Viktor continues to be the voice of reason, repeatedly reassuring Nadezhda that this is for the best, that the children will be safe, his case has not been helped by all this bedlam and hysteria.

  The authorities have stepped up the evacuation of children, and every day now, thousands more are sent by bus and then train into the countryside and as far away as the Urals. Complicating matters, children who earlier were evacuated, stupidly, into the path of the enemy are now being returned to the city to be sorted out and reevacuated to the east. So, alongside the families who showed up this morning to see their children off are swarms of unaccompanied youths, a hundred to every adult, and mothers who troll the crowd, calling out names and pestering authorities, trying to locate the children they sent off to camps in the first days of the war.

  Following the air raid, officials with megaphones attempt to restore order and to locate those whom they had already processed when the air raid sounded. They call out numbers and check names off their clipboards and urge the tide of people back into lines. Arguments blister into ugly scenes as people claim or dispute their places.

  Viktor tried to persuade Nadezhda to stay home this morning, and even pulled his niece away from work to help him escort the children to the evacuation center, but Nadezhda wouldn’t hear of being left behind. She usually defers to her husband on everything, from the amount of onion to put in the soup to the cut and color of her own clothes, but the prospect of losing her children has made her defiant. Twice in the past weeks she has managed to forestall their departure, first by pretending that Mikhail had a fever and later by simply ignoring the official orders. Even now, as they find their place in a line stretching down the avenue, she is renewing her campaign, her worst fears fueled by a conversation she had in the shelter with another mother.

  “She’s been here every day for a week now, but nothing. Her two girls were sent to Kingsiepp, Viktor,” Nadezhda adds in a whisper. Terrible rumors are circulating that a children’s camp was bombed by the Germans.

  “You mustn’t believe everything you hear. You don’t know this woman, Nadezhda. For all you know, she might be a sympathizer.” The radio has warned citizens to be vigilant against those who would aid the Fascist cause by sowing fear. Since the Luga line was broken, a firestorm of rumors has spread through the city—German spies parachuting into the city at night, the slaughter of women and children at the front—but Viktor contends that it is all hysteria.

  “A pilot who was shot down last week confessed that Germans are deserting the lines,” Viktor says. “The army will drive them back shortly, and when the Luga is secured again, they can bring the children home again. They’ll be home in two weeks at the most.”

  “Then why not keep them here?”

  Viktor throws her a warning look and glances around. In a muted voice, he continues. “It’s merely a precaution, Nadezhda. But look at what’s happened in London. We can’t discount that possibility here.”

  “Bombs can fall anywhere.” She is on the verge of tears again.

  “This is not a matter of choice, and there’s no point in discussing it further.” To emphasize his point, he takes Mikhail from Nadezhda’s arms and hands him off to Marina.

  Aunt Nadezhda says something, but it is too soft for Marina to make out. It doesn’t matter. She will certainly not win—Viktor Alekseevich Krasnov is a renowned scientist, a man who believes that there is always a single truth, which can be arrived at by reason, and when one arrives, he will be there waiting. Still, Nadezhda is putting up more of a fight than Marina would have imagined she was capable.

  Mikhail begins to whimper, in seeming sympathy with his mother.

  “What is it?” Marina asks.

  The boy pauses to consider the question, poised on the cusp of crying.

  “Do you have to use the toilet?”

  He shakes his head. “I wanted to bring Bubi, but Papa said I can’t. He says that cats don’t travel well.”

  “Your papa is right. Bubi is better off staying at home.”

  “But I don’t want him to get killed by a bomb.”

  “He’s not going to get killed by a bomb. Bubi is a very smart cat. Besides, he has nine lives, so he will be fine.”

  Mikhail seems to accept this explanation, but his older sister is eyeing Marina suspiciously. Tatiana is beginning to take after her father, adopting his serious expressions and constantly questioning, weighing the accuracy of the fairy tales Marina tells them at night and challenging every turn in the narrative. Why did the witch cast a spell on the children? Why did she go to sleep for seven years? Why were they happy forever after?

  Marina looks around for something to distract them, and proposes a game. She will choose a letter and they must call out all the things they can see that start with that letter.

  Tatiana calls out word after word while Mikhail can only look where she points and repeat her like an echo. Marina coaches him with whispers. What is that man wearing over his shirt? Sweater. Good. What’s that over there? Streetlight.

  With each letter, other children in the line join in until they have gone through the entire alphabet. Then she starts repeating the letters.

  It is nearing dusk when the first bus in a convoy splashed with dirty gray and green camouflage paint pulls away from the curb and rumbles down Nevsky. Nadezhda has opened the larger of two suitcases and unfurled a blanket, unpacked food meant for the trip. Mikhail has eaten and is now curled against her bosom, his face slack with sleep. An hour ago, Viktor left to find someone in charge and get an estimate of how much longer they will be here, but Nadezhda doesn’t care. She is content to take up residence on the sidewalk if it means she may stay with her children.

  Tatiana and Marina eat sausage and crackers and watch the buses as they rumble past. Women trot alongside, frantically waving at the occupants, children whose faces are pressed against the glass in various expressions from grief to stunned oblivion. The buses’ headlights are glowing a dim blue. Blackout blue.

  “Why are the headlights blue?” Tatiana asks.

  “So the Germans can’t see them.”

  “Why can’t the Germans see blue?”

  “Because they have blue eyes.”

  Tatiana considers this, decides it sounds reasonable, and nods solemnly.

  Another bus rolls by, lifting a wash of leaflets in its wake.

  “It looks like a parade with confetti, don’t you think?” Marina observes.

  “People don’t cry at parades.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “They don’t,” Tatiana says with authority.

  Across from Helen, her mother is staring blankly out the window of the ferry. Her features are expressionless—who knows what she is thinking—but it doesn’t seem to bother her to sit here in silence. Underneath a flat, bright sky, the horizon of another island undulates slowly as they pass, a velvety yellow hill unrolling in the w
indow like a slow-paced travelogue. Helen can feel a vague roiling in her gut. It might be seasickness or it might be a growing unease, a suspicion that something is wrong.

  It’s not that her mother has ever been remarkably linear. Still, she just seems a little spacey. Like the business this morning with the coffee and then that remark about Helen’s family. Almost as though she were making conversation with a stranger. Or on the drive up, when out of nowhere she reminded them of a trip they took to Lake Chelan when Helen was eight and Andrei was in high school. There was nothing wrong with the story; it just came out of left field.

  “Mama?”

  Marina turns from the ferry window and seems surprised that Helen is still here. “Hmm?”

  “Are you okay?” Helen asks. “You seem a little distracted.”

  “I’m sorry, dear.” Marina waits expectantly, ready to hear whatever it is that Helen has to say.

  “No, it’s all right.” Helen draws in a deep breath, wondering just how to broach this. “What I meant is that, in general, you seem kind of distracted. How are you feeling?”

  “I’m okay.”

  Helen looks at her mother and concedes to herself that her mother does look fine. Older, sure, but not especially frail or sickly. So, it could be in my head, she thinks. After all, I’m not exactly on top of my game today.

  And then her mother adds, almost as an afterthought, “You know sometimes I forget some things. I told you I was sick?”

  “Sick?” Helen’s heart seizes.

  “I had the flu. And the doctor gave me some medicines.”

  “The flu? Mama, are you talking about two years ago?” Her mother, who is famously never sick, had a bout of the flu the winter before last. The doctor prescribed something, but she got sicker; she grew delirious and drifted in and out of consciousness for two days. As it turned out, her mother was allergic to codeine and, at eighty, had never before had cause to find out. But what this has to do with anything is anyone’s guess.

  “Yes, two years ago,” Marina concurs. “They seem to help my memory.”

  Helen is thoroughly confused. “What helps?”

  “The medicines.”

  “The codeine?”

  Marina’s expression betrays her frustration. “No, the other medicines,” she says, enunciating each word. She looks around. “Where’s Dima?”

  “Beats me.” Her father left more than half an hour ago to use the men’s room, something that really shouldn’t have taken this long. “Maybe he’s getting a cup of coffee.”

  “But he will come back?” A shadow passes over Marina’s face, as though she is afraid that after nearly sixty-five years of marriage he might suddenly abandon her, say he’s going to the men’s room and never return.

  “Of course he will.” I’m not imagining this, Helen thinks. This isn’t me. “I’ll go look for him,” she offers. She has a few questions for her father anyway. “Do you want anything?”

  “No, thank you. I’m okay.” She folds her hands in her lap to demonstrate her contentment.

  Helen finds Dmitri standing at the rail of the stern, facing the water. A wake spreads out behind the boat like a long green tail.

  “Pretty, isn’t it?” Helen says. “We were beginning to think you’d fallen in.”

  “Where’s your mother?” Dmitri cranes his neck and scans the deck.

  “At our seats.”

  He straightens as though to leave.

  “Papa, what medications is Mama taking?” She keeps her voice neutral, though it’s an odd question to pose casually, and, sure enough, her father stops and looks at her appraisingly.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. She just seems a little—I don’t know—kind of fuzzy. Don’t you think so?”

  “Yes,” he admits. He studies the backs of his hands. “It’s not her medicines. This getting old is a trial. I can’t recommend it.” He is smiling, but there is a weariness behind his smile that belies the joke.

  “Things might be easier if you moved into a smaller place.”

  His mouth hardens. “I’m not ready yet to be packed off to a nursing home.”

  “Not a nursing home, Papa, a retirement community.”

  “Did Andrei put you up to this?”

  As a child, she could never fib to him; his gaze was so still and patient, as though he already knew the truth and was merely waiting for her to work herself up to confessing it. Helen realizes too late that she should have let this sit until Monday.

  “I’m sure he doesn’t want you to do anything you’re not ready for. But at least hear him out, okay, Papa? He’s gone to a lot of work researching all this. Who knows, you just might see something you like.”

  “I know what I’ll see, Elena. I have friends in these places. Walt Crawford, you remember him?” She does. Mr. Crawford was headmaster at the private school where her father taught German and Russian for almost thirty years. “Bea, his wife, she died two years ago. Bladder cancer. He’s living at the Shoreside Manor. Every couple of weeks, I go up there. It’s one of the good ones, four thousand dollars a month. But there’s no disguise for a death camp. I’d rather to die at home.”

  He straightens up, signaling the end of the conversation. “Let’s go. I don’t want your mother to worry I’ve gone overboard.”

  If she had it in her to pursue the argument, she could point out that we’d all rather die at home, but all she can think is that Andrei will be annoyed with her for jumping the gun. Though how he hopes to move them against their will is beyond her. They are stubborn people in their own quiet way. It’s the Russian blood, she thinks. She’s got it herself. Her ex used to call her “the mule,” and though she rebelled at the insult, she knew there was truth to it. She tends to stick with things long past the time any reasonable person would give up and move on. Case in point, her marriage. Or her art, for that matter. Anyone else in her situation would have given up the pretense and either accepted that her art was a hobby or started painting things there was a market for—landscapes and flowers or watery abstracts. Instead, she insists on doing her figures and then gets indignant that people who buy their art in the local gift shops and frame stores aren’t looking to hang pictures of nude strangers in their homes. She’s fifty-three: how much longer is she going to wait for a New York dealer to discover her? In their own ways, she and her parents seem to have simultaneously reached the limits of hunkering down as a life strategy.

  Her mother is still staring out the window when they return.

  Her father leans over and kisses the top of her head. “A penny for your thoughts,” he says.

  “I was thinking about Tatiana and Mikhail.”

  Dmitri frowns.

  “Who are they?” Helen asks her mother.

  “My cousins. They were only six and eight, so they were sent away.”

  “Sent away?”

  “Evacuated. At the beginning of the war.”

  “Where did they go?”

  Marina looks up at the ceiling for a moment. “I don’t remember. The Urals, perhaps. It was snowing.”

  Helen waits, but apparently that is the end of the story. That’s about par for the course. Her parents never talk about the war, not in English, anyway, and Helen has only the most general idea of what happened then. Her father was a soldier, and her mother was a war bride who got trapped in Leningrad when the Nazis surrounded the city. Somehow they both ended up in Germany and found each other there. That’s it. As a child, she had little curiosity about her parents’ youth, and they obliged by behaving as though they had never had one. When she did ask, every question got a one-sentence answer. But they won’t be around forever, and it seems odd to know so little of their history.

  “Were these the archaeologist’s children?” Her mother was an orphan and lived with an aunt and an uncle who was a famous archaeologist, but again the details are fuzzy.

  “Yes, Uncle Viktor,” Marina says, nodding. “After that, we lived in the cellar.”

  “Who?”


  “Oh, everybody. There were hundreds of people.”

  No explanation follows. When Helen turns to her father, he says, “Some things are better forgotten.”

  This is considered a minor painting, but some may find it of historical interest. Here the painter Caraffe finds his inspiration in the legend of Metellus, a Roman general who showed mercy on the innocents. We see the city has been surrounded, and at the gates, the army is preparing to storm the walls. Armored soldiers raise their bows, and half-naked corpses are strewn in front of the gates. Against the wall, a clutch of figures face the oncoming soldiers as human shields, the wife and children of a defector.

  What could be more dramatic? There is no terror in this scene, though. It is a staged melodrama with the actors arranged in a carefully balanced tableau. Notice, even the vanquished are beautiful: they die in graceful poses, their injuries unseen. The neoclassical scene is strangely calm and still, the colors clean and glossy. It is war without blood and vomit, without misery—it is a picture to lure French boys to war with fantasies of ennobling self-sacrifice. Hundreds of thousands of them died for Napoleon, their frost-rotted corpses littering the snowy Russian steppes. There was no beauty, no mercy.

  What she remembers is the acrid smell of burning sugar. The way it singed the lining of her nose.

  When Marina emerges from the stairwell onto the roof, she can already hear the low rumble of the approaching Junkers. Schlisselburg fell on Monday, and so Leningrad is completely surrounded now, cut off from the outside world. Two nights ago, the Germans began dropping incendiary bombs, setting fires around the city. Wardens, armed with shovels and buckets of sand, have been posted in the various halls and around the perimeter of the roofs of the museum. Marina is a fire spotter, one of a pair posted to each observation platform on the roofs of the Hermitage.