Debra Dean - The Madonnas Of Leningrad

Helen’s heart, already softened to a pulp, swells with gratitude at all the hidden goodwill in the world. “Thank you,” she says, her throat closing around the words. They seem insufficient, but he accepts them with a nod.

She wanders dim halls lined with lockers and trophy cases and peers into empty classrooms. At the end of a hallway, she happens on the art room. She finds the light switch, and rows of fluorescent tubes sputter and buzz to life. There is something enormously comforting and familiar in the industrial room, with its linoleum floors and paint-spattered tables, the open metal shelving, and the pottery wheel squatting heavily in a corner. Student art projects are taped to the concrete block walls. She circles the room, surveying the results of various assignments-one in collage, mostly magazine photos and slogans pieced together like so many ransom notes, another in pastels, twenty versions of the same bowl of fruit. They show the typical range of beginners, from the careful, self-conscious drawings of the A students to those whose distended bowls and smeared fruits are almost defiantly raw and unskilled.

She got her only A’s in art classes, to the dismay of her parents and those teachers who had taught her older brother and were expecting an echo of brilliance in his younger sibling. Instead, she was ordinary. She did her homework and met her deadlines because to do less was unthinkable in her family, but she set herself apart only in art class, an area where she had no competition from Andrei. Mrs. Hanson, the lantern-jawed young divorcée who taught ceramics and art, encouraged Helen, even giving her private lessons after school when Helen had used up all her electives. It was in a room not very different from this one that she had been most happy as a teenager.

In an unlocked cabinet, Helen finds a sheaf of butcher paper and a box of charcoal. She sits down at one of the tables and lets the charcoal sail wildly across the empty paper, filling several sheets with nothing but furious black slashes and fast loops and squiggles, just for the feel of emotion streaming through her arm. After a while, she slows her hand and, on a fresh sheet, begins dipping with more tentative, exploratory strokes. She closes her eyes, opens them again, and with more confidence lays down a long, sensuous line and then another.

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.