by Debra Dean
Helen is amazed all over again. At the time, she had dismissed the offer out of hand. It was 1970 and, at least in Seattle, having a baby out of wedlock was still an unthinkable shame. She’d had neither the imagination nor the courage to envision an alternative to marriage, even, or especially, when the alternative was proposed by her mother.
Now she wants to ask this sweet little old lady in her ruffled blouse and sensible flats, Who are you, anyway?
Even in her sleep, Marina hears the air-raid sirens. In the bowels of the Hermitage, the shriek of the sirens above are muted, but she is like a mother attuned to the cries of her infant. This must be what it is like to be a mother, she thinks, this endless exhaustion, days and nights measured by the wails of a baby. But like a good mother, though she curses to herself, she gets up, grabs her binoculars and sheepskin, and climbs up the steps toward her post. It is time for her shift.
In order to get to the roof, she must first cross through the Hall of Twenty Columns. At night, the hall is black and utterly terrifying. Because there are no blackout curtains, lights are prohibited, and only one tiny bulb winks like a distant star at the base of the far doorway.
She pauses briefly at the entrance and catches her breath, tries to slow her pounding heart. It seems a silly fear in light of all the very real terrors, but this passage frightens her.
She steps gingerly into the void and tries for a few steps to take the direct route down the center of the hall. It is too much, though, floating unmoored in the blackness. She backs up until her hands find a wall, and then works her way along this wall, step by step, hugging the edge of the room. The columns cut her off from the tiny guide light, but it is still marginally better than the dizziness of open space.
It is so dark that she cannot see even her own hands, can only feel the walls and hear her footsteps echo on the mosaic floor. This is what it might be like to be blind. The dark is not solid, though. It is layered with shades of black. Huge shapes loom suddenly out of shadow. The columns, she reminds herself.
Deep into the huge room, she feels the still air around her shift, and something hovering at the edge of her vision. She thinks she hears the whisper of her name.
“Hello?” Her voice comes out low and hoarse. She listens hard, past the pounding of her heart in her ears, past the shrieking siren outside. Nothing. Taking another step forward, she hears her footfall and what is either its echo or another person’s step in the hall. “Is someone here?” The sense of another presence, though unattached to any physical cues, is unshakable. She has an animal’s sense of being watched.
If she doesn’t keep moving, she will be unable to go on. She reminds herself that she has a duty upstairs, and then she closes her eyes and forces her feet forward steadily, her hands groping the wall. She begins to sing, loudly, a stout song about the victorious People’s Army that has been playing relentlessly on the loudspeakers during the day and on the radio every night before sign-off. Brothers fighting side by side/Marching toward the vision we can see/Though bloodied and weary, the turning of the tide/Will lead us unbowed to victory. Halfway through a breathless second chorus, the guide bulb winks into view again and she dashes gratefully to the doorway.
The wind off the river blows drifts of icy snow across the Hermitage roof, a desolate steppe. When she climbs onto the platform, she sits down and pulls the sheepskin closer around her.
Aside from the sirens, it is quiet tonight, no planes yet. But the moon is rising, so they will come. She hates the moon. It is dead, and its flat, dead light draws in Fascist planes like moths. Though she knows her perspective has been poisoned by the war, it is hard to see why poets make such a romantic fuss over an ugly, pockmarked disk.
She buries her face in the fleece, feeling the pull of sleep threatening to swallow her. Most gather in pairs so they can keep each other awake and pass the night by talking, but Olga Markhaeva is ill. She has the dysentery that has been plaguing so many of the staff. Marina has been covering for her for the past several nights so she will not lose her worker’s rations. When Marina radios downstairs, she pretends that Olga is up here with her. She suspects that Sergei Pavlovich is not fooled, that in fact he is conspiring with her to protect Olga, but he says nothing.
To keep herself awake, she practices her memory palace. Walking the actual rooms by day is no longer the challenge it was. In some of the rooms, the empty frames provide a map, and all she has to do is fill inside the frames. But at night, she must work entirely from memory. Tonight she imagines herself in the Rembrandt Room, starting at the east entrance. She closes her eyes and puts herself in the doorway. She takes in the green walls, the marble wainscoting, the solemnity of the room peopled with quiet Dutch faces and figures, and then she begins to conjure up the first painting she would see.
It is Ferdinand Bol’s Old Woman with a Book, a severe-looking shrew in widow’s weeds, clutching an open Bible in her lap. Her husband provided for her well, one can tell from the big brooch on her chest, but her expression suggests that she will make her heirs grovel and then leave it all to the church.
Across from her is Flora, a portrait of Rembrandt’s young wife, Saskia, painted in the first year of their marriage. Saskia’s moon face is hardly that of the goddess of spring, but the newlywed Rembrandt was so clearly smitten with her that she reflects his happiness. She is dressed in rich finery, silks and embroidery, and to suggest that she is the goddess of spring, her headdress is a lavish Baroque bouquet of flowers. A tulip hangs like a bell over her left ear. In one hand, she holds a staff similarly bedecked with flowers, and her other hand rests on what looks at first to be her pregnant belly. The mounded bodice is merely the fashion of the time, but Marina imagines that Saskia is dreaming a baby into existence, her gaze is so inward and still.
Next to Saskia, Rembrandt’s scholar looks up from his writing and appears dumbfounded by the scene he faces. When one turns around to follow his gaze, there she is, a lounging nude taking up the entire wall. The nude seems at first to be shielding her eyes from the scorn of Bol’s sour-faced old woman, but no, she is looking at someone else.
This is the painter’s first full-size female nude. It illustrates the myth of Danae, a beautiful princess whose father, the king, locked her away in a bronze tower to thwart potential suitors. There she is visited by Zeus, who has admired her. As is his habit when he wishes to satisfy his passions, he transmogrifies himself—with the beautiful Leda, he became a swan, with Europa, a white bull, with Antiope, a satyr, and so on—but with Danae he takes form as a shower of gold. Here Danae is shielding her face from his light, or perhaps she is reaching out to him; it is tantalizingly hard to tell. But tonight her life will change. He will impregnate her, and in time she will give birth to a god, Perseus.
And there is The Sacrifice of Isaac. Very dramatic, Isaac’s body limp and glowing. His face is covered by Abraham’s hand.
Portrait of an Old Jew. Brown. An old face. Old hands.
David and Uriah. The red robes. The scribe in the background.
The Holy Family. Mother. Baby.
The Return of
The Return of
The light dims, and the quiet browns and golds of Rembrandt’s people recede into the dark. Slowly, the room falls away beneath her, and she is lifting up into the sky, flying.
It is like a beautiful, disturbing dream. She is almost in the clouds, and the moon drifts in, drifts out, silvering the ghostly city below. She can see the roof of the Winter Palace, then past the rows of copper statues that line its perimeter, past church spires engraved on the black sky, past the pale dome of St. Isaac’s. Below her, the frozen Neva glitters and weaves. Above her, the blimps hover silently in the clouds. During the day, they are ugly sausages. But at night they swim like enormous white whales through a dark sea.
She is swimming with the whales. She hears what sounds like the rhythmic whoosh of their breath. And then someone is beside her, breathing hotly in her ear, stroking her belly and the insides of her thighs,
pulling her along through the air. Marina. The voice whispers her name. Marina. Come to me.
She starts, hearing the drone of distant planes. Who knows how long she has been here, an hour, perhaps two, she cannot read her wristwatch.
She finds her radio and switches it on.
“Hello?” She is trembling, but not with cold. Her body feels liquid and warm. “Sergei Pavlovich, this is the North Platform. I’m standing by. Over.”
She pulls her binoculars from their case and lifts them to her eyes. In the distance, she finds the approaching silhouettes of planes. As she sweeps the binoculars back toward the embankment, her view suddenly fills with an enormous silhouette. Inexplicably, one of the statues from the roof of the Winter Palace has transported itself several hundred meters north onto the barren roof of the New Hermitage building. The statue, a naked god, gleams in the moonlight, poised at the edge of the roof, so close to the brink that from this angle it appears to be floating suspended over the river.
She is transfixed. As she watches, the statue slowly turns in her direction. He is shockingly beautiful and blindingly bright. She lifts her hand to shield her eyes from the light.
“Oh my god.” Although her voice seems to disappear in the wind, the statue smiles at her and stretches his arm out to her, beckoning. Her chest tightens. She feels a shock of recognition, as in a dream when suddenly one knows, knows with an unshakable certainty, no matter that it should be impossible.
“What is it? Marina?” It is Sergei’s voice. The radio. She can barely lift it to her mouth.
“There is a…” she begins, but her voice falters. “A man.” She is not speaking loudly enough to be heard. She gasps in air.
“Someone is up here,” she says. She refrains from mentioning that he is naked.
“I don’t understand. Do you mean Olga Markhaeva?”
“No,” she breathes. Her heart is pounding wildly. Everything is gold, light, hot. She closes her eyes against the light and the radio falls from her hand. She feels herself lifting up into the night on a slow, throbbing pulse, and she lets herself be carried off on it.
Her skin sparks to a touch sliding down her throat, circling first one nipple, then the other, each touch sending streaks of electric current coursing through her. The long, agonizing stretch of her belly, and then the wet, satiny folds between her thighs. She feels the heat radiating from him expand inside her, and she is frantic, rocking back and forth, back and forth, wildly climbing a series of molten waves. The beat of wings quickens, crescendos into a roar, and she is turned inside out with a flash of heat. Warm milk courses through her limbs and leaks out between her legs.
It is like being underwater, rising toward the light and hearing muffled voices above the surface.
“Look. Do you see the eagle, Marina?”
“We got seats right behind home plate, five rows back. You could see the guys spit.”
“Do you see it?”
“How’d you score those?”
“Oh, Jen’s got some clients. They’ve been real pains. I guess they wanted to make it up to her.”
Marina is sitting in a comfortable chair on the patio with her daughter-in-law. She knows time has passed and those around her have continued on in this world without her, conversing and drinking.
It is beautiful here. The sun is hanging just above the horizon, streaking the sky with long shreds of purple and orange, fringing the woods in velvety shadow. Behind her, music drifts out the open windows, and at regular intervals a tinny sequence of arcade bleeps and hoots announces that one of the kids has scored on the computer upstairs.
Everyone is looking up, and Naureen points out to Marina a dark silhouette gliding on air currents, its wings spread like ragged fingers.
“Aren’t birds wonderful?” Marina says.
“It’s one of the things I love about coming up here,” Naureen agrees. “There’s a nesting pair on White Point, and we see them nearly every day.”
“A pair of bluebirds made a nest in our hanging basket,” Marina says. “There were two eggs, but one of the chicks didn’t survive. The mother and father bird tended it for weeks, and then one day the little bird flew away and that was the last time we saw it.”
They are silent for a moment, watching the eagle.
“Aren’t birds wonderful?”
“Yes.”
“A pair of bluebirds made a nest in our hanging basket.”
“Marina, are you through with that? You hardly touched it.”
Marina looks down at a bowl of melting ice cream. It looks something like blockade jelly.
“Marina?”
“Maybe I will have a bite more.”
“I could get you some more. That’s all melted.”
“No, it’s just the way I like it, dear.” She eats a spoonful just to confirm this. “We ate a jelly made from joiner’s glue.”
“What?”
“Joiner’s glue. You use it to glue the picture frames.”
“You ate glue?” Naureen looks puzzled. Marina wonders if she has used the wrong word. Glue. Glue. It sounds wrong somehow.
“Glue, to stick things together? It was made from sinews of beef, I think. We melted it down. It was pretty tasty, I remember.”
“Dear god,” Naureen breathes. “This was during the war?”
“Yes, dear.” Marina smiles. “We didn’t eat it before. It wasn’t that good.”
“I can’t imagine. The war, I mean.”
“No, it was not imaginable…”
People crowd in on Marina. A swirl of faces and bodies: the naked women in the public bath, women with blackened legs wavering in the steamy light, Olga Markhaeva calling out the locations of fires, the swaddled gray mass of humanity on the streets, moving like ghosts. An emaciated woman has fallen in the snow, a scarecrow with hollow eyes who stretches a claw up toward her. Marina’s eyes are watering, and she shakes her head roughly.
“Are you all right, Marina?”
Marina reaches for Naureen’s hand and grips it tightly in her own. More distressing than the loss of words is the way that time contracts and fractures and drops her in unexpected places.
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” Naureen says. She scoots her chair closer to Marina and with her free hand rubs the back of Marina’s hand.
It’s like a terrible thaw. Like the Hermitage that spring when all the snow on the roof melted. For weeks, they bailed water, carried buckets of filthy water out into the courtyard. Water leaked from out of the walls, through the roof. It ran down the Jordan staircase like a stream. And it just kept coming and coming.
Marina takes a slow breath. “I am becoming like the museum. Everything, it is leaking. It is horrible.”
Naureen doesn’t pursue this. She continues to stroke Marina’s hand, and the two sit quietly. After a few minutes, Naureen changes the subject. “Tell me about Andrei when he was a baby.”
Marina brightens a little at the mention of her son. “Oh, my. When I delivered him, the nurses were astonished. The babies born during the blockade were runty things mostly, tiny and deformed or born dead. But not Andrei—he weighed over three kilos and he was perfect. He never cried. Not even during bombing raids. The shells were so loud, like devils shrieking, but he would be in his blanket, half asleep. His face was so calm. I would check him every few minutes—I was afraid he stopped breathing. I wondered even if he was born deaf. But he was an unusual child. People would stop me in the street to admire him. He had a head of golden curls just like his father.”
“Dmitri had blond hair?”
Marina shakes her head impatiently. “Not Dima. He isn’t a god, dear.”
Naureen smiles. “No, I guess he isn’t. None of them are, are they?”
The Rembrandt Room. At first, it seems empty, the room is so quiet and dark. The walls are a soft green, the color of faded billiards felt, and the flat ceiling is simply decorated. A series of half walls divides the room, so that one cannot see right away that it is actually full of pe
ople. They are quiet, contemplative people, old men in ruffs and modest young women lost in their own thoughts.
Beckoning from the far end of the room is a startling figure, Danae. She is an odalisque, a nude lying in repose, seductive, awaiting her lover. It is a classic pose, but Rembrandt in his genius has painted an ordinary woman, lush of body but not idealized. Her belly is full and spills onto the bed. Her face is almost plain but transformed by wonder.
Everything in the painting is luxuriant and, aptly, golden: the roundness of her heavy belly and delicate breasts, the soft, pale curves of her hip and thigh. The lavish boudoir is draped with heavy brocades and velvets and fine linens, and Danae, though she is nude, is adorned with coral bracelets. She stretches out full length on her bed, propped up on one elbow, with her other hand raised in awe or greeting toward her miraculous visitor. Zeus’s presence is obscured in drapery, but she is bathed in his radiant light. She sees the miracle, what the viewer cannot see. Behind her and half-hidden by drapery stands her elderly guard. She, too, looks on in amazement.
It is late. Most of the wedding party has gone back to the inn, but Helen has lingered. Naureen is gathering up the last of the wineglasses and plates left on tables outside, and Andrei is folding up the extra chairs and stowing them against the side of the house.
Helen studies the bottom of her wineglass. “Why didn’t you tell me she’s got Alzheimer’s?”
Andrei picks up another chair and adds it to the sheaf under the eaves. “We don’t know for certain that it’s Alzheimer’s. She’s got symptoms of dementia, but that’s not at all uncommon in people her age. It’s not my field, but I don’t think even a good gerontologist can diagnose it with complete accuracy.”
“Oh, for god’s sake, Andrei,” Helen snaps. “I wasn’t asking for a diagnosis. I’m just saying that you might have mentioned to me that our mother is losing her mind.”