Anya claims a comfortable armchair and asks Marina to help her remove her boots. Marina squats at her feet and pulls a shabby felt boot into her lap. The laces are frayed to threads and so knobbed with knots that it is slow work unlacing them. She is careful not to tug hard, lest the boot fall apart in her hands.
“The stockings, too, dear, please,” Anya says, leaning her face back into the sunshine and closing her eyes. Marina rolls down the old woman’s heavy stocking, exposing a blackened foot. Anya wriggles her toes and sighs luxuriantly.
“It is good to be alive on a day like this.” She sinks back into the armchair, propping her bare foot on another chair and lifting her other foot like an expectant child waiting to be undressed by her nurse.
By the time Marina has stripped the second foot and set it gently next to its neighbor, Anya’s chin is drooping on her chest and her eyes are closed. Her face is soft, and saliva burbles on her open lips. It is the privilege of the old, Marina thinks. She tells herself that if she lives so long, perhaps she will be able to sleep like that again.
In the space of an hour, the dozens of buckets and urns in the Spanish Hall have overflowed, creating a sea of mud where they’ve mixed with the sand.
On her second pass upstairs, she hears the nearly forgotten sound of laughter. She follows the sound through the Skylight halls and into the Knights’ Hall, where a pair of boys wearing the blue uniforms of the cadets are peering into a huge showcase, their noses pressed against the glass. Inside are three stuffed horses and the padded forms of knights stripped of their medieval tournament armor and looking like dress dummies.
“You should see them with their armor,” Marina says. The boys startle at Marina ’s voice and back away from the case guiltily.
Smiling, she tries to put them at ease, but their faces remain solemn and unreadable.
“They don’t look like much now, but they are quite fierce when they’re dressed. Even the horses wore armor.” Marina describes the jointed full-body armor, the heavy visored helmets, and the breastplates that protected the horses.
The younger of the two boys, only a few years older than her cousins, asks shyly, “Are they real?”
“The horses? Oh, yes, they’re stuffed.”
The older boy stands rooted to the spot, his glance darting nervously between Marina and the door behind her.
“It’s okay,” she reassures him. “You’re supposed to stop and look. We all do. I’ll tell you what: when you’re done, would you like me to show you what else we have here?”
The boys hesitate.
“I don’t know if our captain will allow it,” the older boy volunteers.
“I’ll speak to your captain and to mine. It seems like the least we can do to thank you for all your help.”
“Yes, auntie,” the older one says to her. It is the commonplace term used to address any older woman, but Marina has to resist the urge to hug him.
“Good, then. It’s settled.”
Green. The word doesn’t begin to describe this.
For the moment, she forgets that she is lost, that she is weak and chilled and the soles of her feet are tender with sores. She pinches a leaf between her thumb and forefinger and holds it up. It is breathtakingly beautiful, the first new green of the world, the light of creation still shining inside it. She studies it. Time recedes, and she floats beyond it, absorbed totally and completely in this vision. Who knows how much time has passed? She is beyond the tyranny of time. Dmitri once left her sitting in a chair by the window and returned later to find her still entranced by the dance of dust motes caught in a shaft of late-afternoon sun. He claimed to have done three loads of wash in what felt to her like an instant.
This slow erosion of self has its compensations. Having forgotten whatever associations might dull her vision, she can look at a leaf and see it as if for the first time. Though reason suggests otherwise, she has never seen this green before. It is wondrous. Each day, the world is made fresh again, holy, and she takes it in, in all its raw intensity, like a young child. She feels something bloom in her chest-joy or grief, eventually they are inseparable. The world is so acutely beautiful, for all its horrors, that she will be sorry to leave it.
Helen drifts in and out of sleep, losing consciousness and then starting awake moments later as though she were in danger of drowning. When the sky lightens again, she checks the clock. It is almost five. Twenty-six hours now since this thing started, another hour or two on top of that since her mother disappeared into the night. She sits up slowly, testing her stiff limbs and neck. Dmitri is prone on the couch, his face slack with sleep and his chest lifting and falling rhythmically. Like a mother with a fussy newborn, she slides quietly off of her cot and sneaks out of the room.
The cafeteria is nearly empty: only a silver-haired man with the ropy build of a hiker whom she recognizes as the search coordinator, and Mike, who is stretched out on a narrow bench, his eyes closed, remain. It occurs to her that he, too, has been here nearly a full day, and she wonders if anyone is waiting for him at home. Rather than wake him, she asks the coordinator if there is any news. He shakes his head, his face etched with compassion. “I wish I could tell you different. But that’s a crackerjack team out there. And the temperature’s stayed warm enough at night. I think we’ve got lots of reason to feel hopeful.” He holds her gaze and adds, “I’ve been told she’s a tough lady. I’m looking forward to meeting her.”
Helen’s heart, already softened to a pulp, swells with gratitude at all the hidden goodwill in the world. “Thank you,” she says, her throat closing around the words. They seem insufficient, but he accepts them with a nod.
She wanders dim halls lined with lockers and trophy cases and peers into empty classrooms. At the end of a hallway, she happens on the art room. She finds the light switch, and rows of fluorescent tubes sputter and buzz to life. There is something enormously comforting and familiar in the industrial room, with its linoleum floors and paint-spattered tables, the open metal shelving, and the pottery wheel squatting heavily in a corner. Student art projects are taped to the concrete block walls. She circles the room, surveying the results of various assignments-one in collage, mostly magazine photos and slogans pieced together like so many ransom notes, another in pastels, twenty versions of the same bowl of fruit. They show the typical range of beginners, from the careful, self-conscious drawings of the A students to those whose distended bowls and smeared fruits are almost defiantly raw and unskilled.
She got her only A’s in art classes, to the dismay of her parents and those teachers who had taught her older brother and were expecting an echo of brilliance in his younger sibling. Instead, she was ordinary. She did her homework and met her deadlines because to do less was unthinkable in her family, but she set herself apart only in art class, an area where she had no competition from Andrei. Mrs. Hanson, the lantern-jawed young divorcée who taught ceramics and art, encouraged Helen, even giving her private lessons after school when Helen had used up all her electives. It was in a room not very different from this one that she had been most happy as a teenager.
In an unlocked cabinet, Helen finds a sheaf of butcher paper and a box of charcoal. She sits down at one of the tables and lets the charcoal sail wildly across the empty paper, filling several sheets with nothing but furious black slashes and fast loops and squiggles, just for the feel of emotion streaming through her arm. After a while, she slows her hand and, on a fresh sheet, begins dipping with more tentative, exploratory strokes. She closes her eyes, opens them again, and with more confidence lays down a long, sensuous line and then another.