Several years hence, when Marina’s body is finally winding down, Helen will feel no grief, only a quiet detachment, as though she is waiting for a bus-it is late and she is tired, but she has nowhere she needs to be and it will get here when it gets here. She and Andrei and Naureen and the grandchildren have long since said their good-byes, and Marina herself has left, though no one is able to pinpoint exactly when that happened, only that at some point she was no longer there. It is all over but the waiting.

While she waits, sitting at her mother’s bedside and listening to the hoarse rasp of her breathing, Helen finishes another sketch of her, something she does periodically to pass the time. Once she had thought that she might discover some key to her mother if only she could get her likeness right, but she has since learned that the mysteries of another person only deepen, the longer one looks.

The last time she sketched her, her mother was still speaking occasionally. She had asked to see what Helen was drawing, and when Helen turned the pad, she had looked at her portrait without recognition. This was no measure of Helen’s artistic skill. By then, Marina didn’t know who Helen was, either. She called her Nadezhda. Andrei, too, had lost his identity as her son and become someone else, an imagined suitor with whom she would flirt shamelessly. Only old photographs of herself or Dmitri sparked any recognition. Helen had gone to the dresser and picked up the cracked photograph of Marina taken back in Russia and showed it to her.

Marina studied it long and hard, her face a mask of concentration. “She looks familiar,” she said to Helen. “Do you know her?”

“Not really,” Helen answered. “Maybe you could tell me about her.”

“I think she was one of the Madonnas,” Marina said. “But I can’t say for certain. There were so many.”

It is tempting to see meaning where there may be none. Very often, Marina ’s blank-faced comments have seemed to carry the weighty truth of Zen koans, and the family repeats them, teasing out the possible meanings and then dismissing their own credulity. There is always, though, the yearning to believe.

There was the morning up on Drake Island when the ponytailed roofer found Marina curled up in the fireplace of a mansion under construction out on Channel Bluff. It was Monday morning, and she had been missing almost thirty hours.

As the young man described it later, he thought at first that Marina was dead. She looked just like a ghost in a horror movie, he said, all gray-faced and wearing a dirty cotton gown. But when he prodded her shoulder, her eyes opened and she started mumbling. He thought she might have had a stroke, but then he figured out that she was speaking a foreign language. He said something in Spanish-kind of dumb, he admitted, but he had panicked and it was the only foreign language he knew-then he mimed for her to stay where she was and ran back to his truck to call for help. He’d heard about the old lady who’d gotten lost over the weekend, and he figured this must be her. It wasn’t every day you ran across an old lady in a nightgown, he explained. So he called the sheriff and he got a flannel shirt out of the back of the cab, and a thermos of herb tea. He got her arms threaded into the shirt and helped her sip some tea, and she looked a little better, kind of dazed but smiling. She started looking around and pointing, first in one direction, then another, and saying something. He looked, but there wasn’t anything to see, just two-by-fours and joists, the skeleton frame of the house, and the trees beyond. The young man shrugged, saying No comprende, but she was insistent, repeating a couple of words over and over. She pulled herself to her feet and, hanging on to his arm, started kind of leading him around the perimeter of the room, stopping every couple of feet and pointing. He remembered he was worried because she was barefoot and there were nails and wood scraps all over the floor. “Look out,” he said, and she nodded, her eyes lit bright, and said, “Look.”

“Look?” he repeated.

“Look,” she answered, and pointed. “It is beautiful, yes?”

“What was beautiful?” Helen had asked the young man, puzzled.

“Everything, man. That’s what was so amazing. There’s a killer view of the straits, but she was pointing at everything, you know, this dead madrona tree out back, and these bands of sunlight coming through the roof in the garage.” Here, the young man’s expression had turned very earnest. “It was like she was saying everything was beautiful.”

The doctor said Marina was in shock, but Helen has always preferred the young man’s explanation. “You had to be there,” he insisted. “She was showing me the world.”

Author’s Note

While the characters in this novel are fictional, the wartime events are drawn from historical records. Readers interested to learn more about the Siege of Leningrad might wish to read Harrison E. Salisbury’s The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad; S. P. Varshavskii’s The Ordeal of the Hermitage; and Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina’s Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women’s Diaries, Memoirs, and Documentary Prose. The State Hermitage Museum also has an expansive website (www.hermitagemuseum.org) that provides history, digital reproductions of the collection, and panoramic views of various rooms in the museum.

Acknowledgments

Many people have had a hand in shepherding this book along. My grandparents’ lifelong love affair and their journey with Alzheimer’s provided an initial inspiration. Gratitude goes also to Clifford Paul Fetters, my first and best reader, whose faith never wavered, and to my parents, Beverly Taylor and Ed Dean, for their love and financial support. Thanks to Stuart Gibson and the guides and researchers at the State Hermitage Museum who so graciously answered my endless questions; to Eric Kinzel and Yekaterina Roslova-Kinzel for advice on things Russian; to Cynthia White, Susan Rich, and Linda Wendling for their generous reads; to Mark Elliot for information on the Soviet repatriation; to San Juan County Sheriff Bill Cumming and Undersheriff John Zerby for advice on search and rescue. The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund came through with a grant and the attendant vote of confidence just when it was needed. I am deeply indebted to Claire Wachtel and the good people at William Morrow for their enthusiasm, and most especially to agents Marly Rusoff and Michael Radulescu for voting with their hearts. Finally, to the people of St. Petersburg, Russia, it’s my humble intent that this book will honor their great story.

About the Author

Debra Dean worked as an actor in the New York theater for nearly a decade before opting for the life of a writer and teacher. She lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington. The Madonnas of Leningrad is her first novel. www.debradean.com