They have turned onto a long gravel road, and Marina sees a handsome gray clapboard house set into a stand of trees.

“We’re here, Mama,” Helen says. Cars line the road, but there is an open space in the driveway.

Marina sighs with relief when her son appears from behind the house and strides toward them across the lawn, his arms wide in greeting. He will take care of her.

“You’re here,” Andrei announces. “Good to see you, Helen.” He gives his sister a big bear hug. “Heard you had an adventure getting here.” Marina wonders what adventure Helen has had. She will have to remember to ask.

Andrei comes around the car, squeezes Dmitri, and finally leans in to help extricate her from the backseat.

“How’s my best girl?”

He dips his head to hear her whispered request.

“Of course. Is this an emergency?” She nods.

“You two go ahead. Everyone’s around back. We’re running a little behind with the rehearsal, but tell Naureen to start without me.”

He turns back to Marina and steers her across the lawn. “Are you ready for the big day tomorrow?”

She does a quick internal scan, but nothing surfaces. “I am,” she says brightly. “Tomorrow comes, ready or not.”

“That’s the truth. It’s been one thing after another around here. One of Katie’s bridesmaids seems to have come down with food poisoning. And then this morning, the florist called. A shipment of flowers got left at the dock in Anacortes.” They take the porch steps slowly.

“I should maybe go to get them?”

“The flowers? Oh, no, Naureen’s on it. No, you just relax for now, Mama.” At the top of the steps, he says, “You know the way, right? Through the living room, first door on the left?”

She nods.

“I better get down there. The kids are chomping at the bit. Come down to the beach when you’re through.”

The first room she walks into is cool and dark. Sunlight falls in gold slats through the shutters and stripes the floor. With its stone fireplace and exposed ceiling beams, the room reminds her of the old dachas and hunting lodges. She looks in the fireplace, but there is nothing there except the black husk of a log. In front of the fireplace is a couch with a bright red nylon sleeping bag on it. And here is a photograph of three smiling people. Andrei. His wife. Think. What is her name? Naureen. Put her in the fireplace. Naureen. And a little girl with braces on her teeth.

Her bladder tugs insistently, reminding her that she has to use the toilet. Andrei told her through the living room, then…nothing. Well, just find it, she thinks. Here is the living room. Go through it.

Marina walks into the dining room and around into a spacious kitchen. Through the kitchen windows, she can see a lawn that falls softly away to water. A group of people is gathered down near the beach. Past the kitchen and a little laundry room is a stairway going up. Beyond the stairs, she is circling back onto a hallway with doors on either side. She opens each one. A bedroom. Another bedroom. A room with a television like a movie screen. Finally, and not a moment too soon, a toilet.

It is delightful to make water after holding it for so long. She listens to the music of water on water and feels the wonderful release inside her. And to sit where it is warm and private, not squatting over a chamber pot in the bitter cold. One of the effects of this deterioration seems to be that as the scope of her attention narrows, it also focuses like a magnifying glass on smaller pleasures that have escaped her notice for years. She keeps these observations to herself. She tried once to point out to Dmitri the bottomless beauty in her glass of tea. It looked like amber with buried embers of light, and when held just so, there was a rainbow in the glass that took her breath away. He nodded sympathetically but mostly looked concerned. What would he say if she told him her pee sounded like a symphony?

Yes, isn’t it beautiful? This is called the Early Italian Renaissance Room, and is a fine example of the historicism style. Notice the fine gilded ornamentation on the ceiling and over the doors. The columns here are made of jasper, and these impressive doors are inlaid with precious woods and decorated with painted porcelain cameos.

If I could direct your attention over here, please. In all this splendor, she would be easy to miss, she is so small and quiet, but this is one of the treasures of the collection. She is exquisite, is she not? Such liquidity and grace. Simone Martini was the leading artist of the early fourteenth-century Siennese school, and his work is particularly rare. This little Madonna was once half of a folding diptych; the other wing, which has gone missing, portrayed the Angel Gabriel. So the modern viewer can see only part of the picture. To us, she appears to be lost in her own thoughts, her head tilted in dreamy contemplation. But actually she is listening to an unseen angel who is telling her that she will give birth to the son of God.

The first snows have come early this year. It is only October, but already there are fifty millimeters on the roof. On the radio, the snow is heralded as a good sign because it means winter is coming, and winter has always been Russia ’s salvation. It was the Russian winter that turned back Napoleon, and now, they say, it will keep Hitler out of Moscow.

The Nazis have turned their armies toward Moscow, and despite the suicidal bravery of the Red Army and the citizenry, they have been advancing inexorably, just as they did when they moved against Leningrad. But there are signs that the snow and slush are slowing their progress.

And on this front, the Germans have stopped moving entirely. It seems they have decided not to invade after all and to simply level Leningrad with bombs. Some days, there are as many as a dozen air raids. There are nights when Marina never leaves her post on the roof, and during the day, work has been interrupted so often that they have begun to ignore the sirens. The noise is deafening, but they work through it now, listening to the whine of shells and the thud of bombs and with one part of their brains calculating their distance.

This morning, though, is quiet. The interludes between bombing raids are what stand out. It has begun to snow again, the flakes falling slowly outside the tall arched windows of the Early Italian Renaissance Room. Marina has never heard such a deep silence, only Anya’s and her footsteps on the parquet floors.

Anya is helping Marina build a memory palace in the museum. “Someone must remember,” Anya says, “or it all disappears without a trace, and then they can say it never was.” So each morning, they get up early and the two women make their way slowly through the halls. They add a few more rooms each day, mentally restocking the Hermitage, painting by painting, statue by statue.

The old woman stops at an arched frame and swipes the edges with her feather duster. Marina has noticed that she is very careful to dust only the frame and not the space the painting itself would occupy. Marina pulls up behind her.

“A Madonna,” Marina says, but her mind is a blank. “Just a minute, don’t tell me.”

It’s a Madonna, but there must have been a hundred Madonnas in these rooms, and when Marina is tired and hungry, they start to blur into one another. She is always tired and hungry now, even just after eating.

Marina stares at the wall, but all she can see are women in enormous hoop skirts and self-satisfied gentlemen in powdered wigs. For some reason, the Early Italian Renaissance Room has become a temporary home for a dozen court portraits en route to the vaults. They have been left leaning against all the walls.

Think, she chides herself. Everything in the museum was displayed in strict order of chronology and provenance. So after the two Gerinis, early-fifteenth-century Florentine school, comes…what?