The Madonnas of Leningrad

by Debra Dean

  And on this front, the Germans have stopped moving entirely. It seems they have decided not to invade after all and to simply level Leningrad with bombs. Some days, there are as many as a dozen air raids. There are nights when Marina never leaves her post on the roof, and during the day, work has been interrupted so often that they have begun to ignore the sirens. The noise is deafening, but they work through it now, listening to the whine of shells and the thud of bombs and with one part of their brains calculating their distance.

  This morning, though, is quiet. The interludes between bombing raids are what stand out. It has begun to snow again, the flakes falling slowly outside the tall arched windows of the Early Italian Renaissance Room. Marina has never heard such a deep silence, only Anya’s and her footsteps on the parquet floors.

  Anya is helping Marina build a memory palace in the museum. “Someone must remember,” Anya says, “or it all disappears without a trace, and then they can say it never was.” So each morning, they get up early and the two women make their way slowly through the halls. They add a few more rooms each day, mentally restocking the Hermitage, painting by painting, statue by statue.

  The old woman stops at an arched frame and swipes the edges with her feather duster. Marina has noticed that she is very careful to dust only the frame and not the space the painting itself would occupy. Marina pulls up behind her.

  “A Madonna,” Marina says, but her mind is a blank. “Just a minute, don’t tell me.”

  It’s a Madonna, but there must have been a hundred Madonnas in these rooms, and when Marina is tired and hungry, they start to blur into one another. She is always tired and hungry now, even just after eating.

  Marina stares at the wall, but all she can see are women in enormous hoop skirts and self-satisfied gentlemen in powdered wigs. For some reason, the Early Italian Renaissance Room has become a temporary home for a dozen court portraits en route to the vaults. They have been left leaning against all the walls.

  Think, she chides herself. Everything in the museum was displayed in strict order of chronology and provenance. So after the two Gerinis, early-fifteenth-century Florentine school, comes…what?

  “Close your eyes,” Anya says. “All you can see with your eyes open is the room as it is now.”

  Marina does as she is told.

  “Now, go into your memory and pretend that you are leading a tour again. Walk into the room again.”

  She imagines walking into the room. She is leading a tour of dukes and duchesses, the figures from the court portraits. The Early Italian Renaissance Room, she informs them. In your day, you would have known it as the First Reception Room. You would have waited here to meet with the ambassador or members of the court. She can see the white stuccoed walls, intersected with paneled pilasters. The paintings are hung in a single row above the blue stone wainscot.

  Sure enough, the paintings begin coming into focus in her mind: the crucifixions, the saints, the Madonna in her dark green robes and gilt halo.

  “She’s the one with the two saints and the little angels at her ears. Oh, what’s her name?” Marina hesitates and then it comes in a rush. “Madonna and Child with the Saints James the Less, John the Baptist and Angels. Bicci di Lorenzo. Florentine school. I don’t remember the dates.”

  Marina had thought this would be easier. After all, she has led tours of these rooms for two years, and she prided herself on having learned more of the collection than some guides who had worked there a decade. But she has quickly discovered how spotty her knowledge is. On the general museum tours, they skipped entire wings and walked groups through many of the rooms without stopping. Even on the specialized excursions through the picture gallery, they described only a few selected paintings in each room. In this room, for instance, they stopped only at the smallest painting in the room, Martini’s Madonna of the Annunciation.

  She has no trouble with the pieces that were on her tour scripts, but it is harder to remember the paintings in between, though she has passed them thousands of times. And then there are the countless vases and bibelots, and all the marble cupids and busts and torsos.

  Anya, however, was a room attendant. She would spend an entire day sitting in one spot, and over the years, she seems to have committed the entire museum to memory. She can walk into a room, go to any spot on the wall, and describe for Marina what was there. She has no formal schooling in art and knows nothing about styles or schools or the individual provenances, sometimes not even the name of the artist or the work, but she knows what everything looked like. Her memory is limited only by what she couldn’t see from her chair. For instance, in the Hall of Twenty Columns, where the numismatic collection was displayed, Anya can describe each vase on its pedestal and the placement around the hall of the various glass-fronted cases, but the contents of those cases might have been buttons or candies for all she knows. Otherwise, she is a marvel. Marina doubts that even Director Orbeli himself knows the contents of the museum as well as Anya does. In fact, she has wondered if perhaps she should tell Orbeli about Anya. Mightn’t she be useful when the art comes home again, to speed up the rehanging?

  When she brought this up with Uncle Viktor, though, he said, “I am sure Iosef Abgarovitch knows what is in his own museum, Marina, and doesn’t need the help of one of the babushki.”

  “But isn’t it amazing?” Marina persisted. She felt as though she had discovered a treasure, like Uncle Viktor must have felt when they found the first cuneiform at Karmir-Blur. “It’s not just the important pieces she knows. We were walking down the 1812 Gallery yesterday and she described the faces of the generals.” There are more than three hundred of these portraits, and to Marina they are indistinguishable, one from the next.

  Viktor, though, wasn’t particularly impressed. “It is a parlor trick, Marina. What is the use of this if she doesn’t even know who they are?”

  It is a good question, and Marina doesn’t know how to answer it. She thinks that somehow it must matter, though, to see the art even if one doesn’t know what it means.

  The Leonardo Room is as hushed as a nursery. Here there are no frames, only the two freestanding panels that held Leonardo’s Madonnas. Marina pauses at the first panel and recites. “The Madonna and Child, known also as the Benois Madonna, by Leonardo da Vinci. An early work of Leonardo’s, one of two Madonnas begun by him in Florence in 1478. This is one of the few undisputed originals by the master.”

  Of all the Madonnas in the museum, Marina could never forget this one. She loved this mother and child and misses the two of them with a particular ache. The Mary is completely human, not a remote beauty but a young girl delighted with the surprise of this child, and the Christ Child is so fat and dimpled, a fleshy baby like Mikhail when he was younger. He perches on little Mary’s lap, his pudgy fingers grasping at the flower she holds up to his gaze and studying it as a scientist might. Secretly, she thinks of this painting as hers. With Mary’s high forehead, they even resemble each other, and Marina has sometimes fantasized that she herself could be the model.

  “Such a mess. Do you see this?” Anya is standing in front of the other panel, the one that held the second Leonardo Madonna. She shakes her head and clucks, pointing to the floor at her feet. Sand has drifted or been tracked from the corner, where it is heaped on a tarpaulin. “This will scratch the varnish.”

  She points across the room to where a push broom has been left leaning in the doorway. “Get me that, would you, dear?”

  Marina walks across the parquet and fetches the broom. When she turns around, the old woman is kneeling in front of the panel like a penitent before an altar, her head bowed, her skirt pooled on the floor.

  She sees Marina watching her and says, “I will say a prayer for you, too.”

  “I’m not a believer,” Marina objects.

  The old woman appraises her. “Everyone believes in something.” Then she smiles and says, “But you mean that you are too educated to believe in the superstitious nonsense of old people. Yes?�
� She waits for Marina to answer, but the girl is polite and says nothing.

  “Then my prayer will do you no harm.”

  With a practiced gesture, the old woman touches her fingers to her forehead, her belly, and each of her shoulders and begins mumbling to herself. Marina averts her eyes, with the same embarrassment she feels when she witnesses the spastic fumbling of cripples or the ranting of the feebleminded. She wonders if she should leave Anya alone, but this, too, seems rude, and so she waits, leaning on the broom and studying the blank wall to which Anya is praying.

  Out of the shadowy square of paneling that marks where the painting once hung, the Litta Madonna materializes. With her aquiline nose and porcelain features, the Madonna is the perfect study of contentment, gazing down at her nursing child. The Christ Child, though, is the center of the painting. He is not a blank lump of sweet pink flesh but already commands an adult presence. With one hand, he grasps the exposed breast and suckles absently, his dark, shadowy eyes gazing out of the painting, sizing up the scene before him, an elderly Soviet cleaning woman kneeling at his feet. He looks unsurprised.

  When Anya has finished her prayers, she crosses herself again, smooths her skirt flat, and tells Marina to sweep the sand over the hem. The old woman licks her fingers and gathers up stray grains. Marina tucks the feather duster under her arm and helps the old woman clamber back onto her feet with her skirt full of sand. Before they leave, Anya presses her lips to the Christ Child’s toes and mumbles something to him. At the door, Marina glances back over her shoulder and sees the Christ Child still watching them guardedly. And then he spits the nipple from his mouth and burps.

  We are both insane, she thinks.

  She knows that her visions are easily explained by exhaustion. By hunger. By all the stresses of living like cattle. But they are also a necessary illusion, a gift.

  Past a billowing white tent, the wedding party, some twenty people, is gathered down at the beach, where a regiment of folding chairs faces a rented arbor, and beyond that, the sheltered waters of Pillikut Bay.

  “Hello!” A professionally cheerful woman accosts Helen and Dmitri as they cross the lawn. “I’m Sandy Holcomb, the wedding planner. And you are…?”

  “Dmitri Buriakov and Helen Webb,” Helen says.

  The wedding planner brightens and exclaims, “Wonderful. We’re just about to get started. Would you mind sitting here and letting us know if you can hear everyone?”

  “A wedding planner?” Dmitri says to Helen. “Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

  While the wedding planner walks everyone through their paces, Helen and Dmitri sit in the back row, standing in for the guests who will assemble for the ceremony tomorrow. It is like watching a community theater rehearsal. As the groom’s brother and two friends escort the mothers across the lawn, they undermine each other’s weak attempts at solemnity with self-conscious grins. The young man escorting the mother of the bride whispers something in her ear. It’s possible, Helen thinks, that he might be flirting with her. Naureen is only a few years younger than Helen, but she is tanned and athletic, one of those lean Katharine Hepburn types who seem to age like hardwood.

  Helen remembers how surprised they all were when Andrei, at age thirty-six, turned up with Naureen. He had seemed so destined to remain a bachelor. Helen can’t recall his ever bringing a girl home before or showing any interest in one. Though her own girlfriends were always turning coy and flirty when they first met him, he was hopelessly serious and woodenly indifferent to their charms, a nerd who seemed content to bury himself in his textbooks.

  Later, his life had revolved around his practice, and a specialty in corneal transplants meant that his schedule was more or less dictated by the randomness of car accidents. He moved away from home only to purchase a condo within walking distance of the hospital. Helen went there once or twice, and all you needed to know about Andrei’s private life then could be read in those sparsely furnished rooms: takeout containers on the kitchen counter, a dead cactus on the windowsill, empty dry-cleaning bags draped over a bar stool. He’d brought his maple bedroom set from home, and the nightstand was piled with medical journals, the headboard stuck with threaded needles. When Helen asked, he explained that at night, he lay in bed and practiced threading needles in the dark, so he would be able to do it in surgery while wearing magnifying goggles. “The magnification is so high, everything blurs. It’s like being blind,” he had said, apparently without irony.

  Helen guesses he probably never had a date in his life that wasn’t set up by someone else. So when her parents called her in Phoenix and said that Andrei had met a girl and it looked serious, Helen pegged her as an exceptionally determined husband-hunter with her cap set for a surgeon. When Naureen turned out to be pretty and ten years his junior to boot, that sealed it in Helen’s eyes. She wasn’t particularly close to her brother, but she didn’t like to see him get snookered, either.

  That was twenty-five years ago, and Helen freely admits she misjudged. Naureen’s the best thing that could have happened to Andrei, giving him a home and a life that he never would have come up with on his own. Under her care, he has even developed a few outside interests and can hold up his end of a conversation about restaurants or politics or local sports. Last year, she bought him a titanium fly rod and lessons. “I’m working him up to hobbies,” she joked. “He’s going to have to retire at some point, and I can’t have him hanging around the house all day.” She seems to adore Andrei, and he, in turn, visibly softens in her presence, his careful self-possession melting in spaniel-like gratitude when she praises him or takes his arm. If it’s all for show, Helen has never been able to spot a crack in the facade. They really do seem to be in love, even all these years later.

  Behind Naureen comes a girl who looks to be about five and is the niece of the groom. She processes with resolute concentration, determinedly flinging imaginary handfuls of petals from her wicker basket. Her younger brother stops stone-still just short of the chairs and eyes the assembled group with undisguised suspicion. The laughter that erupts humiliates him, and he veers unsteadily back toward his mother. It requires a good deal of coaching to lure him back down the aisle.

  “Okay, group,” chirps the wedding organizer, “let’s just get through this and then we can all relax and have fun.” One look at her tells that spontaneous fun is not her forte.

  “Bridesmaids, take your time. Wait five counts before the next girl. That’s right.” A redhead dressed in shorts and black satin shoes takes slow, halting steps across the lawn, gripping an imaginary bouquet and looking as though she may topple off her heels at every step.

  “Now we’ll leave a little space for our absent bridesmaid. How is she feeling? Well, one way or the other, the musicians will just keep playing until everyone is down the aisle. And then the sister.” After a gap comes Jen, the groom’s sister.

  “Now, wait ten counts. The music will change to the wedding march.”

  “No,” Naureen says. “They’re playing Ode to Joy.”

  “Okay, so wait for the change. And here it is.” She raises her hand. “Katie, Mr. Buriakov.”

  As Katie and Andrei approach the beach at a measured pace, Dmitri rises and Helen follows suit, the stand-in guests. The bride-to-be glides across the uneven lawn, one hand holding a bouquet constructed of ribbons and tissue paper flowers glued to a doily-encrusted paper plate, the other hand resting lightly on her father’s arm. Even dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, she looks radiant. She has an expression that Helen has sometimes seen on brides and new mothers but didn’t experience herself: a calm, clear-eyed gaze that takes in the world just as it is and pronounces it good.

  The rehearsal drones forward, and Helen lapses into memories of her own wedding. Anyone with the dullest intuition could have foretold the future in the dregs of that day. When she arrived at the church with her parents, Don had been standing outside the entrance, smoking a cigarette. Marina had tried to shoo him off, saying it was bad luck to see the
bride before the ceremony, but Don had just said, “I think we’ve already had our bad luck.”

  Dmitri keeps glancing back at the house, and finally he whispers, “I’m going to go find your mother.” He’s about to stand up, but Helen puts her hand over his.

  “Is something wrong, Papa?”

  “It’s nothing for you to worry about.” When he sees that this is exactly the response guaranteed to make her worry, he amends his answer. “Your mother, she doesn’t like to confess her limits, but she needs looking after a little. That’s all. Your brother makes too much of this,” he adds. “You know how he is.”

  Of course she does. Helen squeezes her father’s hand. “You sit. I’ll get her.”

  Inside the house, Helen calls her mother. She taps on the closed bathroom door. “Mama? Are you okay?”

  After a moment, the toilet flushes and her mother emerges.

  “You’re missing the show,” Helen says.

  “Am I?”

  “No, not really. They’re just walking through the ceremony. Actually, I just came up to see if you were okay.”

  “Okay?”

  Her mother looks a little puzzled, and Helen is conscious of how idiotic she must sound.

  “I don’t know what it is about weddings. I’m always expecting disaster. You remember my wedding?”

  Marina nods. “You were a beautiful bride.”

  Helen rolls her eyes. “Mama, I was such a mess, you were ready to call the whole thing off. Don’t you remember that?” Helen has never forgotten. Standing in the little room off the chapel, she was crying and her mother had turned to her and said that it wasn’t too late, they could still send everyone home. She couldn’t have stunned Helen more if she had sprouted a third eye.

  “I remember,” Marina says. “I didn’t say this because you were a mess. I said this because you didn’t need this boy. Babies need only their mother’s milk and clean diapers.” Her voice is matter-of-fact, practical.