Debra Dean: The Madonnas Of Leningrad

She sees something that has escaped her notice before. It is very faint, but there seems to be another face hovering in the sky just to the left of the Virgin.

She describes the Madonna before her, how small she is, how delicately colored, her formal, upright posture, the way her heavily lidded eyes are distant and peaceful. And the way that the child appears to be reading the open prayer book in Mary’s hand.

“Of course, the logical explanation is that he is simply attracted to the book, as toddlers are. But Raphael’s contemporaries would have seen it differently. They would have seen a miracle.”

Just inside the left edge of the frame is the faint outline of another child, a child that is not in the Conestabile. It is like having double vision, as though her memory were blurring. Marina remembers her teachers in school describing a phenomenon called pentimento. Indigent painters would sometimes reuse canvases, covering over inferior paintings with a coat of pigment and then painting a fresh picture. With time, as the oils aged, the old image might appear ghostlike behind the new. An eye would peer out from the folds of a woman’s skirt, a piece of fruit would hover in a cloudless blue sky. She wonders if it is possible that Raphael used this canvas before he painted the Conestabile.

A second Madonna is coming into focus, and then there are three toddlers ghosting and overlapping one another, and one of them holds up two sticks lashed together in the shape of a cross. With a shock, Marina knows all at once what she is seeing. It is Raphael’s Alba Madonna, the one that disappeared, just as Anya described it. She reaches out to touch the canvas, but there is nothing there, just the paneling.

She turns to the boys, her face radiant. “Do you see?” she asks them. Past them, she can see other paintings in the Skylight halls. Her vision is filling with color and images.

She sweeps through a doorway, beckoning breathlessly for them to follow. The hall is so cavernous that lamplight doesn’t reach the far end. Above, the barrel-vaulted ceiling recedes into black. From the darkness comes the steady drip of water hitting water, each drop echoing in the chasm. Except for the enormous frames that line the walls, the vast room is empty.

“Look here.” She details for them a dramatic scene, three women surprised at an open tomb by an angel. Then she describes another picture, this one showing the Virgin being taken up into heaven. Then another, the conversion of Saul. As she talks, images appear inside the gigantic frames. The pictures are wild with stormy skies and electric emotion, and as Marina ’s sweeping gestures paint the scenes, the lantern sways, throwing wild swoops of light up the walls. Figures appear out of the shadows, their robes swirling, their hands raised in amazement.

“All this is yours, comrades,” Marina tells them. “Can you see?” She is ecstatic. Her voice trembles when she speaks, but her eyes are bright and calm. “It’s all yours.”

Ravishing splashes of color pour out of the darkness and resolve into images-paintings that hung elsewhere in the museum, paintings Marina remembers and others that she has only heard tell of. The room is filling with women, with children, with saints and goddesses, and the boys are whispering among themselves. They point at the frames on the wall, at the paintings crowding the edges of the lamplight. The captain is weeping. He is staring at the wall, wiping at his eyes. “Look,” he says to no one in particular. “Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?” He points to a spot at eye level on the wall. It is Giampetrino’s Madonna, and she is staring right back at them.

Several years hence, when Marina’s body is finally winding down, Helen will feel no grief, only a quiet detachment, as though she is waiting for a bus-it is late and she is tired, but she has nowhere she needs to be and it will get here when it gets here. She and Andrei and Naureen and the grandchildren have long since said their good-byes, and Marina herself has left, though no one is able to pinpoint exactly when that happened, only that at some point she was no longer there. It is all over but the waiting.

While she waits, sitting at her mother’s bedside and listening to the hoarse rasp of her breathing, Helen finishes another sketch of her, something she does periodically to pass the time. Once she had thought that she might discover some key to her mother if only she could get her likeness right, but she has since learned that the mysteries of another person only deepen, the longer one looks.

The last time she sketched her, her mother was still speaking occasionally. She had asked to see what Helen was drawing, and when Helen turned the pad, she had looked at her portrait without recognition. This was no measure of Helen’s artistic skill. By then, Marina didn’t know who Helen was, either. She called her Nadezhda. Andrei, too, had lost his identity as her son and become someone else, an imagined suitor with whom she would flirt shamelessly. Only old photographs of herself or Dmitri sparked any recognition. Helen had gone to the dresser and picked up the cracked photograph of Marina taken back in Russia and showed it to her.

Marina studied it long and hard, her face a mask of concentration. “She looks familiar,” she said to Helen. “Do you know her?”

“Not really,” Helen answered. “Maybe you could tell me about her.”

“I think she was one of the Madonnas,” Marina said. “But I can’t say for certain. There were so many.”

It is tempting to see meaning where there may be none. Very often, Marina ’s blank-faced comments have seemed to carry the weighty truth of Zen koans, and the family repeats them, teasing out the possible meanings and then dismissing their own credulity. There is always, though, the yearning to believe.

There was the morning up on Drake Island when the ponytailed roofer found Marina curled up in the fireplace of a mansion under construction out on Channel Bluff. It was Monday morning, and she had been missing almost thirty hours.

As the young man described it later, he thought at first that Marina was dead. She looked just like a ghost in a horror movie, he said, all gray-faced and wearing a dirty cotton gown. But when he prodded her shoulder, her eyes opened and she started mumbling. He thought she might have had a stroke, but then he figured out that she was speaking a foreign language. He said something in Spanish-kind of dumb, he admitted, but he had panicked and it was the only foreign language he knew-then he mimed for her to stay where she was and ran back to his truck to call for help. He’d heard about the old lady who’d gotten lost over the weekend, and he figured this must be her. It wasn’t every day you ran across an old lady in a nightgown, he explained. So he called the sheriff and he got a flannel shirt out of the back of the cab, and a thermos of herb tea. He got her arms threaded into the shirt and helped her sip some tea, and she looked a little better, kind of dazed but smiling. She started looking around and pointing, first in one direction, then another, and saying something. He looked, but there wasn’t anything to see, just two-by-fours and joists, the skeleton frame of the house, and the trees beyond. The young man shrugged, saying No comprende , but she was insistent, repeating a couple of words over and over. She pulled herself to her feet and, hanging on to his arm, started kind of leading him around the perimeter of the room, stopping every couple of feet and pointing. He remembered he was worried because she was barefoot and there were nails and wood scraps all over the floor. “Look out,” he said, and she nodded, her eyes lit bright, and said, “Look.”

“Look?” he repeated.

“Look,” she answered, and pointed. “It is beautiful, yes?”