Marina follows the candlelight into the hall where the linen cupboard is. She doesn’t want to look in the other rooms, but when she sees that she will need something to stand on in order to reach the high shelf, she makes a tour of the apartment until she finds a metal footlocker in Viktor and Nadezhda’s room. Even empty, it is too heavy to lift, and as Marina drags it slowly back to the closet, it scrapes a trail across Nadezhda’s parquet floors. Finally, she is able to reach the shelf, and she pulls down on top of her head a pile of tablecloths, napkins, doilies, a toy gun. Her hand finds something rectangular, the size of an envelope but heavy in her hand.

She might have eaten it right there, sitting on the metal footlocker, staring down at this miracle in her hand. No one would know. No one. Something desperate works at her gut, and her brain churns, her fingers tremble. What she thinks is that she is holding the life of her uncle in her hands.

It is a terrible thing to have loved ones, people to whom you are shackled by whatever bonds make their pain yours. Although she has no tender feelings for her uncle, her obligation is as strong as love. She recognizes the compact. It is that same sense of duty that has governed his behavior toward her all her life, taking her in and providing for her in spite of his fears. Giving her the larger pieces of bread at every meal, even as he wastes away. Perhaps this is love.

She knows that if she unwraps the foil and exposes the chocolate, the last bit of her that is human will die, and so before she can think any further she stuffs it into her coat pocket with Dmitri’s letter. On the way back to the museum, she feels the weight of the chocolate and the letter in her pocket. They bang insistently against her thigh at each step.

It begins to snow, a few flakes at first, but before long the sky is heavy and swirling. The few other stragglers on the boulevard disappear behind a curtain of whiteness, and she moves on alone through the soft blur as though in a nightmare. Her feet are leaden, and though she keeps lifting each foot and setting it down again, she has no sense of moving forward. The landmarks that marked her journey here have disappeared into whiteness, and the snow muffles any sounds. She cannot recall crossing the Griboedova Canal, though surely she must have.

Five, twelve, forty steps. She begins to count in order to reassure herself that she is moving. She must not panic, she must stay calm and keep walking, trusting that each step forward brings her closer to safety. But she is unsure even of this. For all she knows, she may have turned off Nevsky, she may be wandering in the wrong direction. She has no idea where she is, and the whiteness is starting to dim. Soon it will be completely dark, and what will become of her then?

She is up to one hundred and sixty-three when her weight lands on something that is not ice or snow. The softness shifts under her foot and she yelps, yanking back her boot and lurching to find her balance.

A dark bundle of rags lies at her feet, half hidden under a dusting of snow.

“Mary, mother of God,” the bundle exhales in a soft rattle. “Have mercy.” An arm extends up toward her, and a claw rising out of a blanket grasps feebly at her coat.

Terrified, she bats it away. The claw reaches toward her again, but she swats it away with such force that it falls back to the snow and lies there, still. Marina ’s heart is thudding dangerously in her chest. She feels herself floating in a weightless panic, with the snow swirling around her face. She cannot think, cannot form any thoughts except that this wraith is trying to take her down. People fall and they die where they have fallen. She must not let it happen. She must not die here in the street. She must get back to the museum.

And then she sees the eyes, two hollow eyes peering up at her from above a paisley headscarf wrapped around the face. The eyes are pleading silently with her.

She knows she cannot lift the woman. She hasn’t the strength to get her onto her feet, much less help her to walk.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I can’t help you.”

The eyes do not shift.

Marina feels again the weight of the chocolate in her pocket. It won’t make any difference, she tells herself. The woman is going to die. You can’t help her. Be reasonable. There are family at home who need also. It is never enough.

But already she is pulling the candy bar from inside her coat and ripping back the foil. She breaks off a chunk of the chocolate and, crouching forward, holds it out toward the woman. The woman doesn’t move, but her dull eyes widen almost imperceptibly. Marina peels the frozen scarf away from the woman’s face. The mouth falls open, and Marina places a square of chocolate on the woman’s tongue.

One of five rooms devoted to the Flemish, this is known as the Snyders Room. It is a large hall, with a box-beam ceiling painted with Florentine ornamentation. Checkerboard parquet floors, et cetera. Really, the room itself is of no consequence. It is what the room contains-the long wall is lined with enormous market stalls displaying every kind of fish imaginable, geese and game birds strung overhead, and venison and rabbits draped in languid piles. And yet another stall with a profusion of vegetables overflowing their baskets. Heads of cabbage, leeks, garlic, and cauliflowers, mushrooms and parsnips, the variety is dazzling. Walk a few feet farther and here is a long table of fruits: bowls of apples, baskets heaped with plums and pears, stalks of artichokes and watermelons spilling onto the ground. The busy excess makes one faint. One could eat for years in this room and never be hungry.

And across the way is more fruit, these artfully arranged like jewels on velvet. Utrecht ’s gorgeous, plump grapes are at their peak, his peaches so like the things themselves that their scent perfumes the air. And cherries like a string of bright rubies. One could weep.

The tables on the patio are laden with food. Platters of stuffed mushrooms and roasted vegetables, skewers of grilled lamb. Cheeses and smoked salmon and bowls of fruit nested in a bed of ice. There is an enormous white cake displayed on a separate table, tier upon tier of cake with ornately frosted swirls and leaves and roses, very rococo, like the gilt and plaster walls in the Winter Palace.

At each station, Dmitri asks Marina does she want some green salad? A slice of melon? Smoked salmon and pumpernickel? Long before they reach the end of the line, the plate he is holding for her is heavy with food. He guides her into the white tent and through a maze of tables and seats her next to a tired-looking woman in a bright pink dress.

“I’m getting a plate for myself.” He takes Marina ’s purse and places it on the vacant chair to her left, then disappears into the crowd.

“It was a nice ceremony, don’t you think?” the woman in pink asks.

“Da.” Marina nods in polite agreement.

“When Naureen said Katie and Cooper were doing their own vows, I thought, Oh boy. But they were so thoughtful and simple, just right. My friend Tina-do you remember her?-when her daughter got married, they wrote their own vows, but they rhymed. It was awful-love, dove, above kind of stuff. And they had a juggler come down the aisle. I never did figure out what that was supposed to mean.”

The woman’s face is familiar, but Marina can’t place it. There are so many faces to remember, to put names to and order by rooms. Sometimes when she looks, all she sees is a vacant wall. It is frightening, this forgetting, like another little piece of her life slipping away. If she lets all the paintings disappear, she will be gone with them.

“Mama? Here, why don’t you eat a little something.” Marina ’s attention is diverted to the plate in front of her.