by Debra Dean
She climbs the dozen steps up onto a small wooden platform. Olga Markhaeva, a curator of Netherlandish painting, is already up here. Her husband, Pavel Ivanovich, is in the same Volunteer division as Dmitri. Olga greets Marina and then hands her a pair of binoculars, which Marina hangs around her neck.
“Look,” Olga commands, pointing to the south.
Through the binoculars, Marina follows the droning sound and finds a slowly approaching shadow against the clouds. All summer, there have been planes, tiny specks like mosquitoes circling and diving over the city. But this is different. She cannot make out individual planes, only a menacing phalanx of darkness.
It is not quite dark, and, standing up here on this platform, Marina feels exposed to the sky like a mouse. There is no place on the vast expanse of the roof to hide. Cold with dread, she eyes the door leading back down to the hall below. Were it not for Olga Markhaeva’s presence, she doubts she would be able to resist retreating back down into the safety of the museum.
The Hermitage can’t possibly be a military target, but that is no comfort. There is no sense to any of this, nothing a sane person can understand. Though in the abstract, everyone knew that the Germans were close, when the first shells came screaming into the city a few days ago, it was like a fantasy, surreal and outrageous. Stunned, people looked to each other, disbelieving. This could not be. Not here, not in Leningrad. It is lunacy. They fire long-range missiles into the city, killing women and children and old people at random. For what? And why try to burn down a city? What good is victory if there is nothing left to claim?
Marina thinks of Dmitri and his love of rational argument. What would he do with this? Perhaps there is a logic to this that can be seen only from a cool distance: the two and a half million inhabitants of Leningrad a pin on a map from somewhere in Berlin. But here she is too close to see any pattern. Looking at the horrific swarm bearing down on them, it is easier to believe the explanation on the radio: that the enemy is uniquely evil.
“There must be fifty of them tonight,” Olga says. Her voice is calm, with no hint of the terror Marina feels.
The drone of the Junkers is louder. They are clearly visible now, a dozen, two dozen, maybe more. They move methodically in formation. The ack-ack guns sputter wildly, and she hears the thudding of explosives to the south. Through the binoculars, she picks out a burst of flame near the edge of the city, out by the Vitebsk railroad depot, then several more clustered together. Then the fires are sprouting in a straight line across the dark landscape of the city, springing up like rows of orange tulips. The thunder of engines envelops her, and suddenly bombs are bursting in the Neva, fountains of spray blooming up the length of the river. The platform shudders in the wake of each explosion. A searchlight sweeping the sky catches one plane after another in its path, and Marina sees the swastika on a wing directly above her.
It is not fear, exactly—that is not why she stands so rooted and still, her breath locked in her chest. She is mesmerized by the awful beauty she is witnessing. As soon as the planes are past, though, Marina realizes that her legs are trembling, so much so that she has to grip the rail of the platform with both hands in order to remain upright.
The two-way radio inside Olga’s jacket is crackling. She reaches inside her jacket and pulls it out.
“Has anything hit us?” It is Sergei Pavlovich, down in the warden’s office.
Olga shouts into the radio. “Just a moment. Over. Marina Anatolyevna?”
Marina looks at her and then realizes the binoculars are strung around her own neck. She releases one hand from the railing, and brings the glasses up to her eyes, but her hand is shaking too hard to steady the image. It jumps and wavers.
Olga watches her calmly and waits.
Marina releases her other hand and stiffens her grip on the glasses. She scans the roofs of the Hermitage buildings and across to the gabled roofs of the Winter Palace, where another platform is rigged. And then she checks again, slowly, methodically. Amazingly, the Germans seem to have missed the museum entirely. She directs her binoculars toward two still figures, their counterparts on the far platform. Other figures stand at their posts. No one is moving. She can’t see any fires.
“Nothing. I don’t see anything,” she tells Olga, who relays the information to Sergei.
“Check the perimeter,” Olga reminds her.
Marina sweeps her glasses up and down the embankment. Just across the river, in the gardens next to the Peter and Paul Fortress, the roller coaster has caught fire. The huge wooden structure is ablaze, a writhing dragon of orange flame. She turns and scans the buildings along Millionnaya Street and ringing Palace Square, inscribing a slow circle. Then she looks for spots of fire farther out in the range they are assigned to report on.
“There’s a fire near the Trotsky Bridge, past the Trotsky, I think.” Without lights, it is hard to find landmarks, but she calls out approximate locations to Olga, who relays them to Sergei.
“And another one—this one looks bad—near the Engineer’s Castle.”
There are nearly a dozen fires within a kilometer’s radius of the museum. She relays them one by one to Olga, trying to be accurate.
“On the far side of the Moyka, near the Stroganov Palace, I think. No, wait…” As she is watching, she spots a fire truck already rattling down Nevsky toward the fire. But it races right past the fire and turns south onto Vladimirsky. Other trucks are moving down the avenues, their bells ringing, passing fires that burn unchecked. They are all heading south. When Marina turns her binoculars in that direction, she finds an enormous column of smoke. The plume rises high into the sky above the city. At its base, it is tinged with red.
“My god.”
“What is it?” Olga is standing at her shoulder.
“I don’t know. It’s near the Vitebsk station.” She unstraps the binoculars and hands them to Olga.
Later, she will find out that what they are witnessing is the burning of the Badayev warehouses, where the food supplies for the entire city are stored. Or maybe they know this already; maybe Sergei has reported back to them the rumors already circling the city. Tomorrow, the worst of those rumors will be confirmed. Three thousand tons of flour, thousands of kilograms of meat, a molten river of sugar flowing into the basements of the charred warehouses. She cannot know this now, but lodged in Marina’s mind, as real as anything else, is the chilling certainty that they are witnessing catastrophe.
Down in the streets, there is a rushing of dark figures, the sounds of yelling, the rattle of antiaircraft fire though there are no more planes. But from up here, it seems silent, the terrible silence that might accompany the end of the world. After they have reported the fires within their range of visibility, they stand for a long stretch of time. They watch as sections of the roller coaster buckle and crash to the ground. Searchlights sweep the sky, swords of white light crossing, swishing apart, and crossing again. A full moon rises like a blood orange on the horizon. They may not leave their post, and no one comes to relieve them. Marina wants to sit down, but Olga remains standing, erect as a soldier. Up and down the long series of roofs, wardens stand watching the distant conflagration and the smaller fires dotting the city. Their silhouettes blend into the rows of green copper statues that line the perimeter of the Winter Palace roof, warriors and gods that have vigilantly guarded the palace for nearly two centuries.
The smoke slowly drifts north, smothering the city in a dull haze. It smells strange, sickly sweet. She can no longer see flames because of the smoke, but a thick red glow seems to envelop a whole section of the city. Her eyes burn and her mouth tastes sooty.
Later, a second wave of Junkers appears on the horizon. Rather than strafing the city, they circle around the pillar of smoke like dark moths, dropping fresh rounds of fire. A few planes stray north, but they don’t drop bombs.
Marina lifts the heavy binoculars to her eyes again, but before she can adjust the focus, there is a whistle, then the deafening crash of a high explos
ive in her ear. A shock wave blasts through her body, knocking her off her feet.
Someone is screaming. When she opens her eyes, she realizes that the screams are hers, but she is unhurt, she is fine. Her limbs surge with electricity. She stands up and looks around. Olga, too, is all right. In fact, she seems not to have moved. But something has changed. It takes Marina a long moment to place what is different. Part of the roofline of the building next door has disappeared. It is simply gone.
Rooms have been reserved for members of the wedding party at the Arbutus Hotel, a Victorian-styled inn with a dozen rooms in the middle of town. It trades heavily on its status as the oldest lodgings on the island, a distinction, Helen observes, that seems to preclude updating the furnishings. The dark-paneled lobby is furnished with a mismatched collection of cracked leather couches and high-backed armchairs and decorated with faded photographs of the island when it still had a salmon cannery and a fleet of fishing boats. Framed and yellowed signs behind the manager’s desk list weekly rates in the single digits and caution guests against smoking or cleaning fish in their rooms.
Upstairs, their adjoining rooms are small and spartan, but each overlooks the harbor and has a private bath. Helen takes the smaller of the two rooms. They have a couple hours before the rehearsal dinner, enough time for short naps. She sits down on the edge of the bed. The mattress is mushy, but it doesn’t matter. She’s pretty certain that given half a chance she could sleep standing up. She pulls closed the curtains, sets the alarm, kicks off her sandals, and sinks back onto the coverlet.
And then her brain starts clicking through a series of disjointed thoughts, the way it sometimes does when she’s tired but has had too much caffeine. Her mother lived with her uncle in a cellar. Why would a famous archaeologist live in a cellar? Was this a normal deprivation in Soviet Russia? Maybe they were hiding, like Anne Frank, but that doesn’t make sense either because they weren’t Jewish. Well, she doesn’t know that either, does she? People hid those things. For all she knows, she herself could be Jewish. Wouldn’t that be an odd thing to discover at this point in her life.
This is ridiculous, she tells herself. It’s four twenty-eight. You’ve only got an hour. Go to sleep.
Let’s say she did find out she was Jewish. What would change, really? It’s not as though she’d start keeping kosher. She’s never been religious, though she flirted briefly with Catholicism. You can’t throw a rock in the Southwest without hitting a Catholic church, and they’re always open. During the divorce, she spent a lot of time sitting in the back pews of dark chapels. She even attended a few newcomers’ classes, but she quickly discovered that it was only the imagery she liked. The doctrine was less appealing. But she did get a good series, haunting portraits of various women—a high school girl in jeans and a halter top, a middle-aged Mexican woman wearing her nurse’s whites and Adidas and bifocals, a heavyset woman with an ill-fitting business suit and a ginger-colored perm—each posed as a stiff-limbed Madonna with sad, downcast eyes and an unreadable expression. She set them against a shadowy dark ground, lit only by a bank of flickering blue votive candles at their feet. Helen gave the best of these to her mother because her mother remarked on the good repetition of blues, the very thing that had pleased Helen about it. Go figure. Her mother is odd that way. She knows a great deal about art for someone who has no particular love for it. Helen was a freshman and taking her first art history class when it came out that her mother had also studied art in school, and had even worked briefly at the Hermitage museum when she was young. There was nothing in Helen’s background to prepare her for this revelation; her parents had never taken her to museums or art galleries. They didn’t even have any art on their walls, unless you wanted to count a couple of aphorisms done in cross-stitch, a calendar from the savings and loan with photographic scenes of Washington State, and her own drawings taped to the fridge. But one night at dinner, Helen and her mother had embarked on one of their food battles, her mother expressing what bordered on moral outrage that Helen would eat only cottage cheese when she had prepared a good dinner. Helen, in the time-honored manner of freshmen, made a little offhand remark calculated to pass over the head of her ignorant mother. Thanks to you, she said, I’m already revoltingly Rubenesque. Not only did her mother know who Rubens was, but she rallied him to her side of the argument, pointing out that many of the great painters had chosen models of Helen’s proportions, not only Rubens but Titian as well. She then went on to tick off one example after another of voluptuous nudes.
Helen follows the meandering string of her thoughts for almost an hour before she finally relents, gets up, opens the curtains, and pries up the sticky sash. Leaning her elbows on the window ledge, she inhales the salt-bleached air and watches the late-afternoon ferry lumber into the dock, churning up green water as it snugs between the creosote pilings. It disgorges a fresh load of tourists, first the cyclists followed by a small army of rainbow-attired people carrying backpacks and being towed by dogs straining at the leash. Behind them, vehicles bump up the ramp one at a time, SUVs and convertibles and cars with kayaks strapped on their roofs, a couple of campers, a produce truck, a fuel truck, and finally a flatbed loaded with lumber. The street fronting the harbor swells with a cacophony of music and shouted greetings, but then the tourists slowly disappear into restaurants and trinket shops and the street settles back into a muted afternoon torpor.
She opens her suitcase, unzips the hanging bag, and starts unpacking. She has brought too much for five days, but it’s hard to know what to pack for Seattle and Drake Island in August. In Phoenix, the weather is hot or hotter, but here it could be wool sweaters in the morning and sundresses by noon.
More to the point, though, occasions like this bring out all her worst insecurities. You’d think that by fifty-three she would have grown comfortable in her own skin, but she can still get as obsessive and fretful as a teenager. In anticipation of coming up here, she kept viewing herself through the imaginary lens of her stylish sister-in-law, and what she saw was a plump, faded hippie, the type who might be selling whole grain bread at the Saturday market. She bought and returned three different dresses before she found a coral linen shift and matching Nehru-collared jacket, smart and pulled together but still casual enough for an outdoor wedding. Holding it up now, she wonders what possessed her to choose this color. It’s as bright as a traffic sign.
She unzips the dress, pulls it over her head, and tugs on the little jacket. There’s no mirror in the room, so she goes into the bathroom and carefully hoists herself up onto the edge of the tub. Surveying her reflection in the mirror over the sink, she notes that the fabric is pulling across the bust, and the linen doesn’t begin to disguise the mound of her stomach and the swells of her hips. She’s spent a lifetime watching her weight, but for the past several years she’s ceded one dress size after another, no matter what she does. Even after cutting back her points to near-starvation level, she is still eight pounds shy of the goal she set for the wedding. She’s not even going to attempt to twist around and look at the rear view.
Someone is knocking.
She climbs off the tub and opens the connecting door to her parents’ room.
“Oh. Hello,” her mother says. “I opened the door, and there was another one.”
Her parents’ room is dark, but Helen can make out the shape of her father under the covers of the bed.
“Did you want to come in?” Helen whispers.
“Okay. Do I interrupt something?”
“No, I was just unpacking. What do you think?” She holds out her arms and does a slow turn.
“It’s a beautiful color,” Marina says.
“Is it too tight? I don’t look like an overripe melon?”
“No. You look lovely.”
“Thanks, Mama,” she nods. This is her mother’s stock reply. “Oh, well. No one will be looking at the bride’s aunt.”
Since the bombing began, some two thousand of the staff and their families—the scholars and r
esearchers, the curators, the women who sweep the galleries and polish the floors—all have moved into the cavernous vaults beneath the Hermitage. Viktor Alekseevich Krasnov is a scholar and archaeologist renowned for his work on the digs at Karmir-Blur, and so, though all here are comrades, equals, in theory, the few square meters allotted to him, his wife, and his niece are in a corner of Bomb Shelter #3, tucked behind a pillar of the vault. With a large carpet strung from pillar to wall, the space is almost like a private room. Later, when winter comes and the walls of the vault ice over, this corner will prove to be not only damp but a degree or two colder than the middle of the vault, where the crowded workers generate a bovine heat. But already Marina has cause to regret her privilege.
She owes him everything; she knows this. When her father and then her mother were arrested and taken away, Uncle Viktor took her in and gave her his surname. He arranged for her education to continue at the university and then the art academy, and when she graduated he facilitated her subsequent appointment as a docent in the museum. He has been the model of a devoted uncle, taking a close interest in her friends, overseeing her studies and the books she is reading, everything. Still, she cannot mistake this interest for affection. It is the tense act of balancing what he terms a sacred duty to his dead sister with the insidious threat Marina represents as the daughter of convicted counterrevolutionary activists. Never mind that the charges were invented. Never mind that he himself was arrested and imprisoned in 1930 on similar charges and released a year later only when Director Orbeli personally intervened on his behalf. He returned from prison with ruined lungs and a fastidious compulsion that every aspect of his life appear correct and blameless.
Half of every year, he spends in Armenia at the excavation site in the Caucasus. He leaves with the first thaw, and Marina has always associated his departure with the advent of spring. In his absence, the household becomes warmer and lighter. Nadezhda wears her hair down and dresses the children in play clothes. By summer, they are living like bohemians: eating whenever they feel hungry, staying up till all hours, and entertaining Dmitri and his friends. To be sure, when Viktor returns in the autumn, there is always a period of readjustment in the household. But even so, the relative spaciousness and privacy of their apartment makes his stiffness, his calculated inquiries and ponderous lectures, easier to stomach. Here, quarantined together in this cramped space, she can hardly endure him.
