When she was too far gone to object, Nadezhda was finally carried upstairs to the recently opened convalescent center. She was given glucose, but by then it was too late. In the last week, she stopped eating entirely. She had a terrible thirst and in a scratchy voice begged the nurses for something sour to drink. The nurse on duty advised against it, but Marina couldn’t bear to watch her aunt’s agony. She brought her a cup of vinegar, spooned it down her throat, then watched as she promptly vomited it back up. The next day, she was dead.
Just as she had done when her uncle died, Marina prepared the body and she and Liliia Pavlova dragged it back belowground to the mortuary. In the interval of four weeks, many more bodies had collected in frozen mounds on the stone floor. She found her uncle’s corpse by picking out the sheet she had wrapped him in, and she placed her aunt next to her husband. The next day, she moved her things upstairs into the schoolroom. Then she went to the registry office and stood in line to turn in Nadezhda’s papers. No one in the long line cried or showed any sign of emotion. They might all have been waiting in a breadline.
Initially, Marina too felt nothing, except perhaps relief, but that quickly passed. She hadn’t anticipated how hard it would be to stay on alone. Now, she chastises herself for bringing on her aunt’s death. Here in Leningrad, the pull of the dead was too strong, but surely Nadezhda would have evacuated if Marina had agreed to go as well. Instead, Marina had insisted on remaining in the Hermitage and, by doing so, sentenced her own aunt to die there.
For what? Everything that mattered to her has disappeared. For a while after Nadezhda died, she continued to walk the gallery. But hunger slowed her brain, and when she tried to recite her memory palace, her thoughts seemed to move through sludge, words falling away, whole sentences lost in the muck. The paintings themselves seemed to be disintegrating, shot through with light and shadow like leaves eaten into lace by insects. She would be talking and find that she couldn’t actually visualize what she was describing. She might close her eyes and focus her mind, but Caravaggio’s Lute Player was just the idea of a lute player, not an image.
Now she no longer has the strength to expend on unnecessary journeys through the museum. The rigors of work, the urgencies of the body, and the metric tick from meal to meal absorb what little energy she has left. She must rely entirely on her memory, and, cell by cell, she can feel those memories fading. Even when she is able to reconstruct a picture, it is nothing more than pigment on canvas, without any feeling or meaning. The Benois Madonna, the Madonna with Partridges, they are all just pictures, nothing more, a fable concocted to lull the masses into compliance. That she once prayed to paintings-not even to the paintings themselves, but to the places on the walls where they had hung-seems inconceivably ridiculous. She has stopped asking for miracles; in fact, she can scarcely imagine what there is left to desire.
She is cold. If she falls asleep, she will freeze.
She feels the pull of death. What a relief it would be to relax into nothingness. To follow the long line of souls-Aunt Nadezhda and Uncle Viktor, her parents, her beloved Dima-the throng that has already abandoned the city for other realms. She might simply go to sleep up here on the roof and be gone within the hour.
In the distance, she hears the drone of incoming planes. She no longer feels fear at their approach; the incessant air raids have blunted her fear and taken on the dull quality of other daily routines: standing in lines, eating, sleeping.
When the lead plane, a lighter Heinkel, releases a string of parachute flares, she watches the pink fireflies of light floating, drifting slowly down like a surreal fairy ballet. Shadows of the city leap and dance in their light. A corner of her mind recognizes that what she is seeing is strangely beautiful, but it is an abstract idea, a memory of beauty, and it does not touch her.
She is watching, a dispassionate observer, someone halfway gone already, when she feels something move inside her. She puts her hand on a spot just below her ribs and moves it slowly over her belly. Pressing down on one place, then another, she searches her abdomen as though for an injury. After a minute or two, there is a responding jolt under her palm. She startles and presses back and feels the lump swim away from her hand.
Someone is here with her, not Zeus, but an invisible presence nonetheless, a small life trying to kick its way into this world.
The search expands exponentially all day, mushrooming from a private concern into a full-scale public drama. An incident command post is set up at the high school, and as volunteers arrive in the cafeteria, they are divided into teams and assigned a leader and a swath of the island to search.
The family seems to be cordoned off from the gathering crowd by their misfortune. Though people cast sympathetic sidelong glances in their direction, the barrier is crossed only by officials. Mike Lundgren, the fireman assigned as the family’s liaison, comes over to the long cafeteria table where they are sitting, carrying a cardboard tray of coffees balanced on top of a large box of pastries.
“You folks want some coffee and a roll?” he offers.
Dmitri’s dull gaze is fixed on some interior distance, and he doesn’t answer, but Naureen thanks Mike. She fixes a cup of coffee for Dmitri, prying the paper off a creamer, shaking in a packet of sugar, and setting it in front of him. Then she picks out a muffin for him and a napkin and urges him to have a little something to eat. He stares at the coffee and muffin as though he doesn’t register what they are.
Mike looks over a clipboard. “I’ve just got a few more questions. Sir?” He waits for Dmitri to acknowledge him. “Just a few more questions. No heart condition, no diabetes or hypoglycemia, right? Medications. What medications does your wife take?”
Helen interrupts him. “We already went over all of this with the sheriff.”
“Yes, I’m sorry about this, but I need to make sure it’s all accurate for our report. Sir?”
Dmitri looks up, his eyes bleary and slow, and Mike repeats the question twice before Dmitri nods. He recites a list of drugs, unfamiliar to Helen, and then as Mike pauses over his pad, Dmitri repeats them more slowly.
While Mike is writing down the names, another fireman comes over and stands waiting.
“Excuse me just a moment.” The two men step a few feet away and confer in quiet voices.
Helen’s heart spasms. When Mike returns to his seat, she croaks, “What is it? Did they find her?”
“No, ma’am. He was just telling me they’ve finished setting up the first teams and they’re getting ready to move out.”
Dmitri rises and tries to extricate himself from between the bench and table. “I will go with them.”
“We’ve got plenty of volunteers, sir.”
“I will go look for her,” he repeats.
He looks at Dmitri skeptically. “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea. How about we put your son and daughter out there, and you stay here, where we can keep you apprised of the whole search?”
Dmitri isn’t mollified. He remains standing, waiting for Helen to slide out and release him. Instead, she puts an arm around him and coaxes him to sit down again.
“You heard Mike. They’re going to find her, and she’s going to be fine. But you’re not going to help her by wearing yourself out any more,” she says.
He is persuaded to stay at the command post only after Helen agrees to stay behind with him, and Andrei and Naureen promise to call periodically and check in.
All morning and into the afternoon, people continue to come and go, filling in log sheets or grabbing a bottle of water before they head back out, cell phones pressed to their ears.