Many of the rooms have no name, only a number. Look around. The glass in the windows was shattered by an explosion, and the windows have been boarded over, so it is very dark. But perhaps you can just make out the walls and the pictureless frames, like empty eye sockets. Over here is a pile of sand with a shovel jammed in the top. What else? Nothing. Just frames. Nothing.
Back up. Go back a room or two until something looks familiar and start again. There are over four hundred rooms, but they are all nearly empty.
Cold seeps through the filmy cotton of her nightdress. She pulls the thin fabric close around her legs and hugs her arms to her chest, trying to warm herself. Someone has stolen her clothing, her quilted jacket and boots and gloves, though she doesn’t remember when.
If she falls asleep, she will freeze. This much she knows. But where she is and how she got here are mysteries. Today, yesterday, even an hour ago, are blanks. She is suspended in the present moment and feeling oddly ephemeral, as though she is adrift on an open sea.
Around her are dark shapes, as thin as limbs, skeletal arms and legs swaying, dancing in the blackness. Terror threatens to engulf her, but then the cold pulls her back and disciplines her thoughts.
She is cold. Cold and hungry. This is familiar.
There is also a scent that is familiar, though she can’t identify it, something earthy.
It is dark. Night.
And she is cold. She must not fall asleep. If she falls asleep, she will freeze.
On nights when there is no moon, Leningrad disappears. From her perch on the watchtower, the edge of the Hermitage roof is merely a theory. The dying city beyond gives off no light. Like a photographic negative, what should be solid is seen as an absence, here a dome-shaped shadow cutting into the glittering pavé of stars, over there two black spires spiking the sky. The only other lights are dim as the stars but closer, tiny yellow lights that ring the edge of the imagined city, the campfires of the enemy at the front.
It is the idea of a city, the idea of a world suggested by the gilded frame that surrounds it.
She feels completely alone in the universe, suspended between the star-thick heavens and a black void below. The stars are not a comfort. It is the solitude of shepherds, unbearably lonely.
Nadezhda died a month to the day after Viktor. A romantic might say that she had died of a broken heart, but that was a sentiment for different times. She lost the will to live, a separate thing.
She could have survived, but she wouldn’t make any move to save herself. After Viktor’s death, she wouldn’t even leave the shelter. The other residents of Bomb Shelter #3 had begun to relocate upstairs, leaving behind the gloom and damp that had grown even more oppressive than the shelling up above. Some went back to their homes, others set up cots in the schoolroom, but Nadezhda could not be persuaded to join them. Marina tried to coax her to return to their old apartment, but she couldn’t bear the idea of being there without her family.
So what, Marina wonders now, had made her think that her aunt might undertake a more perilous journey alone?
In January, a road was completed over the frozen Lake Ladoga. Called the Road of Life, it was a slender breach in the blockade through which the city began to evacuate nonessential citizens and to siphon in the most critical supplies from “the mainland,” free Russia. When the first truck rolled across the lake and entered Leningrad, church bells rang to welcome it.
As soon as the road was operational, Director Orbeli received orders from Moscow to reduce the staff of the Hermitage. One by one, he began calling people into his office. When Marina ’s turn came, she waited in the hallway outside his closed door.
Even had she not known the purpose of their meeting, she would have been nervous at the thought of standing alone in his presence. She had never before spoken privately with the director beyond meekly returning his greetings when they occasionally crossed paths on their respective rounds through the galleries. With his long white beard and the legends of his unpredictable rages, he was like the Old Testament god, and the prospect of incurring his displeasure made Marina ’s hands shake uncontrollably.
The door opened and a staff member emerged, her composure collapsing as she crossed the threshold. A voice inside commanded Marina to enter. Sitting behind his desk, Orbeli looked neither stern nor welcoming, only very tired. He gestured for her to sit down in the chair opposite him. Then, in a speech he had clearly repeated many times over already that day, he told Marina that her heroic service to the museum over the winter had not gone unappreciated. The people of the Soviet Union were indebted to her. Now, though, he must ask of her one last service. The museum was to be mothballed, and only a few dozen staff members would be needed to do that work. The rest were to be evacuated out of the city to ease the defense efforts. He would be waiting for letters of resignation on his desk.
“Please don’t order me to go.” Her voice was so tiny that she wasn’t sure he had heard her. He continued to look at her with his hawkish eyes, but his expression didn’t change. At last he said, “May I ask why not?”
How could she explain this? Without her here to keep the memory of its art alive on the walls, the museum would be merely another decaying shell. This was not an idea she could voice aloud.
“My work is needed here,” she finally stammered.
“I myself will be leaving at the end of the month. Do you consider yourself more necessary to the Hermitage than its director?”
She flushed, and her eyes fell to the floor. She waited, half expecting to be incinerated into a heap of ash on the carpet.
“You are the one whom I’ve seen prowling the picture gallery?”
“Yes, Iosef Abgarovitch.”
“The niece of Viktor Alekseevich.”
“Yes.”
“He was stubborn, too.”
“Yes.”
After a long moment, he said, “Well, go on then.”
While Marina herself could not imagine leaving the Hermitage, she had seen no reason for Nadezhda to stay, and she formed the plan that her aunt should join the exodus of staff members. Her motives were selfish. She had become weary of the energy it took to endure her aunt’s stubborn grief, weary of climbing up the stairs from the abandoned shelter every day. She wanted to move up to the schoolroom where light trickled through an unboarded window. Mostly, she wanted to be free from the ghosts of the dead and her last remaining obligation to the living.
When she broached the subject with Nadezhda, though, her aunt had balked.
“You are not going?”
“Director Orbeli has asked me to stay on,” Marina lied. “I am needed here.”
“I’m not strong enough to make the journey alone.”
“Not alone. Most of the staff will be evacuating as well.”
Nadezhda reached for her hand and clasped it with what might have been tenderness but was just as likely fear. “I will stay here with you.”
Marina squelched her irritation and patted her aunt’s hand. She urged her to consider Tatiana and Mikhail. They might well be somewhere on the mainland, waiting for her. When Marina said their names aloud, however, Nadezhda’s eyes remained like two stones.
“Besides,” Marina said, changing tactics, “here, you are using up valuable resources. You have a duty.” These were much the same words she had heard from Orbeli that morning, but in her voice they sounded not magisterial but arch and impatient.
“I will not be using them so much longer,” Nadezhda had replied.
She was true to her word. After their conversation, Nadezhda rapidly deteriorated. When Marina returned to the shelter at the end of her night shifts, she would light a candle, and in the tiny flare of light she would find her aunt just as she had left her, buried under a mound of blankets on her cot. Nadezhda’s eyes would blink open and she would answer Marina ’s greeting. But she made no move to sit up or even to eat. Formerly, the only subject that had held her interest was food, but she no longer spoke of it. She chewed her bread mechanically when it was presented to her, but she didn’t savor it. She claimed that she no longer felt any hunger. Her appearance began to change, her face taking on a weird look of concentration, as though she were trying to remember something. Marina recognized the symptoms.