The Mirrored World (12 page)
W
e returned from the courthouse even poorer than we had been. The judge had granted Xenia control over what little remained of her estate but at the cost of her family’s protection. She, in turn, had bequeathed me this same house as a wedding gift—and with it the enmity of the person charged with finding me a husband. Mine had been a lost cause well before this—I was then nearly twenty-five, well beyond the age of a bride—but I could no longer pretend otherwise.
In short, because it was untenable for us to remain as we were, two women alone and without means or prospects, I devised the only plan I could think of, that we should go to the country and live again under my father’s roof. I wrote to him asking that he take us in.
Xenia did not like my plan, though.
“Where shall they go if the door is locked against them?” she asked me.
I explained that Marfa would go to live with her brother; Ivan and his son, Grishka, to the village where he was born; Masha would be coming with us.
“And the rest?”
“Who?”
“All the others.” There was no one unaccounted for. She gestured at the window. “Them.”
I understood. She meant the beggars. I answered that they would be taken care of.
She looked at me as though this untruth was a visible blemish on my nose.
“You cannot provide for all the poor, Xenia. You cannot even look after yourself.”
“I do not matter,” she countered. “But if you stayed here, you might look after them.”
“And how shall I do that? I do not have even a kopek to my name.”
“God is bringing a husband for you. Then you shall want for nothing.”
I could bear it no more. I broke into sobs, and once I had started could not stop myself. Xenia patted and stroked my head, but this only loosened my grief further. I was alone and unloved. Only Xenia remained, murmuring in my ear that my husband was coming. But she, too, was gone. Bereft, I exhausted myself in tears.
Masha entered to say that Gaspari was downstairs. I had no desire to be seen in such a state, but neither would I send away our last friend in the city. “Say that I shall be down presently.” I splashed water on my face, then gathered myself together and went downstairs.
He met me with such a look of sorrow that I suspected Masha had already told him our news. But no, he was only mirroring what he found in my face.
“The court has sent away Xenia Grigoryevna?”
“It is not the court’s doing, but we must leave nonetheless.”
I told him all that had occurred at the courthouse, and what I had written to my father.
“I have some monies put away, and this I would give you. You must allow me to do this, dear friend.”
He had been setting aside sums every year so that he might return to Italy. I did not know the amount, but I knew its value.
“I cannot. I have no way to repay you, and it would only forestall what needs to be done.”
He looked stricken. An unaccustomed silence fell upon us. He seemed to be making an effort to say something further, but he could find no stories for me now. Xenia entered, wearing Andrei’s jacket over her dress. Gaspari stood up from his chair and, bowing, offered it to her.
Taking no notice of his courtesy, she announced to him, “I am going away. This shall be her house.”
“Yes. I am greatly saddened to hear it.”
She gave him a look of impatience. “This shall be her house,” she repeated, and pounded the wall as though to give proof there were no vermin in it.
“Xenia, please. Come and sit.” I gestured to Gaspari’s chair. “She is distressed by the prospect of our leaving.”
“Her distress is shared by all those who will miss you.”
“It is well built,” Xenia said, “a good marriage portion.”
Briefly, I held the hope that in his imperfect understanding of Russian, he might miss her meaning, but I saw in his flushed countenance that he grasped it too well. He fingered his handkerchief and seemed to scan it for flaws.
“Were I”—Gaspari faltered—“were I a man like others, nothing could halt me. But I am not . . . I cannot, how to say . . .” He fluttered his long fingers pitifully as though to conjure the words from the air. “I am not made for marriage.”
Xenia dismissed his objection. “None of us is made for marriage. It is made for us.”
I tried to put an end to his misery and mine. “Please. You needn’t. She doesn’t know what she says.”
His wretched gaze met mine. “No, she hears the cry of my heart. It does not want you to go. How will I stay on alone in this cold city? They praise my Orfeo and when I sing the part of Procris, they weep. They want to sleep with my Alexander. But I am still the monster. Even when I come to their beds. Who in this cold city hears my heart speak its own words and does not mock me? You, Dasha. If I were whole, I would ask for you so that you might stay.”
I felt the floor tip and slide, right itself, and slide in the other direction. I grasped my chair to steady myself and set the room to rights again. I found my tongue.
“Ask.”
And so he did. Gaspari made the journey to the country to speak to my father and claim me.
How could I have expected any other reception but that which he got? My father derided him. “So she wishes to marry the jester after all,” he said. Apparently, he readily agreed to release me, but he would not release my dowry. Why, he demanded, should he buy a breed horse that had been gelded? And was not his daughter already gaining a house by this marriage? It seems my letter had come to him in the same post with another from Aunt Galya, wherein she made complaints against my character, among them that I was scheming and ungrateful and had taken advantage of her poor daughter’s ruined wit to steal her house.
Gaspari bowed and left without protest. He was loath to tell me any of this at the time; when he returned to Petersburg, he said only that we had all we should expect from my father.
“I will ask my brother, Vanya, to speak with him,” I said, but Gaspari shook his head.
“A brother will not look on me more kindly.”
My humiliation turned to anger. This dowry was rightly mine. Without it, I had nothing to bring to a marriage and was no better than a beggar. With what dignity I could feign, I let Gaspari know that I released him from any obligation.
“Obligation?” He tilted his chin and knitted his brow in the way he had of seeming puzzled or vexed or both. I think it is the habit of someone who must continually question his understanding, for I noticed that he never wore this look when speaking his own tongue.
“It is your father does not want you, Dashenka. My feelings have not changed.”
W
e were wed quietly and without ceremony. The church would not condone such a marriage, but Gaspari bribed a priest to mutter a few words over us in the vestibule of the church, with Xenia and five musicians from the Italian Company as witnesses.
Upon leaving, Xenia invited the beggars on the steps to share in the wedding supper, and with the priest and this motley company we returned on foot to the house. It was high summer, and the servants had spread blankets in the yard that we might dine
al fresco
, as the Italians say, like peasants in the field at harvesttime.
Toasts were made with both vodka and a sweet liquor that tasted of licorice. One by one, the guests wished us wealth and happiness and long life.
“Per cent’anni,”
the Italians said. For a hundred years. And
“Gor’ko!”
the Russians answered. The vine is bitter, and to make it sweet the bride and groom must kiss.
Gaspari held my chin and put his mouth on mine. His lips were soft and insinuating. I had never been kissed and did not know that a shock of heat can travel between two bodies. I startled and drew back. About me, there were hoots and cheers.
In all this celebration, Xenia had sat apart with the priest. But on hearing the noise, she rose from her seat. “The time has come,” she said, and taking me by the hand led me into the house. At the top of the stairs, she turned into her room.
Her bed was dressed in the bridal linens I had stitched more than half my life ago, put away for this night, and then forgotten. Draped across these was a nightgown. I had not seen it for some dozen years, but it was so deeply familiar that my eyes instantly sought the place on the yoke where my mother had sewn a rosette. Next to it was my first imperfect copy—its stitches uneven and lumpy, the linen round it pulled and pricked—and round the yoke the record of my growing skill was visible in each successive flower. I felt again the remembered pressure of the thimble and needle in the tips of my fingers, my furrowed concentration as I had worked this bit of linen. Just as a peasant works his patch of earth—his sweat watering the soil, his prayers tilled into it season after season, and in turn, the soil worked into his brown palms and under his nails—we twine ourselves into a small piece of the world and it becomes us. My old life was suddenly very dear to me.
Xenia pressed a paper into my hand. It was the deed to the house. At the end of the faded document was fresh ink.
In the name of Colonel Andrei Feodorovich Petrov, I bequeath to my cousin, Daria Nikolayevna Pososhkova, this house and all my worldly goods. May she use them to God’s glory and in memory of our love.
Below this, the priest had marked a place for her to sign and added another inscription saying that it was copied and witnessed on this date.
I hesitated, my eyes drifting back to the bed. “But where shall you sleep?”
Was there ever such a dolt? But Xenia did not mind my ungracious thanks. She began to unlace my dress. “You shall be with your beloved, and I with mine.” She helped me to remove my undergarments until I was naked and shivering, though the night was warm. Below the open window, the Italians had begun to serenade. Their high voices drifted up and snared in the limbs of the plane tree and fluttered its leaves so that they sparked with the last lights of the evening sun.
She slipped the gown over my head, and my arms into the sleeves, and the moment was upon us. The feeling rose up in me that I was departing on a long journey from which I should not return. Like all travelers, I wished to sit with her in silence for a time before I set out, but I could not give voice to this and so, as she started to leave, I impulsively threw my arms round her and clung as though we were about to be parted forever. She stroked my hair, and after a time loosened herself from my grasp. “He is waiting.” And with this, she closed the door behind her and left me alone.
I do not know how long I remained there before Gaspari knocked. It must have surprised him to enter and find such an immodest and eager-seeming bride standing just on the far side of the door.
“You are not in bed.” He, too, was dressed in a nightgown, and though this was unremarkable given the circumstances, I had not anticipated it. Transfixed, I stared at the curve of his breasts beneath the thin linen. In the baths, I had seen the bodies of men and of women, but I had never seen this.
He went to the window and closed it, muting the sounds of music. Then he pulled fast the drapery and, blessedly, dissolved from view. I allowed myself to be led to the bed and lifted up onto it. In the dark, I heard his breathing and felt his hand at my waist, very gentle.
My recollection of what followed has the quality of a fever dream in which the most astonishing happenings—such that could scarcely be imagined by the waking self—are met by the dreamer without question. My body, suddenly unfamiliar to me, was revealed to be a map that could be read by touch. His hands, soft as a woman’s, found those places where the soul lay just beneath the surface, like coals banked in a white ash of skin. His tongue worked in more secret places, speaking a hitherto unsuspected language. With quiet insistence, he coaxed from me a wild fluency. I writhed and cried and burbled gibberish and was by all outward and inward signs overtaken by a kind of lunacy from which I emerged spent and badly shaken. I began to weep. It frightened me how thin is the membrane that separates us from madness. I thought of Xenia.
“Did you not enjoy it?”
I did not know how to answer. “I thought I should die.”
“It is called the little death.”
I was hotly ashamed, but I had to know. “Is this what others do?”
“Most take their pleasure more directly. What they say, a means? To get children? But I was not created to get, only to give. However poor, it is my gift to please.” For all the seeming modesty of his words, there was pride in his voice.
“But if it gives you no pleasure—”
“No, no, it makes me very happy.” He found my hand. “You are like figs, Dashenka.”
D
id you not enjoy it?
Xenia had asked this same question of me several years earlier. I had accompanied her and Andrei to Grand Duchess Catherine’s summer palace, Oranienbaum. As a winter entertainment for Catherine’s court, an immense sliding hill had been constructed of timbered frames in the shape of an upended bow and bricked with polished ice so that one might slide down one slope and then up the facing side. It was smaller than the famed Flying Mountain that is there now, but more treacherous, for there was no track to hold the sledge to its course, nothing to prevent it from spilling over the edge.
At Xenia’s urging, we mounted the steps to the top. From this vantage could be seen the entire breadth of the park, the palace in the distance and, gleaming dully like a river, a long ribbon of ice falling away from the platform where we stood. Donkeys and serfs working with ropes were hauling a small sledge back upstream. It resembled a coffin fit with runners. They heaved it up onto the platform, and then waited on us with horrible expectancy.
Together with the driver, we were wedged into this conveyance, Xenia in front and I behind her. Then we were pushed to the lip of the precipice—and over. The sledge careened down the steep incline, ice rushing towards us and all else blurred by terrifying speed. I buried my eyes in the only solid thing, Xenia’s back. She was screaming. I felt the weightless velocity of our descent in my liquefied bones. Then, with a nauseating heave, we reversed course and began to slide backwards, falling and falling and falling. At long last, the sledge began to slow, and finally it came to a rest. We emerged, miraculously unharmed. Xenia was laughing, breathless and eager to ride again.