Someone is knocking.
She climbs off the tub and opens the connecting door to her parents’ room.
“Oh. Hello,” her mother says. “I opened the door, and there was another one.”
Her parents’ room is dark, but Helen can make out the shape of her father under the covers of the bed.
“Did you want to come in?” Helen whispers.
“Okay. Do I interrupt something?”
“No, I was just unpacking. What do you think?” She holds out her arms and does a slow turn.
“It’s a beautiful color,” Marina says.
“Is it too tight? I don’t look like an overripe melon?”
“No. You look lovely.”
“Thanks, Mama,” she nods. This is her mother’s stock reply. “Oh, well. No one will be looking at the bride’s aunt.”
Since the bombing began, some two thousand of the staff and their families-the scholars and researchers, the curators, the women who sweep the galleries and polish the floors-all have moved into the cavernous vaults beneath the Hermitage. Viktor Alekseevich Krasnov is a scholar and archaeologist renowned for his work on the digs at Karmir-Blur, and so, though all here are comrades, equals, in theory, the few square meters allotted to him, his wife, and his niece are in a corner of Bomb Shelter #3, tucked behind a pillar of the vault. With a large carpet strung from pillar to wall, the space is almost like a private room. Later, when winter comes and the walls of the vault ice over, this corner will prove to be not only damp but a degree or two colder than the middle of the vault, where the crowded workers generate a bovine heat. But already Marina has cause to regret her privilege.
She owes him everything; she knows this. When her father and then her mother were arrested and taken away, Uncle Viktor took her in and gave her his surname. He arranged for her education to continue at the university and then the art academy, and when she graduated he facilitated her subsequent appointment as a docent in the museum. He has been the model of a devoted uncle, taking a close interest in her friends, overseeing her studies and the books she is reading, everything. Still, she cannot mistake this interest for affection. It is the tense act of balancing what he terms a sacred duty to his dead sister with the insidious threat Marina represents as the daughter of convicted counterrevolutionary activists. Never mind that the charges were invented. Never mind that he himself was arrested and imprisoned in 1930 on similar charges and released a year later only when Director Orbeli personally intervened on his behalf. He returned from prison with ruined lungs and a fastidious compulsion that every aspect of his life appear correct and blameless.
Half of every year, he spends in Armenia at the excavation site in the Caucasus. He leaves with the first thaw, and Marina has always associated his departure with the advent of spring. In his absence, the household becomes warmer and lighter. Nadezhda wears her hair down and dresses the children in play clothes. By summer, they are living like bohemians: eating whenever they feel hungry, staying up till all hours, and entertaining Dmitri and his friends. To be sure, when Viktor returns in the autumn, there is always a period of readjustment in the household. But even so, the relative spaciousness and privacy of their apartment makes his stiffness, his calculated inquiries and ponderous lectures, easier to stomach. Here, quarantined together in this cramped space, she can hardly endure him.
Furthermore, Viktor Alekseevich Krasnov snores.
Even with a scarf wrapped tightly around her head and a blanket pulled up around her ears, she can’t muffle the sound. Following her shift on the roof last night, she was kept awake another several hours, her fatigued brain snared in the drama of his next breath. First, the long volcanic rumble. Then an uneven stretch of silence. It is like hearing the whistle of a bomb and waiting for the explosion. She can count to twenty and sometimes even thirty before he will finally gasp up more air.
He was given a complete discharge from military service on account of his lungs. Logically, this is probably what causes him to snore so loudly, though Marina can’t help but think of it as an extension of his pedantic character, that even in his sleep he must be listened to. By morning, she is convinced that she could stuff a rag down his throat and not feel any guilt.
Aunt Nadezhda has brought the three of them their ration of bread and coffee. The coffee is nearly colorless, brewed from used grounds. The handful of tea leaves that Marina bought with her mother’s ruby earrings was gone two weeks ago. Beautiful rubies suspended in filigreed gold. One hundred grams of tea.
“Sergei Pavlovich says that they confirmed it this morning. Uritsk has fallen.” This rumor has been circulating widely, but it was too horrific to be believed. Uritsk is a mere ten or twelve kilometers from the Hermitage, a ride on the tram.
On the radio, bad news lags several days behind the rumors, but people gather around the radio in the mornings nonetheless and repeat the official pronouncements from person to person around the Hermitage shelters. Even couched in the uplifting propaganda of the Information Bureau, it is repeatedly bad news these days. It seems now that Viktor’s confidence in the Red Army’s easy superiority over the Germans was misplaced. It is the third week of September, and the Germans have been steadily pushing back the army, edging closer and closer to the gates of the city itself. Still, he was all too right about the bombardment. He seems to take some grim satisfaction in the robotic regularity with which the German planes reappear every night at precisely seven o’clock. If nothing else, he says, it reconfirms the rightness of his decision to override Nadezhda’s terror and allow the children to be evacuated.
They have not been able to procure any news of Tatiana and Mikhail since they were evacuated, but they both hold fast to the conviction that they are still alive, that they were not among those bombed by the Germans as they fled the city. Grim rumors have come back of trains arriving in the Urals, their charred hulls filled with the burned bodies of children.
Though Nadezhda flinches at the mention of her children, she will not contradict her husband’s arrogant surety that they are safe. That would be tempting fate. Neither can she bring herself to agree, so she pretends she has not heard. She hands Marina her coffee and bread and asks how she slept.
It is only because Marina is so tired that she begins to weep into the pale liquid. The older woman carefully sets down her niece’s cup so none of the coffee should spill and draws the young woman into her arms like a child. She strokes Marina ’s hair and makes comforting shushing noises. Every sigh, every gesture, is weighted by the absence of her children.
“I’m sorry,” Marina says, embarrassed.
“Nonsense. You are worried about Dima,” Nadezhda says. “But you shouldn’t worry. There is no time for letters. And you know how bad the army is about delivering mail. You will probably get a whole packet at once.” There were letters in the first month, even if only a few scrawled lines, but Marina has not heard from him since the middle of August. His division was among those encircled after the Luga line fell, and in the chaos, many disappeared, Dmitri among them. Olga Markhaeva’s husband, Pavel Ivanovich, was in the Third Division as well, but he has not been able to provide any information except to write that no one he has talked with in the unit saw Dmitri fall. Marina ’s shameful hope is that he is among the deserters.
“He will come home,” Nadezhda says. “They will all come home soon.” Then she, too, begins to weep.
Viktor stares stonily into his own cup and pretends not to notice. It is the same way that Marina pretends not to hear her aunt and uncle’s furtive lovemaking, the same way that everyone pretends not to notice family quarrels or the sounds and smells of slop pails. After a moment or two, he can stand it no more. Without a word, he stands up and turns his chair around so that it faces away from the women and toward the makeshift desk at the foot of his pallet. This signals that he is now at work and not to be disturbed. Nadezhda sniffs up her tears and bites her lip.