by Debra Dean
The ring that Dmitri gave her in the fall and which she has never gotten sized now knocks loosely against the knuckle of her ring finger as she rolls down another stocking. She stares with horror at the leg that emerges, its skin like burlap and splotched with blue spots from scurvy. At the end, the foot is as rough and blackened as the pads of a dog’s paw. Her stomach lurches, and she shuts her eyes. She rolls down the stockings on the other leg without looking, and then methodically unbuttons and removes first her sweater and then her wool skirt and then the dress beneath it. When finally she peels away the last of her undergarments, she stands naked, feeling the forgotten whisper of air against skin.
She cannot look at herself, but her hands reach for her naked belly of their own accord. While the rest of her has withered, her belly has continued to swell, and her hands have explored the growing expanse with wonder. Now, she waits, her attention focused inward, until she feels a reassuring stirring.
“Mine is distended, too.” When Marina turns, Olga is gesturing at her own abdomen. It is as rounded as a piece of fruit. Marina is about to protest, but Olga lowers her voice to a whisper. “Who would think human beings could look like this and still be alive? Look, you can’t even tell the men from the women, except for their penises.”
Marina follows Olga’s glance down the row of naked bodies opposite them. None of them look either male or female, just an undifferentiated procession of ancient, emaciated carcasses, but sure enough, about halfway down the row she sees a penis resting between two withered legs. The man sits, hands limp at his sides and eyes staring stonily ahead, unashamed. There are too few men left in the city to warrant separate baths, but everyone is past caring, their modesty as shriveled as their bodies. Neither is it modesty that makes Marina avert her eyes to the floor. It is revulsion. These are not bodies but wasted skeletons, rib cages and knobby spines and jutting femurs supported on impossibly spindly legs.
Attendants move down the line of benches, collecting clothing and checking each person for lice, systematically moving their hands over scalps before directing them to a tiled shower room where another attendant explains that the water will run for only three minutes, and they must wash their hair and every part of their bodies in that time. Marina steps under the shower and water streams over her head and batters her skin like a hard rain. She grabs the bar of rough lye soap and scours her feet, then works quickly up her body. She has just enough time to rinse the soap out of her hair before the water trickles to a stop.
Before entering the steam bath, they are handed metal basins filled with water and are cautioned to watch for signs of faintness.
It is like passing into the interior of a cloud and entering heaven. Billowing steam obscures all but the few women sitting closest to the door, but the tiled room echoes with the voices of a hundred. Olga grasps Marina’s hand and sighs happily.
Each wall is terraced, floor to ceiling, with benches, and the benches are crowded with the bodies of women, wavering in the steam like mirages. Marina and Olga wade slowly through the fog until they find open space on a lower bench that is wide enough for both of them. Marina sinks down and closes her eyes. She takes in the sensation of heat seeping through her skin and sinking into her bones. Katya was right: it is not like before the war, when the steam scorched one’s lungs, but there is nothing more delicious than this feeling, like sliding into a vat of warm honey.
Throughout this winter of record low temperatures, she has felt frozen, the cold a twin torture of hunger. Even huddled under a mountain of blankets at night, her frigid body has shivered spastically against the cold. The only relief is the warden’s room, where the stove is always roaring and the staff gathers on any pretext. Director Orbeli himself used to visit there often, talking to the staff members and sipping at a cup of tea. When she comes down from the roof at the end of her shift, she lingers there, listening to the conversations and holding her hands close to the grate until her fingers tingle and burn. That is wonderful, but it pales next to this. Here, her entire body is warm and buoyant, as in a dream. She floats on a current of soft, babbling voices and the hiss of water splashing on hot rocks. She is nearly asleep when a tiny foot or fist jabs her hard in the ribs, and she gasps.
“What is it?” Olga’s face looms above Marina, her brow furrowed with concern.
Marina has not shared her secret with anyone, but she decides impulsively to make this present to Olga. “A baby,” she says shyly. “I am going to have a baby.”
But Olga doesn’t congratulate her. Her lips pressed together, she shakes her head slowly.
“You are not pregnant, Marina. It is the dystrophy. You must know that.”
“No,” Marina protests. “My menses stopped, and…”
Olga cuts her off, gently. “Dear girl, half the women in here have stopped bleeding. It doesn’t mean what you think.” She pats Marina on the shoulder, comforting her. “Someday, you will have lots of children.” This, too, seems dubious, as there are so few men left to father children, but clearly Olga thinks she is not quite rational.
“I’m not crazy,” Marina says and meets Olga’s eyes steadily. “Here.” She moves her hands across her belly, like radar, feeling for the baby. When she finds him, she takes Olga’s hand and presses it on a spot to the left of her navel. “Just a moment. Wait.” The two women wait, listening with their hands. After a moment, Marina feels the baby stir. She raises her eyes to Olga’s and sees confirmation in her look of astonishment.
“It is not possible,” Olga insists, shaking her head. She removes her hand but continues to hold it just above Marina’s belly, as though warming herself at the warden’s stove. Her homely features soften. “A baby.” This woman who knows so many poems finds herself at a loss for words. “Life…well, well,” she says.
Marina becomes aware that she is being scrutinized by the floating heads around her. There is whispering and sidelong glances as the news is telegraphed around the bath. And then an old woman emerges from the steam and stops in front of Marina. Perhaps she is not really old—it is impossible to tell a starving person’s age—but she looks like a crone, her gray hair pasted in wet rivulets to her scrawny shoulders and shriveled teats. In the watery light, she is as pale as a wax figure.
“May I?” she asks, and holds out two skeletal hands. Marina clutches her belly protectively, and Olga waves her hand at the woman.
“Leave her be.”
The woman ignores Olga and waits for Marina to answer.
Marina feels the baby inside her, floating in his own warm bath, safe and secure. “Yes, it’s all right,” Marina finally volunteers, as much to the baby as to Olga. She slides her hands away and exposes her belly. The old woman reaches out, and Marina feels a light skittering touch on her skin. As though rising to the unfamiliar touch, the baby swims toward the old woman’s hand. She nods, her dull eyes glitter, and her lips pull into the insinuation of a smile.
“He is very strong,” she says. “A boy.”
Olga snorts.
“Yes, a boy,” the old woman insists. “I have helped deliver scores of babies, some of them in this very bath. And this one”—she pats Marina’s belly with affection—“is a boy. Here,” she says, “feel how strong he kicks.”
Emboldened by the crone, other women have gathered behind her. One by one, they appear through the steam and passively hold out their hands, as though in the breadlines. Marina nods and then waits patiently as each set of hands touches her belly. They are polite: as soon as they feel the baby move, they move to the side for the next woman. They whisper among themselves. Marina hears a woman remark, “Look at her breasts, how full they are.” And another says, “How far along do you suppose she is?” One of them, when the baby kicks, crosses herself and announces to those around her, “It’s a miracle.” There is general agreement.
The old crone whispers in Marina’s ear.
“I have bread for you. It is in my coat pocket. I will get it.”
“No, auntie,” Marina sa
ys. “You mustn’t.”
“He needs to eat,” the old woman says, and before Marina can protest further, she melts away into the steam like a ghost.
On the first day the trams are running again, it seems that everyone in the city has come out for a ride. The clanging bells draw them out of their dark homes and offices and into the spring air, and even if they have nowhere to go, they line up along the routes and cheer the approach of the bright red cars. There is no pushing or shoving as there was in the old days. People wait patiently and they give up their seats to those who are too weak to stand. Some carry bundles of bright flowers in their arms.
From the service entrance of the Hermitage, Marina watches one of the cars rumble by. As though it is a holiday, passengers on the tram wave to her as they pass. She would love to ride out to the edge of the city, but there is too much work to do here. She waves back, then picks up her empty pail and turns back into the museum.
Unlocked from its shroud of winter ice, the Hermitage is thawing. The walls ooze moisture, the ceilings are seeping, and rivulets run down the walls. Snow melts on the roof, dripping through the skylights and spattering muddy water onto the floors below. The enormous population of the Hermitage has been reduced to a skeletal staff of perhaps fifty, mostly old women, and a third of those are recovering in the Hermitage clinic at any given time. Like shipwrecked survivors in a leaky lifeboat, those who can work bail water ceaselessly, but it is slow work and they are barely able to keep ahead of the filling buckets. All morning, Marina has been ferrying pails of the filthy water out of the Skylight halls, through the long, vacant corridors, and down the stairs leading out to the embankment. In ten-odd trips, she has seen no one she knows, only a handful of cadets from the naval academy, carrying pieces of furniture.
She climbs the Council Staircase. Most of the windows in the museum have been boarded over and it is almost completely dark, but she knows her way without sight. As she passes through the long corridor of the Rembrandt Room, she ticks off the former inhabitants as though taking attendance. Flora and Danae, the Father and his prodigal son, the poet Jeremias de Decker, the old man in red, Baartjen Martens Doomer, Abraham and Isaac, David and Jonathon, the holy family. She doesn’t have time to stop, but out of the corner of her eye, she sometimes seems to catch a glimpse of a familiar face peering out of the dimness.
She turns into the Spanish Skylight Hall. Its dark red walls once teemed with religious fervor, Murillo’s Jacob dreaming a swirl of dark angels, Zurbaran’s martyred Saint Lawrence carrying the gridiron he will be roasted on, and wherever one turned, another saint caught up in some terrible ecstasy, their eyes cast upward to the celestial light streaming through the monumental barrel-vaulted skylight. Now, though, the room seems more like an underground cavern or an abandoned mine. After a shell explosion shattered the skylight, it was tented over with plywood lashed to the frame with wire. In the gloom, the room echoes with the dripping of water, and, looking up, she sees telltale pinpricks and slivers of light. The braver women on the repair crew have repeatedly crawled out onto the skylight and tried to seal the leaks, nailing down loose boards and shellacking canvas over the seams, but wind and water continually find fresh weaknesses.
Her boots slap across the muddy floor toward a thin waterfall that spatters noisily into an overflowing pail. She hefts the heavy pail and replaces it with the empty one in her hand. Hundreds of tons of snow are melting on the roof, and it seems to Marina that she is hauling it out one pail at a time.
Her back is aching and she is short of breath. When she first knew she was pregnant, she would forget for hours at a time and be amazed afresh every time she felt the baby move. But now it is a continual presence, pressing into her bladder and against her diaphragm, waking her in the night. The baby is beginning to settle heavy and low, and the nurse says it could come any day now. Marina is of two minds on this. So long as it is in her womb, she can protect it from the world. But already it is two weeks late, and the lake is thawing.
Descending the stairs, she feels for each step, balancing against the weight of the water in her hand and the weight of the child thrust out in front of her. In the winter, she was careful not to fall because she might not have the strength to get up. Now, though, she is not thinking of herself. Everything now is for this child. She is merely a vehicle for something bigger.
She figures she has time enough for one more trip before lunch, but when she climbs the stairs with her emptied pail, she finds herself veering off her path, drawn toward the light and the sound of voices coming from the Hanging Gardens above the Palace Mews. Just five minutes to rest myself, she promises.
The garden, once dotted with flowering trees and graceful statuary, is now stripped bare, the marble fountain standing alone amid raw squares of earth. A cluster of women are on their knees in the freshly turned soil, chattering among themselves like sparrows as they root shell splinters out of the ground and plant rows of seed. One of them notices her and waves. It is Olga Markhaeva. She pulls herself to her feet and brushes the soil off the front of her coat.
“You shouldn’t be lugging water.” Since Olga learned of Marina’s pregnancy, she has taken charge of Marina’s care, advising her to sleep with her feet elevated, somehow procuring handfuls of fresh dandelion greens, even accompanying her to a doctor to help her secure a milk ration. The doctor’s office was crowded with dystrophics, and it was only through Olga’s doggedness that Marina had gotten five minutes of the harried doctor’s time.
“I’m fine,” she reassures Olga. “Dr. Sokolov said I may continue to work just as I have been. It’s healthy for the baby, he says.”
“What does he know, the old rooster. You are not one of the serfs on his old family estate. Here, sit down and take the weight off your feet.” Olga takes Marina’s arm and leads her to a bench against the wall. Marina sinks down gratefully. She draws the rich, loamy smells of earth into her lungs and turns her face up to the weak, watery light of the new sun. She can barely feel its warmth—she doubts she will ever feel completely warm again—but the light prickles at numb nerve endings.
“Dmitri and I used to bring our lunches out here,” she says, running her hand over the marble. It is smooth and warm under her palm. “We sat on this bench.”
Olga nods but doesn’t say anything. There are too many dead for words of comfort. This is just the way it is.
The bench has been moved. It used to be in the center of the garden, under a particularly beautiful corkscrew willow. They would chew on their sandwiches and listen to the plashing of the fountain; little rainbows hung in its mist. Dmitri talked about Hemingway and Babel. The sun danced in the green leaves. The perfume of wisteria hung in the air.
It doesn’t seem possible that this is the same place. Last summer, the statues were removed to rooms below, and then the harsh winter killed off all the trees and shrubs. Dead willows were cut down one by one for firewood, and now the honeysuckle and wisteria have been pulled out and the rose beds dug up to make room for vegetable plots. There is nothing left but this bench, the fountain, and, heaped against the wall next to her, a dozen old lilac bushes, soil still clinging to their root-balls. The gnarled limbs are covered with leaves.
“Look. They are still alive,” Marina says. The lilacs, planted ages and ages ago for the Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna, have survived. The heart-shaped leaves seem to glow from within, hundreds of hearts pulsing with a beautiful warm green light. She has never seen such a brilliant green.
“It’s a pity, isn’t it,” Olga says. “They leafed out but they didn’t blossom. Besides, we need the room for vegetables. One cannot eat lilacs.”
Marina leans forward and plucks a single leaf. It is as translucent as a baby’s skin, each delicate vein visible, its tender edges just starting to curl inward. She feels something inside her rip open, and the leaf is swimming in a blurry flood of tears.
“There, there.” Olga rubs Marina’s back tentatively. “Stop, now. You mustn’t weep. It isn’t goo
d for the baby, so much grief.”
Marina shakes her head mutely. She can’t explain it, but what she is feeling is as much gratitude as grief, some primal feeling that contains both. “It’s not that,” she sobs. “I’m here to see it. This green. This day.”
In a way, it was easier in winter. The dark, the cold, the hunger, reduced the world to a repeating sequence of dull, small movements. One moved through the day like a zombie, enduring the unendurable, feeling nothing. Now, Marina finds herself awash in sensation. It is like waking from the dead. Her muscles and bones are stiff, but her soul reels drunkenly, buffeted by unexpected memories and by a tenderness of feeling that surprises her.
“It is the pregnancy,” Olga says, visibly relieved to have this explanation. “The mother’s moods become tidal.” She hands Marina a clean rag and watches while she mops her eyes and blows her nose.
“We’ll eat. You’ll feel better. It is time for lunch, anyway.”
The canteen is filled with workers and the murmuring surge and ebb of dozens of conversations. This is new. In the winter, one heard only the shuffle of feet, the slow scrape of utensils, as each diner focused mutely on his food, but as the weather has warmed, meals have started to become social again, with people turning their attentions outward. Marina and Olga stand in line for bowls of porridge and bread and then, carrying their trays, weave through the tables until they spot Anya and another babushka seated at a large table.
Anya is one of the enigmas of the winter starvation. She was so frail in the winter that Marina did not expect her to survive, yet here she is. She is bone thin and shriveled as an apple doll, but alive.
“Just look at you,” Anya says. “This baby must be fat as a little prince,” she says. “Here, sit down next to me, dear.” She pats the bench next to her.
The porridge is delicious, green and tangy with beet tops.