Behind her were the microscopes and petri dishes full of agar that she would leave for microscopes and petri dishes in another, warmer laboratory.
She opened the box before her, lifting out a stack of books.
“So many new books?” I asked, in a tone harsher than intended.
“Not new. These are the only ones I did not burn.” She handed me one whose location she seemed to remember exactly.
I accepted it, taking note only that it was worn, not registering what it was, relieved that she would speak to me. “You go to Georgia then,” I said.
I pictured her there, in the cornucopia of the Union, surrounded by hanging pomegranates ripened to a red-orange color like no other. I saw her mouth stained a pale but fresh and purpling red, not the color of blood, from their seeds. She was dipping flat bread into a rich walnut paste and spooning potato soup, scented with fresh dill, between her lips. She was wearing her necklace of dried beans from the New World, and it lifted slightly as she swallowed.
Though I said none of this aloud, she nodded and smiled broadly.
More than half a million victims of the blockade are buried in the expansive Piskariovskoye Memorial Garden. More than half a million, mostly civilians. These bones that were people are gulped by mass graves — 186 slightly raised mounds that conceal so much.
The bronze figure of a woman, symbol of the mother country, leans toward them, hips rounded, grieving but herself ample.
Though I took the last of no variety of the institute’s collections, many are now gone. In the absence of money, and, in certain years, interest, some of Lidia’s rainbow of legumes, some of the rare landraces of rice that Alena used for her breeding program, were lost to improper storage. What we saved from rats and cold during the winter of hunger fell to rats and heat and humidity in less meager times. Some varieties that needed to be grown out and re-collected every four or five years were left unsowed for decades, as the scientists who cared about them begged money from international conferences and foundations.
A building cannot save what belongs to the fields and gardens of living people.
Voltaire got it right in Candide, I believe: a bit of decency and the physical labor and small rewards of cultivating a garden from seed are the best we can strive or hope for to dull the pain of lost expectation, or to cover our vices of weakness, boredom, and need.
But I’ve always preferred the endings of his earlier works, when he still believed that we could find sense in suffering and make meaning through history. I prefer the image of Zadig, married to his beautiful and virtuous (if somewhat dull) wife and crowned king of a Babylon of peace, glory, and abundance. “Men blessed Zadig, and Zadig blessed heaven.”
But unlike Zadig, we do not inhabit a world guided by Providence. Ours is a world with only apparent design.
Even in Candide, Voltaire was an optimist.
The Komarov Institute, where Alena had refused to ask for a job because it housed so many of the great director’s libelers, lost twenty-four of its twenty-five greenhouses to Hitlerite bombs and shells.
I knew that this would not have pleased Alena, who would have valued the lost tropical and subtropical collections so much more than she could value revenge. She would have felt relief that at least the building that housed the herbarium and library was not hit, sparing the books. She was a woman who cared more about what she was right about than about being right. That I knew about her, though I could not claim to understand her. Even now, I cannot claim to have understood her.
Though early in the hunger winter thieves had dug up their flower bulbs to boil into soup, the Botanical Gardens had fared much better than the Komarov Institute.
Later in the war, tanks pursued by German aircraft tried to hide under the Gardens’ fine trees. But when it was explained to the commander that he would bring destruction in moments to what had been cultivated for two hundred years, he ordered his men to keep moving.
How they fared depends on who is telling the story, but the most reliable sources say they escaped Hitlerite air fire on that day. I do not know which ending makes the better story, which makes the commander the more heroic figure.
The Gardens held their jubilee in February on an evening following one of our rare cloudless days, a day glorious and glinting with hard edges.
I slipped away from watercress tidbits, sliced cheeses, smoked fish, and pickled miniature beets, away from the people, wearing their new shirts and viewing books of flowers that were pressed into thick blue paper by queens two generations and millions of births and deaths earlier.
Almost alone in the fecund greenhouse, greenhouse number twenty-two, alone except for one other man, tall like me, alone like me, eluding greeting like me.
Banana trees pushed at the glass ceiling, fronds of palm and fern brushed my face, and I breathed in the smell of damp soil and violets. I avoided the other man, who stood before the date palms in some possible tribute to nourishment.
I bypassed the whites and pinks and fabulous reds of flowers, the benevolent ignorance of green foliage, and found myself before the cacti, identifying the exact specimens, grown somewhat larger now, that Alena had wiped with her nimble hands, risking her delicate skin to their spines.
I imagined her fingers on the last day I could remember her wiping the cacti. Not the last day that she had done so, but the last time I could remember in its particulars and certainly one of her last days.
And I remembered her hands, stained pink with beet juice, on the afternoon she was taken from our flat, and conjured them preparing glass slides for the microscope in the neat movements of well-known but loved work.
And finally I invoked them as I most wanted them to be, soft and held between my own hands, large and undeserving.
In each memory, her hands were small and pretty-boned, the fine pink nails groomed very short and yet still more elegant than the nails that Lidia had always grown long and shaped with pumice — nails that had left scratches on my back to hide from my wife, who either never saw them or never asked.
The week following the jubilee, I came across the book that Lidia had handed to me before she left the institute, and at last looked at it. Written by Mikhail Osipovich Gershenzon, it had been published in Moscow back in 1917. The red cloth cover was dirty and badly frayed, but inside, the pages had stayed remarkably close to white.
A passage had been underlined, perhaps by Lidia, perhaps by an earlier hand. It clung to me: “Centuries will pass; faith will again be made simple and personal. Work will be joyful, personal creativity; ownership, an intimate contact with a thing. But faith, work, and ownership will be immutable and holy in the person, enormously enriched inside, like an ear of corn grown out of a seed.”
The next day, I wrote to Albertine’s guardians, asking them to hold a letter for her until she was mature. In that letter, on one of the crisp sheets of paper now available throughout the city, I told her about her father’s sense of humor and fondness for dogs, about her mother’s facile mind and elegant posture. I told her that I had loved Alena and that Alena had loved her and that Alena had died. You were right, I told her, when you said that we would never again see them here. I signed my name in a large, clear script.
For years I did not know if my letter had passed through censors and through Europe’s ruins. Then one day, at the beginning of late life, shortly after the infernal Lysenko was deemed irrelevant and the great director’s name was declared rehabilitated as arbitrarily as he had been named a traitor, I received a letter of thanks from the woman I had known briefly as a small girl. She thanked me for the details about her parents, whom she missed but remembered only as dreamed. She thanked me for arranging her life in France. She said it was an ordinary life raising plump children. She said it was a good life.