“I’m okay.”
Helen looks at her mother and concedes to herself that her mother does look fine. Older, sure, but not especially frail or sickly. So, it could be in my head, she thinks. After all, I’m not exactly on top of my game today.
And then her mother adds, almost as an afterthought, “You know sometimes I forget some things. I told you I was sick?”
“Sick?” Helen’s heart seizes.
“I had the flu. And the doctor gave me some medicines.”
“The flu? Mama, are you talking about two years ago?” Her mother, who is famously never sick, had a bout of the flu the winter before last. The doctor prescribed something, but she got sicker; she grew delirious and drifted in and out of consciousness for two days. As it turned out, her mother was allergic to codeine and, at eighty, had never before had cause to find out. But what this has to do with anything is anyone’s guess.
“Yes, two years ago,” Marina concurs. “They seem to help my memory.”
Helen is thoroughly confused. “What helps?”
“The medicines.”
“The codeine?”
Marina ’s expression betrays her frustration. “No, the other medicines,” she says, enunciating each word. She looks around. “Where’s Dima?”
“Beats me.” Her father left more than half an hour ago to use the men’s room, something that really shouldn’t have taken this long. “Maybe he’s getting a cup of coffee.”
“But he will come back?” A shadow passes over Marina ’s face, as though she is afraid that after nearly sixty-five years of marriage he might suddenly abandon her, say he’s going to the men’s room and never return.
“Of course he will.” I’m not imagining this, Helen thinks. This isn’t me. “I’ll go look for him,” she offers. She has a few questions for her father anyway. “Do you want anything?”
“No, thank you. I’m okay.” She folds her hands in her lap to demonstrate her contentment.
Helen finds Dmitri standing at the rail of the stern, facing the water. A wake spreads out behind the boat like a long green tail.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” Helen says. “We were beginning to think you’d fallen in.”
“Where’s your mother?” Dmitri cranes his neck and scans the deck.
“At our seats.”
He straightens as though to leave.
“Papa, what medications is Mama taking?” She keeps her voice neutral, though it’s an odd question to pose casually, and, sure enough, her father stops and looks at her appraisingly.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. She just seems a little-I don’t know-kind of fuzzy. Don’t you think so?”
“Yes,” he admits. He studies the backs of his hands. “It’s not her medicines. This getting old is a trial. I can’t recommend it.” He is smiling, but there is a weariness behind his smile that belies the joke.
“Things might be easier if you moved into a smaller place.”
His mouth hardens. “I’m not ready yet to be packed off to a nursing home.”
“Not a nursing home, Papa, a retirement community.”
“Did Andrei put you up to this?”
As a child, she could never fib to him; his gaze was so still and patient, as though he already knew the truth and was merely waiting for her to work herself up to confessing it. Helen realizes too late that she should have let this sit until Monday.
“I’m sure he doesn’t want you to do anything you’re not ready for. But at least hear him out, okay, Papa? He’s gone to a lot of work researching all this. Who knows, you just might see something you like.”
“I know what I’ll see, Elena. I have friends in these places. Walt Crawford, you remember him?” She does. Mr. Crawford was headmaster at the private school where her father taught German and Russian for almost thirty years. “Bea, his wife, she died two years ago. Bladder cancer. He’s living at the Shoreside Manor. Every couple of weeks, I go up there. It’s one of the good ones, four thousand dollars a month. But there’s no disguise for a death camp. I’d rather to die at home.”
He straightens up, signaling the end of the conversation. “Let’s go. I don’t want your mother to worry I’ve gone overboard.”
If she had it in her to pursue the argument, she could point out that we’d all rather die at home, but all she can think is that Andrei will be annoyed with her for jumping the gun. Though how he hopes to move them against their will is beyond her. They are stubborn people in their own quiet way. It’s the Russian blood, she thinks. She’s got it herself. Her ex used to call her “the mule,” and though she rebelled at the insult, she knew there was truth to it. She tends to stick with things long past the time any reasonable person would give up and move on. Case in point, her marriage. Or her art, for that matter. Anyone else in her situation would have given up the pretense and either accepted that her art was a hobby or started painting things there was a market for-landscapes and flowers or watery abstracts. Instead, she insists on doing her figures and then gets indignant that people who buy their art in the local gift shops and frame stores aren’t looking to hang pictures of nude strangers in their homes. She’s fifty-three: how much longer is she going to wait for a New York dealer to discover her? In their own ways, she and her parents seem to have simultaneously reached the limits of hunkering down as a life strategy.
Her mother is still staring out the window when they return.
Her father leans over and kisses the top of her head. “A penny for your thoughts,” he says.
“I was thinking about Tatiana and Mikhail.”
Dmitri frowns.
“Who are they?” Helen asks her mother.
“My cousins. They were only six and eight, so they were sent away.”
“Sent away?”
“Evacuated. At the beginning of the war.”
“Where did they go?”
Marina looks up at the ceiling for a moment. “I don’t remember. The Urals, perhaps. It was snowing.”
Helen waits, but apparently that is the end of the story. That’s about par for the course. Her parents never talk about the war, not in English, anyway, and Helen has only the most general idea of what happened then. Her father was a soldier, and her mother was a war bride who got trapped in Leningrad when the Nazis surrounded the city. Somehow they both ended up in Germany and found each other there. That’s it. As a child, she had little curiosity about her parents’ youth, and they obliged by behaving as though they had never had one. When she did ask, every question got a one-sentence answer. But they won’t be around forever, and it seems odd to know so little of their history.
“Were these the archaeologist’s children?” Her mother was an orphan and lived with an aunt and an uncle who was a famous archaeologist, but again the details are fuzzy.
“Yes, Uncle Viktor,” Marina says, nodding. “After that, we lived in the cellar.”
“Who?”
“Oh, everybody. There were hundreds of people.”
No explanation follows. When Helen turns to her father, he says, “Some things are better forgotten.”
This is considered a minor painting, but some may find it of historical interest. Here the painter Caraffe finds his inspiration in the legend of Metellus, a Roman general who showed mercy on the innocents. We see the city has been surrounded, and at the gates, the army is preparing to storm the walls. Armored soldiers raise their bows, and half-naked corpses are strewn in front of the gates. Against the wall, a clutch of figures face the oncoming soldiers as human shields, the wife and children of a defector.
What could be more dramatic? There is no terror in this scene, though. It is a staged melodrama with the actors arranged in a carefully balanced tableau. Notice, even the vanquished are beautiful: they die in graceful poses, their injuries unseen. The neoclassical scene is strangely calm and still, the colors clean and glossy. It is war without blood and vomit, without misery-it is a picture to lure French boys to war with fantasies of ennobling self-sacrifice. Hundreds of thousands of them died for Napoleon, their frost-rotted corpses littering the snowy Russian steppes. There was no beauty, no mercy.