Debra Dean - The Madonnas Of Leningrad

This is the painter’s first full-size female nude. It illustrates the myth of Danae, a beautiful princess whose father, the king, locked her away in a bronze tower to thwart potential suitors. There she is visited by Zeus, who has admired her. As is his habit when he wishes to satisfy his passions, he transmogrifies himself-with the beautiful Leda, he became a swan, with Europa, a white bull, with Antiope, a satyr, and so on-but with Danae he takes form as a shower of gold. Here Danae is shielding her face from his light, or perhaps she is reaching out to him; it is tantalizingly hard to tell. But tonight her life will change. He will impregnate her, and in time she will give birth to a god, Perseus.

And there is The Sacrifice of Isaac . Very dramatic, Isaac’s body limp and glowing. His face is covered by Abraham’s hand.

Portrait of an Old Jew . Brown. An old face. Old hands.

David and Uriah . The red robes. The scribe in the background.

The Holy Family . Mother. Baby.

The Return of

The Return of

The light dims, and the quiet browns and golds of Rembrandt’s people recede into the dark. Slowly, the room falls away beneath her, and she is lifting up into the sky, flying.

It is like a beautiful, disturbing dream. She is almost in the clouds, and the moon drifts in, drifts out, silvering the ghostly city below. She can see the roof of the Winter Palace, then past the rows of copper statues that line its perimeter, past church spires engraved on the black sky, past the pale dome of St. Isaac’s. Below her, the frozen Neva glitters and weaves. Above her, the blimps hover silently in the clouds. During the day, they are ugly sausages. But at night they swim like enormous white whales through a dark sea.

She is swimming with the whales. She hears what sounds like the rhythmic whoosh of their breath. And then someone is beside her, breathing hotly in her ear, stroking her belly and the insides of her thighs, pulling her along through the air. Marina. The voice whispers her name. Marina. Come to me.

She starts, hearing the drone of distant planes. Who knows how long she has been here, an hour, perhaps two, she cannot read her wristwatch.

She finds her radio and switches it on.

“Hello?” She is trembling, but not with cold. Her body feels liquid and warm. “Sergei Pavlovich, this is the North Platform. I’m standing by. Over.”

She pulls her binoculars from their case and lifts them to her eyes. In the distance, she finds the approaching silhouettes of planes. As she sweeps the binoculars back toward the embankment, her view suddenly fills with an enormous silhouette. Inexplicably, one of the statues from the roof of the Winter Palace has transported itself several hundred meters north onto the barren roof of the New Hermitage building. The statue, a naked god, gleams in the moonlight, poised at the edge of the roof, so close to the brink that from this angle it appears to be floating suspended over the river.

She is transfixed. As she watches, the statue slowly turns in her direction. He is shockingly beautiful and blindingly bright. She lifts her hand to shield her eyes from the light.

“Oh my god.” Although her voice seems to disappear in the wind, the statue smiles at her and stretches his arm out to her, beckoning. Her chest tightens. She feels a shock of recognition, as in a dream when suddenly one knows, knows with an unshakable certainty, no matter that it should be impossible.

“What is it? Marina?” It is Sergei’s voice. The radio. She can barely lift it to her mouth.

“There is a…” she begins, but her voice falters. “A man.” She is not speaking loudly enough to be heard. She gasps in air.

“Someone is up here,” she says. She refrains from mentioning that he is naked.

“I don’t understand. Do you mean Olga Markhaeva?”

“No,” she breathes. Her heart is pounding wildly. Everything is gold, light, hot. She closes her eyes against the light and the radio falls from her hand. She feels herself lifting up into the night on a slow, throbbing pulse, and she lets herself be carried off on it.

Her skin sparks to a touch sliding down her throat, circling first one nipple, then the other, each touch sending streaks of electric current coursing through her. The long, agonizing stretch of her belly, and then the wet, satiny folds between her thighs. She feels the heat radiating from him expand inside her, and she is frantic, rocking back and forth, back and forth, wildly climbing a series of molten waves. The beat of wings quickens, crescendos into a roar, and she is turned inside out with a flash of heat. Warm milk courses through her limbs and leaks out between her legs.

It is like being underwater, rising toward the light and hearing muffled voices above the surface.

“Look. Do you see the eagle, Marina?”

“We got seats right behind home plate, five rows back. You could see the guys spit.”

“Do you see it?”

“How’d you score those?”

“Oh, Jen’s got some clients. They’ve been real pains. I guess they wanted to make it up to her.”

Marina is sitting in a comfortable chair on the patio with her daughter-in-law. She knows time has passed and those around her have continued on in this world without her, conversing and drinking.

It is beautiful here. The sun is hanging just above the horizon, streaking the sky with long shreds of purple and orange, fringing the woods in velvety shadow. Behind her, music drifts out the open windows, and at regular intervals a tinny sequence of arcade bleeps and hoots announces that one of the kids has scored on the computer upstairs.

Everyone is looking up, and Naureen points out to Marina a dark silhouette gliding on air currents, its wings spread like ragged fingers.

“Aren’t birds wonderful?” Marina says.

“It’s one of the things I love about coming up here,” Naureen agrees. “There’s a nesting pair on White Point, and we see them nearly every day.”

“A pair of bluebirds made a nest in our hanging basket,” Marina says. “There were two eggs, but one of the chicks didn’t survive. The mother and father bird tended it for weeks, and then one day the little bird flew away and that was the last time we saw it.”

They are silent for a moment, watching the eagle.

“Aren’t birds wonderful?”

“Yes.”

“A pair of bluebirds made a nest in our hanging basket.”

“ Marina, are you through with that? You hardly touched it.”

Marina looks down at a bowl of melting ice cream. It looks something like blockade jelly.

“ Marina?”

“Maybe I will have a bite more.”

“I could get you some more. That’s all melted.”

“No, it’s just the way I like it, dear.” She eats a spoonful just to confirm this. “We ate a jelly made from joiner’s glue.”

“What?”

“Joiner’s glue. You use it to glue the picture frames.”

“You ate glue?” Naureen looks puzzled. Marina wonders if she has used the wrong word. Glue. Glue. It sounds wrong somehow.

“Glue, to stick things together? It was made from sinews of beef, I think. We melted it down. It was pretty tasty, I remember.”

“Dear god,” Naureen breathes. “This was during the war?”

“Yes, dear.” Marina smiles. “We didn’t eat it before. It wasn’t that good.”

“I can’t imagine. The war, I mean.”

“No, it was not imaginable…”

People crowd in on Marina. A swirl of faces and bodies: the naked women in the public bath, women with blackened legs wavering in the steamy light, Olga Markhaeva calling out the locations of fires, the swaddled gray mass of humanity on the streets, moving like ghosts. An emaciated woman has fallen in the snow, a scarecrow with hollow eyes who stretches a claw up toward her. Marina ’s eyes are watering, and she shakes her head roughly.