Listen. Coming up the Main Staircase, you can hear them, their raucous laughter and shouted toasts. “The king drinks!” they cry. There is a party in progress in the Snyders Room, a feast to celebrate the Day of the Three Kings. The traditional pie has been baked, and the older man in the middle there must have gotten the piece with the bean inside, because he is wearing the crown of the Bean King. He is surrounded by a tight composition of happy, jostling couples, children, and even a babe in arms. “The king drinks!” Glasses are raised. Do you see that fellow standing behind him with the upraised pitcher? That is the Bean King’s son-in-law, the painter himself. And there is Jordaens’s wife, Yelizabeth. Oh, and over here, look at this, this fellow in the jester’s cap, with one hand reaching out for Jordaens’s pitcher while the other slips casually down the front of this woman’s bodice. “The king drinks! The king drinks!” There they go again. They are boisterous, rollicking. The only stillness in the painting is in the lower right corner, a hound whose eyes are focused with canine intensity on the ham in the Bean King’s lap.

Her granddaughter is getting married. Katie, the girl with the braces. And the groom, whose name escapes her just now.

The lawn is thronged with wedding guests. They mingle and shake hands and hug each other. A string quartet is posted down by the beach on a half circle of folding chairs, and strains of Bach waft up on the early-afternoon breezes.

Marina stands just inside the gate, hesitating. She has difficulty with large groups of people; there are so many faces to keep straight, so many sensations to organize. It is almost dizzying, the blur of faces, the rustle of stiff fabrics, the perfume of so many bodies.

Standing at the gate, she appears to be a greeter, so people make a point to stop and shake her hand. She smiles and says that it’s a lovely day. “It’s so good to see you,” she adds when she suspects that this person may be someone she should know.

Finally, the guests have all arrived and assembled near the beach.

“Papa, we’re going to get started pretty soon.” It is their son, Andrei. He is dressed in a dark suit and looks uncommonly handsome.

“Good morning, beautiful.” He kisses Marina on each cheek and then offers her his arm. “Are you ready to sit down?”

“Will you sit next to me?” she asks coyly.

“I can’t. I have to give Katie away. But Papa will sit with you, okay?” Marina nods. Andrei walks them to their seats where Helen is waiting for them. She slides her purse off the seat next to her.

“Did you say hello to everyone, Mama?”

“I think so.”

“Who’s the woman in the hat?”

“Who?”

“Over there.”

Marina looks in the direction Helen is nodding. There is a woman in a big blue hat like a flying saucer, but it’s not someone she recognizes. She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

“You were talking to her for a long time.”

“Oh, well, she was very nice. I think this is her home.”

“You should see Katie. I went upstairs a little while ago. She looks so beautiful.”

“You look beautiful, too,” Marina tells her daughter.

Helen shrugs off the compliment, but then impulsively takes her mother’s hand and squeezes it. “I…” she starts to say something, but then just gives her mother’s hand another squeeze.

The music is triumphal, and the guests rise and turn to view the approaching bride. She is indeed beautiful, luminous and happy. Andrei is stricken but resolutely delivers her to the handsome young man who has robbed him of his own youth. The company of attendants arrayed on either side of the bride and groom are sober with the unanticipated import of this moment. And looking around, one can see on the faces of the assembled family and guests the best of their humanity radiating a collective warmth around this fledgling young couple. There is music and tears and words. Commitment and love and cherish and community and honor.

And music and more words. Olga Markhaeva recites poetry, and Anya sings a song she remembers from her childhood, romantic and sweet. If Marina lives to be eighty, she thinks, she will never forget this wonderful night.

Such a feast! There is the butter, but also American cheese and boiled pearl barley in silky fat and a bottle of vodka. They have invited guests to share the spoils Viktor has brought back from the front. Sergei Pavlovich and his sister Liliia have contributed a handful of dried apricots that Nadezhda boiled down to make a glaze for her shortbread. Anya has brought an onion, which they slice into wafers.

Paper lanterns are strung from the pipes and a white linen tablecloth laid over the bare wooden table. On the table is arranged an extravagant array of delicacies. They light not one but three candles, and the dank little room in the cellar flickers with light, still cold but bright with the illusion of warmth. Even the sound of shells exploding in the world above them can’t dampen their high spirits. With thimblefuls of vodka, they toast the Red Army’s advances toward Tikhvin, they toast the brave sons and daughters of the Soviet Union, they toast the great fortune of food and friends with whom to share it. It is enough to make them feel drunk, the vodka and the sharp bite of onion and the melting sweetness of shortbread. They ravish the food like lovers. Afterward, they listen as Olga recites Anna Akhmatova’s poems. Her voice, by day clipped and hard, is slow as a deep river, and the candlelight transforms her profile, softening the broad planes of her forehead and nose, and sparkling in her damp eyes.

Sated, Nadezhda nestles into Viktor’s arm like a schoolgirl and he kisses the top of her head. Marina sees Liliia and Sergei mopping their eyes. It feels luxuriant, these warm tears on a full stomach. They are happy.

Later that night, they will retch into slop pails at the foot of their cots. Their bodies have forgotten how to digest such richness. Still, they won’t feel hungry for days.

The Majolica Room. So called because it holds the museum’s collection of the Italian style of decorative pottery. By happy accident, the room itself evokes majolica, being brightly painted in yellows and greens with Renaissance motifs.

Most famously, the room contains the museum’s two Raphaels, the Conestabile Madonna and the Holy Family. There is an apocryphal story that this room once held a third Raphael, another Madonna and child. According to an elderly room attendant, it was, like the Conestabile, a tondo, or round painting, “about the size of a beach ball” and in an elaborate gilt frame. If the woman is to be believed (and really, her story cannot be vouched for) the Madonna in this painting is seated in a field, with the Christ Child standing on her lap. At her side is another slightly older child dressed in animal skins and no doubt representing a young John the Baptist. This older child is handing a small cross to the Christ Child, who accepts it, and all three figures are gazing on the cross as though they can see into the future. She provides other details, that the Madonna is dressed in Roman garb and holds a small gilt-edged book in her hand, a prayer book perhaps, that the background is a delicately colored landscape and in the foreground are white flowers.