The head of a young woman is emerging on the paper. She is posed in half-profile, her chin lifting slightly and her eyes gazing up wistfully at some point above and to the left of the viewer. Her hair is pulled back neatly, exposing a slender neck that ends in a plain round collar. She is achingly, slowly beautiful, like the notes of a cello.
It is an image as deeply encoded in Helen’s memory as certain vaguely disturbing illustrations from childhood picture books. A battered old photograph in a silver frame on her parents’ dresser, a studio portrait from the thirties. She was told it was her mother, the only image of her that had survived the war, yet the girl in the photo bore no resemblance to Helen’s actual mother. Besides being impossibly young, the girl wore an expression that was not one Helen recognized, the dark eyes soft and as romantic as a poet’s. She didn’t think her parents were lying, exactly, but neither could she reconcile this sepia-toned girl with the sturdy woman in shapeless housedresses who cooked liver and onions and ironed gift-wrap and ribbons to be reused. Her imagination failed her.
Now, though, looking at what is very much a re-creation of the photograph, Helen recognizes certain unmistakable features, the wide cheekbones and the firm line of the young woman’s mouth, features that give her parents’ claim an eerie suggestion of truth. She can’t see her mother, really, but one could make the case that this is a younger lost relation.
Helen finds a can of fixative in the cupboard and sprays the drawing to keep the charcoal from smearing. Then she pulls out a fresh sheet and begins again, sketching out the shape of a head, the curve of a shoulder. The rough outlines of another head appear, tilted at the same angle as the first.
She is practiced at working from memory. She used to draw her boys incessantly, starting when they were babies. When they got older and began refusing to pose, she continued on the sly, memorizing their features and putting them on paper later. Sometimes they would catch her looking at them too deeply and moan impatiently, “Stop drawing us, Mom.”
But she has never drawn her own mother, never looked at her with the intent to draw her, and it is harder than she would have expected. Her mother’s face is so familiar that she can’t see her. She abandons one sketch and starts another, and then another. Slowly a face emerges that resembles her mother, though she is too young, somewhere in middle age. The planes of her face are too full, the lines too strong. With her pinkie, Helen softens the line of the jaw into shadow and pulls smudges of charcoal down the throat like gullies. She lays down a veil of delicate hatch marks around the eyes and mouth and adds wispy strokes, the hair that lifts like white smoke off her mother’s scalp.
The drawing is accomplished, but in some ineffable way it misses capturing her mother. Helen studies it, vaguely dissatisfied.
There are voices outside. A search team is coming back in, a dozen or so people trudging across the courtyard toward the cafeteria. She can’t make out what they are saying, but their bodies speak poignantly of weariness. As she watches, a church van pulls into the circular drive and unloads another group.
She drops the charcoal and, leaving the drawings behind, jogs up the hall toward the counselor’s office, her heart pounding. She shouldn’t have wandered off; she should be there with her father. The door is open, but he is gone.
People are streaming into the cafeteria, unloading backpacks, guzzling water, sitting on the floor and pulling off shoes.
She asks the first person she sees what is happening.
“They found her. She’s alive.”
She hasn’t cried, not since this thing started, but now she is fighting back tears, wiping them away as they spring to her eyes. “I thought…” Something breaks loose inside her with a guttural sound, and then she is sobbing out grief she has stored for years, her chest racking and heaving.
There are perhaps three dozen boys and a handful of their elders, gaunt old men in faded uniforms. Marina has gathered them on the landing of the Jordan Staircase, just as she used to before the war, though this time she has brought with her two kerosene lamps.
“Welcome to the State Museum of Leningrad, familiarly known as the Hermitage,” she says. “Over a million visitors pass up these stairs each year. The staircase was designed by the architect Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli in the eighteenth century. Note the lavish use of gilded stucco moldings, the abundance of…” She falters and her eyes drop to the floor. Flakes of paint from the ceiling litter the steps.
The staircase, once a light-filled confection, is gloomy. In March, a bomb blast shattered all the windows, and they are covered over with plywood. The mirrors are clouded with moisture, and the gilt on the railings has dulled and begun to peel away, exposing rusty metal underneath. Marina notes that the painted Olympian clouds above are nearly black.
When she starts speaking again, her voice is softer and less confident. “So much has changed with the war.” Her eyes travel from face to face. They wait expectantly.
“I can show you what is still here, but you will have to use your imagination to see the rooms as they were before. This staircase”-she pats the marble balustrade-“was so magnificent. It was like a fairy-tale staircase. Do you remember when Zolushka dropped her glass slipper as she left the ball? Doesn’t this look like the staircase where she would have dropped it? And on the ceiling…” She gestures upward. “Well, it is very dark, but if you look up, perhaps you can make out some of the Greek gods and goddesses looking down on us.” The boys peer up into the blackness above and, squinting, try to detect the figures.
“Can you see them?” She points. “Over there is Zeus with his thunderbolts. No?”
On the spot, she devises a new tour for the boys and their teachers, starting with what remains in the denuded museum.
“Follow me,” she says, “and stay close to me or the captain. It’s treacherous in the dark if you don’t know your way.”
She leads them down the Rastrelli Gallery, once a confection of receding arches and light, now a dark maze stacked high with crates, the art bound for the third train that never made it out of the city at the start of the war. They turn left through the Hall of Egyptian Art, passing between a pair of imposing black granite sarcophagi, and from there they descend narrow service stairs into a cellar.
“Watch your step,” she says. “This is the repository of Western European statuary,” she announces. She holds up her lantern to reveal a low-ceilinged room crowded with marble angels and nymphs, Roman senators and queens. “They were brought down here to keep them safe from the bombs.” The statues are arranged in rows facing the same direction, full torsos on pedestals in the rear, busts down in front. A pensive young woman, a hand to her cheek, is seated next to a gallantly posed war hero; the bust of a handsome Roman gazes over the head of a young maiden. A prone Satyr lounges in the front row. In the hissing light of the kerosene lantern, they look like an audience at the cinema watching a silent film.
The boys take turns stepping into the small room and looking at the statues.
“Who’s that in the second row?” she quizzes them.
“Catherine the Great,” they respond in a chorus.
“And there is Aphrodite. And Cupid.”
They cross under the Hanging Gardens and into the New Hermitage building, where she gathers them in a half circle under the rim of a gargantuan vase that dominates the center of the room. The lip of the vase looms high above their heads.
“This is called the Kolyvan vase. It is made of green jasper and is generally considered to be the finest example of Russian stone carving. The craftsmen of the Kolyvan Lapidary Works created this especially for a room upstairs, but it is made of nineteen tons of green jasper, and it was feared to be too heavy for the upstairs. ‘Maybe we should just leave it here,’ they decided. All spring, it has been filling up with water from the leaks, and every few days the staff here must climb a ladder and bail it out. But we are thinking of turning it into an enormous birdbath,” she jokes.