by Debra Dean
Andrei stiffens, but before he can respond, Naureen shoots him a look. “We should have prepared you, Helen,” she says. She blows out a votive candle and sits down. “It’s been such a gradual thing, I guess we all kind of take it in stride, but it must be pretty upsetting if you haven’t seen her for a while.”
“I don’t think she knew who I was.” Helen presses a finger against one tear duct, then the other. “When I came to pick them up, she invited me in and asked about my family. The way she said it, it was like I was a stranger.”
Naureen gives her husband another look, a visual nudge, and he joins them at the table.
“She’s just a little absent sometimes. I’m sure she knew who you were,” Andrei offers.
“And what makes you so sure about that?” Helen’s voice is arch.
He takes a deep breath and visibly composes himself. “You’re right. I don’t know anything for sure. They both play their cards pretty close to the chest.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Papa won’t even talk about it. He pretends like she’s fine. But you can see why I’ve been pushing to get them moved. They’re doing okay now, but it’s good to have things in place.”
It is so quiet that they can hear the patter of moths batting against the porch light, the metallic pinging of a boat’s halyard in the bay.
Helen pours herself another swig of wine. “Has she ever said anything to you about living in a cellar in Russia?”
“What are you talking about?” Andrei asks.
“She mentioned some cousins, the family she lived with, and she said they all lived in a cellar. You don’t remember anything like that?”
“That was before my time.”
“No, I know, but she never said anything to you about a cellar?”
“No.”
“Don’t you wonder?”
“Wonder what?”
“Why we don’t know. Isn’t it weird that we don’t know anything about them?” Maybe it’s the wine or the lack of sleep, because she feels she’s being very clear and yet her brother doesn’t seem to get it. “She said they lived in a cellar with hundreds of people.”
“Helen,” Naureen says, “I don’t know how much credence you want to give to everything she says. Tonight, we were talking and one minute she seemed fine, and then next thing you know, she’s telling me how she used to eat glue and swim with whales. Oh, and she met Zeus.”
“Who?” Andrei asks.
“Zeus. The Greek god.”
“Maybe she knew someone named Zeus.”
“She said he was a god, Andrei. She also said he was your real father.”
“Zeus? She said Zeus was my father?” Andrei chuckles and shakes his head.
“Well, that makes perfect sense.” Helen smiles in spite of herself. “She’s always thought you were God’s gift. Now we know why.”
The two women laugh until they cry, and Andrei grins good-naturedly. “Yeah, yeah, very funny,” he says, and they crack up again.
“Tell her about the recliner,” Naureen urges.
“Well, for their anniversary, I bought them two new recliners. To replace those ratty old things they have in the living room. I could tell Papa liked them, but she kept at me until I sent them back. You know how she gets. Everything is more than she needs. I said, ‘Don’t you like them?’ And she said, ‘They’re lovely, but you should save your money. Buy yourself a lamb chop.’”
“A lamb chop?” Helen is poised for the explanation.
Andrei shrugs. “Who knows. She mixes up words.”
“Poor Papa.”
“I guess. To hear him tell it, though, everything’s just fine. You should see him. He’s learned how to cook. He makes a real mean shchi.” This is their mother’s cabbage soup, a wonderful concoction with prunes and peppers and carrots. Helen can almost smell the pungent aroma of it that used to steam up the kitchen windows on winter afternoons.
“Remember how she used to make us wipe down our soup bowls with bread?” Helen asks.
Andrei grins. “You should have seen her, Naureen. She’d go nuts if we left anything on our plates. I mean anything. We had to stay at the table until they were clean. When I was a kid, I fell asleep face-first in a plate of Brussels sprouts. Oh, and remember the rhubarb?”
Helen rolls her eyes. “Stewed rhubarb. Canned rhubarb. Rhubarb juice. Chicken stuffed with rhubarb.”
“Your birthday?” Andrei prompts. The two of them sputter with laughter and Helen adds the punch line. “Rhubarb spice cake!”
“Papa put in some rhubarb one year,” she explains to Naureen. “The stuff went wild, it took over the whole garden. But she wasn’t going to let any of it go to waste. It was like a religion with her.”
“Eat until you see the pattern on the plate so tomorrow we will have nice weather,” Andrei recites, imitating his mother’s accent, and they convulse into laughter again.
Helen catches at her breath and releases a long, pent-up sigh.
“She just shoveled the food down us. I was such a fat kid, and then when I was in college and I started trying to diet, you’d have thought I was torturing her.
“I still can’t throw out food. Last week, I was making a recipe that called for egg whites, and I had these yolks. Two lousy egg yolks, and I couldn’t just dump them down the drain. It was like she was standing at my back, watching me. They’re still in the fridge. All these little containers of leftovers. A cup of rice pilaf. Half an orange in plastic wrap. A half-dozen grapes shriveled like peas.” She throws up her hands in mock surrender. “I’ve actually been thinking about getting another dog, just to have someone to feed the scraps to.”
Seventy-five grams of bread. Bread that is half sawdust, a small, dense block. It is the size of a ticket stub in her palm, the weight of dead leaves. Many evenings, this is their only food, and they must eat very slowly to stretch out this morsel of black bread into the length of a meal. She pulls off a tiny corner. It is nearly tasteless, but Marina eats it slowly, focusing on the sensations of chewing and swallowing. She calls up in her imagination the flavors of foods she has eaten, sausages and watermelon and pickled beets.
Her uncle is reading aloud from the text of his upcoming lecture, a droning recitation of dates and numbers.
Monday, bread rations were cut again, down to two hundred and fifty grams a day for workers, half that for dependents like Aunt Nadezhda. Not even an infant could survive on such a meager portion, and this must be divided into three meals. Some people gobble up their entire day’s ration as soon as they get it, but, as Uncle Viktor points out, they are fools. When the bread is gone, they are still hungry. There is never enough food to still one’s hunger. But time, time is measured in the space between one meal and the next, and without bread to look forward to, the day never ends.
People are starving. They have been reduced to eating unimaginable things. Bubi, Mikhail’s cat, was an early victim of their hunger. Not that they actually ate Bubi—they were still too squeamish for that—but they traded him away for a sack of potatoes and some cooking oil, knowing full well the fate to which they were consigning him. Now, they would eat him themselves without a second thought. They eat wallpaper paste and glue and even wood, and still they starve. The mind reels. It is unimaginable that in 1941, in Leningrad no less, people could actually be dying of starvation, and not just drunkards or ne’er-do-wells, but distinguished scholars and respected artists. Unimaginable, but true. They lie down and die as simply as going to sleep, and those left behind try to explain their deaths, try to find patterns to numb the horror. This person was elderly or that person was always thin as a matchstick. Those without purpose die sooner, and men are more susceptible than women, having less fat. Living alone is a liability, and having to share rations with dependents is a liability also.
Viktor has applied scientific rigor to the business of keeping them alive. In the mornings, he distributes the breakfast ration with the solemnity of a priest bestowing communion wafers. Later
, when Nadezhda returns from the bakery with the bread, he carefully cuts it up into nine portions for that day’s lunch and dinner and the following day’s breakfast. Because Marina is doing physical labor and thus has higher caloric needs, her three nuggets of bread are cut slightly larger. They are wrapped in a cloth and set out of sight. On the days when the canteen serves up extra rations at lunch, a porridge made of boiled buckwheat groats or their famous aspic, the evening ration is halved again and the remainder set aside. If there is extra bread, he barters it on strict principles of nutrition and economy rather than succumbing, as Nadezhda might, to the temptations of the palate.
His scientific system of household management doesn’t factor in luck, though, and Marina has come to suspect that their survival may depend on something beyond the bounds of reason—call it luck or miracles or whatever you wish. Since that day back in October when she saw Anya praying to the Benois Madonna, she has begun to petition the Madonnas as well. When they are making their morning rounds and pass a frame that held a Madonna, she furtively mumbles a quick prayer and then improvises something like the crossing gestures Anya made over her chest. She doesn’t know the incantations one is supposed to recite. The first time, she just whispered, Help. Help us, please. That night, the god came to her on the roof.
Now she asks for things. She asks for Dmitri to come home. She asks for the god on the roof to return. She asks for food. It is foolish, a kind of wishing game that Mikhail and Tatiana might play.
Dmitri has not come home; neither has she heard any word of him. His division was decimated at Chudovo, and those who survived joined other divisions. He might be anywhere. Every morning, she scans the casualty list posted in the warden’s room, looking for his name. When it isn’t there, she feels a flush of gratitude. He may yet be alive, and who knows, perhaps Viktor will hear something of him when he goes to the front.
As for the god on the roof, she knows she imagined that. She has heard others complain of hallucinations brought on by hunger. Though this visitation felt more real than any moment before or since, a tangible consummation of the flesh, she must concede that there is no evidence to support such a wild rent in the fabric of the universe. She does not care. She has gone up to the roof night after night, hoping to hallucinate again, to be swept up into passion. But the statues on the roof have remained inanimate copper, refusing to alchemize into gold.
Still, there have been the miracles of food.
A week after Marina first approached the Madonnas, Nadezhda’s china, which had been languishing in a consignment shop since July, miraculously sold. Viktor returned from the black market with rice and rusks, and the smoky rock candy made from molten sugar excavated from the charred basement of the Badayev warehouse. They were able to save their ration coupons for the rest of the month. Then two weeks ago, when there was nothing left, when Marina had begun fainting at the slightest exertion, a group of sailors on the Palace Embankment presented her with an armful of pine branches. She ate an entire branch on the way back to the shelter, gnawing on the bark. It tasted wonderful, sharp and spicy, like eating the forest. They heard that in the hospital the needles are boiled to extract vitamins for those with scurvy, so Nadezhda made a fragrant broth with the rest.
Now, though he would not call it luck, Viktor has secured a place with the Goodwill Delegation from the Hermitage that will visit the front tomorrow. For the entertainment of the troops, he is scheduled to deliver a lecture on the ancient civilization of Urartu. There will be a banquet following the proceedings, and an honorarium will be paid in butter and vodka.
Tonight, though, there is only bread. Marina disciplines herself to wait until Uncle Viktor finishes a page and has thumbed to the next sheet before she allows herself another nibble. Between bites, she tries to train her mind away from the bread and back to the lecture. She and Nadezhda are a test audience, charged with the thankless task of responding as they imagine a real audience of soldiers might. Before he began to read, Viktor suggested that they pretend they know nothing about Urartian culture.
“Understand that this was originally composed with a scholarly reader in mind. While I believe I’ve adjusted the text of my manuscript sufficiently to accommodate a general audience, there may be references here and there that need further elucidation. Naturally, I’m receptive to any suggestions.”
This last part is not precisely true. Earlier, Marina made the mistake of offering a small suggestion about a turn of phrase that seemed unnecessarily stilted to her and might be improved by the substitution of the word begin for commence. Viktor treated her to a long discourse defending the propriety of his wording, noting that commence had a tone more suitable to the solemnity of the occasion.
“One might begin doing a household chore,” he intoned, “but we are not talking about laundry here but rather the excavation of a culture.”
And then he started the lecture over from the beginning.
The story of Urartu might be told as a compelling mystery story. There once was a powerful kingdom that ruled over the Caucasus for three centuries and then vanished completely from history. Only in the last few decades has it been rescued from oblivion, its temples and fortresses unearthed, its language transcribed, an entire culture that was buried for twenty-five centuries brought back to the surface.
However, Viktor’s description drains the excitement from his subject, substituting detailed exposition of the digs and a painstaking analysis of sociological formation. Some of the leadenness is due, no doubt, to the scientific rigor of his discipline. The rest could be attributed to political necessity. Viktor Alekseevich Krasnov’s version of Urartian culture is dutifully and remarkably prescient of Marx. In this, Marina thinks, his writing is no different from any other piece of writing for public consumption. There is rarely an original thought that isn’t smothered under the deadening weight of Marxist theory. Take the museum guides’ official tour script. If visitors had to navigate the picture gallery upstairs with only this document, they would quickly get lost. This script, which Marina and the other guides have memorized and recite verbatim, translates an innocently frothy portrait by Watteau into “a picture of decadent bourgeois privilege in the disintegration of feudal society.” Or turn to the entry for Cranach the Elder’s exquisite Madonna. The painting is as exotic as a tango, all gorgeous reds and oranges, the sensuous drape of velvet and satins, the Madonna’s spiraling hair, and the wonderful apples hanging over her head like planets, a crown of glowing planets. In the official text, though, all this is reduced to an “instructive religious artifact from the Teutonic cult of Mary.” Marina sometimes will conveniently forget the worst of her script when she is guiding her tours and just let the paintings speak for themselves, but Viktor would never contemplate such a dangerous omission. Having barely survived the purges that decimated the Archaeology Department, along with much of the intelligentsia of Leningrad, he has since grown fluent in the language of the Party.
Even Viktor, though, seems to sense how far short of entertainment his lecture is falling. As he is recounting the laborious process by which language scholars have begun deciphering the various cuneiform inscriptions, he stops midsentence. He runs his finger down the page, murmurs, “Well, perhaps we may dispense with some of this,” and skips to the next page. It is only nearing the finish that Viktor leaves the track of his original manuscript and bends to the upcoming occasion. “It may seem,” he says, looking past Marina and Nadezhda to address an imaginary gathering, “that the fate of a long-dead culture is far removed from the present concerns of the valiant soldiers gathered here tonight. And yet, if we may conclude anything from the fate of Urartu, it is that feudal systems of oppression are eventually defeated and forgotten. When future archaeologists unearth the forgotten ruins of Fascist Germany”—Viktor pauses to clear his throat, and Marina is startled to see his lower lip quivering with suppressed emotion—“surely,” he continues, “surely, comrades, they will be astonished at the vainglorious claims of a Thousand Y
ear Reich.”
Nadezhda claps her hands enthusiastically. “It is inspired, Viktor,” she says. “They will be on their feet.”
“Yes, Uncle. They will certainly be impressed,” Marina concurs.
“In fact,” Nadezhda adds, “I would be surprised if you are not given a supplemental fee.”
“What do you mean?” Viktor’s voice is suddenly sharp.
“I mean something beyond the four hundred grams of butter. Out of gratitude.”
“Haven’t I told you I will bring back what I can? Can you think of nothing but your damned sweets?” Slow starvation has carved the contours of his face into hard bones and made his glare even more stern. “I share my ration with you, even though you are entitled to less, but still you torment me with this incessant ranting.”
Nadezhda has been plotting all week what they will make with the butter. Without work to distract her, she talks of nothing else, circling fixedly around her limited options. They have no flour, but she has squirreled away a few pieces of the blockade candy that could be melted down to make shortbread. And if only they had a bit of jam. She has pestered Viktor repeatedly about trading away the vodka.
Now she pouts. “It’s easy for you to mock me. You will be feasting tomorrow night while Marina and I eat nothing but bread.”
Viktor explodes, not caring that his voice echoes off the frozen walls of the vault and carries through the shelter.
“This is my life’s work, Nadezhda. If I die, this is my legacy to the world.”
“Yes, it is all that matters to you anymore, this book. You don’t even care anymore what has become of your own children.”
She is not prepared for the blow, and it knocks her back onto the pallet. She sits down hard but doesn’t react. Mutely staring at the wall of carpets, she seems oblivious to the hoarse whispers coming from the other side.
Viktor too is stunned. He mumbles something incomprehensible and then sinks down at the foot of the pallet, his head in his hands.
