Debra Dean: The Madonnas Of Leningrad

“I’ll be so glad when we’re done with the porcelain. It’s so delicate, it gets on my nerves. I swear, there must be thousands of teacups alone. You should see them, Dima. Some are so thin, light shines through them. And we’ve run out of cotton wadding, so each one has to be wrapped in paper and packed in more shredded paper, and they look like they’ll break if you breathe on them. And then there’s all the plates and saucers and serving pieces. One could invite all of Leningrad to dinner and not run out of plates.”

She stops when she notices that his thoughts seem to be elsewhere.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “We’ve hardly seen each other for days, and I’m babbling about dishes. You look tired, too. Are they working you very hard?”

He studies the backs of his hands for a moment before he meets her eyes again. “We’re leaving in the morning.”

She is shocked into silence. They have been training for only ten days, not the month that was expected, and these are not soldiers but volunteers in the People’s Army, mostly middle-aged men with no military experience. Though Dmitri is younger than most of his comrades, he doesn’t look any more convincingly like a soldier. He is wearing his usual collarless shirt, and a pair of light canvas trousers that hang loosely on his lanky frame. A paperback is tucked into his pants pocket, a pencil in his shirt pocket. With his long, limp hair and wire-rimmed glasses, he looks exactly like what he is, a graduate student of literature who has only read about war.

“How can you go so soon? You don’t even have a uniform yet,” she says, as though a uniform might help the illusion.

He pats his armband with the insignia of the People’s Volunteer Army. “We don’t need uniforms, Marina.” Then he adds, almost to himself, “What we could use are a few more rifles.”

The waiter has brought their tea. She cups the warm porcelain in her palms, blowing off the steam and staring at the tea leaves on the bottom.

“Where are you going?” she finally asks.

“We’re not allowed to say, but you can certainly guess.”

He must mean the Luga line. Every morning now, news comes of the retreating Red Army. Some speculate that they are falling back merely as a ploy to draw the Germans deep into enemy territory and then to surround them. But whatever the reason, the Luga River is where the army will have to stand fast. About eighty kilometers to the south of the city, it is the last stronghold of fortifications between the Germans and Leningrad. In preparation, thousands of citizens have been drafted to dig trenches and construct gun battlements there. Every day, a few more packers at the Hermitage are taken from their work, handed shovels, and put on the trains heading south. Even high school children have been recruited for the work.

“So long as they are sending students there,” Marina reasons, “it cannot be too bad, right?” She does not want to think about how he will manage.

“I’ll come back, Marina. I promise.”

“What do you mean?” she asks. “Of course you will. They say a few weeks.” This is the timetable that has been announced by every official on the radio and in Pravda , but when she says it aloud to Dmitri, she sees in his eyes that it may well be a lie.

“Perhaps,” he offers. “We can hope. But war is never as easy as they promise.”

The earth tilts a little more and she feels herself sliding. In all these weeks of packing and hurried preparations, it has never occurred to her to be fearful. None of it has seemed quite real. But when people leave, they don’t come back. That has been her experience. That is real.

When they emerge from the restaurant, it is nearly midnight. The city is bathed in pastel shades of dusk, like a tinted postcard. The dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral is burning gold. Above them, the sky is streaked with long purple shadows.

They stroll along the embankment of the Moyka River and then into the green shadows of Admiralty Park. The lawn has been plowed up into long rows of air raid trenches. He stops beneath a plane tree and turns to face her, looking solemn.

“I have something for you.” He reaches into the breast pocket of his shirt and pulls out a tiny gold ring set with an opal.

“I don’t know if it’s your size. The woman who sold it to me had hands that looked like yours.” He fingers the ring uncertainly.

“Would you marry me? Not now. But when I return?”

She has never given any thought to marrying Dmitri. Her romantic fantasies have always featured a future lover whose appearance and qualities were an enticingly hazy mystery, not the boy who has been her companion for nearly a decade.

She was eleven years old when they arrested her father. Three months later, the black van came back for her mother, and her life as she had known it ended. She was taken in by her mother’s brother and his pregnant wife and was put in a new school where no one knew of her or her family. If anyone should ask, Uncle Viktor instructed her, she should say that her parents were away on an archaeological dig. Within a few weeks, though, the rumors had caught up with her. The circle of her new schoolmates stepped back and stranded her in a widening ripple of whispers. And there beside her was Dmitri.

His father had been arrested shortly before hers, but unlike Marina, Dmitri was quietly defiant. He taught her by example not to cringe at the sly insinuations of teachers, to hold up her chin when others treated her as though she might infect them with a disease. When she confessed to wanting to be popular, he laughed, though not meanly, and told her that only ordinary people were popular. “You might as well accept it, Marina,” he had said. “Even if your parents were Party members, you would never fit in. You’re unusual. That’s better than popular if you have some courage.”

She suspected she didn’t have much courage, but neither did she have much choice. He was right. All through school, she had tried to blend in, and had managed, if not to fit in, then at least not to call attention to herself. But after her parents were charged with political dissidence, she was marked, and even her harmless traits and idiosyncrasies became fodder. She was left-handed and red-haired, both signs of a disorderly and deficient character. She sometimes hummed to herself unconsciously, or, worse, she drifted off in class, only to be called back to attention by the sounds of her classmates tittering and the teacher barking her name. Even as her peers had gotten older and less openly cruel, she had still seen it in their eyes-that subtle pulling back when she made what seemed to her a perfectly normal observation.

It was only with Dmitri that she could breathe easily and be herself. She knew that she could tell him whatever she was thinking, that she wanted to live inside a van Ruisdael painting, for instance, and he would weigh her words gravely and then ask her if she would really be happy in a static moment, no matter how idyllic.

Later, when others their age were pairing off, the two of them began, awkwardly, to kiss and hold hands. He told her he thought she was beautiful, a remarkable idea shared by no one else she knew of other than the occasional rude stranger on the street. When he first said it, she assumed he meant that she possessed an inner beauty-he frequently spoke in these romantic terms-but no, he said, he wasn’t speaking of her soul. She was physically desirable. Even so, when they kissed, she imagined that they were merely practicing for others.

Yet it seems this is where they have been heading all along, and, once again, she simply has not been paying attention.

“This is too abrupt,” Dmitri says, reading her surprise. “I thought, what with the war…” His eyes drop to the ring, and he studies it as though looking for flaws. “I love you, Marina. I suppose I should have said that, but you must know.”