The Madonnas Of Leningrad

This morning, though, Anya is determined to visit the Rembrandt Room, where she says she has much to show Marina.

The Main Staircase inside the New Hermitage is treacherous with ice, and there are no handrails to prevent a fall. Anya leans heavily on Marina, and the two edge up one step at a time, like mountain climbers on a treacherous slope. It takes them half an hour to reach the top. They traverse the long landing, passing empty marble pedestals, and come to the first room beyond the staircase, where the van Dykes hung. Anya pulls a rag from the pocket of her jacket. She is loath to admit how exhausted she is, so while she rests she makes a show of inspecting a large frame leaning against the wall. She carefully wipes away dust that has settled along the top edge.

Marina stands at her side and looks around the vacant room. In some ways, it is more beautiful now. Stripped of the paintings and furnishings, the room itself comes to the fore, austere and grand. Frost has etched elaborate patterns across the walls, swirls that glitter in the morning light. Still, the empty frames remind one of all the people who are missing. The Earl of Danby and Queen Henrietta. Charles the First in his armor and Thomas Wharton with his feathered hat. A new family with a baby girl and a pair of young sisters dressed in their finery. The elder sister gazes proudly at Marina as she passes and identifies them, Elizabeth and Philadelphia Wharton, but the younger one looks as though she would like to be released from the uncomfortable pose that the artist has put her in.

There are others that she cannot see, but last week Anya described every detail of the paintings, and so when Marina passes the approximate spots where they hung, she calls back to Anya, still lingering near the door, describing a lord and then a lady and, last, a mother and daughter.

“She’s wearing a crimson dress and a ruff,” Marina says. “And the daughter, who is about seven or eight, stands to her left. She looks like a little adult in her dress.”

“Can you picture them?” Anya asks hopefully.

“Maybe a little,” Marina lies.

She circles nearly back to where Anya is still standing. Here is the artist van Dyke himself, a romantic-looking man with curls and a long nose. And just beyond him, in the enormous frame that Anya was dusting, is a Madonna and child. They look out of place among all these Flemish gentlefolk. The painting is called The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, but two birds on the wing over Mary’s head give the painting its nickname, Madonna with Partridges.

“Are you all right now?” she asks Anya.

“Quite,” Anya says.

Marina takes her arm. “If we want to get to the Rembrandts today, I think we’d better keep moving.” And so the two of them walk, arm in arm, through the Rubens Room. They are moving so slowly that Marina can give a running commentary, though she skips over a few pieces. She resolutely ignores Bacchus and wills his corpulence to fade back to silvery frost, merely noting for the record that he is there. The same goes for Rubens’s painting of the daughter suckling her starving father.

“Mars and Cupid. Venus and Adonis. The Coronation of the Virgin. Hagar Leaving the House of Abraham.”

At this pace, even if they turn around now, she will be late for work. She assists the museum carpenter in the construction of coffins. The museum’s storerooms are the only remaining source of lumber in the city, and so coffin building has become the main occupation of the displaced workers on the staff. They are not craftsmen, but then again these are the most utilitarian of boxes, a few boards of pine slapped together to hold bodies that weigh next to nothing. There are so many workers out ill now that those who are still able are driven even harder trying to keep up with the demand. If she is late, she had better have a very good reason. Something better than strolling the picture gallery and cataloging missing art.

When they get to the Tent Hall, Marina moves them right down the center of the hall, not even bothering to comment on what is on either side of her. She expects Anya to scold her, but the old woman has also focused her attention on the doorway at the end of the hall leading to the Rembrandt Room. Halfway down the length of the hall, Anya suddenly weaves and then grabs at Marina ’s chest.

“I’m fine,” she says, still gripping Marina ’s jacket. “I just lost my balance there.”

“We really should turn around, Anya. You’re looking tired. Besides, I’ll need to go to work soon.”

Anya pulls herself upright and releases Marina. “If you must go, you must go. I will go on to the Rembrandt Room.” She picks up the pace, weaving wildly toward the doorway, as if to suggest that it is Marina who is holding them up.

“Okay, okay, slow down,” Marina says, taking her arm again and steadying her. “We don’t need to get there yesterday.”

Just inside the door, Anya stops in front of the wall that held Danae, but her eyes move beyond the right edge of the frame. “This was one of the first,” she says. “I came to work one morning and he was gone. Quite full of himself, don’t you think?”

It is all Marina can do not to remind Anya that she has never seen this painting, whatever it is. “Who is he?” she asks.

“Oh, well, Rembrandt said he was a Polish nobleman, but he doesn’t look like any Pole I’ve ever seen. He’s Russian. Look.” She points. “He’s got that bearskin cap and the fur cloak like they used to wear here. And that big pearl earring. He thinks he’s quite the catch with that mustache of his, but look at those jowls under his chin.”

“And what was it called?”

Anya pulls out of her reverie and gives Marina a sharp look, as though she has asked a foolish question. “A Polish Nobleman.”

A Polish Nobleman, pearl earring, mustache, bearskin cap. Okay, good enough.

“Now that one looks a bit like you,” Anya says, pointing to the next wall. “But younger. She’s got your red hair, though.”

Anya goes on to describe a girl leaning on a broom and looking directly at the viewer. Girl with a Broom. And then a portrait of a lady with a carnation, and another one of Pallas Athene, and another of an old man.

“Now here is the scene where Peter denied Christ. This was one of his best, in my opinion.”

“Another one?” Marina wonders if perhaps Anya is confused. It’s hard to believe that Stalin would sell off so many masterpieces. Hasn’t he always said that this art belongs to the people, that it is their heritage? She is not so naive as to believe everything she is told, but to sell even one Rembrandt seems inconceivable. Anya has already described half a dozen.

“Do you know this story, Marina? At the last supper, Christ told Peter that he would deny knowing him. Before the cock crowed three times. And the Gospels tell us that this is in fact what happened. You see him here”-she points-“he is sitting around the fire with some people in the town. Romans. Now, this is the touch of the master. Rembrandt used the firelight to make the scene more dramatic.”

Anya’s voice blurs behind the thought taking shape in Marina ’s mind. She knows Anya wouldn’t lie outright, but might these all be fabrications? Might Anya have invented these paintings? They are very specific visions, but that doesn’t mean they are real.

“Are you sure it was a Rembrandt?”

Anya turns very slowly to Marina. “When you see it, you’ll know.” Her eyes are as bright and blank as coins. “No one else could paint like that.”

Marina determines in that moment to ask Olga Markhaeva if she’s ever heard of these missing paintings. She doesn’t know why this didn’t occur to her before. Anya is, after all, a very old woman.

The return trip to the stairs is even more protracted, though they are stopping only for Anya to rest. But if Marina is tempted to rush her, one look at Anya dispels the idea. With each step, Anya’s appearance grows grayer, and soon Marina is half carrying her, Anya’s feet dragging almost weightlessly.

They stop again near the Madonna with Partridges. She slumps Anya against a marble vase, propping her up with one hand. Anya is perilously close to collapsing to the floor, and if she does, Marina isn’t at all sure she will be able to get her up again.

The Madonna is also resting. Holding her baby in her lap, she looks distracted and even a bit alarmed by a flock of putti who are dancing ring-around-the-rosy nearby. She doesn’t look at all anxious to take on anyone else’s troubles. But Marina petitions her anyway. She’s not asking for much. “Help me get her downstairs,” she whispers. “Don’t let her die here, please.” She adds another “please” for good measure and with her free hand furtively touches her fingers to her forehead.

The Rubens Room. Even here, in a room riotous with flesh, the painting at the center of the long wall gives one pause. Here is a young woman suckling an old man. She is young and plump and fresh-faced. He is naked, with only a black cloth draped over his genitals. His hands are bound in chains behind his back. Although his musculature is beautiful-the arms and legs fully sculpted, the chest and abdomen defined-his head is a horror: the beard and hair matted, the eyes bulging as grotesquely as a gargoyle’s and focused downward on the girl’s exposed nipple.

Before you either turn away in disgust or wink knowingly at one another, you should know that the artist insists that this is a picture about love. Filial love. The old man has been condemned by the Roman senate to die of hunger, and his daughter has come to his prison cell and offered her breast to feed him. This has nothing to do with the decorous love or amorous passions one is more accustomed to seeing in a painting. It is raw and wretched and demeaning. In the end, we are physical bodies and every abstract notion about love sinks beneath this fact.

“Doesn’t she look beautiful, Mama? The something old is Naureen’s pearls.”

“She reminds me of a girl I knew once.”

“Who was that?”

“Back in Leningrad. I don’t know-I forget her name now. She was upstairs.”

“Was this when you lived in the cellar?”

“Yes. I would go upstairs and visit her.”

“I don’t understand something. Why were you living in a cellar?”

“It was the war. They were dropping bombs.”

“Oh. Of course. That makes sense.”

“We all lived in the cellars then.”

“But not your friend who lived upstairs?”

“No.”

“Why not her?”

“I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

“It’s okay, you don’t have to. I was just curious.”

“Her father died of starvation that winter. I remember that. She fed him with her breast milk, but he died anyway.”

Sleds have appeared on Nevsky Prospekt, throughout the city, children’s sleds painted red and yellow and blue. The tramcars have long since stopped running, frozen wherever they happened to be on their runs when the last of the electricity shut down. To get from one place to another, people walk. The streets are nearly deserted, but a few people trudge in slow motion, their bodies bent forward as if into a stiff wind. Some pull sleds, ferrying those who can no longer walk. The lame. The dead. Corpses wrapped in swaddling or still bundled in their heavy coats. Blue feet protrude. The only sounds on the street are the terrible squeaking of runners on ice.

Marina struggles over a hummock of frozen snow on the sidewalk. She has been walking for more than two hours and has journeyed five blocks from the service entrance of the New Hermitage, a distance she once traveled in an abstracted heartbeat, giving it no more of her attention than she gave to breathing. Now it is like being in a dream and trying to run from something: her legs will not move, they are inanimate wood, rooted into the ground, and only with a concentrated effort of will can she heave one stump off the ground, push it forward, then set it down again gingerly, feeling for the slide of ice beneath her boot before she shifts her weight.

She rests, breathless and dizzy from the exertion, and reaches out her hand to rest it against the stone front of a building for support. Slowly, she lifts her eyes up from the ground. The flat gray sky reels momentarily before stabilizing.

She is only a few blocks from the Krasnov apartment, but though this is her neighborhood, she hardly recognizes it. Hoarfrost covers every surface, and icicles hang like moss from the wires and eaves above her. The buildings, too, are crusted over with ice, and their boarded windows present a blank face to the street. There is no noise, no dogs or cats in the street, no smoke drifting up from the chimneys, no evidence at all of life. She might be the sole remaining survivor of a lost civilization, like Uncle Viktor’s Urartu. The doomed citizenry has left behind messages, however, plastered on the plywood and walls and sealed under ice, but still legible. Here is a poster with the uplifting pronouncement “Victory Is Near.” Another official poster commands the reader to seek shelter during air raids and threatens severe penalties for failing to do so. Beneath these, at eye level, is a frozen collage of typed and handwritten notices: offers to exchange shoes, a mahogany armoire, a bicycle, gold and silver jewelry, a morocco-bound set of travel journals, a sable coat, a typewriter. Whatever one might want is advertised here, all in exchange for foodstuffs. They are old, the ragged scraps of paper smeared and buried under layers of frost. The last desperate pleas of the civilization, they were posted here back when one might still conceivably barter for food. There are no fresh notices.

In this new geography, the next corner recedes into the distant horizon like the forced perspective in landscapes, hazy gray and impossibly far away, separated by a rolling mountain range of compacted dirty snow and studded with frozen hills of trash and slick lakes of ice. She resolutely turns her attention back to her legs, to the next step. In front of her, she holds out the image of a chocolate bar.

Today is Tatiana’s birthday, and Nadezhda was particularly distressed this morning on account of the day. She cannot admit the too-crushing possibility that her children are dead, so she focused her grief instead on the idea of her little girl celebrating her birthday without family around her. She reminisced distractedly about past birthday celebrations, the cakes that she used to bake for her children, cakes filled with jam and frosted with buttercream, the cocoa, the wrapped gifts heaped on the birthday child’s plate. She remembered hiding a toy rifle, a packet of crayons, and a bar of chocolate for Mikhail’s last birthday, tucking them under some linens on a high shelf where the boy wouldn’t think to look. In the distracted tumult of the children’s leaving, she had forgotten about them until that moment.

“I expected him to be back before his birthday.” She turned on her husband with a sudden fury. “You promised me they would come home in two weeks.”

Viktor looked up at her, his dull eyes filled with pain, but he didn’t say anything. He hasn’t gotten out of bed for ten days now, and in that time his appearance has undergone a disquieting transformation. His face is a skeletal mask, his nose grown sharp, his eyes hollow.

Marina cut off her aunt before she could further berate her sick husband. “Are they still there?”

“Where?” Nadezhda asked, confused.

“The gifts. The chocolate. Is it still there?”

Nadezhda was too distraught to understand the significance of the question, but Marina was already planning this journey. Chocolate, probably a large bar, given Nadezhda’s tendency to indulge her children. Even now, Marina can taste the velvety sweetness in her mouth.

When she turns off Nevsky and onto her street, she is wrenched by the view of Number Nineteen, her home. The face of the building has been peeled away by an explosive, exposing the front apartments to the street like the rooms of a dollhouse. The ground floor is buried in rubble but she can see right into the rooms on the first floor. In one room, a yellow kitchen, chairs are strewn on the floor but an unbroken teacup sits on the table. A calendar hangs askew over the stove. This would be the Magrachev family’s apartment, Marina thinks, a factory supervisor and his wife, her elderly father, and a little girl Mikhail’s age. In the adjoining room, a light fixture still hangs from the ceiling, its shade rocking in a gust of wind. Two coats, a man’s and a woman’s, hang on pegs near the door.

The front entrance to the building, once beautiful Italian marble with two etched-glass doors, is demolished, so Marina makes her slow way around to the side yard. Rubble and refuse is heaped in the yard in frozen piles. She rings the bell and waits. She rings again. Perhaps everyone has left. It doesn’t seem possible that anyone could still be living here, and she is on the verge of tears. She has no door key for the service entrance. All this way for nothing. She cannot feel her legs, and it is impossible to believe that they will carry her back over the distance she has come.

And then the door opens a crack.

“Who is it?” A hoarse voice crackles, and the face of an ancient hag peers around the doorjamb.

“It’s Marina from Five East.”

“Marina Anatolyevna Krasnova?”

Marina realizes with a start that the hag is Vera Yurievna, the building’s janitor, a woman in her early forties. The door opens wide and Vera throws her arms around Marina and hugs her as though Marina were a long-lost relation.

“You’re a block of ice, child. Come in, come in. I’ll put some water on the stove,” she offers, and draws Marina inside and down a black hallway to her apartment.

Vera lights a candle that gutters, spitting flickers of light into the gloom and revealing a dank little warren. She has moved into her kitchen, boarding up the window and closing off the other room. Into this room she has moved a narrow bed, a single chair, and a small table, all arranged around a burzhuika, the ubiquitous little iron stove that everyone uses now.

She offers Marina the chair and pulls a blanket off the rumpled heaps on the bed. “Here, put this around you. We’ll have some heat in a moment.” The blanket is still warm from Vera’s body, and Marina accepts it gratefully.

Vera starts a fire, all the while asking after Marina ’s family, her aunt, her uncle, the two little chicks. She pulls a book off the table, a collection of fables, and tears out two pages, crumples them, and places them in the stove. This is followed by what is clearly part of a table leg. Vera lights the paper and carefully nurses the flame into a tidy little fire.

“Pull that chair closer. Warm your hands.” Then she dribbles some water from a jug into the kettle and sets it back on the stove.

“Are you the only one here?” Marina asks. As much as she hates being cheek by jowl with the crowds huddled in the basements of the Hermitage, this desolation seems a far worse alternative.

“Oh, no. Of course, a lot of them left after the shelling, moved in with friends or whomever.”

“When was that?”

“December twelfth, just after midnight. Terrible.” Vera stares into some private vision. “Terrible.

“But there are still twenty-three of us. The apartments in the rear are unharmed. Your apartment is just as you left it. Anna Ostromovna Dudin and her mother, next door to you, they’re still here. And there’s seven in Four East, Maria Volkova and her little chicks and three cousins.” Vera ticks off the residents still living in the building and the fates of those who have gone. “Sofia Grechina, do you remember her, the poet, that odd woman on the first floor with the two poodles? Her apartment was buried, but she was working the swing shift. You’ve never seen such hysteria. The two dogs, she had managed to keep them alive, I think she fed them part of her own rations, but of course they were buried in the rubble. She’s moved in with Georgi Karasev’s mother.”

Marina recalls the two coats left hanging on their pegs, the swinging light shade, and asks about the Magrachevs. Vera shakes her head.

The water comes to a boil, and Vera pours it into two porcelain cups.

“To our loved ones at the front,” Vera intones and lifts her cup.

Marina cups the warm china in her hands, breathing in the steam and then taking shallow sips. The water is luxuriously hot and cuts a molten swath down Marina ’s throat to her middle. It feels like new life.

“Oh, goodness, that reminds me,” Vera says. “I have a letter for you.” She crosses to a shelf and, after a bit of rummaging, produces a thin envelope. “It came a few weeks ago,” Vera apologizes. “I was going to forward it to you, but the postwoman has stopped coming.”

Her name and address are written out in Dmitri’s careful script. The letter trembles in Marina ’s hands. He is alive. She tears open the envelope and pulls out two sheets. They are ribbed with strips of blue paper pasted over Dmitri’s script by the censors.

My dearest Marinochka,

I think of you every moment and hold the image of you in my heart to remind me of why I am here. We are

But despite all this, I remain hopeful to see you again soon. Everything reminds me of you. Last night, a girl came to our camp with a goodwill delegation from She had your hair and from a distance, she looked so much like you that I called out your name and ran like an idiot halfway across the camp. But, as you know, my distance vision is poor and when I got closer, she actually bore little resemblance to you. I tried to explain my mistake, but I fumbled so, and I think I may have frightened her a little. As a token of apology, I gave her some sunflower seeds.

but then I feel the warmth of the sun on my back, and the vivid green of the trees just beyond our camp and I feel hopeful again that

Marina stops reading, puzzled, and then looks in the upper left corner and finds a date: 21 September 1941. The letter is almost three months old. She feels a flash of anger toward Vera, but before it can bloom she thinks to check the postmark. It reads 28 November.

News comes to us here from the city that How are your aunt and uncle? And what does he think of our engagement? It occurred to me after I left that perhaps I should have asked him for your hand, and I hope you will tell him that I regret not thinking of this sooner. Perhaps he will not mind so much.

Write to me, dearest, and tell me everything you can think of. It needn’t be important, but just the daily things, what you ate for dinner or how the packing is coming. When everything seems so weighted with significance, it is nice to hear of inconsequential things.

Give Tatiana a big hug for me. I don’t imagine that Mikhail will endure a hug, but tell him that he must study hard, that he is the hope of our country. And for yourself, you must imagine that I am kissing your hair, your eyelids, the tip of your nose, your lips, et cetera.

With all my love,

Dima

Vera is watching her face. “Is he well?”

“I don’t know. The letter is very old.”

“I’m sorry, dear. I didn’t see that it was yours before the postwoman had gone, or it would have been forwarded.”

“No, no. You’re not to blame. Thank you for saving it for me.” She feels grief welling up inside her, surging like nausea, but she tamps down her thoughts and forces the darkness back down her throat. She carefully refolds the letter, returns it to its envelope, and puts it into her coat pocket.

“I suppose I should go upstairs.” She does not tell Vera why she has come, but makes up something about needing to fetch some papers for Uncle Viktor. She has brought her door key but stupidly forgotten to bring a candle, so Vera gives her the stub of her own candle. Her generosity makes Marina ashamed of her secret about the chocolate.

“I hope you don’t mind if I don’t go up with you,” Vera says. “The stairs, you know.”

It is a herculean effort to climb up the dizzying stairwell. Marina pulls herself one step at a time up five flights of stairs. By the time she reaches the door to her apartment and turns the key in the lock, she is panting shallowly and can barely find the strength to push open the heavy door.

The dim candlelight laps at a dead gray interior webbed with frost. Uncle Viktor sold off the Oriental carpet in the front room back in October and pieces of the wooden furniture were sold later for firewood, so the room is nearly bare. A lone divan hunkers like a gray beast in the corner.

Marina follows the candlelight into the hall where the linen cupboard is. She doesn’t want to look in the other rooms, but when she sees that she will need something to stand on in order to reach the high shelf, she makes a tour of the apartment until she finds a metal footlocker in Viktor and Nadezhda’s room. Even empty, it is too heavy to lift, and as Marina drags it slowly back to the closet, it scrapes a trail across Nadezhda’s parquet floors. Finally, she is able to reach the shelf, and she pulls down on top of her head a pile of tablecloths, napkins, doilies, a toy gun. Her hand finds something rectangular, the size of an envelope but heavy in her hand.

She might have eaten it right there, sitting on the metal footlocker, staring down at this miracle in her hand. No one would know. No one. Something desperate works at her gut, and her brain churns, her fingers tremble. What she thinks is that she is holding the life of her uncle in her hands.

It is a terrible thing to have loved ones, people to whom you are shackled by whatever bonds make their pain yours. Although she has no tender feelings for her uncle, her obligation is as strong as love. She recognizes the compact. It is that same sense of duty that has governed his behavior toward her all her life, taking her in and providing for her in spite of his fears. Giving her the larger pieces of bread at every meal, even as he wastes away. Perhaps this is love.

She knows that if she unwraps the foil and exposes the chocolate, the last bit of her that is human will die, and so before she can think any further she stuffs it into her coat pocket with Dmitri’s letter. On the way back to the museum, she feels the weight of the chocolate and the letter in her pocket. They bang insistently against her thigh at each step.

It begins to snow, a few flakes at first, but before long the sky is heavy and swirling. The few other stragglers on the boulevard disappear behind a curtain of whiteness, and she moves on alone through the soft blur as though in a nightmare. Her feet are leaden, and though she keeps lifting each foot and setting it down again, she has no sense of moving forward. The landmarks that marked her journey here have disappeared into whiteness, and the snow muffles any sounds. She cannot recall crossing the Griboedova Canal, though surely she must have.

Five, twelve, forty steps. She begins to count in order to reassure herself that she is moving. She must not panic, she must stay calm and keep walking, trusting that each step forward brings her closer to safety. But she is unsure even of this. For all she knows, she may have turned off Nevsky, she may be wandering in the wrong direction. She has no idea where she is, and the whiteness is starting to dim. Soon it will be completely dark, and what will become of her then?

She is up to one hundred and sixty-three when her weight lands on something that is not ice or snow. The softness shifts under her foot and she yelps, yanking back her boot and lurching to find her balance.

A dark bundle of rags lies at her feet, half hidden under a dusting of snow.

“Mary, mother of God,” the bundle exhales in a soft rattle. “Have mercy.” An arm extends up toward her, and a claw rising out of a blanket grasps feebly at her coat.

Terrified, she bats it away. The claw reaches toward her again, but she swats it away with such force that it falls back to the snow and lies there, still. Marina ’s heart is thudding dangerously in her chest. She feels herself floating in a weightless panic, with the snow swirling around her face. She cannot think, cannot form any thoughts except that this wraith is trying to take her down. People fall and they die where they have fallen. She must not let it happen. She must not die here in the street. She must get back to the museum.

And then she sees the eyes, two hollow eyes peering up at her from above a paisley headscarf wrapped around the face. The eyes are pleading silently with her.

She knows she cannot lift the woman. She hasn’t the strength to get her onto her feet, much less help her to walk.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I can’t help you.”

The eyes do not shift.

Marina feels again the weight of the chocolate in her pocket. It won’t make any difference, she tells herself. The woman is going to die. You can’t help her. Be reasonable. There are family at home who need also. It is never enough.

But already she is pulling the candy bar from inside her coat and ripping back the foil. She breaks off a chunk of the chocolate and, crouching forward, holds it out toward the woman. The woman doesn’t move, but her dull eyes widen almost imperceptibly. Marina peels the frozen scarf away from the woman’s face. The mouth falls open, and Marina places a square of chocolate on the woman’s tongue.

One of five rooms devoted to the Flemish, this is known as the Snyders Room. It is a large hall, with a box-beam ceiling painted with Florentine ornamentation. Checkerboard parquet floors, et cetera. Really, the room itself is of no consequence. It is what the room contains-the long wall is lined with enormous market stalls displaying every kind of fish imaginable, geese and game birds strung overhead, and venison and rabbits draped in languid piles. And yet another stall with a profusion of vegetables overflowing their baskets. Heads of cabbage, leeks, garlic, and cauliflowers, mushrooms and parsnips, the variety is dazzling. Walk a few feet farther and here is a long table of fruits: bowls of apples, baskets heaped with plums and pears, stalks of artichokes and watermelons spilling onto the ground. The busy excess makes one faint. One could eat for years in this room and never be hungry.

And across the way is more fruit, these artfully arranged like jewels on velvet. Utrecht ’s gorgeous, plump grapes are at their peak, his peaches so like the things themselves that their scent perfumes the air. And cherries like a string of bright rubies. One could weep.

The tables on the patio are laden with food. Platters of stuffed mushrooms and roasted vegetables, skewers of grilled lamb. Cheeses and smoked salmon and bowls of fruit nested in a bed of ice. There is an enormous white cake displayed on a separate table, tier upon tier of cake with ornately frosted swirls and leaves and roses, very rococo, like the gilt and plaster walls in the Winter Palace.

At each station, Dmitri asks Marina does she want some green salad? A slice of melon? Smoked salmon and pumpernickel? Long before they reach the end of the line, the plate he is holding for her is heavy with food. He guides her into the white tent and through a maze of tables and seats her next to a tired-looking woman in a bright pink dress.

“I’m getting a plate for myself.” He takes Marina ’s purse and places it on the vacant chair to her left, then disappears into the crowd.

“It was a nice ceremony, don’t you think?” the woman in pink asks.

“Da.” Marina nods in polite agreement.

“When Naureen said Katie and Cooper were doing their own vows, I thought, Oh boy. But they were so thoughtful and simple, just right. My friend Tina-do you remember her?-when her daughter got married, they wrote their own vows, but they rhymed. It was awful-love, dove, above kind of stuff. And they had a juggler come down the aisle. I never did figure out what that was supposed to mean.”

The woman’s face is familiar, but Marina can’t place it. There are so many faces to remember, to put names to and order by rooms. Sometimes when she looks, all she sees is a vacant wall. It is frightening, this forgetting, like another little piece of her life slipping away. If she lets all the paintings disappear, she will be gone with them.

“Mama? Here, why don’t you eat a little something.” Marina ’s attention is diverted to the plate in front of her.

“I guess these kids have seen that the old words don’t seem to mean much. Till death do us part. They know better.”

After a moment, the woman picks up Marina ’s fork and spears a chunk of melon. “How about some fruit?”

Marina nods and takes the proffered fork and puts the melon in her mouth.

“Do you want some lamb?”

When Dmitri returns with his plate, the woman in pink is coaxing Marina through her meal.

“How’s this for irony?” she says. “Me trying to get her to eat?”

“She’s just tired. So many people, it tires her out.”

“Papa, I know. I know about her condition.”

Dmitri looks down into his lap and purses his lips. His chest lifts and falls.

“Andrei and Naureen and I talked last night.”

There is a prolonged silence and Marina ’s attention fades away.

“I wish you’d told me.”

“I didn’t want you to worry.”

“She’s my mother.”

Dmitri nods like a chastened child.

“You haven’t touched the salad, Mama.” Marina hears a voice in her ear. “It’s tomatoes and mozzarella. You like tomatoes.”

No one mentions food. It is bad manners to refer to one’s hunger, worse to provoke the hunger of others with memories of meals eaten in the past. But at night, she dreams of feasts. In dreams, she moves inside a Baroque still life, walking down aisles of tables, some heaped with whole fish and glistening hams, others with rabbit and game. The abundance is heady, and she is drunk with the fragrance of apples. Here is a tableau of fruit and flowers, silver bowls heaped with lemons and grapes, and a pomegranate split open to expose a honeycomb of rubies. Goblets are brimming with red and white wines; they glisten with condensation. Next to them, breads and cheeses are carefully arranged on the heavy white linens. For the Baroque painter and his contemporaries, each of these objects was freighted with religious meaning. The red wine and bread symbolize the Eucharist, Christ’s body and blood. The tablecloth is Christ’s shroud. The glass decanter is the Virgin Mary, so pure that light shines through it. Oranges are the fruit of the Garden, but lemons are the bitter fruit of sin.

Her eyes fall on a peach, so ripe and round that she can almost feel the weight of it in her palm. She cannot remember what the peach symbolizes, but as she reaches toward it, she is stopped by the booming voice of Director Orbeli. He warns her that these are national treasures. “These are the lifeblood of the people. We must cradle them in our hearts and minds until they are safely returned.” She is flooded with shame.

When she turns away, a beautiful goddess in a flowing white gown offers her a slice of cake. She leans over and kisses Marina ’s cheek.

“Don’t cry, Gran,” she says. “This is a happy day.”

Something far away explodes, a small popping sound like a champagne cork. She is waking up. She hears a stirring in the darkness, a few voices murmuring, and then someone at the far end of the shelter lights a candle. There is whispering; a shell has hit the museum. Her eyes follow the wavering light until it is snuffed out at the top of the steps. The darkness returns.

In the morning, Viktor Alekseevich Krasnov is dead.

There is such a fine line between the living and the dead that his death is detected only when Nadezhda brings him his tea and he does not raise himself from his bed. When Marina awakens, she sees Nadezhda sitting on the pallet with the body of her husband draped over her lap.

“He is gone,” she says flatly. She doesn’t cry, and there is no expression on her face. The tea cools on the floor beside her.

Marina comes and sits down beside her, and they watch the archaeologist as though he might move, though of course he will not. She is momentarily reminded of Veronese’s Pietà, a sixteenth-century Italian painting depicting the dead Christ hanging in the arms of Mary. In the flickering light of the single candle, the hollows in his face are sunken in deep shadow, and the skin pulled over his nose and cheekbones is like beeswax. She has always assumed that the Italian painter exaggerated the chiaroscuro to heighten the drama, the contrasts of light and dark, warm tones and cold, were so marked, but here it is.

It is strange what one can get used to. Every day now, people around her die, people she knew. At first this was cause for tears, but it turns out that human beings have a limited capacity for grief. Now, when the residents of Bomb Shelter #3 wake up in the morning, someone among them will have expired quietly in the night.

They are supposed to report the death, but if they do not, Viktor’s ration coupons can be shared between them for the remainder of the month. This is what Marina is thinking. Though the thought shames her, it persists: two hundred and fifty more grams of bread a day, one hundred and twenty-five grams apiece for the next eighteen days. Some people who lose loved ones are unlucky-the person dies at the end of the month and his death is of no benefit to anyone.

“He was a good man,” she says to Nadezhda.

Nadezhda sighs hollowly. “At least the children are not here to see their father like this,” she says.

Marina leaves her and goes to the bakery to get their bread rations. When she returns two hours later, Nadezhda seems not to have moved. Olga Markhaeva is sitting next to her, and Marina guesses that it is due to her that Viktor’s body has been moved over to the far side of the pallet. A blanket has been pulled up under his chin and his eyes have been closed.

Olga whispers to Marina, “I didn’t want her to sit alone. Did you hear? A shell blew out the skylight in the Spanish Hall last night. Every last pane of glass.”

Marina nods. News travels fast. In line at the bakery, several members of the Hermitage staff asked Marina to pass their condolences on to Nadezhda. She remembers the bread in her pocket and her ever-present hunger surges. It would be rude to pull out the bread without offering some to Olga.

“Please stay, Olga Markhaeva, and eat. We have extra now.” She unwraps the three thin slices of damp bread from their paper.

Olga quickly averts her eyes. “No, no,” she demurs and pats her stomach as though she is full. “I’ve eaten. Besides, I must go help with the cleanup. Of course it would be snowing.” She shakes her head wearily.

“Of course.”

All month, it has been too cold to snow. No one can remember such a winter, not even Anya. Minus thirty. Minus twenty-six. Minus thirty-five. But now, when the windows shatter, it warms up enough to snow.

“These people who believe in a god, why would they worship someone who does this?” Olga complains. “Ah, well, don’t get me started. Woe rides on woe and uses woe for a whip. I’ll leave you two to your breakfast.” She pulls herself to her feet and leaves.

Marina removes her bread from the paper and passes the two remaining slices to Nadezhda, who carefully divides Viktor’s ration in exact halves and returns a portion to Marina.

They eat the bread in silence.

Marina is already planning what must be done. They will have to fetch water to prepare the body and then find something to wrap it in. There are no coffins left. Even the museum carpenter, who built hundreds of coffins, was wrapped in a blanket when he died last week. There is no wood left for the dead. For now, the best they can do is to take Viktor down to the cellar room beneath the library that serves as the Hermitage’s morgue. Somehow they will have to carry him.

After they have finished their bread, Marina takes a bucket outside to the embankment fronting the Neva. She eases herself down the slippery steps to the river and waits in line to draw water through a hole cut in the ice. Full, the bucket is too heavy for her to lift, and she must pour more than half the water back out in order to carry it. Shifting the weight from one arm to the other, she trudges back across the street, through the museum, and downstairs to the cellar. While Marina was gone, Nadezhda has managed to undress Viktor’s body. The sight of his emaciated corpse is too awful, too horribly intimate. Eyes averted, Marina helps her to lift his body onto a bench and then pours the icy water over his limbs while her aunt gently washes.

They dress Viktor in fresh clothes and swaddle him in a sheet. With careful stitches, Nadezhda sews closed the shroud. After they have rested, each of them takes one end of the shroud and they try to carry the body through the shelter, but it quickly becomes apparent that they will have to drag it. Even so, they have to stop every few meters. Though the corpse weighs hardly anything for a grown man, it is an awkward bundle, and they struggle to heave it up the steps leading out of the shelter. The sheet catches and tears on the rough stone, and when the body threatens to slide out, they must stop midway so Marina can bind the unraveling end more tightly.

As they pass through the halls on the ground floor, dragging the corpse of Viktor behind them, Marina marks their passage past bare glass cases, past the missing bronzes and funerary of ancient Urartu. The only evidence of Viktor Alekseevich Krasnov’s lifework is shadows imprinted on the felt of the shelves. He never finished his book, she thinks. The pages of the unfinished manuscript are still on the desk, and later she will have to determine what is to be done with them.

Here, entombed in a glass showcase, is Viktor’s twin, another desiccated skeleton, leathery skin and bones with a length of linen draped over the hips. The mummy of the Egyptian priest Petese, it was left behind in the evacuation. The living that remained behind have suffered from the ravages of a relentlessly bitter winter, but the mummy, other than exuding a little salt which is regularly wiped off, is just as it was three thousand years ago.

When they enter the mortuary, Marina tries not to notice all the other swaddled corpses lining the room. They place Viktor’s body in a corner. Nadezhda slumps down beside the remains of her husband and closes her eyes.

“Come,” Marina urges and tugs gently at her aunt’s coat. “You must get up.” She is afraid that Nadezhda will simply die beside her husband. “We will go out tomorrow,” she promises her, “and see about finding a coffin. We will bury him next to his mother and father.” She has little hope that they will be successful. Even if they could manage a coffin, there is nothing to pay a grave digger. But she would promise anything now.

Nadezhda opens her eyes, and they travel slowly up the length of Marina ’s outstretched arm.

“I won’t be able to do it alone,” Marina threatens.

Nadezhda nods, her eyes vacant and listless, and she holds out her hand for Marina to help her to her feet.

When they reach the staff entrance and step into the cold air, they are breathing heavily. Their breath rises in vaporous puffs. Nadezhda coughs and Marina hears the rattle. They stand for a moment in silence, looking out across Palace Square. It is a Tuesday afternoon, it has stopped snowing, and there are no new tracks in the entire square, no sound except for the rap of hammering on the roof above them. Soldiers have come to board over the shattered skylight.

The sun is setting already, and the clouds are tinted pink on their undersides.

“When I go, you must try to bury me beside him,” Nadezhda says.

Marina nods. It would be pointless to argue that neither of them is going to die. Already they move through their days like ghosts, one foot in front of the other, thin as vapor.

No one weeps anymore, or if they do, it is over small things, inconsequential moments that catch them unprepared. What is left that is heartbreaking? Not death: death is ordinary. What is heartbreaking is the sight of a single gull lifting effortlessly from a street lamp. Its wings unfurl like silk scarves against the mauve sky, and Marina hears the rustle of its feathers. What is heartbreaking is that there is still beauty in the world.

Helen is startled out of sleep by the sound of knocking. In the unfamiliar darkness, she gropes for the lamp and snaps on the switch. The travel alarm on the bedside table reads 2:39. The knocking at her door is soft but persistent, and then she hears her father’s voice.

“Elena? Elena?”

She wrestles off the cotton coverlet, stumbles around the bed, and then struggles groggily with the chain on the door before she can open it.

Dmitri is standing on the other side of the door, in the dimly lit hallway. An old wool robe is open over his thin pajamas. Tufts of white hair sprout at wild angles from his scalp, giving him the appearance of a lunatic. His translucent, gnarled feet are bare.

“She’s gone,” he says.

“Gone? What do you mean?”

“I woke up and she wasn’t there. I put the suitcase in front of the door, but she moved it.”

“Is she in the bathroom, Papa?”

“No.” His shaky fingers fiddle with a loose end of the robe’s belt. “I went up and down the halls and to the lobby. She’s gone.” Dmitri’s eyes are rheumy, and Helen sees again how very frail and elderly her father is.

“It’s okay, Papa. I’m sure she’s around somewhere.” Her voice exudes calmness, the voice that used to soothe her boys when they had taken a bad spill off their bikes or the monkey bars. “Here, sit down.” She grabs some clothes off the chair. “I’ll get dressed and go find her.”

Her father looks at the chair blankly but doesn’t sit. “I was so tired. Usually, I hear her.”

Helen takes the clothes she is holding and disappears into the bathroom. She keeps talking through the door as she changes.

“She’s done this before?”

“She gets up and wanders the house at night sometimes. But she’s safe there. I put covers on the door handles so she can’t open them.”

Helen splashes some water on her face, runs a comb through her hair, and emerges from the bathroom dressed in the slacks and shirt she wore yesterday. She slips on a pair of sandals.

Dmitri is too agitated to wait in his room, even after Helen explains that Marina might come back and he should be there. So she waits while he puts on pants and shoes, and they leave the door of the room ajar just in case. The two of them check the halls one more time before they descend the stairs into the lobby. Despite her father, Helen has somehow fully expected to find Marina sitting quietly in one of the high-backed chairs. She isn’t there, and there is no night manager on duty to ask if an elderly lady has passed through. Helen walks around the front desk and taps on the door marked “Office.” It is locked. Another door, not locked, turns out to be a narrow supply closet with mops and a vacuum and stores of toilet paper.

Outside, a sodium lamp washes Front Street with a peachy light. Helen steps out into the cool night and walks down the sidewalk a few yards in one direction and then the other, peering past darkened storefronts into the shadows cast by their awnings.

“Mama?” she calls. The streetlight is buzzing and she hears the monotonous bark of a dog somewhere off in the distance, but otherwise the only sound is the clack of her sandals on the sidewalk. It comes to her then that her mother may actually have wandered off.

“Any idea where she might go?”

Dmitri shakes his head mutely.

She heads to the corner and looks up Spring Street, sees nothing but a few cars angle parked in front of dark shops, and then she jogs the half block back to the inn.

“Let’s get the car. She can’t have gotten very far, but it might be faster. Wait here.”

Helen uses her room key to unlock the front door of the inn and climbs breathlessly up the stairs. All the way up she debates whether to call the police. Is there even a police force to call on this island? She has no idea, but first she’d better make sure her mother’s really gone, she decides.

She checks her parents’ room one more time, then grabs her handbag and a sweater out of her own room and returns downstairs. Her father is standing just where she left him, a little old man in a pajama top and unzipped trousers, his shoulders drooping under the weight of his misery. She takes his hand and says lightly, “It’s going to be all right, Papa.”

They go around to the little lot at the side of the inn and get into the rental car. She starts the car and turns off the static rattle of the radio before they crunch over the gravel and roll out onto the deserted street. No one is out at this hour; the town is asleep under a blanket of thick stars. She rolls down the window and quietly calls her mother’s name as they creep down the street. They pass a darkened ice cream parlor and a variety of shops selling clothing and souvenirs and antiques. She stops in front of the ferry ramp and peers out across the black bay. The thought that her mother might wander toward the water unsettles her, but she puts aside that possibility.

Past the ferry dock, the tourist shops begin to peter out, interspersed with bed-and-breakfasts, a diner with its chairs turned upside down on the tables, a real estate office, a Coast to Coast, and a gas station, its self-serve pumps showcased under a stark fluorescent glare. As the street begins to climb up a slope, there are homes set back from the road, shingled cottages adorned with hedges and neat gardens, others more modern and perfunctory. She scans the darkened yards, the halos thrown by porch lights, looking for movement. Beside her, Dmitri is pressed forward against the shoulder restraint, his eyes trained out the passenger window at the houses on the right.

Then they are past town, and their headlights are brushing under thick trees, picking out only the occasional road sign or gravel turnout.

“I don’t think she would come out this far,” Helen says.

“I suppose not,” he says, and slumps back into his seat.

“It’s okay, Papa. She’s probably just somewhere right around the inn. She may even be back in bed by now.” She means to comfort her father, but she herself isn’t convinced. Given what she’s seen in the past two days, it seems like a bad bet that her mother has it in her to remember her room number, much less find her way back to an inn in a strange town. She flashes on news stories about confused seniors wandering away from their homes and even disappearing for good.

She turns around at a wide spot in the road, and they circle back into town. At each corner, she catches her breath until she can see far enough ahead to know that her mother isn’t on this block either. She turns the car onto a cross street and they roll slowly toward the other edge of town.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this? About Mama?” Helen tries not to sound reproachful.

Dmitri stares out the front window, blinking and working his lips. They pass a bookstore, a small brick post office, a market. She scans the empty sidewalks and then glances back at her father. A tear is dribbling down his cheek.

“I’m sorry, Papa. I’m not criticizing.”

“We’ve always cared for each other.” His voice is thick.

“What does Dr. Rich say? Have you at least talked with her about it?”

“They did some tests. But there’s not so much to be done.”

Helen steels herself. “Is it Alzheimer’s?”

Dmitri nods.

He is blinking furiously now and biting down hard on his lower lip.

Helen pulls the car over to the side of the street and turns off the engine. Silence fills the interior of the car. She takes her father’s freckled hand in her own and squeezes it gently. The air seems to go out of him; tears gather in the folds beneath his eyes and spill down his cheeks.

“I don’t know what to do,” he admits. “She’s getting worse. She can’t wash herself anymore. She only stands under the water and forgets to soap herself. I’m afraid to leave her alone, even for a few minutes. Last week, she put some plums in the dryer when I wasn’t looking. Our underwear came out with pink splotches, and I found pits in the bottom of the barrel.”

“Have you told Andrei any of this?”

Dmitri shakes his head. “I promised her I wouldn’t put her in a home. You know how he is-he is so sure.”

“I know, but he just wants to do what’s best. Look, we’ll worry about that later. But I’m going to give him a call,” she says, and roots through her purse for her cell phone. “I think we may need some help here.” She finds the phone but can’t locate the piece of paper with her brother’s numbers on it. She empties the contents of her purse into her lap and picks through receipts and wadded Kleenex and tubes of lipstick.

“Do you know his cell phone number?”

“Two four six,” Dmitri intones. “Six three seven”-he pauses-“twenty-four seven. Twenty-four. Twenty-four something.”

While she’s dialing information, she starts the car up again and they proceed down the street. The operator informs her that cell phone numbers aren’t listed, and at the customer’s request the home number isn’t listed either. She tries to explain that this is an emergency, but the woman is unmoved and suggests calling 911 if this is truly an emergency.

The night sky is fading imperceptibly to gray at the horizon. Helen clicks the phone off and thinks a long moment before she redials information and asks for the local police.

The voice that answers the phone is gravelly with sleep.

“Is this the police?” she asks.

“ Island County sheriff, ma’am. Deputy Kremer.”

Helen hears his muffled voice telling someone to go back to sleep. She apologizes for disturbing him and then explains that her mother is missing.

“How long has your mother been gone?” he asks.

Helen checks the clock. It is almost four. “A couple of hours, at least. My father woke up and she was gone.”

“Are you sure she’s missing? Could she have just stepped out for some reason?”

“She’s eighty-two and she has nowhere to go in the middle of the night.” Helen tamps down the impatience in her voice. “We’re visiting here. There was a wedding. My brother, Andrei Buriakov, has a place here.”

“Buriakov?” If the name registers with the deputy, he doesn’t let on.

“We’ve been driving all over, and I’m a little concerned something might have happened. She has memory problems. Alzheimer’s.”

There is a pause, and when he speaks again, his voice has taken on a new tone, even and official. “Where are you calling from, ma’am?”

“I’m in the car.” They are past town again, on a road that seems to be heading out in the general direction of Andrei’s, though she doesn’t recall what looks like a farm up ahead. “Maybe a mile outside of town,” she guesses. “I don’t know the road.”

“And where was your mother last seen?”

He asks a few more questions, taking down all the information: her name, where they are staying, her brother’s name, and then a careful description of her mother. He pauses before he asks, “Any chance she could have gotten on the ten o’clock ferry?”

They stayed at Andrei’s last evening just long enough to see the bride and groom off on their honeymoon. Katie had stood on the float of the seaplane and thrown her bouquet back at the cluster of young women crowding the dock. Then the pilot helped the couple climb in and they puttered out into the bay and thundered noisily up into the summer sky. After that, the reception shifted into a party, and Helen and her parents made their excuses. At the hotel, her parents had turned in immediately, exhausted by the day’s festivities, but Helen was still up reading at ten. She remembers marveling that it was just starting to get dark.

“I think I would have heard her,” Helen says. “Besides, I think she’s still in a nightgown. Wouldn’t someone stop her?”

“Hard to say. How about we’ll meet you in front of the Arbutus. Might take us a few minutes to get over there.”

When she clicks off the phone, she tells Dmitri that the deputy is meeting them, and then they turn back and take one last pass through town, past the hardware store, past the Bumblebee Diner with its sign reading “Closed, Come Again!” and past the Kingfisher B amp;B. A few cars have queued up alongside the road for the ferry. The glassy water of the harbor mirrors a dim gray sky, heavy with fog. A seagull cuts low over the water and drops onto a buoy, unsettling another gull in a flurry of shrieking. She watches the birds, dully aware now of her exhaustion and a clammy coldness.

Many of the rooms have no name, only a number. Look around. The glass in the windows was shattered by an explosion, and the windows have been boarded over, so it is very dark. But perhaps you can just make out the walls and the pictureless frames, like empty eye sockets. Over here is a pile of sand with a shovel jammed in the top. What else? Nothing. Just frames. Nothing.

Back up. Go back a room or two until something looks familiar and start again. There are over four hundred rooms, but they are all nearly empty.

Cold seeps through the filmy cotton of her nightdress. She pulls the thin fabric close around her legs and hugs her arms to her chest, trying to warm herself. Someone has stolen her clothing, her quilted jacket and boots and gloves, though she doesn’t remember when.

If she falls asleep, she will freeze. This much she knows. But where she is and how she got here are mysteries. Today, yesterday, even an hour ago, are blanks. She is suspended in the present moment and feeling oddly ephemeral, as though she is adrift on an open sea.

Around her are dark shapes, as thin as limbs, skeletal arms and legs swaying, dancing in the blackness. Terror threatens to engulf her, but then the cold pulls her back and disciplines her thoughts.

She is cold. Cold and hungry. This is familiar.

There is also a scent that is familiar, though she can’t identify it, something earthy.

It is dark. Night.

And she is cold. She must not fall asleep. If she falls asleep, she will freeze.

On nights when there is no moon, Leningrad disappears. From her perch on the watchtower, the edge of the Hermitage roof is merely a theory. The dying city beyond gives off no light. Like a photographic negative, what should be solid is seen as an absence, here a dome-shaped shadow cutting into the glittering pavé of stars, over there two black spires spiking the sky. The only other lights are dim as the stars but closer, tiny yellow lights that ring the edge of the imagined city, the campfires of the enemy at the front.

It is the idea of a city, the idea of a world suggested by the gilded frame that surrounds it.

She feels completely alone in the universe, suspended between the star-thick heavens and a black void below. The stars are not a comfort. It is the solitude of shepherds, unbearably lonely.

Nadezhda died a month to the day after Viktor. A romantic might say that she had died of a broken heart, but that was a sentiment for different times. She lost the will to live, a separate thing.

She could have survived, but she wouldn’t make any move to save herself. After Viktor’s death, she wouldn’t even leave the shelter. The other residents of Bomb Shelter #3 had begun to relocate upstairs, leaving behind the gloom and damp that had grown even more oppressive than the shelling up above. Some went back to their homes, others set up cots in the schoolroom, but Nadezhda could not be persuaded to join them. Marina tried to coax her to return to their old apartment, but she couldn’t bear the idea of being there without her family.

So what, Marina wonders now, had made her think that her aunt might undertake a more perilous journey alone?

In January, a road was completed over the frozen Lake Ladoga. Called the Road of Life, it was a slender breach in the blockade through which the city began to evacuate nonessential citizens and to siphon in the most critical supplies from “the mainland,” free Russia. When the first truck rolled across the lake and entered Leningrad, church bells rang to welcome it.

As soon as the road was operational, Director Orbeli received orders from Moscow to reduce the staff of the Hermitage. One by one, he began calling people into his office. When Marina ’s turn came, she waited in the hallway outside his closed door.

Even had she not known the purpose of their meeting, she would have been nervous at the thought of standing alone in his presence. She had never before spoken privately with the director beyond meekly returning his greetings when they occasionally crossed paths on their respective rounds through the galleries. With his long white beard and the legends of his unpredictable rages, he was like the Old Testament god, and the prospect of incurring his displeasure made Marina ’s hands shake uncontrollably.

The door opened and a staff member emerged, her composure collapsing as she crossed the threshold. A voice inside commanded Marina to enter. Sitting behind his desk, Orbeli looked neither stern nor welcoming, only very tired. He gestured for her to sit down in the chair opposite him. Then, in a speech he had clearly repeated many times over already that day, he told Marina that her heroic service to the museum over the winter had not gone unappreciated. The people of the Soviet Union were indebted to her. Now, though, he must ask of her one last service. The museum was to be mothballed, and only a few dozen staff members would be needed to do that work. The rest were to be evacuated out of the city to ease the defense efforts. He would be waiting for letters of resignation on his desk.

“Please don’t order me to go.” Her voice was so tiny that she wasn’t sure he had heard her. He continued to look at her with his hawkish eyes, but his expression didn’t change. At last he said, “May I ask why not?”

How could she explain this? Without her here to keep the memory of its art alive on the walls, the museum would be merely another decaying shell. This was not an idea she could voice aloud.

“My work is needed here,” she finally stammered.

“I myself will be leaving at the end of the month. Do you consider yourself more necessary to the Hermitage than its director?”

She flushed, and her eyes fell to the floor. She waited, half expecting to be incinerated into a heap of ash on the carpet.

“You are the one whom I’ve seen prowling the picture gallery?”

“Yes, Iosef Abgarovitch.”

“The niece of Viktor Alekseevich.”

“Yes.”

“He was stubborn, too.”

“Yes.”

After a long moment, he said, “Well, go on then.”

While Marina herself could not imagine leaving the Hermitage, she had seen no reason for Nadezhda to stay, and she formed the plan that her aunt should join the exodus of staff members. Her motives were selfish. She had become weary of the energy it took to endure her aunt’s stubborn grief, weary of climbing up the stairs from the abandoned shelter every day. She wanted to move up to the schoolroom where light trickled through an unboarded window. Mostly, she wanted to be free from the ghosts of the dead and her last remaining obligation to the living.

When she broached the subject with Nadezhda, though, her aunt had balked.

“You are not going?”

“Director Orbeli has asked me to stay on,” Marina lied. “I am needed here.”

“I’m not strong enough to make the journey alone.”

“Not alone. Most of the staff will be evacuating as well.”

Nadezhda reached for her hand and clasped it with what might have been tenderness but was just as likely fear. “I will stay here with you.”

Marina squelched her irritation and patted her aunt’s hand. She urged her to consider Tatiana and Mikhail. They might well be somewhere on the mainland, waiting for her. When Marina said their names aloud, however, Nadezhda’s eyes remained like two stones.

“Besides,” Marina said, changing tactics, “here, you are using up valuable resources. You have a duty.” These were much the same words she had heard from Orbeli that morning, but in her voice they sounded not magisterial but arch and impatient.

“I will not be using them so much longer,” Nadezhda had replied.

She was true to her word. After their conversation, Nadezhda rapidly deteriorated. When Marina returned to the shelter at the end of her night shifts, she would light a candle, and in the tiny flare of light she would find her aunt just as she had left her, buried under a mound of blankets on her cot. Nadezhda’s eyes would blink open and she would answer Marina ’s greeting. But she made no move to sit up or even to eat. Formerly, the only subject that had held her interest was food, but she no longer spoke of it. She chewed her bread mechanically when it was presented to her, but she didn’t savor it. She claimed that she no longer felt any hunger. Her appearance began to change, her face taking on a weird look of concentration, as though she were trying to remember something. Marina recognized the symptoms.

When she was too far gone to object, Nadezhda was finally carried upstairs to the recently opened convalescent center. She was given glucose, but by then it was too late. In the last week, she stopped eating entirely. She had a terrible thirst and in a scratchy voice begged the nurses for something sour to drink. The nurse on duty advised against it, but Marina couldn’t bear to watch her aunt’s agony. She brought her a cup of vinegar, spooned it down her throat, then watched as she promptly vomited it back up. The next day, she was dead.

Just as she had done when her uncle died, Marina prepared the body and she and Liliia Pavlova dragged it back belowground to the mortuary. In the interval of four weeks, many more bodies had collected in frozen mounds on the stone floor. She found her uncle’s corpse by picking out the sheet she had wrapped him in, and she placed her aunt next to her husband. The next day, she moved her things upstairs into the schoolroom. Then she went to the registry office and stood in line to turn in Nadezhda’s papers. No one in the long line cried or showed any sign of emotion. They might all have been waiting in a breadline.

Initially, Marina too felt nothing, except perhaps relief, but that quickly passed. She hadn’t anticipated how hard it would be to stay on alone. Now, she chastises herself for bringing on her aunt’s death. Here in Leningrad, the pull of the dead was too strong, but surely Nadezhda would have evacuated if Marina had agreed to go as well. Instead, Marina had insisted on remaining in the Hermitage and, by doing so, sentenced her own aunt to die there.

For what? Everything that mattered to her has disappeared. For a while after Nadezhda died, she continued to walk the gallery. But hunger slowed her brain, and when she tried to recite her memory palace, her thoughts seemed to move through sludge, words falling away, whole sentences lost in the muck. The paintings themselves seemed to be disintegrating, shot through with light and shadow like leaves eaten into lace by insects. She would be talking and find that she couldn’t actually visualize what she was describing. She might close her eyes and focus her mind, but Caravaggio’s Lute Player was just the idea of a lute player, not an image.

Now she no longer has the strength to expend on unnecessary journeys through the museum. The rigors of work, the urgencies of the body, and the metric tick from meal to meal absorb what little energy she has left. She must rely entirely on her memory, and, cell by cell, she can feel those memories fading. Even when she is able to reconstruct a picture, it is nothing more than pigment on canvas, without any feeling or meaning. The Benois Madonna, the Madonna with Partridges, they are all just pictures, nothing more, a fable concocted to lull the masses into compliance. That she once prayed to paintings-not even to the paintings themselves, but to the places on the walls where they had hung-seems inconceivably ridiculous. She has stopped asking for miracles; in fact, she can scarcely imagine what there is left to desire.

She is cold. If she falls asleep, she will freeze.

She feels the pull of death. What a relief it would be to relax into nothingness. To follow the long line of souls-Aunt Nadezhda and Uncle Viktor, her parents, her beloved Dima-the throng that has already abandoned the city for other realms. She might simply go to sleep up here on the roof and be gone within the hour.

In the distance, she hears the drone of incoming planes. She no longer feels fear at their approach; the incessant air raids have blunted her fear and taken on the dull quality of other daily routines: standing in lines, eating, sleeping.

When the lead plane, a lighter Heinkel, releases a string of parachute flares, she watches the pink fireflies of light floating, drifting slowly down like a surreal fairy ballet. Shadows of the city leap and dance in their light. A corner of her mind recognizes that what she is seeing is strangely beautiful, but it is an abstract idea, a memory of beauty, and it does not touch her.

She is watching, a dispassionate observer, someone halfway gone already, when she feels something move inside her. She puts her hand on a spot just below her ribs and moves it slowly over her belly. Pressing down on one place, then another, she searches her abdomen as though for an injury. After a minute or two, there is a responding jolt under her palm. She startles and presses back and feels the lump swim away from her hand.

Someone is here with her, not Zeus, but an invisible presence nonetheless, a small life trying to kick its way into this world.

The search expands exponentially all day, mushrooming from a private concern into a full-scale public drama. An incident command post is set up at the high school, and as volunteers arrive in the cafeteria, they are divided into teams and assigned a leader and a swath of the island to search.

The family seems to be cordoned off from the gathering crowd by their misfortune. Though people cast sympathetic sidelong glances in their direction, the barrier is crossed only by officials. Mike Lundgren, the fireman assigned as the family’s liaison, comes over to the long cafeteria table where they are sitting, carrying a cardboard tray of coffees balanced on top of a large box of pastries.

“You folks want some coffee and a roll?” he offers.

Dmitri’s dull gaze is fixed on some interior distance, and he doesn’t answer, but Naureen thanks Mike. She fixes a cup of coffee for Dmitri, prying the paper off a creamer, shaking in a packet of sugar, and setting it in front of him. Then she picks out a muffin for him and a napkin and urges him to have a little something to eat. He stares at the coffee and muffin as though he doesn’t register what they are.

Mike looks over a clipboard. “I’ve just got a few more questions. Sir?” He waits for Dmitri to acknowledge him. “Just a few more questions. No heart condition, no diabetes or hypoglycemia, right? Medications. What medications does your wife take?”

Helen interrupts him. “We already went over all of this with the sheriff.”

“Yes, I’m sorry about this, but I need to make sure it’s all accurate for our report. Sir?”

Dmitri looks up, his eyes bleary and slow, and Mike repeats the question twice before Dmitri nods. He recites a list of drugs, unfamiliar to Helen, and then as Mike pauses over his pad, Dmitri repeats them more slowly.

While Mike is writing down the names, another fireman comes over and stands waiting.

“Excuse me just a moment.” The two men step a few feet away and confer in quiet voices.

Helen’s heart spasms. When Mike returns to his seat, she croaks, “What is it? Did they find her?”

“No, ma’am. He was just telling me they’ve finished setting up the first teams and they’re getting ready to move out.”

Dmitri rises and tries to extricate himself from between the bench and table. “I will go with them.”

“We’ve got plenty of volunteers, sir.”

“I will go look for her,” he repeats.

He looks at Dmitri skeptically. “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea. How about we put your son and daughter out there, and you stay here, where we can keep you apprised of the whole search?”

Dmitri isn’t mollified. He remains standing, waiting for Helen to slide out and release him. Instead, she puts an arm around him and coaxes him to sit down again.

“You heard Mike. They’re going to find her, and she’s going to be fine. But you’re not going to help her by wearing yourself out any more,” she says.

He is persuaded to stay at the command post only after Helen agrees to stay behind with him, and Andrei and Naureen promise to call periodically and check in.

All morning and into the afternoon, people continue to come and go, filling in log sheets or grabbing a bottle of water before they head back out, cell phones pressed to their ears.

At the edge of the fray, Mike Lundgren has unfolded a couple of canvas chairs for Helen and her father, but Dmitri seems determined to prove that he is fit enough to join the search. Periodically, he gets up and drifts around the cafeteria, offering to help volunteers who are unloading donations: cases of pop and bottled water, boxes of sandwiches and chips and trail mix, even sunscreen and bug spray. He gathers up every rumor or bit of news as it filters in and then reports back to Helen. His latest mission was to check out the arrival of a dozen or so military-looking types, conspicuously outfitted in bright orange caps and vests and shouldering fifty-pound packs, who strode into the courtyard outside the windows about a half hour ago. When he returns, he is escorted by Mike Lundgren.

“They are a professional search and rescue unit,” Dmitri tells Helen. “They came on the noon ferry.”

“I wonder, do you happen to have your dad’s room key?” Mike asks her.

Helen picks up her purse and starts rifling through it.

“The dogs need something with her smell on it,” Dmitri says, pointing out a pack of hounds milling excitedly near the door. “They give them something with her smell on it, and the dogs find her.”

Helen finds her own key but not her parents’. She can’t recall if she ever had it, or if she left their door unlocked. Her brain feels sodden.

“It doesn’t matter,” Mike says. “We can get one from the desk clerk. Mr. Buriakov, are you sure I can’t talk you into going back to your room and getting a little rest? You’re looking a little wobbly.”

Mike would probably like to get Dmitri out from underfoot, but it’s also true that, if possible, Dmitri looks even more disheveled than he did this morning. He’s still wearing his pajama top under a windbreaker, and his face is alarmingly ashen.

“I’m okay here,” Dmitri says, and sits down to make his point.

“But maybe your daughter would like to freshen up.” Mike looks directly at Helen as he speaks, appealing to her as a co-conspirator.

“Actually, that sounds like a good idea, Papa,” she says. Dmitri may be past caring, but she is suddenly uncomfortably aware of what she must look like-those victims you see on the evening news who have been rousted from their beds by disaster, a tornado or fire or flood. She runs her tongue self-consciously over her fuzzy teeth.

“I should stay here,” Dmitri says, “but Elena, you can go. She can help you choose something of Marina ’s for the dogs.”

Mike, beaten at his game, suppresses a smile. He thinks for a minute. “Well, how about this,” he counters. “There’s a couch in the school counselor’s office. Would you at least lie down there?”

Dmitri agrees, but only after extracting a promise that he will be informed if anything, anything at all, develops. Mike waves down a volunteer.

“Can you find someone to unlock Ginger Cantor’s office for Mr. Buriakov? He’d like to lie down for a while.”

He turns to Helen and offers his arm as though they are at a dance.

“Ma’am?”

“Please. Helen.”

“Helen.”

“You know, you don’t need to go with me,” she protests, foolishly flustered.

“Happy to,” he says, and he seems genuinely to mean it.

In the cab of Mike’s truck, Helen feels safely out of her father’s earshot for the first time today. She asks Mike about the dogs.

“Is it that serious? I mean, they just look so ominous.”

Mike nods but doesn’t speak right away. “Usually,” he begins, “we get a call like this, and the missing person turns up pretty quick, no harm done.” He studies the road as though he may find the rest of his words on the pavement. She has noticed that he seems to weigh everything he says, and she wonders if this is his typical demeanor or a caution specially adapted to the situation.

“When it goes on more than an hour or so, you gotta take all the precautions.”

“This happens a lot?”

“It happens. We’ve got a guy takes off every couple of months. He used to be a runner, so he’s pretty easy to find. Sticks to the roads mostly.”

Mike swings the truck in the fire lane in front of the Arbutus and shuts off the engine. “I wouldn’t worry too much just yet,” he offers. “Some of them hide like children. Last year, we looked for this one lady for almost eight hours and then we found her under her own house. She was squeezed in a gap behind some shrubbery.”

She has heard this story already, from the deputy. Helen does a quick calculation. Marina has been missing longer than eight hours already. She wonders if there are other stories, ones without happy endings.

Upstairs, they retrieve a clean shirt for Dmitri and a pair of Marina ’s knee-highs, which Mike drops into an evidence bag. He says he’ll come back for her later, if she wants to rest or clean up. They’re standing in the hallway between the two rooms, and Helen looks at the door to her room.

“I think I’m past sleep,” she decides. She’s shaky and buzzing on too many cups of coffee, but more to the point, the prospect of being alone with her thoughts is too unsettling. “Can you wait, though, for just a minute or two, just long enough for me to brush my teeth? I don’t want to hold things up.” She gestures to the evidence bag.

“You do whatever you need to do,” he says, and leans back against the wall. His eyes are steady and warm. “I’ll be here.”

A flush of gratitude nearly undoes her, and she turns away quickly and fumbles with her door key. Inside, she hurriedly brushes her teeth and washes her face. She fluffs up her hair, dabs some concealer under her eyes, and avoids studying her reflection. She chastises herself for her ridiculous vanity. It’s not as though he’s waiting to take her on a date.

When they get back to the high school, the search and rescue team has already headed out, and Mike needs to take the evidence bag to them. He points out to Helen where the counselor’s office is located, across the courtyard, and promises to check back periodically and keep them briefed.

Dmitri is lying on a couch, but when she peeks into the room, his eyes click open like a china doll’s.

“What is it? Did they find her?”

“We were only gone a few minutes, Papa,” Helen says. “Were you asleep?”

He shakes his head no and sits up. “Where could she go, Elena?” He has asked this question or some variation of it at least twenty times today.

“I don’t know, Papa.”

“It’s not so big an island.”

“Mike says they hide sometimes.”

She settles into a deep chair with sprung cushions and flips absently through an old, dog-eared copy of the Smithsonian magazine. She tells Dmitri about a glass harmonica invented by Benjamin Franklin. She reads him an article about the great blue heron. He asks her again how come it is taking them so long to find Marina. She repeats the more upbeat theories he has heard already, that she may have found a warm place to curl up and sleep-a toolshed, an unlocked car. There are vacation homes empty all over the island, even in high season. Periodically, Helen gets up and takes another stroll around the courtyard outside.

And so the warm afternoon ticks away into evening. As promised, Mike comes in every hour or so to brief them, even though there’s nothing to report. He brings offerings of coffee, sandwiches, bags of potato chips, and fruit and candy, all of which she sets aside but then ends up eating. This is how she marks the slow passage of time, in one-hour increments, each separated into smaller units of Fritos or grapes or Kit-Kat bars. Andrei calls twice to see how they are doing, and Helen tells him that they are doing fine. Later, there is dinner in the cafeteria, trays of lasagna and bowls of three-bean salad and coleslaw provided by the women of Drake Presbyterian.

Eventually, the light drains from the sky outside. At first, it seemed inconceivable that Marina could simply vanish, and though Helen was worried, at some deeper level she believed her worries were unfounded. Any moment, her mother would turn up, confused but unharmed. But with each hour that has elapsed, that outcome has seemed increasingly remote, and now, with the coming of dark, Helen realizes that, on an unconscious level, she is bracing herself against an unspecified horror. Dmitri, too, has retreated back into himself; he no longer asks any questions, and even when Mike comes in he registers no interest. Mike suggests again that they go back to the hotel, but he gets nowhere; Dmitri has set like concrete and will not be moved any farther to the periphery. Instead, a cot and blankets are brought in, though these too seem outside the private conditions of his vigil. If he cannot go and search for his wife, perhaps he can bring her back by force of will.

Helen flips through a magazine, waiting for something to grab her attention. She can’t sleep, either, but neither can she focus enough to read anymore. She gets up and crosses over to a rack of pamphlets on the wall: how to prevent sexually transmitted disease, how to recognize depression, how to choose the right college or career, advice against methamphetamine use and smoking and alcohol. She is glad her children are grown. Given the limitless risks, it seems a miracle that any children survive into adulthood-and deeply unjust that one may survive and then find at the other end of life not rest but a new set of dangers.

“Are you sure you don’t want the cot, Papa?” she asks. He shakes his head like a slow metronome.

“I think I’m going to try this again.” He doesn’t respond. She feels guilty, as though she is giving up on her mother or abandoning him.

She walks over to the couch and, sitting down beside him, takes his hand. His mouth shifts a little, but he doesn’t raise his eyes or otherwise acknowledge her. His hand is limp in hers.

“We have never spent a night apart,” he says eventually.

“What about the war?” she asks.

He brushes the comment off, and she’s not about to force the issue. But she doesn’t know what else to say, either.

“Well, okay,” she says, squeezing his hand, and rising to her feet. “I love you.”

He nods. “I love you also, Lenochka.”

“Do you mind if I turn off the overhead light? I can leave this lamp on.”

Lying on the cot, she stares at the ceiling. A random design of holes is punched into the acoustic tiles. She searches idly for patterns, as one might scan the night sky for crabs and hunters and lions. Here is what might be a face with one eye, there a dog with an enormous tail. Only a desperate need for sense, she thinks, could connect these dots into pictures, or the constellations into a meaningful universe.

In March, the public baths are opened. Marina and Olga Markhaeva wait in line outside the banya for three hours, as clusters of women emerge and two dozen more are admitted. In the park across the street, the bulbs that were not dug up and eaten during the winter are pushing spears through the snow. It is still cold, but the bitter grip of winter is loosening. Icicles are melting and crashing to the ground, and each day, the sun stays up in the sky five minutes longer than the day before.

Katya Kostrovitskaia, a worker on the museum’s crash rescue team, approaches them as she is leaving. Her cheeks are flushed. “It is marvelous,” she tells them. “The steam is not so hot as the old days, and there are no birch branches to make vaniks, but feel,” she says, and wraps Olga’s hands in her own. “They are still warm.”

Finally, they reach the front of the line and hand over their tickets. They enter an anteroom with rows of benches where, with a few dozen others, they disrobe. “Deposit your clothing with the laundry workers,” an attendant requests. “It will be disinfected and held for you. Your time will be limited to two hours. Please return to the anteroom and collect your clothing before the two hours has elapsed. May your steam be easy.”

Marina sits down beside Olga and gingerly begins to remove her boots and roll down the top layer of stockings. She has lived in these same clothes from week to week, sleeping and working swaddled in so many layers that her body has been disguised even to herself. While climbing the Jordan Staircase, she studiously avoids her reflection in the mirrored walls, but when she washes herself in a darkened corner of the shelter, sponging her neck and arms and up under her skirts, she has felt the bones of her body surfacing, one by one. Whether she is sitting or lying, they stab against her skin.

The ring that Dmitri gave her in the fall and which she has never gotten sized now knocks loosely against the knuckle of her ring finger as she rolls down another stocking. She stares with horror at the leg that emerges, its skin like burlap and splotched with blue spots from scurvy. At the end, the foot is as rough and blackened as the pads of a dog’s paw. Her stomach lurches, and she shuts her eyes. She rolls down the stockings on the other leg without looking, and then methodically unbuttons and removes first her sweater and then her wool skirt and then the dress beneath it. When finally she peels away the last of her undergarments, she stands naked, feeling the forgotten whisper of air against skin.

She cannot look at herself, but her hands reach for her naked belly of their own accord. While the rest of her has withered, her belly has continued to swell, and her hands have explored the growing expanse with wonder. Now, she waits, her attention focused inward, until she feels a reassuring stirring.

“Mine is distended, too.” When Marina turns, Olga is gesturing at her own abdomen. It is as rounded as a piece of fruit. Marina is about to protest, but Olga lowers her voice to a whisper. “Who would think human beings could look like this and still be alive? Look, you can’t even tell the men from the women, except for their penises.”

Marina follows Olga’s glance down the row of naked bodies opposite them. None of them look either male or female, just an undifferentiated procession of ancient, emaciated carcasses, but sure enough, about halfway down the row she sees a penis resting between two withered legs. The man sits, hands limp at his sides and eyes staring stonily ahead, unashamed. There are too few men left in the city to warrant separate baths, but everyone is past caring, their modesty as shriveled as their bodies. Neither is it modesty that makes Marina avert her eyes to the floor. It is revulsion. These are not bodies but wasted skeletons, rib cages and knobby spines and jutting femurs supported on impossibly spindly legs.

Attendants move down the line of benches, collecting clothing and checking each person for lice, systematically moving their hands over scalps before directing them to a tiled shower room where another attendant explains that the water will run for only three minutes, and they must wash their hair and every part of their bodies in that time. Marina steps under the shower and water streams over her head and batters her skin like a hard rain. She grabs the bar of rough lye soap and scours her feet, then works quickly up her body. She has just enough time to rinse the soap out of her hair before the water trickles to a stop.

Before entering the steam bath, they are handed metal basins filled with water and are cautioned to watch for signs of faintness.

It is like passing into the interior of a cloud and entering heaven. Billowing steam obscures all but the few women sitting closest to the door, but the tiled room echoes with the voices of a hundred. Olga grasps Marina ’s hand and sighs happily.

Each wall is terraced, floor to ceiling, with benches, and the benches are crowded with the bodies of women, wavering in the steam like mirages. Marina and Olga wade slowly through the fog until they find open space on a lower bench that is wide enough for both of them. Marina sinks down and closes her eyes. She takes in the sensation of heat seeping through her skin and sinking into her bones. Katya was right: it is not like before the war, when the steam scorched one’s lungs, but there is nothing more delicious than this feeling, like sliding into a vat of warm honey.

Throughout this winter of record low temperatures, she has felt frozen, the cold a twin torture of hunger. Even huddled under a mountain of blankets at night, her frigid body has shivered spastically against the cold. The only relief is the warden’s room, where the stove is always roaring and the staff gathers on any pretext. Director Orbeli himself used to visit there often, talking to the staff members and sipping at a cup of tea. When she comes down from the roof at the end of her shift, she lingers there, listening to the conversations and holding her hands close to the grate until her fingers tingle and burn. That is wonderful, but it pales next to this. Here, her entire body is warm and buoyant, as in a dream. She floats on a current of soft, babbling voices and the hiss of water splashing on hot rocks. She is nearly asleep when a tiny foot or fist jabs her hard in the ribs, and she gasps.

“What is it?” Olga’s face looms above Marina, her brow furrowed with concern.

Marina has not shared her secret with anyone, but she decides impulsively to make this present to Olga. “A baby,” she says shyly. “I am going to have a baby.”

But Olga doesn’t congratulate her. Her lips pressed together, she shakes her head slowly.

“You are not pregnant, Marina. It is the dystrophy. You must know that.”

“No,” Marina protests. “My menses stopped, and…”

Olga cuts her off, gently. “Dear girl, half the women in here have stopped bleeding. It doesn’t mean what you think.” She pats Marina on the shoulder, comforting her. “Someday, you will have lots of children.” This, too, seems dubious, as there are so few men left to father children, but clearly Olga thinks she is not quite rational.

“I’m not crazy,” Marina says and meets Olga’s eyes steadily. “Here.” She moves her hands across her belly, like radar, feeling for the baby. When she finds him, she takes Olga’s hand and presses it on a spot to the left of her navel. “Just a moment. Wait.” The two women wait, listening with their hands. After a moment, Marina feels the baby stir. She raises her eyes to Olga’s and sees confirmation in her look of astonishment.

“It is not possible,” Olga insists, shaking her head. She removes her hand but continues to hold it just above Marina ’s belly, as though warming herself at the warden’s stove. Her homely features soften. “A baby.” This woman who knows so many poems finds herself at a loss for words. “Life…well, well,” she says.

Marina becomes aware that she is being scrutinized by the floating heads around her. There is whispering and sidelong glances as the news is telegraphed around the bath. And then an old woman emerges from the steam and stops in front of Marina. Perhaps she is not really old-it is impossible to tell a starving person’s age-but she looks like a crone, her gray hair pasted in wet rivulets to her scrawny shoulders and shriveled teats. In the watery light, she is as pale as a wax figure.

“May I?” she asks, and holds out two skeletal hands. Marina clutches her belly protectively, and Olga waves her hand at the woman.

“Leave her be.”

The woman ignores Olga and waits for Marina to answer.

Marina feels the baby inside her, floating in his own warm bath, safe and secure. “Yes, it’s all right,” Marina finally volunteers, as much to the baby as to Olga. She slides her hands away and exposes her belly. The old woman reaches out, and Marina feels a light skittering touch on her skin. As though rising to the unfamiliar touch, the baby swims toward the old woman’s hand. She nods, her dull eyes glitter, and her lips pull into the insinuation of a smile.

“He is very strong,” she says. “A boy.”

Olga snorts.

“Yes, a boy,” the old woman insists. “I have helped deliver scores of babies, some of them in this very bath. And this one”-she pats Marina ’s belly with affection-“is a boy. Here,” she says, “feel how strong he kicks.”

Emboldened by the crone, other women have gathered behind her. One by one, they appear through the steam and passively hold out their hands, as though in the breadlines. Marina nods and then waits patiently as each set of hands touches her belly. They are polite: as soon as they feel the baby move, they move to the side for the next woman. They whisper among themselves. Marina hears a woman remark, “Look at her breasts, how full they are.” And another says, “How far along do you suppose she is?” One of them, when the baby kicks, crosses herself and announces to those around her, “It’s a miracle.” There is general agreement.

The old crone whispers in Marina ’s ear.

“I have bread for you. It is in my coat pocket. I will get it.”

“No, auntie,” Marina says. “You mustn’t.”

“He needs to eat,” the old woman says, and before Marina can protest further, she melts away into the steam like a ghost.

On the first day the trams are running again, it seems that everyone in the city has come out for a ride. The clanging bells draw them out of their dark homes and offices and into the spring air, and even if they have nowhere to go, they line up along the routes and cheer the approach of the bright red cars. There is no pushing or shoving as there was in the old days. People wait patiently and they give up their seats to those who are too weak to stand. Some carry bundles of bright flowers in their arms.

From the service entrance of the Hermitage, Marina watches one of the cars rumble by. As though it is a holiday, passengers on the tram wave to her as they pass. She would love to ride out to the edge of the city, but there is too much work to do here. She waves back, then picks up her empty pail and turns back into the museum.

Unlocked from its shroud of winter ice, the Hermitage is thawing. The walls ooze moisture, the ceilings are seeping, and rivulets run down the walls. Snow melts on the roof, dripping through the skylights and spattering muddy water onto the floors below. The enormous population of the Hermitage has been reduced to a skeletal staff of perhaps fifty, mostly old women, and a third of those are recovering in the Hermitage clinic at any given time. Like shipwrecked survivors in a leaky lifeboat, those who can work bail water ceaselessly, but it is slow work and they are barely able to keep ahead of the filling buckets. All morning, Marina has been ferrying pails of the filthy water out of the Skylight halls, through the long, vacant corridors, and down the stairs leading out to the embankment. In ten-odd trips, she has seen no one she knows, only a handful of cadets from the naval academy, carrying pieces of furniture.

She climbs the Council Staircase. Most of the windows in the museum have been boarded over and it is almost completely dark, but she knows her way without sight. As she passes through the long corridor of the Rembrandt Room, she ticks off the former inhabitants as though taking attendance. Flora and Danae, the Father and his prodigal son, the poet Jeremias de Decker, the old man in red, Baartjen Martens Doomer, Abraham and Isaac, David and Jonathon, the holy family. She doesn’t have time to stop, but out of the corner of her eye, she sometimes seems to catch a glimpse of a familiar face peering out of the dimness.

She turns into the Spanish Skylight Hall. Its dark red walls once teemed with religious fervor, Murillo’s Jacob dreaming a swirl of dark angels, Zurbaran’s martyred Saint Lawrence carrying the gridiron he will be roasted on, and wherever one turned, another saint caught up in some terrible ecstasy, their eyes cast upward to the celestial light streaming through the monumental barrel-vaulted skylight. Now, though, the room seems more like an underground cavern or an abandoned mine. After a shell explosion shattered the skylight, it was tented over with plywood lashed to the frame with wire. In the gloom, the room echoes with the dripping of water, and, looking up, she sees telltale pinpricks and slivers of light. The braver women on the repair crew have repeatedly crawled out onto the skylight and tried to seal the leaks, nailing down loose boards and shellacking canvas over the seams, but wind and water continually find fresh weaknesses.

Her boots slap across the muddy floor toward a thin waterfall that spatters noisily into an overflowing pail. She hefts the heavy pail and replaces it with the empty one in her hand. Hundreds of tons of snow are melting on the roof, and it seems to Marina that she is hauling it out one pail at a time.

Her back is aching and she is short of breath. When she first knew she was pregnant, she would forget for hours at a time and be amazed afresh every time she felt the baby move. But now it is a continual presence, pressing into her bladder and against her diaphragm, waking her in the night. The baby is beginning to settle heavy and low, and the nurse says it could come any day now. Marina is of two minds on this. So long as it is in her womb, she can protect it from the world. But already it is two weeks late, and the lake is thawing.

Descending the stairs, she feels for each step, balancing against the weight of the water in her hand and the weight of the child thrust out in front of her. In the winter, she was careful not to fall because she might not have the strength to get up. Now, though, she is not thinking of herself. Everything now is for this child. She is merely a vehicle for something bigger.

She figures she has time enough for one more trip before lunch, but when she climbs the stairs with her emptied pail, she finds herself veering off her path, drawn toward the light and the sound of voices coming from the Hanging Gardens above the Palace Mews. Just five minutes to rest myself, she promises.

The garden, once dotted with flowering trees and graceful statuary, is now stripped bare, the marble fountain standing alone amid raw squares of earth. A cluster of women are on their knees in the freshly turned soil, chattering among themselves like sparrows as they root shell splinters out of the ground and plant rows of seed. One of them notices her and waves. It is Olga Markhaeva. She pulls herself to her feet and brushes the soil off the front of her coat.

“You shouldn’t be lugging water.” Since Olga learned of Marina’s pregnancy, she has taken charge of Marina’s care, advising her to sleep with her feet elevated, somehow procuring handfuls of fresh dandelion greens, even accompanying her to a doctor to help her secure a milk ration. The doctor’s office was crowded with dystrophics, and it was only through Olga’s doggedness that Marina had gotten five minutes of the harried doctor’s time.

“I’m fine,” she reassures Olga. “Dr. Sokolov said I may continue to work just as I have been. It’s healthy for the baby, he says.”

“What does he know, the old rooster. You are not one of the serfs on his old family estate. Here, sit down and take the weight off your feet.” Olga takes Marina ’s arm and leads her to a bench against the wall. Marina sinks down gratefully. She draws the rich, loamy smells of earth into her lungs and turns her face up to the weak, watery light of the new sun. She can barely feel its warmth-she doubts she will ever feel completely warm again-but the light prickles at numb nerve endings.

“Dmitri and I used to bring our lunches out here,” she says, running her hand over the marble. It is smooth and warm under her palm. “We sat on this bench.”

Olga nods but doesn’t say anything. There are too many dead for words of comfort. This is just the way it is.

The bench has been moved. It used to be in the center of the garden, under a particularly beautiful corkscrew willow. They would chew on their sandwiches and listen to the plashing of the fountain; little rainbows hung in its mist. Dmitri talked about Hemingway and Babel. The sun danced in the green leaves. The perfume of wisteria hung in the air.

It doesn’t seem possible that this is the same place. Last summer, the statues were removed to rooms below, and then the harsh winter killed off all the trees and shrubs. Dead willows were cut down one by one for firewood, and now the honeysuckle and wisteria have been pulled out and the rose beds dug up to make room for vegetable plots. There is nothing left but this bench, the fountain, and, heaped against the wall next to her, a dozen old lilac bushes, soil still clinging to their root-balls. The gnarled limbs are covered with leaves.

“Look. They are still alive,” Marina says. The lilacs, planted ages and ages ago for the Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna, have survived. The heart-shaped leaves seem to glow from within, hundreds of hearts pulsing with a beautiful warm green light. She has never seen such a brilliant green.

“It’s a pity, isn’t it,” Olga says. “They leafed out but they didn’t blossom. Besides, we need the room for vegetables. One cannot eat lilacs.”

Marina leans forward and plucks a single leaf. It is as translucent as a baby’s skin, each delicate vein visible, its tender edges just starting to curl inward. She feels something inside her rip open, and the leaf is swimming in a blurry flood of tears.

“There, there.” Olga rubs Marina ’s back tentatively. “Stop, now. You mustn’t weep. It isn’t good for the baby, so much grief.”

Marina shakes her head mutely. She can’t explain it, but what she is feeling is as much gratitude as grief, some primal feeling that contains both. “It’s not that,” she sobs. “I’m here to see it. This green. This day.”

In a way, it was easier in winter. The dark, the cold, the hunger, reduced the world to a repeating sequence of dull, small movements. One moved through the day like a zombie, enduring the unendurable, feeling nothing. Now, Marina finds herself awash in sensation. It is like waking from the dead. Her muscles and bones are stiff, but her soul reels drunkenly, buffeted by unexpected memories and by a tenderness of feeling that surprises her.

“It is the pregnancy,” Olga says, visibly relieved to have this explanation. “The mother’s moods become tidal.” She hands Marina a clean rag and watches while she mops her eyes and blows her nose.

“We’ll eat. You’ll feel better. It is time for lunch, anyway.”

The canteen is filled with workers and the murmuring surge and ebb of dozens of conversations. This is new. In the winter, one heard only the shuffle of feet, the slow scrape of utensils, as each diner focused mutely on his food, but as the weather has warmed, meals have started to become social again, with people turning their attentions outward. Marina and Olga stand in line for bowls of porridge and bread and then, carrying their trays, weave through the tables until they spot Anya and another babushka seated at a large table.

Anya is one of the enigmas of the winter starvation. She was so frail in the winter that Marina did not expect her to survive, yet here she is. She is bone thin and shriveled as an apple doll, but alive.

“Just look at you,” Anya says. “This baby must be fat as a little prince,” she says. “Here, sit down next to me, dear.” She pats the bench next to her.

The porridge is delicious, green and tangy with beet tops.

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 comforting 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,” she 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.

They trail after her through the dim Jupiter Hall, crowded with hundreds of vases made of precious metals and stone and presided over by the towering gold and marble statue of Jupiter. It is like being undersea, with muted light filtering down through a few unbroken panes just below the ceiling and reflecting off the green stone walls.

“The walls are artificial marble,” she informs them, “made by a special process mixing marble dust and concrete and dyes. Each of the rooms down here has walls of a different color: here rose colored”-she gestures as they pass through the Ancient Courtyard-“and up here, in the Hall of Dionysus, it is the color of coral. This is a wonderful room. I think it is like being inside the mother’s womb, very red and dark and safe.

“Do you wish to see more?” The boys nod, mute but eager.

The captain, an elderly man in a long fur-collared coat, speaks up. “You are very generous, comrade, but we don’t wish to overtire you in your condition.”

She assures them that she is not tired at all, and, amazingly, she is telling the truth. She feels as though she could walk her charges through every single room of the museum if only they would follow. There is so much she wants to show them. So she leads them up the Main Staircase to the picture gallery on the first floor, holding up her lantern to guide them. Their footsteps echo on the parquet floors. Rows of dusty gilt frames line the barren walls.

“This is my favorite part of the museum, though it may be hard to see why. From here on out, you will have to rely entirely on your imagination.”

She walks them into the Rubens Room and stops before an empty frame. The boys look bewildered. Drawing a deep breath, she silently wills up the image. Gradually, a picture takes shape for her inside the frame. It is Rubens’s portrayal of Andromeda being rescued by the warrior Perseus. A wonderful winged horse slowly surfaces on the blank green wall inside the frame. Then the decapitated head of the gorgon and the open mouth of the sea monster in the foreground. This will appeal to boys, she decides.

She begins to sketch out the painting for them. Starting at the left edge, she describes the beautiful princess posed with one hand shyly covering her privates, her eyes downcast before the smitten Perseus.

“She is a princess and was about to be sacrificed to a sea monster. Perseus just happened to be flying over the sea on his winged horse-he had been off killing the evil gorgon, whose head is impaled on his shield here. The head is still alive and the face is terrified.” She makes a horrible face. “So Perseus looked down, and he saw the beautiful Andromeda chained to a rock, and he fell instantly in love. He flew down and rescued her by slaying the sea monster. Here, at the bottom of the painting, is the dead monster. He is green and very ugly, and his eyes are bulging.”

As she talks, she sees that one of the boys in particular is transfixed, a flush spreading across his cheeks. She is encouraged. She asks them to picture the angel placing a wreath on the hero’s head and the little putti that busily attend the scene. They are draping garments over the modest young woman and holding the reins of Pegasus, the winged horse.

“This one little putto looks frightened that he will be stepped on. Pegasus is such a lively horse. His flesh is slick and quivering, and his hooves are lifting off the ground. He has huge white wings, and they are poised for flight. Any second now he will lift into the sky. You can just feel it. In fact, everything in the painting is moving. You almost feel that if you turned away, and then turned back again, the painting would be different.” She moves on, but as she walks away she sees that one of the younger boys has lingered behind. He whips his head back and forth as though he may catch a glimpse of something if only he is fast enough.

She skips down a few frames and holds up her lantern. “This is the spot where the painting Bacchus hung. Does anyone know who he was?”

One boy volunteers that he was the Roman god of wine.

“Yes, that’s right. So this is a picture about drinking. Bacchus is holding up an enormous gold goblet, and it is being filled by one of his Bacchae. The Bacchae were his female attendants. And poised directly under the goblet here is a young cupid catching the spilled wine in his mouth, and another one here is urinating.” She sees one boy stifle a smirk. “Over here is Pan, and he is pouring a river of wine into his open mouth. They are all very drunk. Look, even the leopard is drunk.” She corrects herself. “In the painting, there is a leopard right here under Bacchus’s foot, and he is chewing on a grapevine like a drunken kitten.

“Now, usually Bacchus was portrayed as a slim and handsome young man, but Rubens shows him here as very fat. Imagine a very fat, naked man with flesh piled in rolls on his huge belly. This was painted at the end of Rubens’s life, when he was so sick with gout that he could hardly grasp a brush.”

The boys trade glances between themselves.

“Excuse me, comrade-what is gout?”

Of course these boys have never heard of such a thing. “It is the disease of the decadent bourgeoisie, caused by indulging in too much rich food and wine. Catherine the Great also had gout. It caused the extremities to swell painfully. Here Rubens has given Bacchus gout, as well. He is seated on a wine cask because his toes are too swollen for him to stand.”

One of the boys raises his hand and asks, “Is his female comrade naked also?”

“Well, no,” Marina answers, keeping her face straight, “she has only one breast exposed, but that is an astute question, because Rubens’s women are often unclothed. He was the undisputed master at painting skin and making it look real, and so he was famous for his nudes.”

“Are they pretty?” another boy asks.

“I think they are quite beautiful.”

As she moves down the wall, she points out Venus and Cybele, and the boys focus intensely, as though willing the naked women to appear.

In the next room, she stops in front of another vacant frame.

“Oh, I like this one very much. It is called Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin. There were so many paintings of the Madonna in the museum, but this one is particularly clever because it is not so much about the Madonna as it is about the artist and art itself.

“The people who commissioned van der Weyden wanted an official painting for their guild, which was like a union. They said, ‘Paint us a picture with the Madonna.’ So over on the left here, holding her child, is Mary.” Marina describes a woman wearing a dark, rather plain gown, very similar in color to the dark background.

“But the artist didn’t want to paint just another Madonna, because this was such a commonplace subject, so he cleverly put himself into the picture, disguised as Saint Luke, the patron saint of artists. A patron saint,” she adds, “is the dead person that believers prayed to for help.” With the flat of her hand, she sketches the space on the right that the figure occupied. “He is over here, holding a small canvas and a brush. But not only has van der Weyden put himself in the picture, but he’s dressed in bright red, from his head to his toes. So our eye is drawn to him rather than to Mary.

“And then our eye moves here, to the center of the painting. Do you see these two smaller figures in the background?” She catches herself, realizing that she is pointing to a blank square, but the boys and their teachers are all completely focused on the spot where she has directed their gaze. “There are two figures, a man and a woman. They are standing outside, past the studio where the artist is painting his model, and they’re gazing away from the viewer at the landscape beyond. They’re posed between two dark pillars that open onto a light-filled landscape. Our eyes follow theirs to the view of the peaceful river. It zigzags through a beautiful medieval city and off into this very soft, luminous horizon.”

She is awed by the vision and doesn’t say anything for a moment. They all stare at the wall in silence.

“So,” she resumes, “the artist was saying to us that this isn’t really about a Madonna. The real miracle is the painting itself, which lifts us and carries us away to this magical world.”

And then she is walking again, backtracking through the rooms. “I have something else wonderful to show you,” she promises. She marches them briskly through the empty Snyders Room, calling up in her memory and then reluctantly rejecting canvas after canvas. They are wonderful-enormous market scenes teeming with dizzying heaps of fish and baskets of produce-but it would be cruel to describe such pictures to starving boys. Similarly, she skips past the frames that held Fyt’s still lifes, with their artful arrangements of dead game and glistening fruit.

They pass into a dark passage lit only by Marina ’s kerosene lamp. At the start of the war, the Raphael Loggias, a glassed arcade with exquisitely detailed frescoes covering every surface, were boarded over from the inside and sandbagged up to the top of the windows. The frescoes were left in place, though, and as they move down the darkened tunnel, fantastic images emerge from the shadows, wavering in the dim light and then receding again. Painted squirrels climb columns decorated with elaborate scrolls of oak leaves. Greek athletes strike poses in medallions on the walls.

“This loggia is five hundred years old. It is an exact copy of the original in the Vatican, which was painted by Raphael and his students. This style of ornamentation was seen in classical Rome and was called grotesques.”

Every surface is crowded with animals and fruits, with real and imaginary creatures-a porcupine, a crow, a unicorn and a satyr, lions’ heads and equestrian mounts and winged angels-an illustrated encyclopedia of the world. The lamplight flickers in water-darkened mirrors, and as they pass, their own images jump out at them. Above, in a succession of vaults, loom sea-dark scenes from the Bible.

At the end of the loggia, they emerge into another denuded room. She draws them into a half circle around the first in a row of freestanding panels.

“This is the spot that held one of the most prized paintings in the entire Hermitage collection. The painting is called The Holy Family, and it was painted by Raphael.”

Marina gazes at the panel. “I don’t know that I will be able to do it justice,” she admits. “It’s such a wondrous painting because Raphael took these mythical characters, the Virgin Mary and Joseph and the Christ Child, and he reimagined them as real people, an actual family. If they were real, they wouldn’t be gilt and perfect. And so what he came up with was this rather melancholy little family portrait. On one side,” she says, pointing, “we have Mary. She is beautiful but very distant and unaware. And quite apart from her, over here, is Joseph. He’s much older than Mary. He leans on his walking stick and looks almost frail. Between them”- Marina points to the exact center of the blank square-“standing on his mother’s lap, is the Christ Child. He’s a mama’s boy. He is eyeing Joseph fearfully and his arms are reaching out for his mother. Joseph’s expression, I think, is one of resigned disappointment, a father whose child rejects him for the mother.”

The boys are staring at the blank square, their eyes unfocused and dreamy.

“They have halos,” an older boy murmurs.

“Why yes, they do,” Marina responds, a little taken aback. “You have been here before?” she asks him.

The boy’s eyes drop to the floor. “No, comrade,” he murmurs. “It is just…” he points to the framed space, unable to complete his sentence.

Marina is puzzled, but she continues. “One wouldn’t notice the halos at first, but they are there, fine as piano wires. It’s almost as though Raphael was saying that what sets them apart from any other family is almost invisible. They might be us.

“Now, over here was Raphael’s Conestabile Madonna.” She leads them to another panel, this one very ornate and gilded like the proscenium arch of an old theater. There is nothing in the center where the stage would be except a darkened square of paint.

“The Conestabile Madonna was one of only three paintings that were packed with their frames. Which is too bad for us, because the frame itself was quite beautiful and elaborate.” She describes the frame and then works her way in to the round canvas at the center. “Everything in the painting has been arranged to fit inside the circle,” she says. “The Madonna’s head is slightly inclined”- Marina demonstrates by tucking her chin just so-“and the shore of the lake and the distant mountains curve into the center.”

She sees something that has escaped her notice before. It is very faint, but there seems to be another face hovering in the sky just to the left of the Virgin.

She describes the Madonna before her, how small she is, how delicately colored, her formal, upright posture, the way her heavily lidded eyes are distant and peaceful. And the way that the child appears to be reading the open prayer book in Mary’s hand.

“Of course, the logical explanation is that he is simply attracted to the book, as toddlers are. But Raphael’s contemporaries would have seen it differently. They would have seen a miracle.”

Just inside the left edge of the frame is the faint outline of another child, a child that is not in the Conestabile. It is like having double vision, as though her memory were blurring. Marina remembers her teachers in school describing a phenomenon called pentimento. Indigent painters would sometimes reuse canvases, covering over inferior paintings with a coat of pigment and then painting a fresh picture. With time, as the oils aged, the old image might appear ghostlike behind the new. An eye would peer out from the folds of a woman’s skirt, a piece of fruit would hover in a cloudless blue sky. She wonders if it is possible that Raphael used this canvas before he painted the Conestabile.

A second Madonna is coming into focus, and then there are three toddlers ghosting and overlapping one another, and one of them holds up two sticks lashed together in the shape of a cross. With a shock, Marina knows all at once what she is seeing. It is Raphael’s Alba Madonna, the one that disappeared, just as Anya described it. She reaches out to touch the canvas, but there is nothing there, just the paneling.

She turns to the boys, her face radiant. “Do you see?” she asks them. Past them, she can see other paintings in the Skylight halls. Her vision is filling with color and images.

She sweeps through a doorway, beckoning breathlessly for them to follow. The hall is so cavernous that lamplight doesn’t reach the far end. Above, the barrel-vaulted ceiling recedes into black. From the darkness comes the steady drip of water hitting water, each drop echoing in the chasm. Except for the enormous frames that line the walls, the vast room is empty.

“Look here.” She details for them a dramatic scene, three women surprised at an open tomb by an angel. Then she describes another picture, this one showing the Virgin being taken up into heaven. Then another, the conversion of Saul. As she talks, images appear inside the gigantic frames. The pictures are wild with stormy skies and electric emotion, and as Marina ’s sweeping gestures paint the scenes, the lantern sways, throwing wild swoops of light up the walls. Figures appear out of the shadows, their robes swirling, their hands raised in amazement.

“All this is yours, comrades,” Marina tells them. “Can you see?” She is ecstatic. Her voice trembles when she speaks, but her eyes are bright and calm. “It’s all yours.”

Ravishing splashes of color pour out of the darkness and resolve into images-paintings that hung elsewhere in the museum, paintings Marina remembers and others that she has only heard tell of. The room is filling with women, with children, with saints and goddesses, and the boys are whispering among themselves. They point at the frames on the wall, at the paintings crowding the edges of the lamplight. The captain is weeping. He is staring at the wall, wiping at his eyes. “Look,” he says to no one in particular. “Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?” He points to a spot at eye level on the wall. It is Giampetrino’s Madonna, and she is staring right back at them.

Several years hence, when Marina’s body is finally winding down, Helen will feel no grief, only a quiet detachment, as though she is waiting for a bus-it is late and she is tired, but she has nowhere she needs to be and it will get here when it gets here. She and Andrei and Naureen and the grandchildren have long since said their good-byes, and Marina herself has left, though no one is able to pinpoint exactly when that happened, only that at some point she was no longer there. It is all over but the waiting.

While she waits, sitting at her mother’s bedside and listening to the hoarse rasp of her breathing, Helen finishes another sketch of her, something she does periodically to pass the time. Once she had thought that she might discover some key to her mother if only she could get her likeness right, but she has since learned that the mysteries of another person only deepen, the longer one looks.

The last time she sketched her, her mother was still speaking occasionally. She had asked to see what Helen was drawing, and when Helen turned the pad, she had looked at her portrait without recognition. This was no measure of Helen’s artistic skill. By then, Marina didn’t know who Helen was, either. She called her Nadezhda. Andrei, too, had lost his identity as her son and become someone else, an imagined suitor with whom she would flirt shamelessly. Only old photographs of herself or Dmitri sparked any recognition. Helen had gone to the dresser and picked up the cracked photograph of Marina taken back in Russia and showed it to her.

Marina studied it long and hard, her face a mask of concentration. “She looks familiar,” she said to Helen. “Do you know her?”

“Not really,” Helen answered. “Maybe you could tell me about her.”

“I think she was one of the Madonnas,” Marina said. “But I can’t say for certain. There were so many.”

It is tempting to see meaning where there may be none. Very often, Marina ’s blank-faced comments have seemed to carry the weighty truth of Zen koans, and the family repeats them, teasing out the possible meanings and then dismissing their own credulity. There is always, though, the yearning to believe.

There was the morning up on Drake Island when the ponytailed roofer found Marina curled up in the fireplace of a mansion under construction out on Channel Bluff. It was Monday morning, and she had been missing almost thirty hours.

As the young man described it later, he thought at first that Marina was dead. She looked just like a ghost in a horror movie, he said, all gray-faced and wearing a dirty cotton gown. But when he prodded her shoulder, her eyes opened and she started mumbling. He thought she might have had a stroke, but then he figured out that she was speaking a foreign language. He said something in Spanish-kind of dumb, he admitted, but he had panicked and it was the only foreign language he knew-then he mimed for her to stay where she was and ran back to his truck to call for help. He’d heard about the old lady who’d gotten lost over the weekend, and he figured this must be her. It wasn’t every day you ran across an old lady in a nightgown, he explained. So he called the sheriff and he got a flannel shirt out of the back of the cab, and a thermos of herb tea. He got her arms threaded into the shirt and helped her sip some tea, and she looked a little better, kind of dazed but smiling. She started looking around and pointing, first in one direction, then another, and saying something. He looked, but there wasn’t anything to see, just two-by-fours and joists, the skeleton frame of the house, and the trees beyond. The young man shrugged, saying No comprende, but she was insistent, repeating a couple of words over and over. She pulled herself to her feet and, hanging on to his arm, started kind of leading him around the perimeter of the room, stopping every couple of feet and pointing. He remembered he was worried because she was barefoot and there were nails and wood scraps all over the floor. “Look out,” he said, and she nodded, her eyes lit bright, and said, “Look.”

“Look?” he repeated.

“Look,” she answered, and pointed. “It is beautiful, yes?”

“What was beautiful?” Helen had asked the young man, puzzled.

“Everything, man. That’s what was so amazing. There’s a killer view of the straits, but she was pointing at everything, you know, this dead madrona tree out back, and these bands of sunlight coming through the roof in the garage.” Here, the young man’s expression had turned very earnest. “It was like she was saying everything was beautiful.”

The doctor said Marina was in shock, but Helen has always preferred the young man’s explanation. “You had to be there,” he insisted. “She was showing me the world.”