Debra Dean - The Madonnas Of Leningrad

“If we miss the ferry, there’s another one,” Helen says.

Dmitri isn’t convinced. “The lines get long in the summer. I don’t want to get into the soup like a chicken. You can keep your mother company while I dress?”

“You go ahead.”

“I won’t be long.”

“No hurry.”

“On the road, we can talk.” Dmitri smiles at her, his watery blue eyes holding hers for a long moment. “It’s good you are home.”

As soon as he is gone, Marina pops up out of her chair and disappears into the kitchen. Helen hears her opening drawers and rooting around. She follows her mother into the dim kitchen and finds her methodically opening and closing each of the overhead cabinets. Post-it notes flutter like so many prayer flags.

“What are you looking for?”

“Coffee. You want a cup of coffee, yes?” Marina opens the doors beneath the sink and peers in at the collection of rags and cleaning supplies.

“I don’t need any coffee, Mama.”

“It’s somewhere here, but Dima keeps moving things.”

“Really, I’m fine. I had some at the hotel.”

“It’s somewhere here.” Increasingly agitated, Marina opens the silverware drawer again and then each of the drawers below it.

“Mama, I don’t want any. Truth is, if I have one more cup of coffee, something’s gonna shake loose.” Marina seems determined to ignore her. “Please. Come sit down.” This comes out sharper than she intended, but it stops Marina in her tracks.

“Well, if you’re sure.” Reluctantly, Marina follows Helen back out to the table and settles her hands in her lap. She smiles at Helen.

“So, how is your family?” she asks.

Helen finds the question odd, but she can’t place why. It’s nothing new to tell her mother something and find out later that she’s forgotten. Helen has long since stopped taking it personally. So she repeats last week’s big news, that her son Jeff has been offered a promotion. It’s a great opportunity, heading up customer fulfillment for the entire Southwest division, but Helen is hoping he’ll pass it up.

“I’d miss them, but it’s not just me I’m thinking of. It would mean transferring the family to Houston, and then he’d be spending a lot of time training people in India.”

“It’s nice to have the family all in one place,” Marina agrees. “But I learned you have to let them chase their dreams.”

“ Phoenix was hardly my dream, Mama.” Her mother seems never to have appreciated that Helen’s moving away was not an act of rebellion. It was her ex-husband, Don, who had insisted on picking up and transplanting her and the boys, and for no better reason than he was tired of the rain. She’d had a hard time adjusting to the heat and the ugly, sunburned suburbs with no trees. Eventually she did, and even grew to love the desert, the clean emptiness of it. But none of it-not Phoenix, not the house, not the marriage-none of it had been her dream.

Her dream had been entirely different. She minored in art at the UW, and while there, she had concocted a future identity as a working artist. The fantasy was hazy but included unencumbered days following the pulse of a painting, late nights spent in the company of other artists, arguing and laughing and drinking chianti, a disorderly, passionate existence on a picturesque houseboat or in a quaint cabin in the woods. Even at the time, she’d known that such clichés wouldn’t stand up to the scrutiny of her practical parents, and she knows herself well enough now to question whether she would have had the courage to so openly court their disapproval. As it happened, she never had the chance to find out. She got pregnant and stumbled forward into a life crushingly typical in its compromises: a husband who drank his ambition into quiet submission at the end of each day, two boys whom she loved fiercely enough to quell her periodic resentment of them, a job in the city planning office that was stupefyingly boring but from which she would never be fired, a few hours of drawing squirreled away here, a class there, a local art fair, a group show. Every once in a while, her lurking discontent would surface and overwhelm her, and then she would have to lock herself in the bathroom and run the tub, weeping under the thunder of the water. Lying submerged up to her nostrils like a crocodile, she would plot her escape: after the boys grew up and moved out, she would leave Don. She would throw off the yoke of her parents’ caution, quit her job, and commit herself wholeheartedly to her art.

Then, surprise, Don left first, beating her out the door six months before their younger boy graduated from high school. Their son Kyle was already living in Los Angeles, and in the fall, when Jeff packed up his TV and computer and moved into a dorm at Arizona State, she was suddenly, unexpectedly alone.

She could do whatever she wished. There was no one to answer to and no one to blame. She felt-not free exactly, that was not the word. More like abandoned.

Worse, it turned out that she was incapable of making the ripping, headlong leap out of the familiar that she had been planning for years. Instead, she has been slowly edging forward in a series of tentative half measures. She stayed in the house but converted the rec room to a painting studio. She stayed at her job for the health insurance but treated herself to a trip to Florence last year. Sometimes she stays up until four in the morning and leaves jars of paint thinner and brushes on the kitchen counter. At this rate, she figures she’ll be living the dream by the time she’s, say, seventy.

But she can’t explain any of this to her mother. Compared with her brother, the doctor, Helen is the wild child. Picking up and moving to the middle of a desert is just the kind of thing Andrei would never do. She can’t make her mother understand her, but she can’t give up trying, either.

“For better or worse,” Helen says, “I moved to Phoenix because I was trying to be a good wife.”

Marina smiles at her benignly. “You are, dear, I’m sure.”

“What?” Helen feels a little outside of her body, that light-headedness that comes of traveling and going without sleep. “I’ve been divorced almost ten years, Mama.”

Her mother doesn’t miss a beat. “Has it been so long? It’s strange how time seems to fly away, yes? Poof, and it’s another year.”

Helen nods. “I was just thinking that.”

Even before the all-clear siren has died in their ears, crowds are streaming up out of the air raid shelter and back onto Nevsky Prospekt, rushing to reclaim their places in line. One by one, they stop and raise their faces to the sky.

It looks like snow, drifts of snow falling from the German plane. As the white flakes float closer to earth, they resolve into squares of paper. They catch on currents of air, darting and sailing like tiny kites. Marina watches scores of children leap and grab at them with a mixture of terror and delight. Her little cousin Tatiana is tugging at her hand to escape, but Marina knows better than to let go of her in this crowd.

One of the leaflets seesaws through the air and lands at their feet, and Tatiana snatches it up like a prize. Marina reads over her shoulder. Printed in bold typeset, it says, “Wait for the full moon!” In smaller type, the message warns the reader that Leningrad cannot be defended, that German troops will destroy the city “in a hurricane of bombs and shells.”

“What does it mean about the full moon?” Tatiana asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Papa, what does it mean about the full moon?” Tatiana holds up her souvenir to her father, who has appeared through the crowd. Aunt Nadezhda lags a few steps behind, with the boy, Mikhail, in hand.

Uncle Viktor’s face turns angry as he reads. “They think we are backwards, that we’ll be frightened by superstitious garbage.” He crumples it and throws it to the sidewalk, grinding it under his boot.