So far as is possible in this crowded shelter, the residents cling to the routines they had before the war. It is a communal act of faith that if they adhere to the routines of their old lives, their old lives will return to them. The scholars continue to draft their papers, the students study for exams. Viktor Alekseevich Krasnov has been organizing several years’ worth of his field notes in order to begin work on a history of the pre-class culture of Urartu. He diligently puts in an hour every morning before he and Nadezhda go out to work on the fortifications, then spends several more hours in the evening working by the light of an altar candle.
Marina can’t get around the bulky gilded chair that Viktor has co-opted from a set Marina carried down last week from the Snyders Room.
“Pardon me,” she says.
“One moment, Marina.” Viktor’s eyes do not leave the page he is scrawling on. Finally he reaches the end of a thought, takes a sip from the dregs of his coffee, and then stands to allow Marina to pass. He wishes her a good day. She masks her murderous feelings in a nod but cannot bring herself to return his greeting.
It is harder for Marina to preserve her old life. She was a museum guide, and now there is no one to guide and nothing to see. Every day, she walks through the abandoned picture gallery with its broken and boarded windows. Hills of sand are piled near the entrance to each room in case of fire. And on the walls are rows of empty frames, left hanging as a pledge that the paintings will return someday. Each time she enters a room, she runs through her script, mentally placing as many of the paintings as she can recall back in their frames. She moves like a ghost past the blank rectangles and describes by rote the pictures that hung inside them. She narrates the history of the paintings and the stories they tell, pointing out the range of expressions in van der Goes’s mourners, the way that Velázquez used light and shadow to transform paint into a table linen with such weight and texture that one can almost feel it in the tips of one’s fingers. Out of the corner of her eye, she can almost see the loaf of bread, the pomegranates and sardines, all arranged on a heavy white cloth, and the three peasants posing around their luncheon table. As always, they are boisterous. One seems to wink at her.
Today, her route to the smallest of the three skylight halls takes her through the Italian Renaissance. Here is Giorgione’s Judith. She is so serene, so poised, that it is a shock to follow her lowered gaze down the length of her shapely leg and find beneath her foot the severed head of Holofernes.
And here is The Assumption of Mary Magdalene into Heaven. She is flying, her startled eyes lifted up, her arms spread wide, her cloak and red sash trailing behind her. Supporting the Magdalene are a pair of full-grown angels and a flock of tiny putti, fat little cherubs hefting her on their backs and shoulders as though she were a heavy sack of grain. Domenichino has also painted strange disembodied cherubs in the sky, infant heads propped on flapping wings.
“Good morning.”
The Magdalene and putti vanish, replaced by an empty gilt frame.
Anya, one of the babushski, hobbles toward Marina. If Anya wonders, she doesn’t ask what Marina is doing, why she is loitering in this deserted room, staring at nothing. She stops at Marina ’s side, follows her glance, and nods appreciatively. “I’ve always liked that one, too.” Then she says, “Did you hear? They’ve had to shut down the Kirov Works again. The German bastards got a direct hit with a delayed explosive and it’s in the basement. They’ve got one of the girls working on it.” A group of young women has been trained to defuse the delayed explosives the Germans are dropping now, and their heroics have become the subject of nightly radio broadcasts. To minimize the loss of life, they work alone, a single young woman crawling down into the bomb crater and toiling against a ticking fuse. They are the new symbols of Soviet womanhood, Judiths going into single combat with mechanized monsters, slaying the enemy to save their people.
Marina ’s work is less dramatic. Whatever remains in the museum that can be moved is being hauled downstairs and out of harm’s way. Since the bombing started, they have carried hundreds of chairs, massive stone vases and tabletops, standing candelabra, mirrors, and couches. They are stripping the rooms bare, one by one. It is hard physical labor and nearly as tedious as the packing. Yesterday it took a dozen of them the whole day to wrestle the two onyx candelabra out of the Large Italian Skylight Room and into the basement.
Today, the other members of their crew have moved on to the Small Italian Skylight Room. All that remains are the chairs and tables that can be managed by the two women. Marina takes one end of a small divan, Anya the other. They heft it up and begin slowly retracing their steps through the gallery.
Lionello Spada, The Martyrdom of Saint Peter. Annibale Carracci, The Holy Women at the Sepulchre.
“What’s that, dear?” Anya asks. “My hearing isn’t so good anymore.”
Marina is embarrassed to realize she has been muttering out loud. “Oh, I beg your pardon. It’s nothing, a sort of game I play. To see how many paintings I can recall.”
“You are building a memory palace?”
Marina has never heard of such a thing.
“They don’t teach this in school anymore?” Anya asks and clucks in dismay. “When I was a girl, we made memory palaces to help us memorize for our examinations. You chose an actual place, a palace worked best, but any building with lots of rooms would do, and then you furnished it with whatever you wished to remember.”
“You furnished it?” Marina shakes her head, perplexed.
“Ah, well, first you walked through the actual rooms and memorized their appearance. But once you had learned the rooms, in your imagination you could add anything you wish. So, when we needed to memorize the Law of God, for instance, we closed our eyes and put a question and answer in each room.”
Anya lowers her voice. “My school friend’s family waited at the court,” she continues. “Before the civil war, they had a beautiful house, thirty-five rooms. It is ministry offices now, but when I was a little girl, I used it for my memory palace. I can still tell you exactly what was in every one of those rooms.” Anya stops, sets down her end of the divan, and closes her eyes. After a moment, her face softens.
“When one walks through the front doors, the entry has a marble floor and a very large Persian carpet. On the center of that carpet, where there is a rose design, I put the third question from the Law of God. ‘What is necessary to please God and to save one’s own soul?’ Next, I go to the fireplace. It has a carved black marble mantel. Inside, instead of logs, I put the answer. ‘In the first place, a knowledge of the true God and a right faith in him. In the second place, a life according to faith and good works.’” Anya opens her eyes. “I can walk through the entire house that way, stopping at each spot and putting there whatever I wish to remember. And later, I can come back and retrieve it all.”
“This works?”
“I memorized the entire Law of God, all the Roman emperors and their reigns, and the Romanovs, too, of course. Everything. It’s all still here.” She taps her forehead. “I am like an old elephant. Ask me anything.”
Marina is ready to get out of the car. She needs to use the toilet. When she asked, Helen said it was only a few more minutes to Andrei’s, but Marina thinks they have been in the car longer than that. She leans forward and taps Dmitri on the shoulder. He twists around in the passenger seat. Strapped in like this, she can’t reach his ear.
“Mnye nuzhno v tualyet,” she whispers.