Marina nods. “You were a beautiful bride.”
Helen rolls her eyes. “Mama, I was such a mess, you were ready to call the whole thing off. Don’t you remember that?” Helen has never forgotten. Standing in the little room off the chapel, she was crying and her mother had turned to her and said that it wasn’t too late, they could still send everyone home. She couldn’t have stunned Helen more if she had sprouted a third eye.
“I remember,” Marina says. “I didn’t say this because you were a mess. I said this because you didn’t need this boy. Babies need only their mother’s milk and clean diapers.” Her voice is matter-of-fact, practical.
Helen is amazed all over again. At the time, she had dismissed the offer out of hand. It was 1970 and, at least in Seattle, having a baby out of wedlock was still an unthinkable shame. She’d had neither the imagination nor the courage to envision an alternative to marriage, even, or especially, when the alternative was proposed by her mother.
Now she wants to ask this sweet little old lady in her ruffled blouse and sensible flats, Who are you, anyway?
Even in her sleep, Marina hears the air-raid sirens. In the bowels of the Hermitage, the shriek of the sirens above are muted, but she is like a mother attuned to the cries of her infant. This must be what it is like to be a mother, she thinks, this endless exhaustion, days and nights measured by the wails of a baby. But like a good mother, though she curses to herself, she gets up, grabs her binoculars and sheepskin, and climbs up the steps toward her post. It is time for her shift.
In order to get to the roof, she must first cross through the Hall of Twenty Columns. At night, the hall is black and utterly terrifying. Because there are no blackout curtains, lights are prohibited, and only one tiny bulb winks like a distant star at the base of the far doorway.
She pauses briefly at the entrance and catches her breath, tries to slow her pounding heart. It seems a silly fear in light of all the very real terrors, but this passage frightens her.
She steps gingerly into the void and tries for a few steps to take the direct route down the center of the hall. It is too much, though, floating unmoored in the blackness. She backs up until her hands find a wall, and then works her way along this wall, step by step, hugging the edge of the room. The columns cut her off from the tiny guide light, but it is still marginally better than the dizziness of open space.
It is so dark that she cannot see even her own hands, can only feel the walls and hear her footsteps echo on the mosaic floor. This is what it might be like to be blind. The dark is not solid, though. It is layered with shades of black. Huge shapes loom suddenly out of shadow. The columns, she reminds herself.
Deep into the huge room, she feels the still air around her shift, and something hovering at the edge of her vision. She thinks she hears the whisper of her name.
“Hello?” Her voice comes out low and hoarse. She listens hard, past the pounding of her heart in her ears, past the shrieking siren outside. Nothing. Taking another step forward, she hears her footfall and what is either its echo or another person’s step in the hall. “Is someone here?” The sense of another presence, though unattached to any physical cues, is unshakable. She has an animal’s sense of being watched.
If she doesn’t keep moving, she will be unable to go on. She reminds herself that she has a duty upstairs, and then she closes her eyes and forces her feet forward steadily, her hands groping the wall. She begins to sing, loudly, a stout song about the victorious People’s Army that has been playing relentlessly on the loudspeakers during the day and on the radio every night before sign-off. Brothers fighting side by side/Marching toward the vision we can see/Though bloodied and weary, the turning of the tide/Will lead us unbowed to victory. Halfway through a breathless second chorus, the guide bulb winks into view again and she dashes gratefully to the doorway.
The wind off the river blows drifts of icy snow across the Hermitage roof, a desolate steppe. When she climbs onto the platform, she sits down and pulls the sheepskin closer around her.
Aside from the sirens, it is quiet tonight, no planes yet. But the moon is rising, so they will come. She hates the moon. It is dead, and its flat, dead light draws in Fascist planes like moths. Though she knows her perspective has been poisoned by the war, it is hard to see why poets make such a romantic fuss over an ugly, pockmarked disk.
She buries her face in the fleece, feeling the pull of sleep threatening to swallow her. Most gather in pairs so they can keep each other awake and pass the night by talking, but Olga Markhaeva is ill. She has the dysentery that has been plaguing so many of the staff. Marina has been covering for her for the past several nights so she will not lose her worker’s rations. When Marina radios downstairs, she pretends that Olga is up here with her. She suspects that Sergei Pavlovich is not fooled, that in fact he is conspiring with her to protect Olga, but he says nothing.
To keep herself awake, she practices her memory palace. Walking the actual rooms by day is no longer the challenge it was. In some of the rooms, the empty frames provide a map, and all she has to do is fill inside the frames. But at night, she must work entirely from memory. Tonight she imagines herself in the Rembrandt Room, starting at the east entrance. She closes her eyes and puts herself in the doorway. She takes in the green walls, the marble wainscoting, the solemnity of the room peopled with quiet Dutch faces and figures, and then she begins to conjure up the first painting she would see.
It is Ferdinand Bol’s Old Woman with a Book, a severe-looking shrew in widow’s weeds, clutching an open Bible in her lap. Her husband provided for her well, one can tell from the big brooch on her chest, but her expression suggests that she will make her heirs grovel and then leave it all to the church.
Across from her is Flora, a portrait of Rembrandt’s young wife, Saskia, painted in the first year of their marriage. Saskia’s moon face is hardly that of the goddess of spring, but the newlywed Rembrandt was so clearly smitten with her that she reflects his happiness. She is dressed in rich finery, silks and embroidery, and to suggest that she is the goddess of spring, her headdress is a lavish Baroque bouquet of flowers. A tulip hangs like a bell over her left ear. In one hand, she holds a staff similarly bedecked with flowers, and her other hand rests on what looks at first to be her pregnant belly. The mounded bodice is merely the fashion of the time, but Marina imagines that Saskia is dreaming a baby into existence, her gaze is so inward and still.
Next to Saskia, Rembrandt’s scholar looks up from his writing and appears dumbfounded by the scene he faces. When one turns around to follow his gaze, there she is, a lounging nude taking up the entire wall. The nude seems at first to be shielding her eyes from the scorn of Bol’s sour-faced old woman, but no, she is looking at someone else.
This is the painter’s first full-size female nude. It illustrates the myth of Danae, a beautiful princess whose father, the king, locked her away in a bronze tower to thwart potential suitors. There she is visited by Zeus, who has admired her. As is his habit when he wishes to satisfy his passions, he transmogrifies himself-with the beautiful Leda, he became a swan, with Europa, a white bull, with Antiope, a satyr, and so on-but with Danae he takes form as a shower of gold. Here Danae is shielding her face from his light, or perhaps she is reaching out to him; it is tantalizingly hard to tell. But tonight her life will change. He will impregnate her, and in time she will give birth to a god, Perseus.