The Madonnas of Leningrad

by Debra Dean

  Furthermore, Viktor Alekseevich Krasnov snores.

  Even with a scarf wrapped tightly around her head and a blanket pulled up around her ears, she can’t muffle the sound. Following her shift on the roof last night, she was kept awake another several hours, her fatigued brain snared in the drama of his next breath. First, the long volcanic rumble. Then an uneven stretch of silence. It is like hearing the whistle of a bomb and waiting for the explosion. She can count to twenty and sometimes even thirty before he will finally gasp up more air.

  He was given a complete discharge from military service on account of his lungs. Logically, this is probably what causes him to snore so loudly, though Marina can’t help but think of it as an extension of his pedantic character, that even in his sleep he must be listened to. By morning, she is convinced that she could stuff a rag down his throat and not feel any guilt.

  Aunt Nadezhda has brought the three of them their ration of bread and coffee. The coffee is nearly colorless, brewed from used grounds. The handful of tea leaves that Marina bought with her mother’s ruby earrings was gone two weeks ago. Beautiful rubies suspended in filigreed gold. One hundred grams of tea.

  “Sergei Pavlovich says that they confirmed it this morning. Uritsk has fallen.” This rumor has been circulating widely, but it was too horrific to be believed. Uritsk is a mere ten or twelve kilometers from the Hermitage, a ride on the tram.

  On the radio, bad news lags several days behind the rumors, but people gather around the radio in the mornings nonetheless and repeat the official pronouncements from person to person around the Hermitage shelters. Even couched in the uplifting propaganda of the Information Bureau, it is repeatedly bad news these days. It seems now that Viktor’s confidence in the Red Army’s easy superiority over the Germans was misplaced. It is the third week of September, and the Germans have been steadily pushing back the army, edging closer and closer to the gates of the city itself. Still, he was all too right about the bombardment. He seems to take some grim satisfaction in the robotic regularity with which the German planes reappear every night at precisely seven o’clock. If nothing else, he says, it reconfirms the rightness of his decision to override Nadezhda’s terror and allow the children to be evacuated.

  They have not been able to procure any news of Tatiana and Mikhail since they were evacuated, but they both hold fast to the conviction that they are still alive, that they were not among those bombed by the Germans as they fled the city. Grim rumors have come back of trains arriving in the Urals, their charred hulls filled with the burned bodies of children.

  Though Nadezhda flinches at the mention of her children, she will not contradict her husband’s arrogant surety that they are safe. That would be tempting fate. Neither can she bring herself to agree, so she pretends she has not heard. She hands Marina her coffee and bread and asks how she slept.

  It is only because Marina is so tired that she begins to weep into the pale liquid. The older woman carefully sets down her niece’s cup so none of the coffee should spill and draws the young woman into her arms like a child. She strokes Marina’s hair and makes comforting shushing noises. Every sigh, every gesture, is weighted by the absence of her children.

  “I’m sorry,” Marina says, embarrassed.

  “Nonsense. You are worried about Dima,” Nadezhda says. “But you shouldn’t worry. There is no time for letters. And you know how bad the army is about delivering mail. You will probably get a whole packet at once.” There were letters in the first month, even if only a few scrawled lines, but Marina has not heard from him since the middle of August. His division was among those encircled after the Luga line fell, and in the chaos, many disappeared, Dmitri among them. Olga Markhaeva’s husband, Pavel Ivanovich, was in the Third Division as well, but he has not been able to provide any information except to write that no one he has talked with in the unit saw Dmitri fall. Marina’s shameful hope is that he is among the deserters.

  “He will come home,” Nadezhda says. “They will all come home soon.” Then she, too, begins to weep.

  Viktor stares stonily into his own cup and pretends not to notice. It is the same way that Marina pretends not to hear her aunt and uncle’s furtive lovemaking, the same way that everyone pretends not to notice family quarrels or the sounds and smells of slop pails. After a moment or two, he can stand it no more. Without a word, he stands up and turns his chair around so that it faces away from the women and toward the makeshift desk at the foot of his pallet. This signals that he is now at work and not to be disturbed. Nadezhda sniffs up her tears and bites her lip.

  So far as is possible in this crowded shelter, the residents cling to the routines they had before the war. It is a communal act of faith that if they adhere to the routines of their old lives, their old lives will return to them. The scholars continue to draft their papers, the students study for exams. Viktor Alekseevich Krasnov has been organizing several years’ worth of his field notes in order to begin work on a history of the pre-class culture of Urartu. He diligently puts in an hour every morning before he and Nadezhda go out to work on the fortifications, then spends several more hours in the evening working by the light of an altar candle.

  Marina can’t get around the bulky gilded chair that Viktor has co-opted from a set Marina carried down last week from the Snyders Room.

  “Pardon me,” she says.

  “One moment, Marina.” Viktor’s eyes do not leave the page he is scrawling on. Finally he reaches the end of a thought, takes a sip from the dregs of his coffee, and then stands to allow Marina to pass. He wishes her a good day. She masks her murderous feelings in a nod but cannot bring herself to return his greeting.

  It is harder for Marina to preserve her old life. She was a museum guide, and now there is no one to guide and nothing to see. Every day, she walks through the abandoned picture gallery with its broken and boarded windows. Hills of sand are piled near the entrance to each room in case of fire. And on the walls are rows of empty frames, left hanging as a pledge that the paintings will return someday. Each time she enters a room, she runs through her script, mentally placing as many of the paintings as she can recall back in their frames. She moves like a ghost past the blank rectangles and describes by rote the pictures that hung inside them. She narrates the history of the paintings and the stories they tell, pointing out the range of expressions in van der Goes’s mourners, the way that Velázquez used light and shadow to transform paint into a table linen with such weight and texture that one can almost feel it in the tips of one’s fingers. Out of the corner of her eye, she can almost see the loaf of bread, the pomegranates and sardines, all arranged on a heavy white cloth, and the three peasants posing around their luncheon table. As always, they are boisterous. One seems to wink at her.

  Today, her route to the smallest of the three skylight halls takes her through the Italian Renaissance. Here is Giorgione’s Judith. She is so serene, so poised, that it is a shock to follow her lowered gaze down the length of her shapely leg and find beneath her foot the severed head of Holofernes.

  And here is The Assumption of Mary Magdalene into Heaven. She is flying, her startled eyes lifted up, her arms spread wide, her cloak and red sash trailing behind her. Supporting the Magdalene are a pair of full-grown angels and a flock of tiny putti, fat little cherubs hefting her on their backs and shoulders as though she were a heavy sack of grain. Domenichino has also painted strange disembodied cherubs in the sky, infant heads propped on flapping wings.

  “Good morning.”

  The Magdalene and putti vanish, replaced by an empty gilt frame.

  Anya, one of the babushski, hobbles toward Marina. If Anya wonders, she doesn’t ask what Marina is doing, why she is loitering in this deserted room, staring at nothing. She stops at Marina’s side, follows her glance, and nods appreciatively. “I’ve always liked that one, too.” Then she says, “Did you hear? They’ve had to shut down the Kirov Works again. The German bastards got a direct hit with a delayed explosive and it’s in the base
ment. They’ve got one of the girls working on it.” A group of young women has been trained to defuse the delayed explosives the Germans are dropping now, and their heroics have become the subject of nightly radio broadcasts. To minimize the loss of life, they work alone, a single young woman crawling down into the bomb crater and toiling against a ticking fuse. They are the new symbols of Soviet womanhood, Judiths going into single combat with mechanized monsters, slaying the enemy to save their people.

  Marina’s work is less dramatic. Whatever remains in the museum that can be moved is being hauled downstairs and out of harm’s way. Since the bombing started, they have carried hundreds of chairs, massive stone vases and tabletops, standing candelabra, mirrors, and couches. They are stripping the rooms bare, one by one. It is hard physical labor and nearly as tedious as the packing. Yesterday it took a dozen of them the whole day to wrestle the two onyx candelabra out of the Large Italian Skylight Room and into the basement.

  Today, the other members of their crew have moved on to the Small Italian Skylight Room. All that remains are the chairs and tables that can be managed by the two women. Marina takes one end of a small divan, Anya the other. They heft it up and begin slowly retracing their steps through the gallery.

  Lionello Spada, The Martyrdom of Saint Peter. Annibale Carracci, The Holy Women at the Sepulchre.

  “What’s that, dear?” Anya asks. “My hearing isn’t so good anymore.”

  Marina is embarrassed to realize she has been muttering out loud. “Oh, I beg your pardon. It’s nothing, a sort of game I play. To see how many paintings I can recall.”

  “You are building a memory palace?”

  Marina has never heard of such a thing.

  “They don’t teach this in school anymore?” Anya asks and clucks in dismay. “When I was a girl, we made memory palaces to help us memorize for our examinations. You chose an actual place, a palace worked best, but any building with lots of rooms would do, and then you furnished it with whatever you wished to remember.”

  “You furnished it?” Marina shakes her head, perplexed.

  “Ah, well, first you walked through the actual rooms and memorized their appearance. But once you had learned the rooms, in your imagination you could add anything you wish. So, when we needed to memorize the Law of God, for instance, we closed our eyes and put a question and answer in each room.”

  Anya lowers her voice. “My school friend’s family waited at the court,” she continues. “Before the civil war, they had a beautiful house, thirty-five rooms. It is ministry offices now, but when I was a little girl, I used it for my memory palace. I can still tell you exactly what was in every one of those rooms.” Anya stops, sets down her end of the divan, and closes her eyes. After a moment, her face softens.

  “When one walks through the front doors, the entry has a marble floor and a very large Persian carpet. On the center of that carpet, where there is a rose design, I put the third question from the Law of God. ‘What is necessary to please God and to save one’s own soul?’ Next, I go to the fireplace. It has a carved black marble mantel. Inside, instead of logs, I put the answer. ‘In the first place, a knowledge of the true God and a right faith in him. In the second place, a life according to faith and good works.’” Anya opens her eyes. “I can walk through the entire house that way, stopping at each spot and putting there whatever I wish to remember. And later, I can come back and retrieve it all.”

  “This works?”

  “I memorized the entire Law of God, all the Roman emperors and their reigns, and the Romanovs, too, of course. Everything. It’s all still here.” She taps her forehead. “I am like an old elephant. Ask me anything.”

  Marina is ready to get out of the car. She needs to use the toilet. When she asked, Helen said it was only a few more minutes to Andrei’s, but Marina thinks they have been in the car longer than that. She leans forward and taps Dmitri on the shoulder. He twists around in the passenger seat. Strapped in like this, she can’t reach his ear.

  “Mnye nuzhno v tualyet,” she whispers.

  They have turned onto a long gravel road, and Marina sees a handsome gray clapboard house set into a stand of trees.

  “We’re here, Mama,” Helen says. Cars line the road, but there is an open space in the driveway.

  Marina sighs with relief when her son appears from behind the house and strides toward them across the lawn, his arms wide in greeting. He will take care of her.

  “You’re here,” Andrei announces. “Good to see you, Helen.” He gives his sister a big bear hug. “Heard you had an adventure getting here.” Marina wonders what adventure Helen has had. She will have to remember to ask.

  Andrei comes around the car, squeezes Dmitri, and finally leans in to help extricate her from the backseat.

  “How’s my best girl?”

  He dips his head to hear her whispered request.

  “Of course. Is this an emergency?” She nods.

  “You two go ahead. Everyone’s around back. We’re running a little behind with the rehearsal, but tell Naureen to start without me.”

  He turns back to Marina and steers her across the lawn. “Are you ready for the big day tomorrow?”

  She does a quick internal scan, but nothing surfaces. “I am,” she says brightly. “Tomorrow comes, ready or not.”

  “That’s the truth. It’s been one thing after another around here. One of Katie’s bridesmaids seems to have come down with food poisoning. And then this morning, the florist called. A shipment of flowers got left at the dock in Anacortes.” They take the porch steps slowly.

  “I should maybe go to get them?”

  “The flowers? Oh, no, Naureen’s on it. No, you just relax for now, Mama.” At the top of the steps, he says, “You know the way, right? Through the living room, first door on the left?”

  She nods.

  “I better get down there. The kids are chomping at the bit. Come down to the beach when you’re through.”

  The first room she walks into is cool and dark. Sunlight falls in gold slats through the shutters and stripes the floor. With its stone fireplace and exposed ceiling beams, the room reminds her of the old dachas and hunting lodges. She looks in the fireplace, but there is nothing there except the black husk of a log. In front of the fireplace is a couch with a bright red nylon sleeping bag on it. And here is a photograph of three smiling people. Andrei. His wife. Think. What is her name? Naureen. Put her in the fireplace. Naureen. And a little girl with braces on her teeth.

  Her bladder tugs insistently, reminding her that she has to use the toilet. Andrei told her through the living room, then…nothing. Well, just find it, she thinks. Here is the living room. Go through it.

  Marina walks into the dining room and around into a spacious kitchen. Through the kitchen windows, she can see a lawn that falls softly away to water. A group of people is gathered down near the beach. Past the kitchen and a little laundry room is a stairway going up. Beyond the stairs, she is circling back onto a hallway with doors on either side. She opens each one. A bedroom. Another bedroom. A room with a television like a movie screen. Finally, and not a moment too soon, a toilet.

  It is delightful to make water after holding it for so long. She listens to the music of water on water and feels the wonderful release inside her. And to sit where it is warm and private, not squatting over a chamber pot in the bitter cold. One of the effects of this deterioration seems to be that as the scope of her attention narrows, it also focuses like a magnifying glass on smaller pleasures that have escaped her notice for years. She keeps these observations to herself. She tried once to point out to Dmitri the bottomless beauty in her glass of tea. It looked like amber with buried embers of light, and when held just so, there was a rainbow in the glass that took her breath away. He nodded sympathetically but mostly looked concerned. What would he say if she told him her pee sounded like a symphony?

  Yes, isn’t it beautiful? This is called the Early Italian Renaissance Room, and is a fine example of the hist
oricism style. Notice the fine gilded ornamentation on the ceiling and over the doors. The columns here are made of jasper, and these impressive doors are inlaid with precious woods and decorated with painted porcelain cameos.

  If I could direct your attention over here, please. In all this splendor, she would be easy to miss, she is so small and quiet, but this is one of the treasures of the collection. She is exquisite, is she not? Such liquidity and grace. Simone Martini was the leading artist of the early fourteenth-century Siennese school, and his work is particularly rare. This little Madonna was once half of a folding diptych; the other wing, which has gone missing, portrayed the Angel Gabriel. So the modern viewer can see only part of the picture. To us, she appears to be lost in her own thoughts, her head tilted in dreamy contemplation. But actually she is listening to an unseen angel who is telling her that she will give birth to the son of God.

  The first snows have come early this year. It is only October, but already there are fifty millimeters on the roof. On the radio, the snow is heralded as a good sign because it means winter is coming, and winter has always been Russia’s salvation. It was the Russian winter that turned back Napoleon, and now, they say, it will keep Hitler out of Moscow.

  The Nazis have turned their armies toward Moscow, and despite the suicidal bravery of the Red Army and the citizenry, they have been advancing inexorably, just as they did when they moved against Leningrad. But there are signs that the snow and slush are slowing their progress.