The Mirrored World (10 page)

Chapter Nine

T
hat Lenten season, I had no need of bells to call me to prayer nor icons to put me in mind of our Savior’s suffering. I had Xenia. Very early every morning, she set forth to matins. I went with her, but my own piety was a fraud, compelled as it was by apprehension of what she might say or do were I not there to prevent it.

Before leaving the house, she stuffed her purse with kopeks and silver rubles she had taken from the household strongbox and filled a basket with bread she had taken from the kitchen. These she distributed to the unfortunates outside the church, who began to greet her by calling her
matushka
, “little mother.” As she emptied her purse and basket, she drew from them stories of how they had come to their situation, labyrinthine tales of illness and death, lost positions, failed crops, violent or cheating masters. Once when I was late in rising, she had already gone, and when I arrived at the church, I found her sitting on the ground in the company of the beggars, quite as though she meant to set out a begging bowl herself.

More respectable persons kept a discreet distance. Her look barred their approach, and those few who braved addressing her were rewarded with disinterest or, worse, her unmodified thoughts. A singer in the choir who had regarded himself as a rival to Andrei tendered his condolences to Xenia. He heaped extravagant praise on her husband and claimed a great affection for him.

Xenia cut him off. “You were jealous of him.”

“It was I who brought the largest wreath for his casket,” the man protested. “I might have expected a word of thanks.”

“You already have your reward. He is dead.”

Feeling the eyes of those round us, I hurried her into the church. “You should not have done that.”

“His compliments were lies. He showed no affection to Andrei while he lived.”

“He meant no harm,” I answered. “It is what people say when someone has died.”

She slapped my hand from her shoulder. “What do I care about that?”

When she was safely in prayer beside me, I tried to turn my mind to God but I could not, except in anger.
Is this what you want,
I demanded,
that she should wreck herself so publicly?

After the service, she asked again to be taken to Smolenskoye cemetery. She had not yet been to his grave, for I had feared it might further unhinge her, but plainly I had no power to protect her from herself.

“As you wish,” I replied.

Her eyes sharpened inquisitively.

Yes, I knew the pettiness of my tone, the martyred weariness, but I thought myself justified in it.

For all my misgivings, the cemetery did not disturb her. She did not even weep at the sight of his grave but stood looking on the new stone and the raised mound of snow as though she were absorbing the truth of them. Then she sat right down on the ground beside his head. She ran her fingers over the letters of his name. After a while, she said, “Leave us.”

I hesitated. “I will wait in the sleigh.” She did not answer.

She was gone so long that I began to worry and to repent my former harshness, but at last she appeared from out of the trees and without a word climbed into the sleigh. I could not read anything in her countenance; she was only quiet.

T
he large circle of Andrei and Xenia’s friends who had called at the house after little Katenka’s death kept away now, as though so much sorrow and ill fortune were a contagion. I do not fault them. Had she been receptive to their sympathy then, she might have had it now. No matter; she did not want it. She would not receive even her own mother. After that incident, a friend of Aunt Galya’s would not be put off by my saying that Xenia was indisposed to visitors and insisted on going upstairs, since Xenia would not come down. “She only thinks she wants solitude,” said this woman whose name I have forgotten. She knew what it was to mourn a husband, the woman said, “but trust me, too much solitude is the worst cure.” Finding Xenia in her room, she tried to comfort her with assurances that this grief would pass.

“I thought I should have died with my husband,” Madam Somethingorother said. “Nothing could console me. My appetite suffered, and I took no pleasure from my friends. I could not be amused. Then one day”—the widow’s round face brightened at the memory—“I was brought a little china dish of strawberries and cream. Eating them, I thought I had never tasted anything so lovely. And after that, all my old delights returned to me, one by one.”

Xenia looked at her, impassive. “So you believe I may also become an idiot again?”

This is not to say we were entirely without company. Gaspari was insensible to her slights. The first time he called, she happened to wander into the drawing room shortly after him. She was wearing Andrei’s jacket, a habit she had acquired that seemed to comfort her. He stood and bowed, and she perused his person.

“Are you the eunuch?”

He answered with no sign that the question was rude. Thus encouraged, she sat down beside him. “Did it hurt when they cut you?”

“I do not remember it. I was given opium.”

“My heart has been cut out of me, yet I still feel such pain.”

He nodded. “There is no opium for this wound,” he said, touching his breast. “I am sorry for the loss of your husband.”

With matching graveness, she replied, “And I am sorry for the loss of your eggs.” They sat together without speaking for another few moments and then, abruptly, she stood. “I must return to my prayers.” And with this, she turned and left the room.

When he took his leave, he presented his card and asked me to extend to her his apologies for having come at an inopportune hour, promising to try again for a more agreeable time.

We were host as well to increasing numbers of beggars. Though Xenia was discourteous to her friends, she took exceeding care of those beneath her, and those most in need she brought back to the house with us. She offered them food and a place to sleep and whatever else they expressed a desire for. One cannot fault such behavior; those who have read the
Domostroi
will recognize that these acts conform exactly to its prescriptions for Christian charity. That said, so literal an interpretation was exasperating. Many of these unfortunates were pulsing with fleas and stank so strongly that Marfa would not tolerate their sleeping in the servants’ room. I tried to make Xenia see reason. Where were we to put them? Her answer was to bed the worst offenders in front of the stove in the drawing room that they might be out of the way, and to have their food brought there also. The stench could never be aired entirely from that room, but as we no longer had respectable visitors, it was, I suppose, a moot concern.

More troubling than what came into the house was what left it. I discovered that in addition to the bread, Xenia had been tucking into her basket whatever other thing caught her eye—the porcelain bonbonniere on her dressing table, a silvered candlestick. I could not curb her generosity. I tried bargaining her down to sensible sacrifices—an apple in place of the inkwell, an earthenware mug for a porcelain cup—but the ploy failed, and so I began to hide certain of her more precious things, reasoning that she might otherwise regret later having given them away.

One day, she pulled from the basket a particularly fine pair of gloves and handed them to an orphan. They were made of delicate white kid worked with silver thread, and I had coveted them once. When the child pulled them onto her filthy hands, I flinched.

“Xenia, if you must, it would be better to sell the finer things and then give the profits to the poor.”

She didn’t answer but looked on me with something like pity. I felt that she could read my thoughts.

“They are too thin,” I protested. “They will not even keep her hands warm.”

Perhaps it was to appease me that some days later she determined to pack up her court dresses and the rest of her finery and take them to a pawn shop. Heaped on the bed and floor was a colorful froth of skirts and bodices.

“Oh no, darling, I did not mean that you should sell these,” I said.

“I cannot stand the sight of them.”

“Maybe not now . . .” Someday, I thought, she would come out of mourning and return to society. She would want to marry again. I started to pick up a matching bodice and skirt, yellow brocade with gold lace trim, that I might return them to the wardrobe. “Later, you may think differently.”

“She is
gone
!” Xenia shrieked. “Are you too dull to see it? There is no point in keeping her things.”

She snatched the bodice from my hands and in doing so tore loose a piece of lace. Fiercely, she ripped it away from the sleeve and then tore the lace from the other sleeve for good measure. She grabbed up two handfuls of the skirt, meaning to rend this to pieces also, but the fabric would not give. Her features strained with the effort and then went slack, and quick as the storm had erupted it was spent, and she was overcome with remorse.

“I’m sorry.” She held the skirt back out to me. “Please take it. You should have something pretty to wear when your husband calls.”

“I do not need your dresses or your pity either.”

She nodded and let it fall to the floor. “You are right to be offended. I should not try to buy your forgiveness with rubbish. You see its worth. Oh, Dasha”—her face contorted in anguish—“when I recall my terrible thoughtlessness. I have let people starve that I might wear that lace.” She looked about her. “But I shall be naked before God. How shall I ever account for all this?”

The pawnbroker was more than willing to relieve her of her finery. Fingering a pink moiré silk, he tried to mask his greed with appraising looks, frowning at imaginary flaws and clucking. After thus inspecting each dress, he offered a very small sum for the lot, less than the worth of one alone. Xenia was content to take whatever he offered, but I would not allow it and haggled with the miser. He raised his price a little, then seeing Xenia’s disinterest in the outcome of our bargaining returned his attention to her.

“I can see that you know the worth of discretion. It is worth more than money, and I can promise you, no one shall know where these came from. I will be a cipher, a stone.”

She was as impassive as the Sphinx in reply.

Only by irritating him like a fly was I able to extract another fifty kopeks. From the shop to the church, I vented my annoyance at her having been swindled, but I could not persuade Xenia to share my grievance. She was as blasé about money as the Empress herself. When we reached the church, she handed the profits, purse and all, to the first beggar who held out his hand.

G
aspari called again, and again Xenia was at her prayers but said that I should entertain him in her place. Had he relied on me for this, we should have sat in silence. I am often tongue-tied with strangers and have what the philosopher Monsieur Diderot calls
l’esprit de l’escalier
, staircase wit: only long after a remark is made to me will my imagination supply the thing I should have said in reply. But I was further stricken with self-consciousness by Gaspari. There were no rules by which to steer conversation with a person who was neither man nor woman.

As it happened, though, Gaspari liked to talk, and even hampered by his poor Russian he was gifted at this. Left to choose a theme, he told me of his village in the north of Italy and described for me its varied charms—hillsides dotted with sheep, a sun that shone far warmer than it does here, the scents of rosemary and drying grasses that perfume the air.

“My mother’s garden has a fig tree in it,” he said, “and to eat one of these figs is to taste music on the tongue. I dream of this, to sit in the warm sun and eat a plate of these figs.”

I nodded.

He flattered me that I had a talent to listen. “Most persons, they are intent only to make the impression. But you are not this way. I see you at the ball; you do not care for what you look like, only to help your cousin.”

“I was mortified,” I admitted.

“I do not know this word.”

“Embarrassed.”

“Ah.” He nodded. “Mortified. It is the condition of life, yes?”

I gradually forgot my discomfort and even came to anticipate his next visit. If Xenia did not show herself—and she rarely did—he was content to pass an hour entertaining me with accounts of who had attended his performance on the previous night, what they had worn and said, who had snubbed or flattered whom. A keen mimic, he would adopt the guttural voice of a well-known attaché and this man’s habit of adjusting the weight of his stomach as he spoke, and then with the next breath he would answer in a comical falsetto that I recognized as belonging to a certain lady-in-waiting.

I confess, I wondered at first if Xenia might be fodder for amusement on his subsequent calls—she would be so easy to mock. I did not know how few doors were open to him, how alone he was in Russia. But more important, I did not know then how Gaspari judged the world, upside down. His barbed wit was reserved for his betters; those whom the rest of the world disdained he treated with courtesy. I think this accounted for the tolerance he showed to Xenia. When I apologized for her, he assured me there was no need.

“She is herself,” he said.

Though I could not agree, I did not correct him.

X
enia and I continued to work at cross-purposes, she pillaging her possessions and I hiding what of them I could in my room. Her methods were haphazard: when I went with her to Andrei’s grave, I might find small tokens she had left there on a previous visit—a swollen folio of music and the glass stopper that had belonged to a decanter—and I could only guess at what else may have been taken away by grave robbers. On one day, she went to the church with only an onion and a linen rag, but on the next she pulled from her basket pieces of silver that had been put away for Lent, handing a soupspoon to a bewildered beggar and a fork to the next. Coming to a lean man with leather skin and a beard so ratty it appeared to grow uninterrupted from his sheepskin, she fished about in the basket. She dug out something but then stopped short of giving it. Her eyes softened. “It is such a little thing,” she mused, turning the object in her palm. “The material world is so strong, Dasha. These things are worth nothing, yet they cling to my soul like vines.”