The Madonnas of Leningrad

by Debra Dean

  They go around to the little lot at the side of the inn and get into the rental car. She starts the car and turns off the static rattle of the radio before they crunch over the gravel and roll out onto the deserted street. No one is out at this hour; the town is asleep under a blanket of thick stars. She rolls down the window and quietly calls her mother’s name as they creep down the street. They pass a darkened ice cream parlor and a variety of shops selling clothing and souvenirs and antiques. She stops in front of the ferry ramp and peers out across the black bay. The thought that her mother might wander toward the water unsettles her, but she puts aside that possibility.

  Past the ferry dock, the tourist shops begin to peter out, interspersed with bed-and-breakfasts, a diner with its chairs turned upside down on the tables, a real estate office, a Coast to Coast, and a gas station, its self-serve pumps showcased under a stark fluorescent glare. As the street begins to climb up a slope, there are homes set back from the road, shingled cottages adorned with hedges and neat gardens, others more modern and perfunctory. She scans the darkened yards, the halos thrown by porch lights, looking for movement. Beside her, Dmitri is pressed forward against the shoulder restraint, his eyes trained out the passenger window at the houses on the right.

  Then they are past town, and their headlights are brushing under thick trees, picking out only the occasional road sign or gravel turnout.

  “I don’t think she would come out this far,” Helen says.

  “I suppose not,” he says, and slumps back into his seat.

  “It’s okay, Papa. She’s probably just somewhere right around the inn. She may even be back in bed by now.” She means to comfort her father, but she herself isn’t convinced. Given what she’s seen in the past two days, it seems like a bad bet that her mother has it in her to remember her room number, much less find her way back to an inn in a strange town. She flashes on news stories about confused seniors wandering away from their homes and even disappearing for good.

  She turns around at a wide spot in the road, and they circle back into town. At each corner, she catches her breath until she can see far enough ahead to know that her mother isn’t on this block either. She turns the car onto a cross street and they roll slowly toward the other edge of town.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this? About Mama?” Helen tries not to sound reproachful.

  Dmitri stares out the front window, blinking and working his lips. They pass a bookstore, a small brick post office, a market. She scans the empty sidewalks and then glances back at her father. A tear is dribbling down his cheek.

  “I’m sorry, Papa. I’m not criticizing.”

  “We’ve always cared for each other.” His voice is thick.

  “What does Dr. Rich say? Have you at least talked with her about it?”

  “They did some tests. But there’s not so much to be done.”

  Helen steels herself. “Is it Alzheimer’s?”

  Dmitri nods.

  He is blinking furiously now and biting down hard on his lower lip.

  Helen pulls the car over to the side of the street and turns off the engine. Silence fills the interior of the car. She takes her father’s freckled hand in her own and squeezes it gently. The air seems to go out of him; tears gather in the folds beneath his eyes and spill down his cheeks.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he admits. “She’s getting worse. She can’t wash herself anymore. She only stands under the water and forgets to soap herself. I’m afraid to leave her alone, even for a few minutes. Last week, she put some plums in the dryer when I wasn’t looking. Our underwear came out with pink splotches, and I found pits in the bottom of the barrel.”

  “Have you told Andrei any of this?”

  Dmitri shakes his head. “I promised her I wouldn’t put her in a home. You know how he is—he is so sure.”

  “I know, but he just wants to do what’s best. Look, we’ll worry about that later. But I’m going to give him a call,” she says, and roots through her purse for her cell phone. “I think we may need some help here.” She finds the phone but can’t locate the piece of paper with her brother’s numbers on it. She empties the contents of her purse into her lap and picks through receipts and wadded Kleenex and tubes of lipstick.

  “Do you know his cell phone number?”

  “Two four six,” Dmitri intones. “Six three seven”—he pauses—“twenty-four seven. Twenty-four. Twenty-four something.”

  While she’s dialing information, she starts the car up again and they proceed down the street. The operator informs her that cell phone numbers aren’t listed, and at the customer’s request the home number isn’t listed either. She tries to explain that this is an emergency, but the woman is unmoved and suggests calling 911 if this is truly an emergency.

  The night sky is fading imperceptibly to gray at the horizon. Helen clicks the phone off and thinks a long moment before she redials information and asks for the local police.

  The voice that answers the phone is gravelly with sleep.

  “Is this the police?” she asks.

  “Island County sheriff, ma’am. Deputy Kremer.”

  Helen hears his muffled voice telling someone to go back to sleep. She apologizes for disturbing him and then explains that her mother is missing.

  “How long has your mother been gone?” he asks.

  Helen checks the clock. It is almost four. “A couple of hours, at least. My father woke up and she was gone.”

  “Are you sure she’s missing? Could she have just stepped out for some reason?”

  “She’s eighty-two and she has nowhere to go in the middle of the night.” Helen tamps down the impatience in her voice. “We’re visiting here. There was a wedding. My brother, Andrei Buriakov, has a place here.”

  “Buriakov?” If the name registers with the deputy, he doesn’t let on.

  “We’ve been driving all over, and I’m a little concerned something might have happened. She has memory problems. Alzheimer’s.”

  There is a pause, and when he speaks again, his voice has taken on a new tone, even and official. “Where are you calling from, ma’am?”

  “I’m in the car.” They are past town again, on a road that seems to be heading out in the general direction of Andrei’s, though she doesn’t recall what looks like a farm up ahead. “Maybe a mile outside of town,” she guesses. “I don’t know the road.”

  “And where was your mother last seen?”

  He asks a few more questions, taking down all the information: her name, where they are staying, her brother’s name, and then a careful description of her mother. He pauses before he asks, “Any chance she could have gotten on the ten o’clock ferry?”

  They stayed at Andrei’s last evening just long enough to see the bride and groom off on their honeymoon. Katie had stood on the float of the seaplane and thrown her bouquet back at the cluster of young women crowding the dock. Then the pilot helped the couple climb in and they puttered out into the bay and thundered noisily up into the summer sky. After that, the reception shifted into a party, and Helen and her parents made their excuses. At the hotel, her parents had turned in immediately, exhausted by the day’s festivities, but Helen was still up reading at ten. She remembers marveling that it was just starting to get dark.

  “I think I would have heard her,” Helen says. “Besides, I think she’s still in a nightgown. Wouldn’t someone stop her?”

  “Hard to say. How about we’ll meet you in front of the Arbutus. Might take us a few minutes to get over there.”

  When she clicks off the phone, she tells Dmitri that the deputy is meeting them, and then they turn back and take one last pass through town, past the hardware store, past the Bumblebee Diner with its sign reading “Closed, Come Again!” and past the Kingfisher B&B. A few cars have queued up alongside the road for the ferry. The glassy water of the harbor mirrors a dim gray sky, heavy with fog. A seagull cuts low over the water and drops onto a buoy, unsettling another gull in a flurry of shrieking. She w
atches the birds, dully aware now of her exhaustion and a clammy coldness.

  Many of the rooms have no name, only a number. Look around. The glass in the windows was shattered by an explosion, and the windows have been boarded over, so it is very dark. But perhaps you can just make out the walls and the pictureless frames, like empty eye sockets. Over here is a pile of sand with a shovel jammed in the top. What else? Nothing. Just frames. Nothing.

  Back up. Go back a room or two until something looks familiar and start again. There are over four hundred rooms, but they are all nearly empty.

  Cold seeps through the filmy cotton of her nightdress. She pulls the thin fabric close around her legs and hugs her arms to her chest, trying to warm herself. Someone has stolen her clothing, her quilted jacket and boots and gloves, though she doesn’t remember when.

  If she falls asleep, she will freeze. This much she knows. But where she is and how she got here are mysteries. Today, yesterday, even an hour ago, are blanks. She is suspended in the present moment and feeling oddly ephemeral, as though she is adrift on an open sea.

  Around her are dark shapes, as thin as limbs, skeletal arms and legs swaying, dancing in the blackness. Terror threatens to engulf her, but then the cold pulls her back and disciplines her thoughts.

  She is cold. Cold and hungry. This is familiar.

  There is also a scent that is familiar, though she can’t identify it, something earthy.

  It is dark. Night.

  And she is cold. She must not fall asleep. If she falls asleep, she will freeze.

  On nights when there is no moon, Leningrad disappears. From her perch on the watchtower, the edge of the Hermitage roof is merely a theory. The dying city beyond gives off no light. Like a photographic negative, what should be solid is seen as an absence, here a dome-shaped shadow cutting into the glittering pavé of stars, over there two black spires spiking the sky. The only other lights are dim as the stars but closer, tiny yellow lights that ring the edge of the imagined city, the campfires of the enemy at the front.

  It is the idea of a city, the idea of a world suggested by the gilded frame that surrounds it.

  She feels completely alone in the universe, suspended between the star-thick heavens and a black void below. The stars are not a comfort. It is the solitude of shepherds, unbearably lonely.

  Nadezhda died a month to the day after Viktor. A romantic might say that she had died of a broken heart, but that was a sentiment for different times. She lost the will to live, a separate thing.

  She could have survived, but she wouldn’t make any move to save herself. After Viktor’s death, she wouldn’t even leave the shelter. The other residents of Bomb Shelter #3 had begun to relocate upstairs, leaving behind the gloom and damp that had grown even more oppressive than the shelling up above. Some went back to their homes, others set up cots in the schoolroom, but Nadezhda could not be persuaded to join them. Marina tried to coax her to return to their old apartment, but she couldn’t bear the idea of being there without her family.

  So what, Marina wonders now, had made her think that her aunt might undertake a more perilous journey alone?

  In January, a road was completed over the frozen Lake Ladoga. Called the Road of Life, it was a slender breach in the blockade through which the city began to evacuate nonessential citizens and to siphon in the most critical supplies from “the mainland,” free Russia. When the first truck rolled across the lake and entered Leningrad, church bells rang to welcome it.

  As soon as the road was operational, Director Orbeli received orders from Moscow to reduce the staff of the Hermitage. One by one, he began calling people into his office. When Marina’s turn came, she waited in the hallway outside his closed door.

  Even had she not known the purpose of their meeting, she would have been nervous at the thought of standing alone in his presence. She had never before spoken privately with the director beyond meekly returning his greetings when they occasionally crossed paths on their respective rounds through the galleries. With his long white beard and the legends of his unpredictable rages, he was like the Old Testament god, and the prospect of incurring his displeasure made Marina’s hands shake uncontrollably.

  The door opened and a staff member emerged, her composure collapsing as she crossed the threshold. A voice inside commanded Marina to enter. Sitting behind his desk, Orbeli looked neither stern nor welcoming, only very tired. He gestured for her to sit down in the chair opposite him. Then, in a speech he had clearly repeated many times over already that day, he told Marina that her heroic service to the museum over the winter had not gone unappreciated. The people of the Soviet Union were indebted to her. Now, though, he must ask of her one last service. The museum was to be mothballed, and only a few dozen staff members would be needed to do that work. The rest were to be evacuated out of the city to ease the defense efforts. He would be waiting for letters of resignation on his desk.

  “Please don’t order me to go.” Her voice was so tiny that she wasn’t sure he had heard her. He continued to look at her with his hawkish eyes, but his expression didn’t change. At last he said, “May I ask why not?”

  How could she explain this? Without her here to keep the memory of its art alive on the walls, the museum would be merely another decaying shell. This was not an idea she could voice aloud.

  “My work is needed here,” she finally stammered.

  “I myself will be leaving at the end of the month. Do you consider yourself more necessary to the Hermitage than its director?”

  She flushed, and her eyes fell to the floor. She waited, half expecting to be incinerated into a heap of ash on the carpet.

  “You are the one whom I’ve seen prowling the picture gallery?”

  “Yes, Iosef Abgarovitch.”

  “The niece of Viktor Alekseevich.”

  “Yes.”

  “He was stubborn, too.”

  “Yes.”

  After a long moment, he said, “Well, go on then.”

  While Marina herself could not imagine leaving the Hermitage, she had seen no reason for Nadezhda to stay, and she formed the plan that her aunt should join the exodus of staff members. Her motives were selfish. She had become weary of the energy it took to endure her aunt’s stubborn grief, weary of climbing up the stairs from the abandoned shelter every day. She wanted to move up to the schoolroom where light trickled through an unboarded window. Mostly, she wanted to be free from the ghosts of the dead and her last remaining obligation to the living.

  When she broached the subject with Nadezhda, though, her aunt had balked.

  “You are not going?”

  “Director Orbeli has asked me to stay on,” Marina lied. “I am needed here.”

  “I’m not strong enough to make the journey alone.”

  “Not alone. Most of the staff will be evacuating as well.”

  Nadezhda reached for her hand and clasped it with what might have been tenderness but was just as likely fear. “I will stay here with you.”

  Marina squelched her irritation and patted her aunt’s hand. She urged her to consider Tatiana and Mikhail. They might well be somewhere on the mainland, waiting for her. When Marina said their names aloud, however, Nadezhda’s eyes remained like two stones.

  “Besides,” Marina said, changing tactics, “here, you are using up valuable resources. You have a duty.” These were much the same words she had heard from Orbeli that morning, but in her voice they sounded not magisterial but arch and impatient.

  “I will not be using them so much longer,” Nadezhda had replied.

  She was true to her word. After their conversation, Nadezhda rapidly deteriorated. When Marina returned to the shelter at the end of her night shifts, she would light a candle, and in the tiny flare of light she would find her aunt just as she had left her, buried under a mound of blankets on her cot. Nadezhda’s eyes would blink open and she would answer Marina’s greeting. But she made no move to sit up or even to eat. Formerly, the only subject that had held her inte
rest was food, but she no longer spoke of it. She chewed her bread mechanically when it was presented to her, but she didn’t savor it. She claimed that she no longer felt any hunger. Her appearance began to change, her face taking on a weird look of concentration, as though she were trying to remember something. Marina recognized the symptoms.

  When she was too far gone to object, Nadezhda was finally carried upstairs to the recently opened convalescent center. She was given glucose, but by then it was too late. In the last week, she stopped eating entirely. She had a terrible thirst and in a scratchy voice begged the nurses for something sour to drink. The nurse on duty advised against it, but Marina couldn’t bear to watch her aunt’s agony. She brought her a cup of vinegar, spooned it down her throat, then watched as she promptly vomited it back up. The next day, she was dead.

  Just as she had done when her uncle died, Marina prepared the body and she and Liliia Pavlova dragged it back belowground to the mortuary. In the interval of four weeks, many more bodies had collected in frozen mounds on the stone floor. She found her uncle’s corpse by picking out the sheet she had wrapped him in, and she placed her aunt next to her husband. The next day, she moved her things upstairs into the schoolroom. Then she went to the registry office and stood in line to turn in Nadezhda’s papers. No one in the long line cried or showed any sign of emotion. They might all have been waiting in a breadline.

  Initially, Marina too felt nothing, except perhaps relief, but that quickly passed. She hadn’t anticipated how hard it would be to stay on alone. Now, she chastises herself for bringing on her aunt’s death. Here in Leningrad, the pull of the dead was too strong, but surely Nadezhda would have evacuated if Marina had agreed to go as well. Instead, Marina had insisted on remaining in the Hermitage and, by doing so, sentenced her own aunt to die there.

  For what? Everything that mattered to her has disappeared. For a while after Nadezhda died, she continued to walk the gallery. But hunger slowed her brain, and when she tried to recite her memory palace, her thoughts seemed to move through sludge, words falling away, whole sentences lost in the muck. The paintings themselves seemed to be disintegrating, shot through with light and shadow like leaves eaten into lace by insects. She would be talking and find that she couldn’t actually visualize what she was describing. She might close her eyes and focus her mind, but Caravaggio’s Lute Player was just the idea of a lute player, not an image.