Bit by bit, the ravages of age are eroding Marina\'s grip on the everyday.
Vivid images of her youth in war-torn Leningrad arise unbidden, carrying her back to the terrible fall of 1941, when she was a tour guide at the Hermitage Museum and the German a.
An elderly Russian woman now living in America, she cannot hold on to fresh memories--the details of her grown children\'s lives, the approaching wedding of her grandchild--yet her distant past is miraculously preserved in her mind\'s eye.
Bit by bit, the ravages of age are eroding Marina\'s grip on the everyday