Mother Winter by Sophia Shalmiyev

Author:Sophia Shalmiyev
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

XXV

My boyfriend went out to explore my city by himself when I was too despondent to leave our little flat. He was a photographer, constantly snapping pictures of every event from his own point of view of an exotic world of Soviet-era leftovers, Lenin statues and young girls who lived in Stalinist buildings much like my granny’s flat. He didn’t take a picture of my granny’s apartment or the toothless couple next door. These were not monuments, or works of great art, or relics of the past. These things were still breathing, too hot to touch, even with a lens. He had an ability to hold you from a distance.

With only a few days left in St. Petersburg I decide there’s nothing left to do but to play hostess to my companion. I would take hot baths in the algae-green water after a sleepless night with a towel on my eyes to keep out the amorous light, mocking me, and attempt to move about as though walking in peanut butter.

During one of my restorative walks through the bedrooms and sitting rooms of the royals, whom some of my ancestors were indirectly responsible for killing off as soldiers in the Red Army, I overheard a tour guide tell a couple of Americans that the upholstered walls in the palace are a replica of the originals, which could not be salvaged after a fire. I was dismayed with this forgery because for most of my childhood I worshiped this elaborate silk wallpaper as something ancient and belonging to a decadent era of kings and queens.

I made a joke to the tour guide that they need to tell the kids who come through here that these are not original silks so that they don’t waste their imaginations on the wrong fantasy. She pointed to the elderly couple in front of her and scolded me for rudely interrupting their private tour.

When St. Petersburg was still called Leningrad, private was a dirty word, and I hadn’t adjusted to this new place with its new rules in the week I hid in museums on our native soil to think about you in the only way I have managed to find useful.

I found a room in the attic of the Hermitage where restorations were taking place. Everyone seemed to be away at lunch. A small canvas, a landscape full of yellows and browns, was in the process of getting its supposedly original colors back.

The window was open onto the square as the painting dried in the wind coming off the river.

What kind of data was collected about the state of the painting when it was still fresh? The restoration could only attempt to fix the piece up to a certain point, about the time one would begin to suspect the onset of an unacceptable kind of ruin. The larger, understood decay, had to be respected and drawn around. Once the new paint was applied, did the artist wait for it to dry enough to do violence to

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