by Debra Dean
Marina watches him guardedly from her corner. He is not a violent man, in fact he prides himself on his self-control, but hunger has eaten away the veneer of civilization, and people are not themselves. She has heard terrible things. In the cellars, she hears mothers beat their hungry children when they cry. In the bread lines, young boys rip the bread from the hands of feeble women, and there are rumors of missing children and black market sausage. Liliia Pavlova told her last week about a corpse on the street with its buttocks carved out.
Viktor stands up and trudges to where the candle has been left burning. He blows it out, and Marina hears him cross back to the pallet he and Nadezhda share. He murmurs to his wife, telling her to lift her legs, to get under the blankets. As silently as possible, Marina crawls under her own mountain of blankets and disappears under its comforting, muffling weight.
She wakes up in the night, crying.
“Izvinite,” she is whimpering. I’m sorry. When Dmitri reaches over and touches her back, she flinches and jerks away. “I can’t help you,” she snaps in Russian.
“It’s okay,” he says. “It’s okay, my darling.” He pats her back absently, still half-asleep himself. The shoulder of his pajamas is damp with her tears.
“I must go home,” she tells him.
“Not tonight.”
“No, I must go home. It’s urgent. I have to take this chocolate back. They are waiting for me.”
“You’ve had a nightmare, Marinochka. It’s okay now.” Throughout their married life, not often but once in a while, she has had nightmares. He has them, too, but even in his sleep, he is guarded. Marina wakes him, flailing and muttering things that Dmitri doesn’t always understand. Sometimes she cries out, and in the first years of their marriage, there was frequently one name, or he thought it was a name, though not one he recognized. Once, more than fifty years ago, he almost asked, but something stopped him, and now it doesn’t matter. It hasn’t mattered for a long time.
“I must be home before it’s dark,” she says. “They are waiting and…” She stops and shudders. “Where am I?” She sits upright and looks around, frightened.
It is nearly dark in the room, but ambient light from the marina seeps through the curtains and tints the darkness green.
“We’re on Drake Island. At the inn. Remember?” he asks, though he knows she will not.
“We’re on an island?”
“Where Andrei has his dacha. We were there this evening.”
“I must go home.” Her voice is as plaintive as a child’s.
“We’ll go home Monday morning. After the wedding. Go back to sleep now.”
But she has swung her legs over the side of the bed and is on her feet, at the window, pulling open the curtain, peering out into the dark. And then she explains again about the chocolate—there isn’t enough for him, she is sorry, but she has to take it home.
“I don’t want any chocolate.”
“Can I go home now?”
“Not tonight.”
“They are waiting for me.”
“They will be okay.”
“Where am I?”
He is so tired. His eyes are leaden, and his mind is swimming in deep, heavy water. He answers her questions, but each one costs him an effort. Sometimes it is more than he can bear, this repetition, over and over, of the same questions, the same answers, as though their lives were a battered phonograph record with a hundred skips and they will never get to the end of it.
“Come back to bed,” he pleads.
“Where am I?”
When he pulls himself up onto his elbows, he feels the exhaustion in his bones.
“Marina, you have to sleep now.” He feels his eyes stinging with frustration. “I need for you to help me. Do you understand?” In the half-light, their eyes meet. What he finds there is her, but also not her. Her eyes are like the bright surface of shallow water, reflecting back his own gaze. Something flutters and darts under the surface, but it might be his own desire, his own memory. He is, he realizes, probably alone.
“Please, Marina. I miss you.”
Obediently, she crawls back into their bed and pulls the covers up over her chest. She asks him again, but hesitantly this time, if they can go home, she wants to go home.
“Monday morning, we’ll go home. Go to sleep now.” His voice is husky. He is holding her and smoothing her hair, her neck. His fingertips know the shape of her back, each little knob of her spine, the soft folds of her waist. If she were lost, he could find her in the dark by touch alone.
She relaxes a little into the crook of his arm. The smell of her, warm and yeasty and faintly scented with lavender, is familiar and potent. She has been in his life for so long that he can hardly recall a time before her. Over the years, they have grown together, their flesh and their thoughts twining so closely that he cannot imagine the person he might be apart from her.
Even during the war, when they were physically separated, she was there with him in the form of a small studio photograph taken to mark her graduation. When his unit was encircled at Chudovo and he was captured by the Germans, he held on to the photograph and began whispering to it like an icon. For three years, he worked in the German prison camps, first in the Ukraine and later in Bavaria, where starving prisoners logged the forest and cut railroad ties. He kept the photograph in his breast pocket and, while working, he would dredge up and replay every conversation with her that he could remember. Later, he invented new ones, talking with her under his breath. The Germans thought he had gone crazy. She listened as he confessed his cowardice, his fear of the sadistic guards, and his humiliating physical needs. At night, her delicate hands came to him in sleep, stroking his face, his chest, his penis.
He survived the war, but when the American soldiers came to liberate the camp, he was already a dead man. Being captured by the Germans was treason: Stalin had said as much. Dmitri knew what that meant—he had lost his father in prison—he could never go home again. Dazed and without hope, he slipped out of the camp and joined the millions of refugees wandering the roads through the rubble of Germany. He stayed safely inside the American occupation zone and for nearly three months managed to avoid the dragnets rounding up Soviets for forced repatriation. But he had no papers, no money, and eventually he was caught filching eggs from a henhouse, beaten severely by the enraged farmer, and rescued just this side of death by American soldiers. A week later, he was behind barbed wire again, this time in a refugee camp. He had heard rumors of others who had committed suicide rather than return to the Soviet Union, and he noted that the soldiers took his belt.
On his third day in the camp, walking down the main corridor between the barracks, he saw a woman up ahead who looked like Marina. He was not surprised; he had lost his glasses when he was captured, and from a distance, many women appeared to be Marina. But as he drew closer, she did not resolve into a stranger, and when she turned and saw him staring at her, she cried out his name.
Fifty-eight years later, this single moment still astonishes him. It is the one event in his long life that is both wildly illogical and absolutely necessary. Everything else he can consign to the random happenstance of a godless world, but not this moment.
He remembers they stood stock-still before each other, stunned into speechlessness. Tentatively, he reached out and ran his fingers over her face like a blind man, rubbing a tear from her cheek, astonished at its materiality. And then he looked down and saw that she was not alone. There was a child, a solemn toddler that watched him unblinkingly from behind her legs.
“This is our son,” she said, drawing the boy forward. “I named him Andrei,” and nothing more.
What were the odds that a single act of lovemaking might result in a child? Another man might have doubted her, might have questioned whether she had met someone after he left for the front. Or worse. He had witnessed the depravities, the vodka-fueled rapes of old women and children, and the desperate licentiousness of starving women. Later, she told him how she an
d her infant had evacuated from Leningrad and survived the journey to a small resort town in the Caucasus only to arrive a few short weeks before the Wehrmacht overran and occupied it. She had scratched out an existence doing laundry for the officers there, and a year later, with the Red Army threatening to retake the town, had retreated with those officers all the way back to Munich, where she spent the remainder of the war in a munitions factory. Another man might have wondered if this child was German.
But he had just been handed back his life. It was a miracle—it embarrasses him to think in such terms, but there is no other word for it—and he would not spit on it. Instead, he threw himself into saving what had been given him, forging new identities as Polish Ukrainians for himself and Marina and the boy so that they could emigrate to America. They made a new life, learned a new language, found work, made a home. They even had a second child, a leap of faith in their future. And both of them did their best not to look back, lest they turn into pillars of salt. If they spoke at all of the war, they were as careful as the official censors back in the Soviet Union to mention only the victories and the acts of heroism.
It didn’t matter. The bond that had first brought them together as children existed whether they spoke of it or not, the bond of survivors. Here in America, a relentlessly foolish and optimistic country, what they knew drew them closer together. She was his country and he hers. They were inseparable.
Until now. She is leaving him, not all at once, which would be painful enough, but in a wrenching succession of separations. One moment she is here, and then she is gone again, and each journey takes her a little farther from his reach. He cannot follow her, and he wonders where she goes when she leaves.
Listen. Coming up the Main Staircase, you can hear them, their raucous laughter and shouted toasts. “The king drinks!” they cry. There is a party in progress in the Snyders Room, a feast to celebrate the Day of the Three Kings. The traditional pie has been baked, and the older man in the middle there must have gotten the piece with the bean inside, because he is wearing the crown of the Bean King. He is surrounded by a tight composition of happy, jostling couples, children, and even a babe in arms. “The king drinks!” Glasses are raised. Do you see that fellow standing behind him with the upraised pitcher? That is the Bean King’s son-in-law, the painter himself. And there is Jordaens’s wife, Yelizabeth. Oh, and over here, look at this, this fellow in the jester’s cap, with one hand reaching out for Jordaens’s pitcher while the other slips casually down the front of this woman’s bodice. “The king drinks! The king drinks!” There they go again. They are boisterous, rollicking. The only stillness in the painting is in the lower right corner, a hound whose eyes are focused with canine intensity on the ham in the Bean King’s lap.
Her granddaughter is getting married. Katie, the girl with the braces. And the groom, whose name escapes her just now.
The lawn is thronged with wedding guests. They mingle and shake hands and hug each other. A string quartet is posted down by the beach on a half circle of folding chairs, and strains of Bach waft up on the early-afternoon breezes.
Marina stands just inside the gate, hesitating. She has difficulty with large groups of people; there are so many faces to keep straight, so many sensations to organize. It is almost dizzying, the blur of faces, the rustle of stiff fabrics, the perfume of so many bodies.
Standing at the gate, she appears to be a greeter, so people make a point to stop and shake her hand. She smiles and says that it’s a lovely day. “It’s so good to see you,” she adds when she suspects that this person may be someone she should know.
Finally, the guests have all arrived and assembled near the beach.
“Papa, we’re going to get started pretty soon.” It is their son, Andrei. He is dressed in a dark suit and looks uncommonly handsome.
“Good morning, beautiful.” He kisses Marina on each cheek and then offers her his arm. “Are you ready to sit down?”
“Will you sit next to me?” she asks coyly.
“I can’t. I have to give Katie away. But Papa will sit with you, okay?” Marina nods. Andrei walks them to their seats where Helen is waiting for them. She slides her purse off the seat next to her.
“Did you say hello to everyone, Mama?”
“I think so.”
“Who’s the woman in the hat?”
“Who?”
“Over there.”
Marina looks in the direction Helen is nodding. There is a woman in a big blue hat like a flying saucer, but it’s not someone she recognizes. She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”
“You were talking to her for a long time.”
“Oh, well, she was very nice. I think this is her home.”
“You should see Katie. I went upstairs a little while ago. She looks so beautiful.”
“You look beautiful, too,” Marina tells her daughter.
Helen shrugs off the compliment, but then impulsively takes her mother’s hand and squeezes it. “I…” she starts to say something, but then just gives her mother’s hand another squeeze.
The music is triumphal, and the guests rise and turn to view the approaching bride. She is indeed beautiful, luminous and happy. Andrei is stricken but resolutely delivers her to the handsome young man who has robbed him of his own youth. The company of attendants arrayed on either side of the bride and groom are sober with the unanticipated import of this moment. And looking around, one can see on the faces of the assembled family and guests the best of their humanity radiating a collective warmth around this fledgling young couple. There is music and tears and words. Commitment and love and cherish and community and honor.
And music and more words. Olga Markhaeva recites poetry, and Anya sings a song she remembers from her childhood, romantic and sweet. If Marina lives to be eighty, she thinks, she will never forget this wonderful night.
Such a feast! There is the butter, but also American cheese and boiled pearl barley in silky fat and a bottle of vodka. They have invited guests to share the spoils Viktor has brought back from the front. Sergei Pavlovich and his sister Liliia have contributed a handful of dried apricots that Nadezhda boiled down to make a glaze for her shortbread. Anya has brought an onion, which they slice into wafers.
Paper lanterns are strung from the pipes and a white linen tablecloth laid over the bare wooden table. On the table is arranged an extravagant array of delicacies. They light not one but three candles, and the dank little room in the cellar flickers with light, still cold but bright with the illusion of warmth. Even the sound of shells exploding in the world above them can’t dampen their high spirits. With thimblefuls of vodka, they toast the Red Army’s advances toward Tikhvin, they toast the brave sons and daughters of the Soviet Union, they toast the great fortune of food and friends with whom to share it. It is enough to make them feel drunk, the vodka and the sharp bite of onion and the melting sweetness of shortbread. They ravish the food like lovers. Afterward, they listen as Olga recites Anna Akhmatova’s poems. Her voice, by day clipped and hard, is slow as a deep river, and the candlelight transforms her profile, softening the broad planes of her forehead and nose, and sparkling in her damp eyes.
Somewhere there is a simple life and a world,
Transparent, warm, joyful…
There at evening a neighbor talks with a girl
Across the fence, and only the bees can hear
This most tender murmuring of all.
But we live ceremoniously and with difficulty
And we observe the rites of our bitter meetings,
When suddenly the reckless wind
Breaks off a sentence just begun—
But not for anything would we exchange this splendid
Granite city of fame and calamity,
The wide rivers of glistening ice,
The sunless, gloomy gardens,
And barely audible, the muse’s voice.
Sated, Nadezhda nestles into Viktor’s arm like a schoolgirl and he kisses the top of her head. Marina
sees Liliia and Sergei mopping their eyes. It feels luxuriant, these warm tears on a full stomach. They are happy.
Later that night, they will retch into slop pails at the foot of their cots. Their bodies have forgotten how to digest such richness. Still, they won’t feel hungry for days.
The Majolica Room. So called because it holds the museum’s collection of the Italian style of decorative pottery. By happy accident, the room itself evokes majolica, being brightly painted in yellows and greens with Renaissance motifs.
Most famously, the room contains the museum’s two Raphaels, the Conestabile Madonna and the Holy Family. There is an apocryphal story that this room once held a third Raphael, another Madonna and child. According to an elderly room attendant, it was, like the Conestabile, a tondo, or round painting, “about the size of a beach ball” and in an elaborate gilt frame. If the woman is to be believed (and really, her story cannot be vouched for) the Madonna in this painting is seated in a field, with the Christ Child standing on her lap. At her side is another slightly older child dressed in animal skins and no doubt representing a young John the Baptist. This older child is handing a small cross to the Christ Child, who accepts it, and all three figures are gazing on the cross as though they can see into the future. She provides other details, that the Madonna is dressed in Roman garb and holds a small gilt-edged book in her hand, a prayer book perhaps, that the background is a delicately colored landscape and in the foreground are white flowers.
No painting in the museum’s holdings answers to this description. Though the details she has provided are consistent with Raphael’s style, there is absolutely no corroborating evidence to support her claim, and it is likely that she has merely confused it with the Conestabile Madonna.
The radio fell silent at the beginning of the month and the last newspaper went to print on December 12. Even the bombing has stopped. There is nothing left now to distract them from the miseries of cold and hunger except their own internal resources. And so, as the world gets smaller and colder and dimmer, Marina notices, people are becoming fixated. Most fixate on their physical miseries, spending hours running their tongues over swollen gums or opening and shutting the same cupboard in search of food that is not there. But others disown their shriveling bodies and fixate instead on an idea.