The Madonnas of Leningrad

by Debra Dean

  While they eat, the women chat about the progress of work in the Hanging Garden. They talk about what is being planted, how many rows of carrots and cabbage, how many rows of leeks and onions, what will be ready for harvest first.

  “It’s just a big kitchen garden, though,” Olga says. “It won’t be enough to get us through.”

  Even on a bright spring day, it is hard to avoid thinking forward to next winter. No one talks anymore of an imminent resolution to the war. The Red Army’s victories in December buoyed the population for months, but despite a full-scale offensive, the winter campaign has ended in a stalemate, and the army is near collapse from exhaustion.

  Meanwhile, spring is melting the ice road over Lake Ladoga and the only means of escape out of the city. Though the trucks continue to roll along the road, already their wheels are splashing through water.

  “If the warm weather holds, they say the road may close within a few weeks,” Marina tells Anya. “Dr. Sokolov said I would be able to travel about a week after the birth, but the baby is already two weeks late.” Her plan is to travel south to a little resort town in the Caucasus, where many of the Hermitage staff have already headed.

  “God will provide, dear,” Anya says.

  “I don’t want to be disrespectful, but after all you have seen, how can you say that?”

  The old woman’s expression is so full of anguish that Marina is instantly sorry to have challenged her.

  “I don’t know what He will provide for you, dear. The future is always written with a pitchfork on the water. But I will pray for you. It will do you no harm anyway.”

  Olga bids them a good afternoon and heads back upstairs to the garden. Marina walks with Anya out to the courtyard. It is strewn with furniture: rows of gilt chairs, Russian Empire settees and divans. The upholstered furniture in the museum has begun to bloom with mildew, and because the staff is too weak to heft the heavy pieces, cadets from the naval academy have been brought in to help move them all into the sun to air. A few old women are working on the upholstery with brushes, dusting a green fur off the brocades and velvets.

  Anya claims a comfortable armchair and asks Marina to help her remove her boots. Marina squats at her feet and pulls a shabby felt boot into her lap. The laces are frayed to threads and so knobbed with knots that it is slow work unlacing them. She is careful not to tug hard, lest the boot fall apart in her hands.

  “The stockings, too, dear, please,” Anya says, leaning her face back into the sunshine and closing her eyes. Marina rolls down the old woman’s heavy stocking, exposing a blackened foot. Anya wriggles her toes and sighs luxuriantly.

  “It is good to be alive on a day like this.” She sinks back into the armchair, propping her bare foot on another chair and lifting her other foot like an expectant child waiting to be undressed by her nurse.

  By the time Marina has stripped the second foot and set it gently next to its neighbor, Anya’s chin is drooping on her chest and her eyes are closed. Her face is soft, and saliva burbles on her open lips. It is the privilege of the old, Marina thinks. She tells herself that if she lives so long, perhaps she will be able to sleep like that again.

  In the space of an hour, the dozens of buckets and urns in the Spanish Hall have overflowed, creating a sea of mud where they’ve mixed with the sand.

  On her second pass upstairs, she hears the nearly forgotten sound of laughter. She follows the sound through the Skylight halls and into the Knights’ Hall, where a pair of boys wearing the blue uniforms of the cadets are peering into a huge showcase, their noses pressed against the glass. Inside are three stuffed horses and the padded forms of knights stripped of their medieval tournament armor and looking like dress dummies.

  “You should see them with their armor,” Marina says. The boys startle at Marina’s voice and back away from the case guiltily.

  Smiling, she tries to put them at ease, but their faces remain solemn and unreadable.

  “They don’t look like much now, but they are quite fierce when they’re dressed. Even the horses wore armor.” Marina describes the jointed full-body armor, the heavy visored helmets, and the breastplates that protected the horses.

  The younger of the two boys, only a few years older than her cousins, asks shyly, “Are they real?”

  “The horses? Oh, yes, they’re stuffed.”

  The older boy stands rooted to the spot, his glance darting nervously between Marina and the door behind her.

  “It’s okay,” she reassures him. “You’re supposed to stop and look. We all do. I’ll tell you what: when you’re done, would you like me to show you what else we have here?”

  The boys hesitate.

  “I don’t know if our captain will allow it,” the older boy volunteers.

  “I’ll speak to your captain and to mine. It seems like the least we can do to thank you for all your help.”

  “Yes, auntie,” the older one says to her. It is the commonplace term used to address any older woman, but Marina has to resist the urge to hug him.

  “Good, then. It’s settled.”

  Green. The word doesn’t begin to describe this.

  For the moment, she forgets that she is lost, that she is weak and chilled and the soles of her feet are tender with sores. She pinches a leaf between her thumb and forefinger and holds it up. It is breathtakingly beautiful, the first new green of the world, the light of creation still shining inside it. She studies it. Time recedes, and she floats beyond it, absorbed totally and completely in this vision. Who knows how much time has passed? She is beyond the tyranny of time. Dmitri once left her sitting in a chair by the window and returned later to find her still entranced by the dance of dust motes caught in a shaft of late-afternoon sun. He claimed to have done three loads of wash in what felt to her like an instant.

  This slow erosion of self has its compensations. Having forgotten whatever associations might dull her vision, she can look at a leaf and see it as if for the first time. Though reason suggests otherwise, she has never seen this green before. It is wondrous. Each day, the world is made fresh again, holy, and she takes it in, in all its raw intensity, like a young child. She feels something bloom in her chest—joy or grief, eventually they are inseparable. The world is so acutely beautiful, for all its horrors, that she will be sorry to leave it.

  Helen drifts in and out of sleep, losing consciousness and then starting awake moments later as though she were in danger of drowning. When the sky lightens again, she checks the clock. It is almost five. Twenty-six hours now since this thing started, another hour or two on top of that since her mother disappeared into the night. She sits up slowly, testing her stiff limbs and neck. Dmitri is prone on the couch, his face slack with sleep and his chest lifting and falling rhythmically. Like a mother with a fussy newborn, she slides quietly off of her cot and sneaks out of the room.

  The cafeteria is nearly empty: only a silver-haired man with the ropy build of a hiker whom she recognizes as the search coordinator, and Mike, who is stretched out on a narrow bench, his eyes closed, remain. It occurs to her that he, too, has been here nearly a full day, and she wonders if anyone is waiting for him at home. Rather than wake him, she asks the coordinator if there is any news. He shakes his head, his face etched with compassion. “I wish I could tell you different. But that’s a crackerjack team out there. And the temperature’s stayed warm enough at night. I think we’ve got lots of reason to feel hopeful.” He holds her gaze and adds, “I’ve been told she’s a tough lady. I’m looking forward to meeting her.”

  Helen’s heart, already softened to a pulp, swells with gratitude at all the hidden goodwill in the world. “Thank you,” she says, her throat closing around the words. They seem insufficient, but he accepts them with a nod.

  She wanders dim halls lined with lockers and trophy cases and peers into empty classrooms. At the end of a hallway, she happens on the art room. She finds the light switch, and rows of fluorescent tubes sputter and buzz to life. There is something enormously c
omforting and familiar in the industrial room, with its linoleum floors and paint-spattered tables, the open metal shelving, and the pottery wheel squatting heavily in a corner. Student art projects are taped to the concrete block walls. She circles the room, surveying the results of various assignments—one in collage, mostly magazine photos and slogans pieced together like so many ransom notes, another in pastels, twenty versions of the same bowl of fruit. They show the typical range of beginners, from the careful, self-conscious drawings of the A students to those whose distended bowls and smeared fruits are almost defiantly raw and unskilled.

  She got her only A’s in art classes, to the dismay of her parents and those teachers who had taught her older brother and were expecting an echo of brilliance in his younger sibling. Instead, she was ordinary. She did her homework and met her deadlines because to do less was unthinkable in her family, but she set herself apart only in art class, an area where she had no competition from Andrei. Mrs. Hanson, the lantern-jawed young divorcée who taught ceramics and art, encouraged Helen, even giving her private lessons after school when Helen had used up all her electives. It was in a room not very different from this one that she had been most happy as a teenager.

  In an unlocked cabinet, Helen finds a sheaf of butcher paper and a box of charcoal. She sits down at one of the tables and lets the charcoal sail wildly across the empty paper, filling several sheets with nothing but furious black slashes and fast loops and squiggles, just for the feel of emotion streaming through her arm. After a while, she slows her hand and, on a fresh sheet, begins dipping with more tentative, exploratory strokes. She closes her eyes, opens them again, and with more confidence lays down a long, sensuous line and then another.

  The head of a young woman is emerging on the paper. She is posed in half-profile, her chin lifting slightly and her eyes gazing up wistfully at some point above and to the left of the viewer. Her hair is pulled back neatly, exposing a slender neck that ends in a plain round collar. She is achingly, slowly beautiful, like the notes of a cello.

  It is an image as deeply encoded in Helen’s memory as certain vaguely disturbing illustrations from childhood picture books. A battered old photograph in a silver frame on her parents’ dresser, a studio portrait from the thirties. She was told it was her mother, the only image of her that had survived the war, yet the girl in the photo bore no resemblance to Helen’s actual mother. Besides being impossibly young, the girl wore an expression that was not one Helen recognized, the dark eyes soft and as romantic as a poet’s. She didn’t think her parents were lying, exactly, but neither could she reconcile this sepia-toned girl with the sturdy woman in shapeless housedresses who cooked liver and onions and ironed gift-wrap and ribbons to be reused. Her imagination failed her.

  Now, though, looking at what is very much a re-creation of the photograph, Helen recognizes certain unmistakable features, the wide cheekbones and the firm line of the young woman’s mouth, features that give her parents’ claim an eerie suggestion of truth. She can’t see her mother, really, but one could make the case that this is a younger lost relation.

  Helen finds a can of fixative in the cupboard and sprays the drawing to keep the charcoal from smearing. Then she pulls out a fresh sheet and begins again, sketching out the shape of a head, the curve of a shoulder. The rough outlines of another head appear, tilted at the same angle as the first.

  She is practiced at working from memory. She used to draw her boys incessantly, starting when they were babies. When they got older and began refusing to pose, she continued on the sly, memorizing their features and putting them on paper later. Sometimes they would catch her looking at them too deeply and moan impatiently, “Stop drawing us, Mom.”

  But she has never drawn her own mother, never looked at her with the intent to draw her, and it is harder than she would have expected. Her mother’s face is so familiar that she can’t see her. She abandons one sketch and starts another, and then another. Slowly a face emerges that resembles her mother, though she is too young, somewhere in middle age. The planes of her face are too full, the lines too strong. With her pinkie, Helen softens the line of the jaw into shadow and pulls smudges of charcoal down the throat like gullies. She lays down a veil of delicate hatch marks around the eyes and mouth and adds wispy strokes, the hair that lifts like white smoke off her mother’s scalp.

  The drawing is accomplished, but in some ineffable way it misses capturing her mother. Helen studies it, vaguely dissatisfied.

  There are voices outside. A search team is coming back in, a dozen or so people trudging across the courtyard toward the cafeteria. She can’t make out what they are saying, but their bodies speak poignantly of weariness. As she watches, a church van pulls into the circular drive and unloads another group.

  She drops the charcoal and, leaving the drawings behind, jogs up the hall toward the counselor’s office, her heart pounding. She shouldn’t have wandered off; she should be there with her father. The door is open, but he is gone.

  People are streaming into the cafeteria, unloading backpacks, guzzling water, sitting on the floor and pulling off shoes.

  She asks the first person she sees what is happening.

  “They found her. She’s alive.”

  She hasn’t cried, not since this thing started, but now she is fighting back tears, wiping them away as they spring to her eyes. “I thought…” Something breaks loose inside her with a guttural sound, and then she is sobbing out grief she has stored for years, her chest racking and heaving.

  There are perhaps three dozen boys and a handful of their elders, gaunt old men in faded uniforms. Marina has gathered them on the landing of the Jordan Staircase, just as she used to before the war, though this time she has brought with her two kerosene lamps.

  “Welcome to the State Museum of Leningrad, familiarly known as the Hermitage,” she says. “Over a million visitors pass up these stairs each year. The staircase was designed by the architect Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli in the eighteenth century. Note the lavish use of gilded stucco moldings, the abundance of…” She falters and her eyes drop to the floor. Flakes of paint from the ceiling litter the steps.

  The staircase, once a light-filled confection, is gloomy. In March, a bomb blast shattered all the windows, and they are covered over with plywood. The mirrors are clouded with moisture, and the gilt on the railings has dulled and begun to peel away, exposing rusty metal underneath. Marina notes that the painted Olympian clouds above are nearly black.

  When she starts speaking again, her voice is softer and less confident. “So much has changed with the war.” Her eyes travel from face to face. They wait expectantly.

  “I can show you what is still here, but you will have to use your imagination to see the rooms as they were before. This staircase”—she pats the marble balustrade—“was so magnificent. It was like a fairy-tale staircase. Do you remember when Zolushka dropped her glass slipper as she left the ball? Doesn’t this look like the staircase where she would have dropped it? And on the ceiling…” She gestures upward. “Well, it is very dark, but if you look up, perhaps you can make out some of the Greek gods and goddesses looking down on us.” The boys peer up into the blackness above and, squinting, try to detect the figures.

  “Can you see them?” She points. “Over there is Zeus with his thunderbolts. No?”

  On the spot, she devises a new tour for the boys and their teachers, starting with what remains in the denuded museum.

  “Follow me,” she says, “and stay close to me or the captain. It’s treacherous in the dark if you don’t know your way.”

  She leads them down the Rastrelli Gallery, once a confection of receding arches and light, now a dark maze stacked high with crates, the art bound for the third train that never made it out of the city at the start of the war. They turn left through the Hall of Egyptian Art, passing between a pair of imposing black granite sarcophagi, and from there they descend narrow service stairs into a cellar.

  “Watch your step,” sh
e says. “This is the repository of Western European statuary,” she announces. She holds up her lantern to reveal a low-ceilinged room crowded with marble angels and nymphs, Roman senators and queens. “They were brought down here to keep them safe from the bombs.” The statues are arranged in rows facing the same direction, full torsos on pedestals in the rear, busts down in front. A pensive young woman, a hand to her cheek, is seated next to a gallantly posed war hero; the bust of a handsome Roman gazes over the head of a young maiden. A prone Satyr lounges in the front row. In the hissing light of the kerosene lantern, they look like an audience at the cinema watching a silent film.

  The boys take turns stepping into the small room and looking at the statues.

  “Who’s that in the second row?” she quizzes them.

  “Catherine the Great,” they respond in a chorus.

  “And there is Aphrodite. And Cupid.”

  They cross under the Hanging Gardens and into the New Hermitage building, where she gathers them in a half circle under the rim of a gargantuan vase that dominates the center of the room. The lip of the vase looms high above their heads.

  “This is called the Kolyvan vase. It is made of green jasper and is generally considered to be the finest example of Russian stone carving. The craftsmen of the Kolyvan Lapidary Works created this especially for a room upstairs, but it is made of nineteen tons of green jasper, and it was feared to be too heavy for the upstairs. ‘Maybe we should just leave it here,’ they decided. All spring, it has been filling up with water from the leaks, and every few days the staff here must climb a ladder and bail it out. But we are thinking of turning it into an enormous birdbath,” she jokes.

  The boys look at her, solemn-eyed, and nod as though this is a reasonable solution.

  They are very serious, even the younger ones. At first Marina wonders if they are bored, but they don’t fidget or whisper or surreptitiously punch one another’s shoulders as boys will do. When Marina talks to them, they listen raptly, taking it all in with their deep, round eyes. In their young lives, they have already seen too much, and it has given them a slow and haunted demeanor. Even so, they have never seen things such as this. Their eyes widen at each new wonder.