Debra Dean - The Madonnas Of Leningrad

Down in the streets, there is a rushing of dark figures, the sounds of yelling, the rattle of antiaircraft fire though there are no more planes. But from up here, it seems silent, the terrible silence that might accompany the end of the world. After they have reported the fires within their range of visibility, they stand for a long stretch of time. They watch as sections of the roller coaster buckle and crash to the ground. Searchlights sweep the sky, swords of white light crossing, swishing apart, and crossing again. A full moon rises like a blood orange on the horizon. They may not leave their post, and no one comes to relieve them. Marina wants to sit down, but Olga remains standing, erect as a soldier. Up and down the long series of roofs, wardens stand watching the distant conflagration and the smaller fires dotting the city. Their silhouettes blend into the rows of green copper statues that line the perimeter of the Winter Palace roof, warriors and gods that have vigilantly guarded the palace for nearly two centuries.

The smoke slowly drifts north, smothering the city in a dull haze. It smells strange, sickly sweet. She can no longer see flames because of the smoke, but a thick red glow seems to envelop a whole section of the city. Her eyes burn and her mouth tastes sooty.

Later, a second wave of Junkers appears on the horizon. Rather than strafing the city, they circle around the pillar of smoke like dark moths, dropping fresh rounds of fire. A few planes stray north, but they don’t drop bombs.

Marina lifts the heavy binoculars to her eyes again, but before she can adjust the focus, there is a whistle, then the deafening crash of a high explosive in her ear. A shock wave blasts through her body, knocking her off her feet.

Someone is screaming. When she opens her eyes, she realizes that the screams are hers, but she is unhurt, she is fine. Her limbs surge with electricity. She stands up and looks around. Olga, too, is all right. In fact, she seems not to have moved. But something has changed. It takes Marina a long moment to place what is different. Part of the roofline of the building next door has disappeared. It is simply gone.

Rooms have been reserved for members of the wedding party at the Arbutus Hotel, a Victorian-styled inn with a dozen rooms in the middle of town. It trades heavily on its status as the oldest lodgings on the island, a distinction, Helen observes, that seems to preclude updating the furnishings. The dark-paneled lobby is furnished with a mismatched collection of cracked leather couches and high-backed armchairs and decorated with faded photographs of the island when it still had a salmon cannery and a fleet of fishing boats. Framed and yellowed signs behind the manager’s desk list weekly rates in the single digits and caution guests against smoking or cleaning fish in their rooms.

Upstairs, their adjoining rooms are small and spartan, but each overlooks the harbor and has a private bath. Helen takes the smaller of the two rooms. They have a couple hours before the rehearsal dinner, enough time for short naps. She sits down on the edge of the bed. The mattress is mushy, but it doesn’t matter. She’s pretty certain that given half a chance she could sleep standing up. She pulls closed the curtains, sets the alarm, kicks off her sandals, and sinks back onto the coverlet.

And then her brain starts clicking through a series of disjointed thoughts, the way it sometimes does when she’s tired but has had too much caffeine. Her mother lived with her uncle in a cellar. Why would a famous archaeologist live in a cellar? Was this a normal deprivation in Soviet Russia? Maybe they were hiding, like Anne Frank, but that doesn’t make sense either because they weren’t Jewish. Well, she doesn’t know that either, does she? People hid those things. For all she knows, she herself could be Jewish. Wouldn’t that be an odd thing to discover at this point in her life.

This is ridiculous, she tells herself. It’s four twenty-eight. You’ve only got an hour. Go to sleep.

Let’s say she did find out she was Jewish. What would change, really? It’s not as though she’d start keeping kosher. She’s never been religious, though she flirted briefly with Catholicism. You can’t throw a rock in the Southwest without hitting a Catholic church, and they’re always open. During the divorce, she spent a lot of time sitting in the back pews of dark chapels. She even attended a few newcomers’ classes, but she quickly discovered that it was only the imagery she liked. The doctrine was less appealing. But she did get a good series, haunting portraits of various women-a high school girl in jeans and a halter top, a middle-aged Mexican woman wearing her nurse’s whites and Adidas and bifocals, a heavyset woman with an ill-fitting business suit and a ginger-colored perm-each posed as a stiff-limbed Madonna with sad, downcast eyes and an unreadable expression. She set them against a shadowy dark ground, lit only by a bank of flickering blue votive candles at their feet. Helen gave the best of these to her mother because her mother remarked on the good repetition of blues, the very thing that had pleased Helen about it. Go figure. Her mother is odd that way. She knows a great deal about art for someone who has no particular love for it. Helen was a freshman and taking her first art history class when it came out that her mother had also studied art in school, and had even worked briefly at the Hermitage museum when she was young. There was nothing in Helen’s background to prepare her for this revelation; her parents had never taken her to museums or art galleries. They didn’t even have any art on their walls, unless you wanted to count a couple of aphorisms done in cross-stitch, a calendar from the savings and loan with photographic scenes of Washington State, and her own drawings taped to the fridge. But one night at dinner, Helen and her mother had embarked on one of their food battles, her mother expressing what bordered on moral outrage that Helen would eat only cottage cheese when she had prepared a good dinner. Helen, in the time-honored manner of freshmen, made a little offhand remark calculated to pass over the head of her ignorant mother. Thanks to you, she said, I’m already revoltingly Rubenesque. Not only did her mother know who Rubens was, but she rallied him to her side of the argument, pointing out that many of the great painters had chosen models of Helen’s proportions, not only Rubens but Titian as well. She then went on to tick off one example after another of voluptuous nudes.

Helen follows the meandering string of her thoughts for almost an hour before she finally relents, gets up, opens the curtains, and pries up the sticky sash. Leaning her elbows on the window ledge, she inhales the salt-bleached air and watches the late-afternoon ferry lumber into the dock, churning up green water as it snugs between the creosote pilings. It disgorges a fresh load of tourists, first the cyclists followed by a small army of rainbow-attired people carrying backpacks and being towed by dogs straining at the leash. Behind them, vehicles bump up the ramp one at a time, SUVs and convertibles and cars with kayaks strapped on their roofs, a couple of campers, a produce truck, a fuel truck, and finally a flatbed loaded with lumber. The street fronting the harbor swells with a cacophony of music and shouted greetings, but then the tourists slowly disappear into restaurants and trinket shops and the street settles back into a muted afternoon torpor.

She opens her suitcase, unzips the hanging bag, and starts unpacking. She has brought too much for five days, but it’s hard to know what to pack for Seattle and Drake Island in August. In Phoenix, the weather is hot or hotter, but here it could be wool sweaters in the morning and sundresses by noon.

More to the point, though, occasions like this bring out all her worst insecurities. You’d think that by fifty-three she would have grown comfortable in her own skin, but she can still get as obsessive and fretful as a teenager. In anticipation of coming up here, she kept viewing herself through the imaginary lens of her stylish sister-in-law, and what she saw was a plump, faded hippie, the type who might be selling whole grain bread at the Saturday market. She bought and returned three different dresses before she found a coral linen shift and matching Nehru-collared jacket, smart and pulled together but still casual enough for an outdoor wedding. Holding it up now, she wonders what possessed her to choose this color. It’s as bright as a traffic sign.