The Mirrored World (15 page)
T
he horrible days of his death and the slow journey back to Petersburg with his coffin strapped to the rear of the public coach—I recall this with more grief than I felt at the time. I was cloaked in numbness.
For one whose voice had inspired fervent admiration, Gaspari had left behind in Russia hardly enough mourners to bear his coffin to its resting place. His tailor and three stranded members of the Italian Company put him in unconsecrated ground. As his coffin was lowered, I remember worrying that come winter the ground would be too cold for him, much colder than if he had been in Italy.
I brought Masha back—I was obliged to buy her from Nadya, though I had not sold her—and I attempted to take up my old life, remaking my routines round the absence at their center. A stranger to myself, I kneaded bread enough for a larger household. I forgot and then remembered a dozen times in a day that there was no cause now for the glass of kvas or the plate of anchovies, no need to build the fire so hot.
During this same time, Catherine seized the throne from her husband, the new Emperor, by riding into Petersburg at the head of the Imperial Guards. Within days, Peter the Third was dead by mysterious hands. These momentous happenings were like thunder heard at a great distance: they did not touch me. I slept at odd hours and then was wakeful through the night. What came to me in these hours were all my sins of omission, those small tendernesses I might have shown Gaspari while he still lived, and words I might have said to ease his passage into the hereafter.
Dear friend,
I might have said—as I have said a hundred times since—
you were a great gift to me.
These regrets haunted me even into the day. I attempted to escape them through working, and when this failed I fled the house to distance myself from its associations. Going out to take the air, I would later find myself in some unfamiliar place, and with no memory of how I had come there.
I had no cause to return to St. Matthias parish. But I rose early one morning after another night of broken sleep, hired a droshky, and directed the driver to take me across the river. On the steps of the church there, I distributed coins to the poor. If I had hoped by this to gain some relief, I did not; the squalor of the place and the desperate circumstances of the people only increased my despondency. I could not bear even to stay for the service. Thinking only how to get away quickly, I gave up protecting my skirt against the foulness in the street and set off in search of another droshky to take me home. A short distance from the church, I found the same one I had dismissed, stopped before a tavern. The driver was not about, but thinking he would return momentarily I got in it to wait.
There was such a menagerie in the street, both man and beast, that I took no special notice of a fool approaching the droshky, thin and shabbily dressed and talking to the air—there are many such creatures in Petersburg, and they are generally harmless and pitiable souls. He stopped and fastened his attention on the horse, then extracted a parsnip from the jacket of his pocket. The horse nickered and bobbed at its bridle, and the fool, bobbing his head in response, began to sing as it fed from his hand.
It was his tune that snagged my attention.
“This poor sinner only prays”
—the fool nuzzled the nose of the horse with his own as he sang—
“to be kissed to Paradise.”
All at once and with a shock, I knew.
E
ven had she not been dressed as a man, I might not have recognized Xenia except by the song. She was filthy, her hair matted as felt, and her garments stained and worn to threads.
Steadying myself, I came down from the droshky and approached her with the quiet demeanor one would use to tame a wild bird. “Xenia?”
Her gaze turned at my voice.
“It is Dasha,” I said.
“Are you looking for Xenia?” she asked. There was such a sweetness in her face—it is beyond my poor powers to describe—as if all of life’s harshness had been wiped clean from it, leaving her soft and unscarred.
I nodded. “I looked everywhere. We thought you had . . .” In spite of my intent, my voice broke.
The horse was nudging her pocket. “He could use another.”
“Where did you go, darling?” I asked.
“Do you have one?”
“A parsnip?”
“Any vegetable will do. He is not particular.”
“No.” I asked her again where she had gone.
She cocked her head. “I am here. This is all of me.”
Never mind for now, I thought. I held fast to this: she had returned to me. For the moment, it was more than enough. I took both her hands in mine, and she did not resist this.
“Let us go home,” I said.
She was content to get into the droshky, but for the length of our journey Xenia said nothing. Her attention was entirely taken up by the passing scenes, and she seemed equally pleased by all prospects. As we approached the house, I expected some change in her aspect, but there was none. The driver stopped before our door.
“Do you not remember your house?” I asked.
“I do not have one of these,” she answered cheerfully.
“Of course you do. This is your home.”
The driver would take no fare. “Not for her,” he demurred. I wondered briefly at this, but it was one with the strangeness of the morning.
Masha opened the front door. Upon seeing Xenia, she knew her instantly and burst into tears and kissed her shoulders. Xenia received these affections and allowed herself to be led inside.
“We shall have tea, but would you like to bathe first?” I asked.
“Would you like me to?”
Truth be told, her stink was bad, but I answered that I was thinking only of her comfort.
She laughed brightly. “My comfort is not your concern. Or mine either.” She was perfectly amenable to bathing if it would please me; I confessed that it would please me very much.
She stained the water brown as a flood stream. When at last she was clean, she looked to put on her breeches again.
“I have a dress for you.” I offered one of mine, but she shook her head and would not take it.
“It is black.”
“Yes. I am a widow now, too.”
“I wear red and green, you know.”
I could make nothing of this, but as she was immoveable on this point I was compelled to retrieve her garments, which Masha was on the point of burning.
“She wants them back,” I said.
Masha crossed herself. “They are
his
,” she said, and began to weep again.
The jacket and breeches were Andrei’s old military uniform, the same that had been altered so many years before that Xenia might wear them to the metamorphoses ball. The green jacket was scarcely more than a rag now and the breeches darkened with filth to the color of dried blood.
“They should be burned,” Masha said.
“I think we shall have to humor her for the present. Here now—” I handed her my handkerchief. “Come inside and make us tea.”
Tea is not the extravagance now that it was then. When Gaspari was still alive, I had brewed it by the thimbleful to cure his cough, and a little remained. I instructed Masha to put the last of it in the pot.
When I returned the clothes to Xenia, I suggested that I might have others of the same cut and color made for her. She answered just as she had to the bath: if it would please me she was amenable.
After she had dressed, we went into the drawing room. Masha brought in a tray with the tea things, a fat wedge of mutton pie, and a raisin cake. When she saw Xenia, her eyes filled again and the glasses tinkled unsteadily on the tray.
I motioned her to set it down. “I will pour.”
Masha bowed and, wiping at her eyes with the corner of her apron, fled the room. Xenia’s eyes, alert as a deer’s, followed her.
“It has been a long time,” I explained, “and she has missed you. Meat or sweet? Xenia?”
Her attention remained on the doorway. I put the pie on a plate.
“Tea?” I did not wait on an answer but poured some into a glass and stirred in two spoons of honey. I invited her to sit and she did, though on the floor beside the chair rather than on the chair itself. I handed her the glass, cautioning her as I did to be mindful that it was hot. Obediently, she set it down on the floor beside her. I poured another glass.
“You are here,” I said. I could not entirely absorb the fact of her presence. It is usual when two dear friends have been parted for many years to slake their thirst for one another’s company with talk, but Xenia seemed not to feel the need. “I thought you were drowned.”
Did she nod? I cannot remember, but I had the distinct impression that she knew this already, though she did not say so and it makes no sense that she would.
“I, too, have missed you,” I said. “Terribly.”
Though she did not utter a word, her placid gaze was so sympathetic that I talked for us both. I poured out all that had passed in her absence, my life with Gaspari, our intent to go to Italy, and how he had died. Nothing I said surprised her; she only nodded, but with such pure and simple understanding that I unburdened myself further.
“I failed to love him,” I said.
This thought had tormented me, a sliver buried in the flesh, but when I spoke it aloud, I saw it was untrue.
“No, I loved him. But I failed to know it.”
My love for Gaspari had been there all along, for how many years, so quiet that I had been no more aware of it than the pulse of my own blood. Only when he was gone did I feel it, and then as a terrible, aching absence.
“I opened myself so narrowly.” As I said this, tears formed. “And now he is gone, I am hollowed out,
opustoshyonnaya
, and can feel nothing.”
She smiled at me with exquisite gentleness.
“In nothing, we have all we need. This emptiness is sweet.”
How could she say that she had all she needed? My dear cousin had been deprived of everything that was life to her: her child and her husband and finally her reason. She had not even a kopek to her name. And perhaps not even her name, I thought, recalling that when I found her she had referred to herself in the third person. There could be nothing sweet in this.
She lifted her glass and drained the cold tea in a single, long swallow. “The vessel must be empty before it can be filled,” she said, and then shrugged as if to say this much was common knowledge. Standing, she then took up the pot and began to pour more tea into her glass. I was on the verge of telling her that this would be cold also, that I would have Masha warm it, when the tea reached the rim and began flowing over into the saucer. She continued to pour, looking on with delight as the saucer also filled and then spilled over onto the table and onto the floor. She watched until nothing more came from the spout.
“Of course, with God’s love”—she set the empty pot back on the table—“there is no end to it. It keeps pouring and pouring.”
She seemed to be waiting on me to agree, and so I did, though my mind was still fixed on my carpet and the wasted tea.
She went to the door. “I am needed.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I am needed,” she said again, and she left. By the time I had gathered my wits to follow her outside, she was already gone from sight, and though I combed the nearby streets, she had disappeared entirely.
I
returned the next morning to St. Matthias parish. Asking shopkeepers and various persons in the street, I learnt that the woman I described was a well-known personage in the neighborhood, but her name was not Xenia. She answered to Andrei Feodorovich.
She was, they said, a holy fool, and they proved this by citing miracles she had performed: not only had she predicted the death of the late Empress but there were also boils and rotted teeth healed, a baby cured of grave illness only by her rocking it in her arms. A young woman, it was said, had been prevented from marrying a charlatan by Xenia’s warning her mother against the handsome young man. Xenia helped another young woman to marry by sending her to a graveyard where a man was mourning his late wife.
Mostly, these stories were hearsay, excepting one merchant who told me that his own reputation had been saved from ruin by her intervention. Just a year before, he said, in Apostles’ Week, Andrei Feodorovich had burst into his shop as he was dipping honey from a barrel for a customer.
“She rushed in and threw herself against that barrel until it tipped. A new barrel, just delivered that morning, and the purest honey to be had. Ask who you will, I am known by everyone to be an honest businessman.” He was intent on securing this point before he continued his story.
“Well, all that fine and costly honey spilt across my floor. But then, out from the bottom of the barrel floated a rat. A huge rat! Drowned and bloated and slick as an otter. She saved my good name.”
Being a pious man, he had taken a handful of coins from his apron and tried to press them into Xenia’s hands, but she let them fall through her fingers. This had left no doubt in him that she was holy.
I asked him where I might find her.
Whenever she came onto his street, he said, he endeavored to draw her into his shop that she might bless the barrels. “She has a taste for honey, and I give her all she will eat.” But where she went afterwards, he could not say.
Though everyone seemed to know of her, no one could tell me where she lived. Nor could any say with certainty how long ago she had arrived there or from where, though there was no want of conjecture on this. Some said she had come from a monastery and that she had studied with an elder there to learn their ascetic ways. Others said she had come from some place in the north. When I said that I was her cousin, that I lived across the river and sought her that I might take her home again, they bowed to my claim but with visible reluctance. They seemed to feel she belonged to them.
Wherever I went, she had been there only recently but was not there now. Or someone had heard report of her at another place. Piecing together various sightings, I made my way north and towards the far edge of the parish, which was worse even than the heart of it. Here, every person in the street had such an air of menace that I no longer dared ask after Xenia.