by Debra Dean
Marina struggles over a hummock of frozen snow on the sidewalk. She has been walking for more than two hours and has journeyed five blocks from the service entrance of the New Hermitage, a distance she once traveled in an abstracted heartbeat, giving it no more of her attention than she gave to breathing. Now it is like being in a dream and trying to run from something: her legs will not move, they are inanimate wood, rooted into the ground, and only with a concentrated effort of will can she heave one stump off the ground, push it forward, then set it down again gingerly, feeling for the slide of ice beneath her boot before she shifts her weight.
She rests, breathless and dizzy from the exertion, and reaches out her hand to rest it against the stone front of a building for support. Slowly, she lifts her eyes up from the ground. The flat gray sky reels momentarily before stabilizing.
She is only a few blocks from the Krasnov apartment, but though this is her neighborhood, she hardly recognizes it. Hoarfrost covers every surface, and icicles hang like moss from the wires and eaves above her. The buildings, too, are crusted over with ice, and their boarded windows present a blank face to the street. There is no noise, no dogs or cats in the street, no smoke drifting up from the chimneys, no evidence at all of life. She might be the sole remaining survivor of a lost civilization, like Uncle Viktor’s Urartu. The doomed citizenry has left behind messages, however, plastered on the plywood and walls and sealed under ice, but still legible. Here is a poster with the uplifting pronouncement “Victory Is Near.” Another official poster commands the reader to seek shelter during air raids and threatens severe penalties for failing to do so. Beneath these, at eye level, is a frozen collage of typed and handwritten notices: offers to exchange shoes, a mahogany armoire, a bicycle, gold and silver jewelry, a morocco-bound set of travel journals, a sable coat, a typewriter. Whatever one might want is advertised here, all in exchange for foodstuffs. They are old, the ragged scraps of paper smeared and buried under layers of frost. The last desperate pleas of the civilization, they were posted here back when one might still conceivably barter for food. There are no fresh notices.
In this new geography, the next corner recedes into the distant horizon like the forced perspective in landscapes, hazy gray and impossibly far away, separated by a rolling mountain range of compacted dirty snow and studded with frozen hills of trash and slick lakes of ice. She resolutely turns her attention back to her legs, to the next step. In front of her, she holds out the image of a chocolate bar.
Today is Tatiana’s birthday, and Nadezhda was particularly distressed this morning on account of the day. She cannot admit the too-crushing possibility that her children are dead, so she focused her grief instead on the idea of her little girl celebrating her birthday without family around her. She reminisced distractedly about past birthday celebrations, the cakes that she used to bake for her children, cakes filled with jam and frosted with buttercream, the cocoa, the wrapped gifts heaped on the birthday child’s plate. She remembered hiding a toy rifle, a packet of crayons, and a bar of chocolate for Mikhail’s last birthday, tucking them under some linens on a high shelf where the boy wouldn’t think to look. In the distracted tumult of the children’s leaving, she had forgotten about them until that moment.
“I expected him to be back before his birthday.” She turned on her husband with a sudden fury. “You promised me they would come home in two weeks.”
Viktor looked up at her, his dull eyes filled with pain, but he didn’t say anything. He hasn’t gotten out of bed for ten days now, and in that time his appearance has undergone a disquieting transformation. His face is a skeletal mask, his nose grown sharp, his eyes hollow.
Marina cut off her aunt before she could further berate her sick husband. “Are they still there?”
“Where?” Nadezhda asked, confused.
“The gifts. The chocolate. Is it still there?”
Nadezhda was too distraught to understand the significance of the question, but Marina was already planning this journey. Chocolate, probably a large bar, given Nadezhda’s tendency to indulge her children. Even now, Marina can taste the velvety sweetness in her mouth.
When she turns off Nevsky and onto her street, she is wrenched by the view of Number Nineteen, her home. The face of the building has been peeled away by an explosive, exposing the front apartments to the street like the rooms of a dollhouse. The ground floor is buried in rubble but she can see right into the rooms on the first floor. In one room, a yellow kitchen, chairs are strewn on the floor but an unbroken teacup sits on the table. A calendar hangs askew over the stove. This would be the Magrachev family’s apartment, Marina thinks, a factory supervisor and his wife, her elderly father, and a little girl Mikhail’s age. In the adjoining room, a light fixture still hangs from the ceiling, its shade rocking in a gust of wind. Two coats, a man’s and a woman’s, hang on pegs near the door.
The front entrance to the building, once beautiful Italian marble with two etched-glass doors, is demolished, so Marina makes her slow way around to the side yard. Rubble and refuse is heaped in the yard in frozen piles. She rings the bell and waits. She rings again. Perhaps everyone has left. It doesn’t seem possible that anyone could still be living here, and she is on the verge of tears. She has no door key for the service entrance. All this way for nothing. She cannot feel her legs, and it is impossible to believe that they will carry her back over the distance she has come.
And then the door opens a crack.
“Who is it?” A hoarse voice crackles, and the face of an ancient hag peers around the doorjamb.
“It’s Marina from Five East.”
“Marina Anatolyevna Krasnova?”
Marina realizes with a start that the hag is Vera Yurievna, the building’s janitor, a woman in her early forties. The door opens wide and Vera throws her arms around Marina and hugs her as though Marina were a long-lost relation.
“You’re a block of ice, child. Come in, come in. I’ll put some water on the stove,” she offers, and draws Marina inside and down a black hallway to her apartment.
Vera lights a candle that gutters, spitting flickers of light into the gloom and revealing a dank little warren. She has moved into her kitchen, boarding up the window and closing off the other room. Into this room she has moved a narrow bed, a single chair, and a small table, all arranged around a burzhuika, the ubiquitous little iron stove that everyone uses now.
She offers Marina the chair and pulls a blanket off the rumpled heaps on the bed. “Here, put this around you. We’ll have some heat in a moment.” The blanket is still warm from Vera’s body, and Marina accepts it gratefully.
Vera starts a fire, all the while asking after Marina’s family, her aunt, her uncle, the two little chicks. She pulls a book off the table, a collection of fables, and tears out two pages, crumples them, and places them in the stove. This is followed by what is clearly part of a table leg. Vera lights the paper and carefully nurses the flame into a tidy little fire.
“Pull that chair closer. Warm your hands.” Then she dribbles some water from a jug into the kettle and sets it back on the stove.
“Are you the only one here?” Marina asks. As much as she hates being cheek by jowl with the crowds huddled in the basements of the Hermitage, this desolation seems a far worse alternative.
“Oh, no. Of course, a lot of them left after the shelling, moved in with friends or whomever.”
“When was that?”
“December twelfth, just after midnight. Terrible.” Vera stares into some private vision. “Terrible.
“But there are still twenty-three of us. The apartments in the rear are unharmed. Your apartment is just as you left it. Anna Ostromovna Dudin and her mother, next door to you, they’re still here. And there’s seven in Four East, Maria Volkova and her little chicks and three cousins.” Vera ticks off the residents still living in the building and the fates of those who have gone. “Sofia Grechina, do you remember her, the poet, that odd woman on the first floor with the two poodles? Her
apartment was buried, but she was working the swing shift. You’ve never seen such hysteria. The two dogs, she had managed to keep them alive, I think she fed them part of her own rations, but of course they were buried in the rubble. She’s moved in with Georgi Karasev’s mother.”
Marina recalls the two coats left hanging on their pegs, the swinging light shade, and asks about the Magrachevs. Vera shakes her head.
The water comes to a boil, and Vera pours it into two porcelain cups.
“To our loved ones at the front,” Vera intones and lifts her cup.
Marina cups the warm china in her hands, breathing in the steam and then taking shallow sips. The water is luxuriously hot and cuts a molten swath down Marina’s throat to her middle. It feels like new life.
“Oh, goodness, that reminds me,” Vera says. “I have a letter for you.” She crosses to a shelf and, after a bit of rummaging, produces a thin envelope. “It came a few weeks ago,” Vera apologizes. “I was going to forward it to you, but the postwoman has stopped coming.”
Her name and address are written out in Dmitri’s careful script. The letter trembles in Marina’s hands. He is alive. She tears open the envelope and pulls out two sheets. They are ribbed with strips of blue paper pasted over Dmitri’s script by the censors.
My dearest Marinochka,
I think of you every moment and hold the image of you in my heart to remind me of why I am here. We are
But despite all this, I remain hopeful to see you again soon. Everything reminds me of you. Last night, a girl came to our camp with a goodwill delegation from . She had your hair and from a distance, she looked so much like you that I called out your name and ran like an idiot halfway across the camp. But, as you know, my distance vision is poor and when I got closer, she actually bore little resemblance to you. I tried to explain my mistake, but I fumbled so, and I think I may have frightened her a little. As a token of apology, I gave her some sunflower seeds.
but then I feel the warmth of the sun on my back, and the vivid green of the trees just beyond our camp and I feel hopeful again that
Marina stops reading, puzzled, and then looks in the upper left corner and finds a date: 21 September 1941. The letter is almost three months old. She feels a flash of anger toward Vera, but before it can bloom she thinks to check the postmark. It reads 28 November.
News comes to us here from the city that How are your aunt and uncle? And what does he think of our engagement? It occurred to me after I left that perhaps I should have asked him for your hand, and I hope you will tell him that I regret not thinking of this sooner. Perhaps he will not mind so much.
Write to me, dearest, and tell me everything you can think of. It needn’t be important, but just the daily things, what you ate for dinner or how the packing is coming. When everything seems so weighted with significance, it is nice to hear of inconsequential things.
Give Tatiana a big hug for me. I don’t imagine that Mikhail will endure a hug, but tell him that he must study hard, that he is the hope of our country. And for yourself, you must imagine that I am kissing your hair, your eyelids, the tip of your nose, your lips, et cetera.
With all my love,
Dima
Vera is watching her face. “Is he well?”
“I don’t know. The letter is very old.”
“I’m sorry, dear. I didn’t see that it was yours before the postwoman had gone, or it would have been forwarded.”
“No, no. You’re not to blame. Thank you for saving it for me.” She feels grief welling up inside her, surging like nausea, but she tamps down her thoughts and forces the darkness back down her throat. She carefully refolds the letter, returns it to its envelope, and puts it into her coat pocket.
“I suppose I should go upstairs.” She does not tell Vera why she has come, but makes up something about needing to fetch some papers for Uncle Viktor. She has brought her door key but stupidly forgotten to bring a candle, so Vera gives her the stub of her own candle. Her generosity makes Marina ashamed of her secret about the chocolate.
“I hope you don’t mind if I don’t go up with you,” Vera says. “The stairs, you know.”
It is a herculean effort to climb up the dizzying stairwell. Marina pulls herself one step at a time up five flights of stairs. By the time she reaches the door to her apartment and turns the key in the lock, she is panting shallowly and can barely find the strength to push open the heavy door.
The dim candlelight laps at a dead gray interior webbed with frost. Uncle Viktor sold off the Oriental carpet in the front room back in October and pieces of the wooden furniture were sold later for firewood, so the room is nearly bare. A lone divan hunkers like a gray beast in the corner.
Marina follows the candlelight into the hall where the linen cupboard is. She doesn’t want to look in the other rooms, but when she sees that she will need something to stand on in order to reach the high shelf, she makes a tour of the apartment until she finds a metal footlocker in Viktor and Nadezhda’s room. Even empty, it is too heavy to lift, and as Marina drags it slowly back to the closet, it scrapes a trail across Nadezhda’s parquet floors. Finally, she is able to reach the shelf, and she pulls down on top of her head a pile of tablecloths, napkins, doilies, a toy gun. Her hand finds something rectangular, the size of an envelope but heavy in her hand.
She might have eaten it right there, sitting on the metal footlocker, staring down at this miracle in her hand. No one would know. No one. Something desperate works at her gut, and her brain churns, her fingers tremble. What she thinks is that she is holding the life of her uncle in her hands.
It is a terrible thing to have loved ones, people to whom you are shackled by whatever bonds make their pain yours. Although she has no tender feelings for her uncle, her obligation is as strong as love. She recognizes the compact. It is that same sense of duty that has governed his behavior toward her all her life, taking her in and providing for her in spite of his fears. Giving her the larger pieces of bread at every meal, even as he wastes away. Perhaps this is love.
She knows that if she unwraps the foil and exposes the chocolate, the last bit of her that is human will die, and so before she can think any further she stuffs it into her coat pocket with Dmitri’s letter. On the way back to the museum, she feels the weight of the chocolate and the letter in her pocket. They bang insistently against her thigh at each step.
It begins to snow, a few flakes at first, but before long the sky is heavy and swirling. The few other stragglers on the boulevard disappear behind a curtain of whiteness, and she moves on alone through the soft blur as though in a nightmare. Her feet are leaden, and though she keeps lifting each foot and setting it down again, she has no sense of moving forward. The landmarks that marked her journey here have disappeared into whiteness, and the snow muffles any sounds. She cannot recall crossing the Griboedova Canal, though surely she must have.
Five, twelve, forty steps. She begins to count in order to reassure herself that she is moving. She must not panic, she must stay calm and keep walking, trusting that each step forward brings her closer to safety. But she is unsure even of this. For all she knows, she may have turned off Nevsky, she may be wandering in the wrong direction. She has no idea where she is, and the whiteness is starting to dim. Soon it will be completely dark, and what will become of her then?
She is up to one hundred and sixty-three when her weight lands on something that is not ice or snow. The softness shifts under her foot and she yelps, yanking back her boot and lurching to find her balance.
A dark bundle of rags lies at her feet, half hidden under a dusting of snow.
“Mary, mother of God,” the bundle exhales in a soft rattle. “Have mercy.” An arm extends up toward her, and a claw rising out of a blanket grasps feebly at her coat.
Terrified, she bats it away. The claw reaches toward her again, but she swats it away with such force that it falls back to the snow and lies there, still. Marina’s heart is thudding dangerously in her chest. She feels hers
elf floating in a weightless panic, with the snow swirling around her face. She cannot think, cannot form any thoughts except that this wraith is trying to take her down. People fall and they die where they have fallen. She must not let it happen. She must not die here in the street. She must get back to the museum.
And then she sees the eyes, two hollow eyes peering up at her from above a paisley headscarf wrapped around the face. The eyes are pleading silently with her.
She knows she cannot lift the woman. She hasn’t the strength to get her onto her feet, much less help her to walk.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I can’t help you.”
The eyes do not shift.
Marina feels again the weight of the chocolate in her pocket. It won’t make any difference, she tells herself. The woman is going to die. You can’t help her. Be reasonable. There are family at home who need also. It is never enough.
But already she is pulling the candy bar from inside her coat and ripping back the foil. She breaks off a chunk of the chocolate and, crouching forward, holds it out toward the woman. The woman doesn’t move, but her dull eyes widen almost imperceptibly. Marina peels the frozen scarf away from the woman’s face. The mouth falls open, and Marina places a square of chocolate on the woman’s tongue.
One of five rooms devoted to the Flemish, this is known as the Snyders Room. It is a large hall, with a box-beam ceiling painted with Florentine ornamentation. Checkerboard parquet floors, et cetera. Really, the room itself is of no consequence. It is what the room contains—the long wall is lined with enormous market stalls displaying every kind of fish imaginable, geese and game birds strung overhead, and venison and rabbits draped in languid piles. And yet another stall with a profusion of vegetables overflowing their baskets. Heads of cabbage, leeks, garlic, and cauliflowers, mushrooms and parsnips, the variety is dazzling. Walk a few feet farther and here is a long table of fruits: bowls of apples, baskets heaped with plums and pears, stalks of artichokes and watermelons spilling onto the ground. The busy excess makes one faint. One could eat for years in this room and never be hungry.