- best-of
Eighteen months later, Dani found it—buried in the lower floors of the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg. But we did not start there.
We started at Mariinsky Palace.
The mansion was once lavish. Now, apartments and storefronts hid it from the street.
A guard shook his head then pointed instead to an unmarked door half a flight of stairs below ground.
Inside, low brick vaults forced us to duck as we followed signs to the ticket counter.
The woman behind the glass stood, peeling a handwritten notice from the door.
Instead of using fresh tape, she carefully pressed the same cloudy strips back onto the new sign. They’d collected enough dust and paper fibers that they no longer stuck.
One corner sagged.
Then another.
She pressed them down again.
We waited.
Eventually the sign surrendered, and so did she.
She sat behind the counter with her paper still in hand and sold us the only tickets available to foreign visitors.
“They include the mansion.”
And they did.
Mostly.
The audio guide led us from room to room describing paintings, sculptures, and furniture that no longer lived there.
“This masterpiece is now in the Hermitage …”
“The original furnishings are now in the Hermitage …”
Again.
And again.
The rooms themselves stood almost empty. Pale rectangles marked where paintings had once protected the wallpaper from sunlight.
~
This mansion had never been meant to be a museum.
Instead of wide galleries, it had parlors and bedrooms joined by doors that seemed to lead anywhere except where you wanted to go.
To keep traffic moving, the attendants had developed a system.
One escorted us upstairs to the proper starting room.
Others stood at key intersections throughout the house, waiting for visitors to wander off course.
We emerged through the wrong doorway. An attendant appeared almost immediately, pointing to another door.
We followed.
When we finally reached the Chinese Room, one of the few spaces that still contained its original silk walls and carved woodwork, a guard waved us through before we had finished looking.
“No stopping.”
“No touching.”
“Keep moving.”
He said to each person, no matter how quickly they moved.
A few rooms later another guard blocked another doorway. Through the window, it looked furnished.
“Special ticket.”
We moved on.
To our surprise, the chapel next door opened.
Inside, three singers appeared without announcement and filled the room with music.
The tour groups fell silent.
For five minutes the palace stopped feeling like a museum.
Then everyone applauded, stood, and shuffled toward the theater.
Gold leaf scaled the walls.
Red velvet covered the seats and balconies.
Above us, painted figures disappeared into the curve of the ceiling, and rows of empty chairs descended toward the stage.
There, another attendant explained to a group of tourists that the evening performance required yet another ticket.
As they packed away their snacks and filed out, the theater emptied allowing us to sit beneath the carved balconies and red velvet curtains.
Then the attendant returned.
“Special ticket.”
~
Dani glanced up at the dark rectangles still visible against the faded wallpaper as we headed to the exit.
“Should we go there next?”
“The Hermitage? Sure.”
We followed the other visitors through the mansion, passing from room to room until we reached the courtyard. Paths crossed the garden beneath the trees, leading to doors on the far side. Turnstiles lined part of the walkway.
The grounds were quiet. Beyond the courtyard doors, the lobby was packed.
Three ticket booths stood along one wall. Most visitors crowded around the closest. The line at the second was shorter, and the farthest booth had fewer people still.
I took the shortest line. Dani joined the one beside it.
When I reached the counter, the attendant looked up.
“Two?”
“Two.”
She printed our tickets. I paid, and we stepped away from the counter.
With four hours before the museums closed, we started on the first floor.
ROOM 12: Chandeliers hung above marble floors. Gold leaf framed doorways. Royal portraits hung on the walls.
Above each door stood a bronze sign: ~12
I crossed it off the map.
ROOM 13: A guest apartment room now containing a case of coins.
I crossed it off the map.
ROOM 14: A hallway.
“That’s weird. The map says this is a ballroom.”
I studied it.
“Oh, wow. We’re in a completely different wing than I thought.”
So I dug through my bag for a new color of pen and started again.
ROOM 35: A former throne room with more portraits.
Emperors.
Generals.
Noblemen.
Every plaque seemed to contain the name Alexander somewhere on it.
“Between the artist and the subject, half the paintings in Russia probably involved an Alexander.” I said.
Dani kept reading.
ROOM 36: portraits, again.
I glanced at the map, then at the time.
“We’re still on the first floor.” I said. “We have to move faster.”
Dani looked up from a painting.
“Does Alexander’s stance here remind young Catherine the Great? She often posed as a man, so people would see her …”
“How much faster?”
“Favorite object only,” I said.
Even so, the museum kept winning.
“Come back and look at this.” Dani said. We were on the second floor now.
I followed her, retracing my steps through five rooms to where she pointed at a familiar-looking statue.
“Bernini. From Denmark. Remember him?”
“I think you’re right,” I said.
Then I glanced at my map, scribbled through my prior cross marks as we headed through a different door in a new direction.
Two minutes later: “Come look at this.” I said while looking up. The ceiling was more elaborate than anything we’d seen downstairs.
Ten rooms later: it was Dani’s turn again. “No, seriously.” She said. “This one.”
Each stop lasted only a minute. The minutes accumulated anyway.
One hour became two and then three.
“What was in the last room again?” I asked Dani.
She shrugged.
“Probably doesn’t matter.”
I glanced down the hallway in front of us. Rooms branched down both sides.
“I’ll go this way.” I said pointing to the map. “You go this other way. We should meet up again at the end of the wing.”
“Come look at this.” She said when we regrouped.
Around the next corner a crowd stopped us.
People stood on tiptoe.
Others pressed against a glass case.
Inside stood a life-sized mechanical peacock perched among golden branches and jeweled leaves. Once each day it came alive. The bird turned its head. Its wings spread. Smaller clockwork animals stirred around it.
~
Then we came to a stairway.
I looked at the map again.
“We could go down to the basement? The rooms there seem … strange .”
Dani shrugged then opened the door.
Serbian coffins carved from logs, still smelling of resin. Samurai armor behind glass, the helmet visor down. Entire rooms of Indian paintings, the colors—vivid and bright.
Dani stopped in front of a painting and called me over.
Hundreds of figures pressed into a single plane—merchants tossing coins, priests raising their arms, bodies stacked without depth. At the center, an emperor rode through sandstone gates on an elephant.
Dani recognized the setting before I did.
“Is that Agra Fort?”
I’d seen a reproduction of this painting before.
“Jahangir’s Coronation.”
I never expected to see it in real life, especially not here.
~
Eighteen months earlier, Dani and I had been to Agra Fort.
The entrance sat a half-mile walk from the train station, along a path beside its sandstone walls.
The sun beat down. We’d been traveling all night.
A vendor appeared along the path toting a cart of pomegranates.
Dani held out two fingers, then pointed at a pair of fruits.
“Two pomegranates, please.”
The vendor picked them up and set them on a balance scale hanging from one hand.
He stacked the fruit on one side and used makeshift weights to counterbalance the other.
First, he tried a rock.
Then he replaced it with a large hex nut from a rickshaw.
He added three coins.
He removed one.
At last, he nodded.
“Eighty rupees.”
We ate them as we walked.
At the fort, it took four guards to admit us.
One scanned our ticket. A second punched holes through it with a paper punch. A third collected it. A fourth patted us down.
Then we joined another line and were patted down again.
Our pomegranates bulged from the mesh pouches on my bag.
Signs warned against bringing food.
Nobody found them.
Maybe, nobody cared.
We kept walking.
The crowd entered behind us and didn’t thin.
At each junction, one path was open. The others had ropes, or soldiers, or nothing at all — just a look that meant “no.”
So we kept moving.
In a shady pavilion against the railings sat a slab of black onyx inscribed with Persian script—the throne of Jahangir.
Signs nearby described him as a distant ruler who had made a chain that once hung between the Fort and a stone anchor at the bank of the river. It was made of pure gold and strung with bells. Anyone could shake the chain and summon their king, to petition their case to his ear.
A rope stretched across the base of a staircase I remembered climbing years before.
No sign.
No explanation.
A soldier stood beside it, not quite looking at us.
The corridor beyond bent left, toward what I thought was the Moti Masjid.
Another barrier.
We followed the only open direction and ended up back where we’d started.
I left Dani sitting in the shade and ran back alone for a photograph.
The crowds had thickened in the few minutes since I’d passed through.
Monkeys ran across the pavilion.
People sat against the pillars. They crowded the railings.
I raised my camera.
Someone bumped my elbow.
I tried again.
Someone was in my shot.
I tried to stay. My view never cleared. The crowd kept pushing.
~
My map hung limp at my side, the pen still clenched in my fingers.
Eighteen months later, in the Hermitage, I stood in front of Jahangir’s coronation and didn’t move on.
Then the lights flickered.
An attendant appeared ahead and waved everyone through a side doorway.
Rope barriers materialized across rooms we’d passed only minutes earlier.
Without realizing it, we’d been funneled toward the central staircase.
Then down.
Suddenly, we were in the courtyard.
Stars hung overhead. Snow crunched under my feet.
I looked at my map.
Half the rooms remained unchecked.