The Madonnas of Leningrad Read online

  Nevertheless, for no reason that Marina can imagine, she has been relieved until tomorrow morning, when she must report back for her ARP duty as a fire warden. Dmitri has made some kind of arrangement with the woman from the Lomonosov Porcelain Factory who is directing the packing of breakables; he will tell her no more than this, and Comrade Markovish will say only that Dmitri has promised to name their first daughter after her. She winks at Dmitri and adds, “But he has not asked me my given name.”

  “I’m so sorry, Comrade Markovish. What is your name?”

  “Ah, too late, Comrade Buriakov,” she teases. “The deal is already made.” She turns to Marina. “Go on. Just don’t say anything to the other girls. I can’t spare another hand.”

  She and Dmitri pass through room after room, weaving through a maze of sealed and labeled crates and past dozens of women lined up along tables filled with porcelain or kneeling on the floor in a forest of silver candelabra. She is ashamed to be leaving for no better reason than a meal, but when they step out into the air and she feels the breeze washing off the Neva River, her shame is forgotten. She sucks the bracing air deep into her lungs and feels herself revive. Except to run up to the roof every time the air raid sirens shriek, she has hardly set foot outside, has been home only a few times, and only then for just long enough to bathe and to change into fresh clothes that her aunt has washed out for her.

  “Where are we going?” she asks.

  “You shall see,” he says mysteriously. He takes her arm and guides her through knots of evening strollers, across Palace Square, under the triumphal arch, and over onto Nevsky Prospekt, the main thoroughfare. In the space of a few weeks, the city has been transformed. The spire of Peter and Paul Cathedral is draped in camouflage rigging, the Admiralty tower spattered with gray paint. They pass shop windows that are crosshatched with strips of paper to prevent their shattering in the event of shelling. The window of a pharmacy is papered with a lacy design of flowers and crosses as elaborate as a Fabergé egg. After a few more blocks, Dmitri turns the corner onto Mikhailovskaya Street and stops outside the front entrance to the Hotel Grand Europa. Its plate-glass windows are hidden behind a wall of sandbags, but the front doors are open and she hears music coming from inside.

  “Oh, no, Dima. I can’t go in there. Look at me.” The Hotel Grand Europa is legendary for its elegance, and she is still wearing her blue work smock.

  “You look fine,” he says. “What do you care what they think? Do you know anyone in there?”

  “But it’s horribly expensive.”

  “It is. But what am I saving my money for?” The question is not rhetorical; he is waiting for her to answer.

  As though he could read her thoughts, he says, “I’m not being foolhardy, Marina. I might as well spend it now. I suspect the ruble won’t be worth an empty eggshell by the time I get back.” He takes her hand. “Please humor me. This is a special night.”

  She can’t imagine what is special about tonight, except that every night is special now. Every day, every night since the war began has become infused with a new intensity, the awareness that the world is about to change. It is strangely exhilarating. There is the possibility that when this is all over, the Soviet Union will be a better place. She is ready for change, any change.

  The grand Art Deco dining room is buzzing, its tables full. Astonishing the way the world can tilt on its axis and yet people continue to walk upright, to go about their days, eating their dinners in restaurants, making their plans. Except for the incongruity of gas masks hanging from the necks of the finely dressed patrons, one might think the war looming outside were a fiction. A harpist plucks delicate music from the air, and palm trees waft in the colored light of a stained-glass skylight.

  The maître d’ guides them through the room to a table in a corner. He pulls out Marina’s chair, and with a flourish snaps open a linen napkin and drapes it across her lap. Like magic, a waiter appears at Dmitri’s elbow.

  Dmitri orders champagne and osetra caviar, but the waiter takes stock of the young couple and confides that really, the caviar is not worth the thieves’ rates being charged these days. He glances around discreetly. “Secretary Kuznetsov himself was here for dinner earlier, and I told him precisely the same thing. He had instead a very nice fish solyanka, followed by sturgeon in cream sauce with potatoes and a salad of cucumbers and tomatoes.” Dmitri thanks the waiter and agrees that they cannot do better than to follow the Party secretary’s wise choice.

  It is indeed a delicious dinner, and in spite of her exhaustion, Marina finds herself enjoying it immensely. Dmitri is quiet, but Marina fills the silences by telling him about the progress of the work at the museum.

  “I’m packing things I’ve never seen before. I just had no idea. You go on your usual routes through the museum, seeing the same things every day, and you forget how much more is not on display. I don’t think anyone, except Orbeli, of course, had any idea just how much there was to evacuate. It’s overwhelming sometimes.

  “This morning, I had an eerie moment,” she confides. She would never admit this to anyone but Dmitri. “I was packing a set of eighteenth-century Belgian Delft. Each plate has a different scene from this particular town. They are so detailed, almost like paintings, except all blue and white. For hours it was just blue and white, blue and white, plate after plate, all these detailed little scenes of houses and canals and milkmaids. And I suppose I was daydreaming because I was wrapping this one plate—it pictured the front of a house, and there was a splotch of bright red on the door. And I thought that was odd, but maybe it was a religious reference. But then the next plate, as I was looking at it, suddenly there was a splash of red in the water of the canal. And then more red. And then every plate I picked up, when I looked at it, blood appeared in the scene. The hair on the back of my neck stood up and I got a little panicky until I realized it was coming from me. My nose was bleeding. Nothing alarming, it’s just from leaning over from the waist for too long. It’s happening to everybody, but I suppose I was so tired, it just didn’t occur to me. I know it sounds silly, something for the hens to laugh at, but I had a moment when I thought I was having a vision.” She smiles at her own ridiculousness.

  “I’ll be so glad when we’re done with the porcelain. It’s so delicate, it gets on my nerves. I swear, there must be thousands of teacups alone. You should see them, Dima. Some are so thin, light shines through them. And we’ve run out of cotton wadding, so each one has to be wrapped in paper and packed in more shredded paper, and they look like they’ll break if you breathe on them. And then there’s all the plates and saucers and serving pieces. One could invite all of Leningrad to dinner and not run out of plates.”

  She stops when she notices that his thoughts seem to be elsewhere.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “We’ve hardly seen each other for days, and I’m babbling about dishes. You look tired, too. Are they working you very hard?”

  He studies the backs of his hands for a moment before he meets her eyes again. “We’re leaving in the morning.”

  She is shocked into silence. They have been training for only ten days, not the month that was expected, and these are not soldiers but volunteers in the People’s Army, mostly middle-aged men with no military experience. Though Dmitri is younger than most of his comrades, he doesn’t look any more convincingly like a soldier. He is wearing his usual collarless shirt, and a pair of light canvas trousers that hang loosely on his lanky frame. A paperback is tucked into his pants pocket, a pencil in his shirt pocket. With his long, limp hair and wire-rimmed glasses, he looks exactly like what he is, a graduate student of literature who has only read about war.

  “How can you go so soon? You don’t even have a uniform yet,” she says, as though a uniform might help the illusion.

  He pats his armband with the insignia of the People’s Volunteer Army. “We don’t need uniforms, Marina.” Then he adds, almost to himself, “What we could use are a few more rifles.”

  Th
e waiter has brought their tea. She cups the warm porcelain in her palms, blowing off the steam and staring at the tea leaves on the bottom.

  “Where are you going?” she finally asks.

  “We’re not allowed to say, but you can certainly guess.”

  He must mean the Luga line. Every morning now, news comes of the retreating Red Army. Some speculate that they are falling back merely as a ploy to draw the Germans deep into enemy territory and then to surround them. But whatever the reason, the Luga River is where the army will have to stand fast. About eighty kilometers to the south of the city, it is the last stronghold of fortifications between the Germans and Leningrad. In preparation, thousands of citizens have been drafted to dig trenches and construct gun battlements there. Every day, a few more packers at the Hermitage are taken from their work, handed shovels, and put on the trains heading south. Even high school children have been recruited for the work.

  “So long as they are sending students there,” Marina reasons, “it cannot be too bad, right?” She does not want to think about how he will manage.

  “I’ll come back, Marina. I promise.”

  “What do you mean?” she asks. “Of course you will. They say a few weeks.” This is the timetable that has been announced by every official on the radio and in Pravda, but when she says it aloud to Dmitri, she sees in his eyes that it may well be a lie.

  “Perhaps,” he offers. “We can hope. But war is never as easy as they promise.”

  The earth tilts a little more and she feels herself sliding. In all these weeks of packing and hurried preparations, it has never occurred to her to be fearful. None of it has seemed quite real. But when people leave, they don’t come back. That has been her experience. That is real.

  When they emerge from the restaurant, it is nearly midnight. The city is bathed in pastel shades of dusk, like a tinted postcard. The dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral is burning gold. Above them, the sky is streaked with long purple shadows.

  They stroll along the embankment of the Moyka River and then into the green shadows of Admiralty Park. The lawn has been plowed up into long rows of air raid trenches. He stops beneath a plane tree and turns to face her, looking solemn.

  “I have something for you.” He reaches into the breast pocket of his shirt and pulls out a tiny gold ring set with an opal.

  “I don’t know if it’s your size. The woman who sold it to me had hands that looked like yours.” He fingers the ring uncertainly.

  “Would you marry me? Not now. But when I return?”

  She has never given any thought to marrying Dmitri. Her romantic fantasies have always featured a future lover whose appearance and qualities were an enticingly hazy mystery, not the boy who has been her companion for nearly a decade.

  She was eleven years old when they arrested her father. Three months later, the black van came back for her mother, and her life as she had known it ended. She was taken in by her mother’s brother and his pregnant wife and was put in a new school where no one knew of her or her family. If anyone should ask, Uncle Viktor instructed her, she should say that her parents were away on an archaeological dig. Within a few weeks, though, the rumors had caught up with her. The circle of her new schoolmates stepped back and stranded her in a widening ripple of whispers. And there beside her was Dmitri.

  His father had been arrested shortly before hers, but unlike Marina, Dmitri was quietly defiant. He taught her by example not to cringe at the sly insinuations of teachers, to hold up her chin when others treated her as though she might infect them with a disease. When she confessed to wanting to be popular, he laughed, though not meanly, and told her that only ordinary people were popular. “You might as well accept it, Marina,” he had said. “Even if your parents were Party members, you would never fit in. You’re unusual. That’s better than popular if you have some courage.”

  She suspected she didn’t have much courage, but neither did she have much choice. He was right. All through school, she had tried to blend in, and had managed, if not to fit in, then at least not to call attention to herself. But after her parents were charged with political dissidence, she was marked, and even her harmless traits and idiosyncrasies became fodder. She was left-handed and red-haired, both signs of a disorderly and deficient character. She sometimes hummed to herself unconsciously, or, worse, she drifted off in class, only to be called back to attention by the sounds of her classmates tittering and the teacher barking her name. Even as her peers had gotten older and less openly cruel, she had still seen it in their eyes—that subtle pulling back when she made what seemed to her a perfectly normal observation.

  It was only with Dmitri that she could breathe easily and be herself. She knew that she could tell him whatever she was thinking, that she wanted to live inside a van Ruisdael painting, for instance, and he would weigh her words gravely and then ask her if she would really be happy in a static moment, no matter how idyllic.

  Later, when others their age were pairing off, the two of them began, awkwardly, to kiss and hold hands. He told her he thought she was beautiful, a remarkable idea shared by no one else she knew of other than the occasional rude stranger on the street. When he first said it, she assumed he meant that she possessed an inner beauty—he frequently spoke in these romantic terms—but no, he said, he wasn’t speaking of her soul. She was physically desirable. Even so, when they kissed, she imagined that they were merely practicing for others.

  Yet it seems this is where they have been heading all along, and, once again, she simply has not been paying attention.

  “This is too abrupt,” Dmitri says, reading her surprise. “I thought, what with the war…” His eyes drop to the ring, and he studies it as though looking for flaws. “I love you, Marina. I suppose I should have said that, but you must know.”

  She should have spoken by now. “I love you, too,” she murmurs. It’s true, though she realizes it only after she has said the words. Marriage to Dima. She would not have guessed this, but it seems right somehow.

  “Yes,” she announces, nodding. “Of course.”

  He smiles, relieved, and reaches for her hand. When he attempts to slide the ring onto her third finger, however, it will not go. She takes her hand back and tries to work the ring over the knuckle, then takes it off and slides it onto her pinkie finger.

  “I can get it sized,” she assures him. “It’s beautiful.” She reaches her mouth up to his and kisses him.

  They lean against the trunk of the plane tree and kiss, but not as they have in the past. They kiss desperately, until their mouths are raw and pulpy. He kneads her breasts through the fabric of her smock. At first it makes her pleasantly light-headed, and then her tender nipples begin to ache. There is a look at the bottom of his eyes that is new and urgent. She feels the heat radiating off his skin, the trembling of his fingers, and a persistent hardness pushing against her thigh. When she reaches down and touches him tentatively, he groans softly and presses her hand more firmly down.

  This is different. In sculpture, the male member is always flaccid, a soft little worm nested between muscled thighs.

  What she knows about sex is confined mostly to what she has picked up studying art. It is an uneven education, strong on anatomy but weaker in the working details. Countless paintings depict scenes of demure courtship, a few suggest languid postcoital bliss, but, excepting a few obscure oriental pieces, there is little in between.

  Dmitri suddenly stops and pulls himself away from her. Both of them are panting.

  “What is it?” she whispers, fearful that she has hurt him.

  “We are not dogs, Marina, that copulate in a park.”

  She responds, reasonably, that there is no place they can go to be alone with each other. She lives with her aunt and uncle and two young cousins; he shares a communal apartment with six other students.

  He nods solemnly and repeats the stock response of the Housing Committee whenever they address the perpetual shortage of apartments in Leningrad. “Privacy is a conce
it of degenerate societies.” He tries to smile, though he really does seem to be in pain. “So you will be degenerate with me, Marinochka?”

  She nods her consent and they slide awkwardly down onto the grass. When she feels his hands fumbling at the waistband of her underpants, she wriggles out of them and leans back. What happens next, though, takes her completely by surprise: he won’t fit. He pushes and pushes, and just as she is wondering if they are going about it wrong, there is a searing pain that rips from the inside out. She gasps and holds her breath against the pain until she thinks she may black out. And then it is over and they are lying, spent, on the grass. She is almost too weak to move, and there is a terrible burning where he entered her. She reaches up under her rumpled skirt and finds the swollen folds between her thighs. They are hot and sticky, and when she pulls her hand out from under her skirt, her fingers are bloody.

  “Dima,” she says, and holds up her hand.

  He nods. “It’s normal the first time. Does it hurt?”

  She nods. He pulls her closer into his arms and strokes her hair. With her ear against his chest, she can hear the pulse of his blood, the steady thump of his heart, and they seem to slow as she listens. She drifts on the surf of his blood, lolling in and out of sleep.

  “Go to sleep,” he says. “We have time.”

  The sun has hardly set for weeks, suspended above the horizon like a held breath. In this endless dusk, it is easy to believe that time is elastic. It stretches out before them, the future so indistinct that it must be quite far away.

  Then it shrinks and snaps back into the present moment. The clock on the Admiralty is chiming. The light is pearly gray and the air is cool. Dmitri is jostling her shoulder. She sits up and finds that the front of her smock is wet with dew. Hours have passed in the space of a heartbeat, and it is early morning. He is leaving soon. He’d rather she didn’t come to the station. Even if he wanted her to, it is after five o’clock and she is expected to report to the warden’s office in less than half an hour. They can say good-bye here. It is better this way. He will write. He loves her. He will come back.