The Mirrored World (13 page)

“It is like flying!” she said, and was puzzled that I did not share her euphoria.

T
he morning following the wedding, Xenia was gone from the house. I thought nothing of this, but when she did not return by late afternoon I sent Grishka to the church to fetch her. He returned and reported that she had not been seen there. I sent him directly back out to look for her at Andrei’s grave. So narrow were her habits that I could not conceive of any other destination, but even before he returned, a part of me knew she had gone much farther.

I found myself standing outside Andrei’s room. Since his death, the door had remained closed, but that morning it stood ajar. I entered. In the faded heat of the midsummer evening, the room was close. Everything in it was silted with a fine sheath of dust, but otherwise it seemed much as it had been while he was alive. Because he slept in Xenia’s room, it was not furnished with a bed but only a dressing table, a boot chair and commode, a standing mirror, and other such accoutrements as are necessary to a gentleman’s dressing room. His wig was now gone from its stand, and there were clean shapes on the dressing table where formerly there had been jars of pomade and powder and whatnot. She had given some of his things away, yet by comparison to the looted appearance of the rest of the house the room seemed overstuffed with possessions.

For this reason, perhaps, it was some moments before I saw Xenia’s black mourning dress, her last remaining garment, discarded on the floor of the empty armoire. When I picked it up, something fell from its folds: the delicate cross and chain she had worn round her neck since infancy. Apprehension knifed through me.

Still, I had only a foreboding and nothing material to pin it to. In the weeks that followed, I returned to the church and to Smolenskoye cemetery again and again, thinking I might find her or some sign that she had been there. I sought her out in increasingly unlikely quarters of the city as well, asking at churches and taverns and wherever people were congregated if any had seen a woman of about my years but more comely and answering to the name Xenia Grigoryevna. That by all appearances she had left the house unclothed would suggest that someone should have remembered seeing her, but it was as though she had been removed from the earth and no trace left behind.

We went to the authorities, but they were uniformly uninterested—women go missing all the time, murdered or escaped from husbands or fathers or masters. As Xenia belonged to no one, no husband or father or master, she might go where she pleased and they had no cause to find her and bring her back. Yes, said one uncurious officer, it was less common for a woman to leave behind even her clothing. But then again, he added, the rivers are full of madwomen.

When it was spoken aloud, my foreboding instantly assumed material form. I recalled the terms of her parting from me on my wedding night. “You shall be with your beloved, and I with mine.” How had I missed the portent in these words when she said them? Why would she give me her house except that she saw no further need of it herself? Why had I not questioned this gift?

The answer came to me that I had not questioned it because I had need of a house.

After this, I could not cross a bridge without my gaze drifting down to the water and seeking there her countenance, wavering dim and green in the depths. What I found was only my own reflection on the surface. I contemplated Lake Svetloyar and the pilgrims who had gone there and disappeared.

At the end of a fortnight, Gaspari was compelled to return to the Italian Company, which was still in summer residence with the court at Tsarskoye Selo. I could not bring myself to desert the city. “If she were to return . . .” I explained. He agreed, though I saw in his face that it was only out of kindness and an unwillingness to destroy what hope I had.

In truth, this hope was small and unsteady. Strung between unsettled expectation and despair, on some days I prayed fervently that God might bring her back to me and at other times I asked only for her bones that I might lay my grief to rest alongside them. Later still, my supplications were even more faltering and exhausted. Give me only this, I prayed, the reassurance of your presence. But my thoughts floated outwards and came back thin as an echo. I continued to look for her on the church steps, but she was never there, and I went less often. At some moment unmarked by me, the low flame of my faith guttered and went out.

Chapter Twelve

T
he musici were notorious for being temperamental—it was widely held that the sacrifice of their manhood unbalanced their humors—and Gaspari’s reputation in the court was no different. Stories of his unrestrained behavior circulated through the court: that he had insisted on being reseated above the salt at a supper and then left anyway, that he had ripped up a score because he did not like the composition, that he canceled performances for no better reason than that he objected to the weather. Of course, one cannot depend upon wags for the truth if it can be improved by exaggeration and falsehoods. In truth, the thin blood of Italians is unsuited to our climate, and Gaspari suffered most grievously in the winter. He was often wracked with terrible chills and coughs, and if he did not perform, it was because of this. And while it is true that he once called Alexi Bestuzhev-Ryumin a horse’s ass and refused to sing a note unless the Grand Chancellor was first removed from the building, it was not reported that the Grand Chancellor had earlier insulted him very grievously or that the whole matter came to nothing once it was discovered that there had been a misunderstanding and the Grand Chancellor was not, after all, present at the opera house that evening.

I doubt the world would have credited how unassuming a man Gaspari was within our walls and how generous to his friends, but he did nothing to help his own cause. Perceiving that most persons found him strange and repellent, he moved through society with a haughty air, stiffening at whispers and sensitive to imagined slights. And if any person had the temerity to talk while he sang or to applaud tepidly afterwards, that person was forever his enemy. Even fawning admiration, though he craved it, might arouse in him suspicions that he was being mocked, and he would then retaliate with a barbed wit.

As the cognoscenti prize most what is most rare and delicate, they tolerated what they deemed this capriciousness and even encouraged it. They wanted monsters, and so they had them.

In the year that followed Xenia’s disappearance, Araja announced that he would revive his
Alessandro nell’Indie
, the opera that had first brought Gaspari to the attention of Petersburg. With the singer Carestini gone to London, Gaspari anticipated taking the
primo uomo
role of the Indian King Poro who battled with Alexander the Great for the love of his Indian Queen, Cleofide.

Gaspari was violently offended, then, to learn that Araja had awarded the role instead to Lorenzo Saletti for his return to the Russian court. “It is the faithful dog is kicked,” Gaspari said.

He took up his old part, that of Alexander, but returned from rehearsal the first day frothing with bitterness towards Saletti, who was, he claimed, so past his vigor that his listeners must envy the deaf. “Squeak, squeak, squeak! I cannot bear it! I cannot pretend to a noble contest with this fat, old mouse. I should be chasing him about the stage with the broom!”

He grew increasingly distressed with each rehearsal. It physically pained Gaspari to hear a sour note, and though he did his best to shield himself from the assaults by covering his ears while Saletti sang, it was more than he could endure. He broke down into weeping one night, and I feared he would not last until the evening of the first performance.

It was my habit to watch his performances from the wings, where I could not be seen. Sitting in the house meant suffering the many eyes that peered at me from behind fans, the trail of titters that attended my coming or going. “The musico’s wife,” they would whisper, and I knew they were thinking of what we did in our bed.

And so, on the first evening, after I had helped Gaspari with his dressing, I tucked myself behind a bit of scenery, where I should be out of the way.

Saletti took the stage in his gold turban and striped robes, assumed a pose, and without yet singing a note brought the audience to a cheer. When he had drunk his fill of it, he began to sing. He was indeed past his strength, though not so terrible as my husband had portrayed him. I looked over to Gaspari, who stood in the shadow of the proscenium awaiting his own entrance. His painted features twisted at each wavering note, and I worried that he might turn and leave the theatre. But as I watched, he closed his eyes and shook loose his long limbs.

As Saletti scaled the last treacherous note of his aria, Gaspari strutted onto the stage, swishing his purple robe in glorious arcs of color, and planted himself in the center of the footlights. He did not wait even a beat after Saletti’s last note before he began to sing himself, and thus he deprived the older musico of any applause. For the length of the opera, Gaspari greatly embellished his part, departing from the score to weave in filigrees of trilling and florid ornamentation. The battle between Alexander and the Indian King for the love of Cleofide was a contest also between the two musici, and it was one that Saletti could not win. To hear them singing together was to see history reenacted and to understand how Alexander had so thoroughly vanquished and humiliated India.

At the end of the second act, Gaspari finished his final aria with an exquisite
messa di voce
, sustaining a single note, letting it swell and then fade almost to nothing before it rose again like a phoenix. The audience was stirred to its feet and shouted its bravos. Rather than exiting, Gaspari remained near the lip of the stage as Saletti sang, that he might relish the unflattering comparisons being made in the house.

This triumph did not appease Gaspari’s pricked vanity. He talked more frequently of quitting Russia—moving to Italy or even to Paris, where the climate was more temperate and he might be better appreciated—but he was too much rewarded in the employ of Her Imperial Majesty to give it up as yet for uncertain prospects. And so we continued to live a quiet life in the shadow of the court.

There was little left in the house to remind me of Xenia. So many of the furnishings had been sold or given away, and the repetitive tasks of domesticity—the sweeping and cleaning and polishing—gradually erased her signature from what remained. I did not forget her, but the sharp pain of her loss softened and became like a swollen joint or weakened back. One accommodates the ache, and it becomes a part of you.

Because I could have no expectation of children, I had schooled myself not to want them, having learnt from Xenia the peril of unchecked longing. I managed the household well and was attentive to my husband’s particular needs, keeping the stove fueled at night in the worst of winter and tucking cooked stones wrapped in flannel round his feet. When in spite of this he took ill, I stayed at his bedside and fed him strong broths. I also learnt to prepare dishes of his birthplace and even taught myself some few phrases of Italian that he might feel himself more at home here. As Xenia had for Andrei, I brought him warm kvas with honey and herbs for his throat. However, what had been at the heart of that little gesture—a passionate and unreserved love—I could not give. Perhaps I was unwilling to fall again into the abyss that had so frightened me on the first night of our marriage. I think I held myself a little apart.

Did he sense any shortcoming in my heart? I do not know. I think we were happy enough.

S
eason followed season, each alike except for the small changes that every year brings—a new opera or a new way to wear a wig, shifts in alliances between person and person or country and country—diversions that fill our days with seeming import but are then displaced by whatever newer thing follows. At some point during this time, the Empress engaged the architect Rastrelli to design a splendid new masonry palace on the site of the old Winter Palace. For this work, thousands of laborers were absorbed into the city and took up residence in huts near the site. They labored there for years, the enormous structure rising by such slow increments as to seem unchanging, as though it had always been there in its unfinished state.

The war begun against Prussia in 1756 also rumbled on ceaselessly, a tidal ebb and flow of battle lines that washed over the whole of Europe but was present to me only in the person of my brother, Vanya. Cut off by my family, I had no news of him until his death at Züllichau, which I learnt of when the rolls were published in the papers. In a dull fog, I was on the point of traveling to the country to console my parents, but Gaspari prevented it. “There is nothing there for you, Dashenka,” he said. “They do not love you. I am all your family now.” After that, I did not take an interest in the war again until I was forced to by circumstances that I will relate.

On Christmas Day of 1761, the tolling of the bells brought news of the death of Her Imperial Majesty. I remember feeling no shock. She was old—or so it seemed then, though it occurs to me that she was younger by several years than I am now—and she had been ill for so long, her death predicted so repeatedly that when it arrived it felt like the exhalation of a long-held breath.

No one of our acquaintance was happy at the prospect of her nephew, Grand Duke Peter, taking the throne, but I did not anticipate how this would change our lives or with what suddenness. Within two days of her death, the new Emperor dismissed the Italian Company from the service of the court. Only a fortnight before, Elizabeth had issued a decree to recruit more actors and musicians for the troupe. Now he ordered the theatre shuttered, with all its stock of scenery, effects, machinery, and costumes left inside to molder. Peter moved himself into the dead Empress’s still-unfinished palace and set about to wipe clean from memory all the graces of her reign.

Gaspari was then suffering the annual toll that our winters took on him, a perpetual weariness from always being cold, but this seeming reversal of his fortunes had a tonic effect. His spirits rose at the news and for this reason: there was nothing to keep us here any longer. He might now return to Italy. He had succeeded in putting by more than enough funds to keep us in comfort until he found a position. We might go first to the village where he had been born. He happily anticipated showing it to me—the terraced hills with their low stone walls, the lion’s head over the door of his mother’s house—and, in turn, showing me to his relations. These were, by his account, most all of the village.

I made an effort to share his joy, but he knew me too well not to feel the thinness of my enthusiasm. “I know what I ask, Dasha . . . but I will die if I stay here.” And then he tried to cheer me with this: so much of Petersburg, the palaces and canals and bridges, were but poor copies of what I should find in Italy. “And everything looks more happy there,” he added, “because it is where it belongs.” He wrote to his mother with the news that he was coming home and bringing with him his Russian wife.

The war had made private travel treacherous, and the route to Italy passed through Prussia, where we could not go. However, in his eagerness to quit Russia, Gaspari found a means. An envoy to the ministry at Leipzig had been appointed to announce His Majesty’s accession to the throne and would leave on this mission shortly. Gaspari approached Countess Stroganova, who was a devoted follower of the new Emperor, and secured from her the favor of our being attached to Prince Bezborodko’s travel party.

I gathered together the household and said that I wished to free them to settle their own futures. If they had a place to go, I would see to their papers; if not, they might serve my aunt Galina Stepanovna. With many tears, we began to pack our belongings that we should be ready to leave within the week. Passports were arranged for Gaspari and me, and because I could not bring myself to sell it, the house was put with an agent to let.

Christ instructed his disciples not to lay up their treasure on earth but in Heaven. For where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also. But the heart stubbornly attaches itself to familiar places and things and would rather have these, no matter how humble, than to exchange them for the promise of what is glorious but unknown. That Italy’s skies would be as yellow as Paradise did not console me; I preferred the granite shadows of this most bleak and most beautiful city. Even the history of my sadness here was dear to me.

On the day before we were to set out, I made to bid our dear Empress good-bye and joined the thousands of mourners lined up outside the old wooden palace where she lay in state. Though she had been his benefactress, Gaspari could not risk his health by lingering out of doors, but he urged me to go and to say his prayers for him. I was glad for the time to be alone with my thoughts; the grave sky and the mournful aspect of the crowd were well tuned to my mood.

I waited several hours to gain entrance to the death chamber, standing behind two women whom I took by their conversation to be soldiers’ wives. Reflecting that where I was going I should not hear my native tongue, I sucked in the earthy sounds of it. They began talking of the rumor that our new Emperor Peter would suspend hostilities against his beloved Frederick, the Emperor of Prussia.

“No, surely not,” said one, “not with victory so close.”

The other raised her brow meaningfully. “They say he speaks German with his advisors.”

My thoughts wandered elsewhere until I heard one of the women speak a familiar name. Andrei Feodorovich. “She foretold this, you know,” the woman continued to her companion. “I saw her outside the church. She was tearing at her clothes and crying out to passersby to go home and bake blinis.”

Hope startled awake in me, coursing into my veins as sudden and violent as a spring river.

“For a funeral supper?” the one woman asked.

The other nodded gravely. “What else would you make of it? And two days later, Her Majesty was dead.”

“Excuse me.” I interrupted their talk. “Who is it you are speaking of?”

“The Empress,” she answered.

“Yes, yes, but you heard someone foretell her death?”

The woman nodded.

“Whereabouts was this church?”

The woman’s features stiffened at my abruptness. “In St. Matthias parish,” she said, and then turned back to her friend.

“Please,” I implored. She eyed me once more, warily. “Just answer me this. Was the person’s name Xenia Grigoryevna?”