Debra Dean: The Madonnas Of Leningrad

She should have spoken by now. “I love you, too,” she murmurs. It’s true, though she realizes it only after she has said the words. Marriage to Dima. She would not have guessed this, but it seems right somehow.

“Yes,” she announces, nodding. “Of course.”

He smiles, relieved, and reaches for her hand. When he attempts to slide the ring onto her third finger, however, it will not go. She takes her hand back and tries to work the ring over the knuckle, then takes it off and slides it onto her pinkie finger.

“I can get it sized,” she assures him. “It’s beautiful.” She reaches her mouth up to his and kisses him.

They lean against the trunk of the plane tree and kiss, but not as they have in the past. They kiss desperately, until their mouths are raw and pulpy. He kneads her breasts through the fabric of her smock. At first it makes her pleasantly light-headed, and then her tender nipples begin to ache. There is a look at the bottom of his eyes that is new and urgent. She feels the heat radiating off his skin, the trembling of his fingers, and a persistent hardness pushing against her thigh. When she reaches down and touches him tentatively, he groans softly and presses her hand more firmly down.

This is different. In sculpture, the male member is always flaccid, a soft little worm nested between muscled thighs.

What she knows about sex is confined mostly to what she has picked up studying art. It is an uneven education, strong on anatomy but weaker in the working details. Countless paintings depict scenes of demure courtship, a few suggest languid postcoital bliss, but, excepting a few obscure oriental pieces, there is little in between.

Dmitri suddenly stops and pulls himself away from her. Both of them are panting.

“What is it?” she whispers, fearful that she has hurt him.

“We are not dogs, Marina, that copulate in a park.”

She responds, reasonably, that there is no place they can go to be alone with each other. She lives with her aunt and uncle and two young cousins; he shares a communal apartment with six other students.

He nods solemnly and repeats the stock response of the Housing Committee whenever they address the perpetual shortage of apartments in Leningrad. “Privacy is a conceit of degenerate societies.” He tries to smile, though he really does seem to be in pain. “So you will be degenerate with me, Marinochka?”

She nods her consent and they slide awkwardly down onto the grass. When she feels his hands fumbling at the waistband of her underpants, she wriggles out of them and leans back. What happens next, though, takes her completely by surprise: he won’t fit. He pushes and pushes, and just as she is wondering if they are going about it wrong, there is a searing pain that rips from the inside out. She gasps and holds her breath against the pain until she thinks she may black out. And then it is over and they are lying, spent, on the grass. She is almost too weak to move, and there is a terrible burning where he entered her. She reaches up under her rumpled skirt and finds the swollen folds between her thighs. They are hot and sticky, and when she pulls her hand out from under her skirt, her fingers are bloody.

“Dima,” she says, and holds up her hand.

He nods. “It’s normal the first time. Does it hurt?”

She nods. He pulls her closer into his arms and strokes her hair. With her ear against his chest, she can hear the pulse of his blood, the steady thump of his heart, and they seem to slow as she listens. She drifts on the surf of his blood, lolling in and out of sleep.

“Go to sleep,” he says. “We have time.”

The sun has hardly set for weeks, suspended above the horizon like a held breath. In this endless dusk, it is easy to believe that time is elastic. It stretches out before them, the future so indistinct that it must be quite far away.

Then it shrinks and snaps back into the present moment. The clock on the Admiralty is chiming. The light is pearly gray and the air is cool. Dmitri is jostling her shoulder. She sits up and finds that the front of her smock is wet with dew. Hours have passed in the space of a heartbeat, and it is early morning. He is leaving soon. He’d rather she didn’t come to the station. Even if he wanted her to, it is after five o’clock and she is expected to report to the warden’s office in less than half an hour. They can say good-bye here. It is better this way. He will write. He loves her. He will come back.

A man waiting for the trolley, a lunch pail in one hand, a newspaper under his arm, witnesses the young couple emerging from the trees of the park. The girl is heartbreakingly beautiful, her clothes rumpled, her red hair loose on her shoulders, her cheeks flushed like fruit. She fingers the sleeve of her young man’s shirt, says something, stops. The young man shakes his head no. Taking both her hands in his, he speaks very earnestly to the girl. Then he kisses her lightly on the mouth, turns around, and walks away. It is then that the man sees the armband of the People’s Volunteers. It is a timeless story being reenacted, repeated, over and over, for centuries. Nothing changes. Only the young couple themselves do not know this.

She stares after the young soldier for a moment, and then turns, herself, and runs in the opposite direction.

Inside the Winter Palace, at the foot of the Jordan Staircase, one might believe that time has indeed stood still, that nothing has changed for centuries. The stone pillars rise regally up into a painted sky inhabited by the gods of Olympus, and the mirrored walls seem to hold the glittering reflections of generations of imperial soldiers, their sabers glinting in the dim light, and elegant women in huge satin skirts, their bosoms draped with fat pearls, their faces hidden behind sweeping fans. Marina ascends the marble steps, up, up, up, and stops on the first landing to catch her breath.

This is where the tour begins. For two years, she guided groups of schoolchildren or factory workers through the Hermitage. They would gather here at the start of a tour, and she would welcome them to the museum and begin by noting how many visitors had passed up these stairs before them. “This staircase was designed in the eighteenth century by the architect Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli. Notice the lavish use of gilded stucco moldings, the abundance of mirrors and marble. And above us”-she would direct their gaze to the intricately painted ceiling fifteen meters up-“the Italian painter Gaspare Diziani has depicted the Greek gods on Olympus.

“All this Baroque splendor was intended to overwhelm visiting dignitaries with the might and wealth of Russia. But this is merely the entrance. The State Museum of Leningrad comprises four hundred rooms in five contiguous buildings: the Winter Palace, where we stand now, the Small Hermitage, the Old Hermitage, the New Hermitage, and the Hermitage Theatre. The architecture is, as you can see here, magnificent. But what is even more remarkable is what these buildings contain, the most precious collection of art in the entire world.

“In pre-Marxist society, this was considered the private property of the ruling class, but after the Great Socialist Revolution, it was liberated and returned to the workers who created it.” Her sweeping gesture would direct their eyes down the grand staircase and back up again to the soaring ceilings.

“Comrades, all this is yours.”

This is the official welcome, lines scripted by some Party functionary, but for her it is not empty propaganda. She herself is still amazed: they are her paintings. She is like a lover who still sees her beloved in the trembling golden light of their first meeting.

Her uncle brought her here for the first time shortly after she came to live with them. It was the day his wife went to the hospital to deliver their first child. Rather than following the old ways-leaving his niece with the women while he went off with the men and got drunk-he decided instead to bring her with him to the museum, saying that they could both pass the time better in educational pursuits. She was bitterly disappointed by this change in plans, having looked forward to seeing for herself what she had heard about only in whispers. Nothing her uncle proposed could be expected to be nearly so interesting; that much she had learned already.