by Debra Dean
Uncle Viktor has become increasingly obsessed with finishing his history of Urartu. He worries that he may die before he completes it, and that this unearthed history will die with him. Marina lies in bed late into the night and listens to the feverish scratching of his pen. It has gotten so cold in the cellars that ink freezes, and so he must constantly stop and warm the bottle in his hands. But then a few minutes later, the scratching will start again. Sometimes he writes late into the night until he collapses at his desk.
In another corner of Bomb Shelter #3, the architect Alexander Nikolsky also has his fixation. He sketches so incessantly that at the end of the day his fist will not unclench to release his pencil. The other night, he staged a showing of these drawings. He lined up chairs in his corner of the cellar, leaned one drawing against the back of each chair, and invited his neighbors to come view his work.
And when they came, what people saw was not art such as they had expected but drawings of the actual room where they stood. He had sketched interiors of the cellar and its residents, odd little drawings of their makeshift lodgings. Sketch after sketch showed the low vaulted ceilings crossed with pipes, the clutter of furniture, and the stark shadows cast by a single oil lamp. He had also sketched the rooms upstairs, some drawings all but black, others portraying eerily gothic scenes with figures dwarfed in huge, vacant spaces. One drawing showed merely a hand with three marble-size pieces of bread resting in the palm.
What struck Marina was the roughness of the drawings, their looming shapes and smudgy darkness. That and the human figures, faceless and interchangeable. She didn’t know if this was his intention, but they had the quality of nightmares.
Nikolsky pondered this. “My intention was not to suggest anything but what is. These are not meant to be art. They are documentation, so that those who come later will know how we lived,” he said.
Marina was reminded uncomfortably of her uncle recording the history of the lost civilization of Urartu.
“But surely,” Marina said to Nikolsky, “some here will live to tell the story themselves.”
“Oh, yes,” Nikolsky agreed pleasantly. “But who will believe them?”
Marina has her memory palace: that has become her fixation. She can now walk anywhere in the picture gallery, and the sculptures and paintings appear so readily in her mind that she can rattle most of them off without thinking. What started as an exercise, a distraction, has come to seem like the very point of her existence. But if she had to justify that point, she would be at a loss. There are no books, no drawings, nothing to show for nearly three months of practice.
“That is the point,” Anya says. “Your uncle and Alexander Nikolsky are wise men, I’m sure, but they trust too much to paper. No one can take away what is in here.” She taps her forehead.
“Yes, no one can take it away, but no one else can see it, either, Anya.”
“Don’t give up just yet, dear.”
Marina sighs.
One day shortly after they began their little tours, Anya stopped in the Titian Room, pointed to a place on the wall, and then, in a conspiratorial whisper, described a painting that Marina had never seen.
Anya breathed into Marina’s ear. “They took it away.”
“Why do you whisper, Auntie?” Marina asked. “It’s not a secret that paintings went to Moscow. Everyone knows this.” About ten years ago, Stalin forced the Hermitage to send a large part of its holdings, including some four hundred old masters, to the Museum of Fine Arts in exchange for some Impressionists and Post-Impressionists which were too decadent to display. The professors at the academy used to talk quite openly about it, though of course they were careful to couch the rape of the museum in the most veiled of euphemisms.
Anya shook her head and whispered, “Not the paintings that went to Moscow. Others. Before that. Before you were born.” She glanced around again, as though someone might be hiding in the empty room. “They would come and the next morning things would be missing,” Anya said, raising her eyebrows knowingly.
“Who?”
“I never saw them, but it was well known that they were from the Antiquariat.”
According to Anya, all through the twenties, Stalin’s agents came to Orbeli with lists and left in the night with art to be sold on the international market. When the room attendants and museum guides came to work in the morning, they would find that art was missing and that the remaining paintings had been rehung in the night to disguise the gaps. Curators and directors made no mention of the vanished work and rebuffed any questions, and quickly it was understood that, officially, this art had never existed. Anya says that, years before the official deacquisitions, hundreds of other pieces disappeared one by one: paintings and sculpture and enough silver to fill a pirate ship.
But Anya can recall these paintings as easily as those that are still part of the collection, and she has come up with a scheme to include all these missing works in Marina’s memory palace. Never mind that Marina has never seen them herself. This has become Anya’s fixation.
“If no one is left to remember them,” Anya said when she first hatched this lunatic notion, “then it is as though they never existed.”
Marina agreed that this was sad but protested the logic of trying to remember something she had never seen. But Anya was not interested in reason. “I could die any day now,” she answered, “and when I do, they should not die with me.”
It is impossible to argue, as she shows every sign of being near death. The many layers of clothing everyone must pile on against the cold conceal the worst ravages of starvation, but Anya is increasingly frail, hardly able to bear even the weight of her own bones. Walking tires her, and she can take only a few steps without having to rest. Her health alone would seem to be reason enough to abandon walking the palace and burning precious calories unnecessarily, but Anya is adamant, and Marina suspects that this need to pass on what she remembers is the only thing keeping her alive.
So now Marina is trying to relearn the rooms, adding another layer of vanished paintings over the ones she already knows. Anya describes the missing canvas in detail, and while Marina can’t actually visualize it, she commits enough to memory to appease her friend. It is tedious work, and even though they get up earlier and earlier, their progress has slowed to a crawl. They have not yet made it past the New Hermitage rooms or across the courtyard to the rooms in the Winter Palace, and some days they cannot even get up the stairs.
This morning, though, Anya is determined to visit the Rembrandt Room, where she says she has much to show Marina.
The Main Staircase inside the New Hermitage is treacherous with ice, and there are no handrails to prevent a fall. Anya leans heavily on Marina, and the two edge up one step at a time, like mountain climbers on a treacherous slope. It takes them half an hour to reach the top. They traverse the long landing, passing empty marble pedestals, and come to the first room beyond the staircase, where the van Dykes hung. Anya pulls a rag from the pocket of her jacket. She is loath to admit how exhausted she is, so while she rests she makes a show of inspecting a large frame leaning against the wall. She carefully wipes away dust that has settled along the top edge.
Marina stands at her side and looks around the vacant room. In some ways, it is more beautiful now. Stripped of the paintings and furnishings, the room itself comes to the fore, austere and grand. Frost has etched elaborate patterns across the walls, swirls that glitter in the morning light. Still, the empty frames remind one of all the people who are missing. The Earl of Danby and Queen Henrietta. Charles the First in his armor and Thomas Wharton with his feathered hat. A new family with a baby girl and a pair of young sisters dressed in their finery. The elder sister gazes proudly at Marina as she passes and identifies them, Elizabeth and Philadelphia Wharton, but the younger one looks as though she would like to be released from the uncomfortable pose that the artist has put her in.
There are others that she cannot see, but last week Anya described every detail of the paintin
gs, and so when Marina passes the approximate spots where they hung, she calls back to Anya, still lingering near the door, describing a lord and then a lady and, last, a mother and daughter.
“She’s wearing a crimson dress and a ruff,” Marina says. “And the daughter, who is about seven or eight, stands to her left. She looks like a little adult in her dress.”
“Can you picture them?” Anya asks hopefully.
“Maybe a little,” Marina lies.
She circles nearly back to where Anya is still standing. Here is the artist van Dyke himself, a romantic-looking man with curls and a long nose. And just beyond him, in the enormous frame that Anya was dusting, is a Madonna and child. They look out of place among all these Flemish gentlefolk. The painting is called The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, but two birds on the wing over Mary’s head give the painting its nickname, Madonna with Partridges.
“Are you all right now?” she asks Anya.
“Quite,” Anya says.
Marina takes her arm. “If we want to get to the Rembrandts today, I think we’d better keep moving.” And so the two of them walk, arm in arm, through the Rubens Room. They are moving so slowly that Marina can give a running commentary, though she skips over a few pieces. She resolutely ignores Bacchus and wills his corpulence to fade back to silvery frost, merely noting for the record that he is there. The same goes for Rubens’s painting of the daughter suckling her starving father.
“Mars and Cupid. Venus and Adonis. The Coronation of the Virgin. Hagar Leaving the House of Abraham.”
At this pace, even if they turn around now, she will be late for work. She assists the museum carpenter in the construction of coffins. The museum’s storerooms are the only remaining source of lumber in the city, and so coffin building has become the main occupation of the displaced workers on the staff. They are not craftsmen, but then again these are the most utilitarian of boxes, a few boards of pine slapped together to hold bodies that weigh next to nothing. There are so many workers out ill now that those who are still able are driven even harder trying to keep up with the demand. If she is late, she had better have a very good reason. Something better than strolling the picture gallery and cataloging missing art.
When they get to the Tent Hall, Marina moves them right down the center of the hall, not even bothering to comment on what is on either side of her. She expects Anya to scold her, but the old woman has also focused her attention on the doorway at the end of the hall leading to the Rembrandt Room. Halfway down the length of the hall, Anya suddenly weaves and then grabs at Marina’s chest.
“I’m fine,” she says, still gripping Marina’s jacket. “I just lost my balance there.”
“We really should turn around, Anya. You’re looking tired. Besides, I’ll need to go to work soon.”
Anya pulls herself upright and releases Marina. “If you must go, you must go. I will go on to the Rembrandt Room.” She picks up the pace, weaving wildly toward the doorway, as if to suggest that it is Marina who is holding them up.
“Okay, okay, slow down,” Marina says, taking her arm again and steadying her. “We don’t need to get there yesterday.”
Just inside the door, Anya stops in front of the wall that held Danae, but her eyes move beyond the right edge of the frame. “This was one of the first,” she says. “I came to work one morning and he was gone. Quite full of himself, don’t you think?”
It is all Marina can do not to remind Anya that she has never seen this painting, whatever it is. “Who is he?” she asks.
“Oh, well, Rembrandt said he was a Polish nobleman, but he doesn’t look like any Pole I’ve ever seen. He’s Russian. Look.” She points. “He’s got that bearskin cap and the fur cloak like they used to wear here. And that big pearl earring. He thinks he’s quite the catch with that mustache of his, but look at those jowls under his chin.”
“And what was it called?”
Anya pulls out of her reverie and gives Marina a sharp look, as though she has asked a foolish question. “A Polish Nobleman.”
A Polish Nobleman, pearl earring, mustache, bearskin cap. Okay, good enough.
“Now that one looks a bit like you,” Anya says, pointing to the next wall. “But younger. She’s got your red hair, though.”
Anya goes on to describe a girl leaning on a broom and looking directly at the viewer. Girl with a Broom. And then a portrait of a lady with a carnation, and another one of Pallas Athene, and another of an old man.
“Now here is the scene where Peter denied Christ. This was one of his best, in my opinion.”
“Another one?” Marina wonders if perhaps Anya is confused. It’s hard to believe that Stalin would sell off so many masterpieces. Hasn’t he always said that this art belongs to the people, that it is their heritage? She is not so naive as to believe everything she is told, but to sell even one Rembrandt seems inconceivable. Anya has already described half a dozen.
“Do you know this story, Marina? At the last supper, Christ told Peter that he would deny knowing him. Before the cock crowed three times. And the Gospels tell us that this is in fact what happened. You see him here”—she points—“he is sitting around the fire with some people in the town. Romans. Now, this is the touch of the master. Rembrandt used the firelight to make the scene more dramatic.”
Anya’s voice blurs behind the thought taking shape in Marina’s mind. She knows Anya wouldn’t lie outright, but might these all be fabrications? Might Anya have invented these paintings? They are very specific visions, but that doesn’t mean they are real.
“Are you sure it was a Rembrandt?”
Anya turns very slowly to Marina. “When you see it, you’ll know.” Her eyes are as bright and blank as coins. “No one else could paint like that.”
Marina determines in that moment to ask Olga Markhaeva if she’s ever heard of these missing paintings. She doesn’t know why this didn’t occur to her before. Anya is, after all, a very old woman.
The return trip to the stairs is even more protracted, though they are stopping only for Anya to rest. But if Marina is tempted to rush her, one look at Anya dispels the idea. With each step, Anya’s appearance grows grayer, and soon Marina is half carrying her, Anya’s feet dragging almost weightlessly.
They stop again near the Madonna with Partridges. She slumps Anya against a marble vase, propping her up with one hand. Anya is perilously close to collapsing to the floor, and if she does, Marina isn’t at all sure she will be able to get her up again.
The Madonna is also resting. Holding her baby in her lap, she looks distracted and even a bit alarmed by a flock of putti who are dancing ring-around-the-rosy nearby. She doesn’t look at all anxious to take on anyone else’s troubles. But Marina petitions her anyway. She’s not asking for much. “Help me get her downstairs,” she whispers. “Don’t let her die here, please.” She adds another “please” for good measure and with her free hand furtively touches her fingers to her forehead.
The Rubens Room. Even here, in a room riotous with flesh, the painting at the center of the long wall gives one pause. Here is a young woman suckling an old man. She is young and plump and fresh-faced. He is naked, with only a black cloth draped over his genitals. His hands are bound in chains behind his back. Although his musculature is beautiful—the arms and legs fully sculpted, the chest and abdomen defined—his head is a horror: the beard and hair matted, the eyes bulging as grotesquely as a gargoyle’s and focused downward on the girl’s exposed nipple.
Before you either turn away in disgust or wink knowingly at one another, you should know that the artist insists that this is a picture about love. Filial love. The old man has been condemned by the Roman senate to die of hunger, and his daughter has come to his prison cell and offered her breast to feed him. This has nothing to do with the decorous love or amorous passions one is more accustomed to seeing in a painting. It is raw and wretched and demeaning. In the end, we are physical bodies and every abstract notion about love sinks beneath this fact.
�
�Doesn’t she look beautiful, Mama? The something old is Naureen’s pearls.”
“She reminds me of a girl I knew once.”
“Who was that?”
“Back in Leningrad. I don’t know—I forget her name now. She was upstairs.”
“Was this when you lived in the cellar?”
“Yes. I would go upstairs and visit her.”
“I don’t understand something. Why were you living in a cellar?”
“It was the war. They were dropping bombs.”
“Oh. Of course. That makes sense.”
“We all lived in the cellars then.”
“But not your friend who lived upstairs?”
“No.”
“Why not her?”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
“It’s okay, you don’t have to. I was just curious.”
“Her father died of starvation that winter. I remember that. She fed him with her breast milk, but he died anyway.”
Sleds have appeared on Nevsky Prospekt, throughout the city, children’s sleds painted red and yellow and blue. The tramcars have long since stopped running, frozen wherever they happened to be on their runs when the last of the electricity shut down. To get from one place to another, people walk. The streets are nearly deserted, but a few people trudge in slow motion, their bodies bent forward as if into a stiff wind. Some pull sleds, ferrying those who can no longer walk. The lame. The dead. Corpses wrapped in swaddling or still bundled in their heavy coats. Blue feet protrude. The only sounds on the street are the terrible squeaking of runners on ice.