The Mirrored World (17 page)
W
e had only just sat down at table last month when the bell was ringing downstairs. Briefly, absurdly, my heart rose, thinking it was Xenia come to bid Matvey farewell, but she had not visited here for nearly half a year and she never rings. Masha came to the table to say there was a woman downstairs wanting food for her child. “Well, invite her in,” I said, but Masha replied that I should come to the door. I excused myself from my company and made my way down the stairs, feeling vexed by each of the fourteen steps to the bottom, and lifted the latch.
The woman on the far side of the door had the thin and exhausted look of one who has lived from hand to mouth for some time. I told her she was welcome and stepped back to let her pass.
“God bless,” she answered, but she showed reluctance to cross the threshold. “It’s not for me that I come.” She drew forward a child hidden in her skirts. Of perhaps three or four years, it was pale and bruised-looking. “I was told I might leave her here. Only for an hour or two.”
“There is enough for you as well.”
“God bless,” she repeated. “It’s only that . . .” Her glance strayed nervously to the street. My eyes followed, but there was only the drowse of midday and nothing out of the ordinary. The sky outside had turned woolly, signaling that it would snow before long. I had felt it in my joints since I woke that morning, age making me as prescient as Xenia, though my predictions are confined to the weather.
“I left a blanket,” she said. “Near the Anichkov Bridge. I’m afraid someone may steal it. If you will take her, I’ll go back and fetch it.”
I nodded, and she began to pry the child’s fingers loose from her skirt. “The good
babushka
here will look after you,” she said. The child eyed me with the wariness of a feral cat and desperately tried to reattach herself to her mother. “It cannot be helped,” the mother said sternly, but she was visibly distressed also, and turned and ran away.
I took one of the child’s arms. It was thin as dry tinder. “Come,” I coaxed. “There is food upstairs.”
The others looked up when I returned with a child.
“Where is the mother?” Matvey asked.
“She will be back shortly.” I said this to reassure the child, but in truth I did not believe it.
“Here, you may sit with us,” I said to the child. Osip slid down the bench to make room next to himself, which was generous, as he has come here almost daily for years now and is very proprietary about his place at the table.
Masha fetched a plate, spooned some cabbage and a bit of sausage onto it, and we resumed the talk the child’s arrival had interrupted. Matvey was telling the company what he knew of his new employer.
Although the child was clearly starved, she was too upset to eat. She looked warily round the table, and I cannot say as I blamed her. We made for a strange lot. Besides Osip and Matvey, there was Varenka, who was once a dancer kept by Peter Sheremetyev in his harem until she lost too many teeth and was put out. And next to her, Marie de l’Église, who is stranded here by the troubles in France. There were also Nikita, a laborer Xenia sent here after his leg was shattered in a fall from a roof, and Stepanov-Nelidov. He was formerly a prosperous fur trader, though you would not guess it now. He astonishes me by finding his way here when he is otherwise too drunk to remember even his own name. He eats a little dinner, sleeps, and then takes his leave when he is sober again, full of repentance and devastated courtesy. I am never lacking for company if I do not mind whose company it is.
I have said to Masha that I will ruin myself, just as old Leonid Vladimirovich did, by keeping an open house and table. The jest only half conceals a real anxiety. Every year, I draw water from a little closer to the bottom of the well, and I have feared outliving my money. I also worry that by spending on strangers, I am depriving Matvey of an inheritance. He has never spoken a word of reproach. Still, when I am gone and have left nothing behind, might he not think that I loved him no more than the flotsam that washed onto my doorstep?
In spite of this, I have continued to take them in, those that Xenia sends as well as those who seem to arrive of their own volition. After Gaspari died, I sent half of his money to his mother, thinking that what remained would be sufficient to keep me. Naturally, I had not accounted for the feeding of so many guests. In spite of every frugality, most of the remaining sum was run through in eight years. To make ends meet, I rented the downstairs of the house, but even this did not cover my expenses. I began to look on each person who came here as another debit and to consider how I might prevent Xenia from bringing more.
Then my father died. My mother, who had been by all accounts in the most perfect health, followed him into the hereafter within a few short weeks. I would not have thought her so attached but have learnt it is unwise to judge these bonds by their outward appearance.
In short, being the only remaining heir, I was left the estate unencumbered, and it was sold. Between the modest proceeds and what I receive in rent from the glovemaker downstairs, I have the means to continue on here for perhaps another two or three years. After that, we shall see. I have no gift to foretell the future, not even from one day into the next.
Seeing that the child would not touch her plate, I excused myself and took her away from the table to a quieter corner of the room. I pulled her onto my lap and rocked her. I hummed aimlessly, following with one ear the conversation that continued at the table. Because Matvey would be stopping one night in Moscow, Varenka was telling him something of the city, though it seems doubtful she was ever there. Without teeth, her speech is very mumbled, but the others listened politely—even Marie, who understands no more than a few words of Russian. All except Stepanov-Nelidov. He has most certainly visited Moscow but could add nothing to the general wisdom, as he had drifted into sleep, his chin on his chest and a light snore emanating from his open mouth.
The child squirmed, then gradually her restlessness slowed, and at last she could not fight sleep any longer. As she drifted off, limp and open-mouthed, her breath was a rasping whisper. I adjusted the sharp little elbow that was digging into my side. Except that her belly distended unnaturally, she seemed not to have enough flesh on her to anchor her to this life. Then again, children are sturdier than I credit them or none would live past his first year. With sufficient bread and meat, who knows.
By ones and twos, my guests excused themselves and took their leave. I do not think a one of them has a particular place to go, but they are careful to pretend that they do. In the worst of winter, some will return here at night to sleep, but even then only the sick remain past the morning.
It was nearly two o’clock when the bell rang again. Two policemen were at the door. The more senior of the two asked for “the one who is called Andrei Feodorovich.” I could not tell whether his phrasing denoted honor or suspicion.
“Andrei Feodorovich has been dead now for more than thirty years,” I said.
“We are looking for the fool who goes by that name.”
I was able to say with honesty that I had not seen her since late spring and, for the moment, to be grateful of this.
“What is it you want with her?” I asked.
“There is talk that this person has spoken out against Her Imperial Majesty and means harm to her.” He then cited a rumor that Xenia had been seen in the streets ranting about rivers of blood.
“Yes, yes, so they say.” The rumor had been repeated for some twenty-five years, ever since the murder of Ivan Antonovich. “Even if there were anything to it,” I said, “it is cold gossip indeed.”
He was not pleased by my impertinence. They had been ordered to find Xenia and bring her in.
I expect the recent insurrection in France has made Her Imperial Majesty newly fearful for her crown and alert to any stirrings in the population here. Emigrés fleeing from Paris to Petersburg are bringing with them alarming reports of soldiers and priests and commoners rising up in arms against their nobles and their king.
For all that Catherine is well-loved, it has not been forgotten by some that she came to the throne by means of a coup and that perhaps others had a more rightful claim to it. And while it is strange to think of our most reason-loving Empress being made uneasy by a fool, she would hardly be the first. Elizabeth before her kept poor babbling Ivan Antonovich a prisoner of the crown all her days. Even so, they say, it was fear of him that kept her awake nights. And before that, Saint Basil is said to have caused Tsar Ivan Grozny to tremble when the holy fool presented him with a slab of raw meat, saying that a murderer needn’t bother with keeping the fast. Our Sovereign may not herself credit the rantings of fools, but others do, and when the world has gone topsy-turvy, even a fool may be dangerous to the crown. Especially one such as Xenia, who will not keep silent.
“Do you know her whereabouts?” the officer asked.
“She is a wanderer,” I said, “and comes and goes according to her own dictates. She may stay for five hours or five minutes, but where she goes after is anyone’s guess.”
This was not the whole truth. I did not know where she was at that moment, but only recently one of the unfortunates who come here had brought with him a report that she sleeps in the Smolenskoye cemetery. Then again, gossip needs no carriage, and her fame has grown so great that she is rumored to be everywhere, within the city and without it. If all claims were believed, she would be pilgrimming continually from one holy site to another, for reports of her have returned from as far away as Siberia.
“Truly,” I added, “there is no cause to seek her further. Andrei Feodorovich would do no harm to anyone. She has been touched by God”—I tapped my temple—“but she always loved Her Imperial Majesty most particularly.”
He crossed himself, but instantly put on again his opaque manner and informed me that I was obliged to alert officials if she should come to this house or if I should hear anything pertinent to her whereabouts, and with that they left. I feared for Xenia if the police succeeded in finding her, for she would certainly be unable to give her interrogators satisfaction.
It is a peasant belief that, as we are all equal in God’s eyes, He must surely confer on fools unseen, compensatory gifts. And so our peasants attend fools with great reverence and scrutinize their gibbering for veiled wisdom and prophecy. Even the more enlightened prefer them in their charity over the ordinary poor. For this reason, the streets are thick with counterfeit fools who don chains and profit by feigning madness. The credulous lump all these together and call them the blessed ones.
Because I have known Xenia as she was—bequeathed every worldly advantage of wit, modesty, and riches—I know she is not a pretender. At the same time, it is hard for me to accept the loss of these advantages as a sign of God’s favor. I should still choose for her the easier blessings.
A
s so often happens in Petersburg at this time of year, the sun made its first, brief appearance that day even as it was setting. Unexpectedly, it peeked from beneath sodden clouds, flared, and then dropped into a narrow band of sky on the horizon gone suddenly bright. The world, gray since dawn, saturated with color. On the church, the unpainted brick glowed warm as a stove and the tiny icicles on its cornices glittered. The hem of the clouds was streaked vermilion, and even the air itself was amber as honey. For a few moments everything was luminous, like a hand-tinted drawing. And then it was over. The band of light dissolved, and the sky began to fade.
A new church is being built on the grounds of the cemetery. I have watched it go up for two years, until now only the belfry remains to be finished. This last is the slow labor of ants, for the workers must climb to the top of the scaffold and then pulley up each load of bricks. Recently, though, the tower has grown more rapidly, so that it will certainly be completed soon. The workers know me—I go there most every week to tend the graves—and they will wave when I pass. At that hour, though, only two remained, packing their tools, and they expressed surprise to see me.
“This is no time to visit the dead, Matushka.”
I said that I was looking for the fool Andrei Feodorovich.
They know of her, of course, but had not seen her about. When I told them that I had heard she slept there, a look passed between the two, but then the larger one shook his head. You should go home, he told me. It will be dark before long.
The driver did not like the idea of my staying, either. I was only able to quell his misgivings by paying him double the usual fare and promising the same again if he would wait.
I set off down the path that cuts to the river, calling her name. My voice carried so loudly in that silent place that she would surely hear me if she was there, though this did not mean she would answer.
In summer, it is a pleasant place to visit. Past the edge of the city, it is so thick with birch and oak that it stays cool even in the worst of the heat. At Easter or in fine weather, there are others about, and I will sometimes see peasants bathing at the river. But now, in the autumn gloaming, the cemetery was desolate. With the floods, every depression had become a pond, and I had need to pick my way with care, stick in one hand, and to leave the path when it submerged. I should have been uneasy, alone there at dusk and surrounded by the dead, but I was not. Each marker was familiar: the wooden crosses of the earliest residents, the granite slabs with their more recent dates, the white marble tombs of the well-born.
At last I came to Andrei Feodorovich Petrov’s grave, an iron cross and a low fence frosted with new snow. It was deserted, the snow undisturbed. If she had been here, there was no sign of it but only the withered flowers I had left some weeks before.
“Andrei Feodorovich,” I called out, for she will not answer to Xenia. I listened for some answering sound. “Andrei Feodorovich, are you here?” If some person were to have come upon me, what might he have thought of my standing at Andrei’s grave and shouting his name? But I had no concern of being judged: the place was so empty at that hour that no one would come there who was not himself a little mad.
“It is Dasha. Please. I must see you.” This had been all of my plan—to go to Smolenskoye cemetery and find her. I wanted to warn her of the police, though I knew she would not care.
The cemetery was silent as no other place can be. There was perhaps a quarter hour of light left. I should do as I have been advised, I thought, and return home. Instead, I left Andrei’s resting place and followed the path to the river. This river separates the Orthodox buried on the left bank from the foreigners and infidels interred on the right. Across the little bridge, the cemetery is new and untamed, the few markers scattered amongst the trees. In death, as in life, they are lonely in their difference there.
His stone is granite, engraved in both Russian and Italian. It was crusted with snow, and I brushed this away.
Francesco Gaspari. 1718–1762.
I brushed again.
Beloved.
The fig I planted in May had dropped its leaves; the first hard freeze would kill it. Every winter, I pull up the dead shrub, buy a fruit, and start another from seed, nursing the tender shoot indoors until it can be planted in late spring. When Matvey was a child, it gave him pleasure to grow this fig for his father, and it became a tradition with us.
I go to Gaspari’s grave nearly every week, and as I weed the plot and scrub lichen from the stone I will talk to him. Our conversation is now the reverse of what it once was, with my carrying the weight of it and his listening. I also look to his neighbors that need tending to, those dead, Germans mostly, without family here. After my work is done, I stay on. Though I am not so entertaining as he was, I have found I have much to say.
I tugged on the fig, but it would not pull up. “I’m sorry I did not come last week. Matveyushka came home with news. He has found a position.
“Princess Dashkova—do you remember her? She was a friend to Grand Duchess Catherine, and after you were gone she had a hand in putting her on the throne. Since then, well, you can imagine, her influence has only grown.” I used my stick to loosen the dirt around the roots. “Well, our Matveyushka will be overseeing the building of a greenhouse for her and will manage the orchards. He says she has two hectares given to stone fruits—plums and cherries and I cannot recall what else—but most of this is sent to market. She would like a greenhouse so she may have melons and cucumbers when there is snow on the ground.”
I yanked again, and continued to work. “He was flush with pride when he told me. For his sake, I made to celebrate. I had Masha bring out a bottle of your Madeira that I had been saving against I know not what. But he will be leaving Petersburg, dearest. And Troitskoye is at best a week from here. It is hard that he will be so far away.”
At last, the fig came up. I smoothed over the soil I’d disturbed.
“He wishes me to close up the house and follow him. ‘You are too old to stay on alone, Maman,’ he said. But how can I abandon the unfortunates? With winter there will be more of them coming to the door.”
The offices of love are obscure to me. I have often felt exhausted by this endless procession of the needful—the starving and lonely widows, the old men undone by illness or drink—but it grieved me to think of the door being shut against them. I thought of Martha: Martha who fretted and served and then was rebuked by Christ because it was her sister, Mary, who was doing what was needful, which was only to adore. I pictured these two sisters, and it was Xenia that I saw sitting at Christ’s feet and gazing up at him, her face radiant with joy.
“All week, I have tried to think what Xenia would have me do. After all, it is her house, too. But even could I ask her, she would express no view on the matter beyond telling me to listen. She says this and then is no more forthcoming than you, my dear husband. I think she means I should pray, but I have done this. God, too, is silent.”
The sky had grown dark, but the snow gave off a little light, making Gaspari’s stone and the nearest trees visible. There was a moon.
“I had thought I might find her here. The police came to our door this afternoon. They were looking for her. They said she had spoken out against the Empress. You and I know that cannot be true, but there is such madness afoot in the world these days. All this wild talk of blood and anarchy in France.
“Oh, and there is also a child come to the house today. Her mother brought her and then left. I do not think she is coming back. What then? If I take her to the foundling home, it is little different from killing her outright. I suppose I might take her with me if I leave. But I cannot take them all.”
I plucked up the few gray weeds that stuck through the snow until his plot was as clean as a new blanket.
“If I go, there will be no one left to tend to this. Perhaps you should not mind it so much, but I hate the idea of leaving you alone here. If you were in Italy, there would be family to visit you. I am so sorry,
cuoricino mio
. It pained me to leave Petersburg when I thought I would never see it again, but I might have been more cheerful for your sake. There is no use for these regrets. Still, you should know. I would gratefully follow you anywhere now.
“It is so simple to see what I might have done in the past, but I am no wiser for it. No, every year that passes, I know even less. What do you think, is this why I have lived so long? That I should eventually become a fool?”
I am not yet so muddled that I expected an answer, but I stopped talking. I was weary of my own fretting. The moon had risen, so bright that the snow gleamed like silver. I was stiff with cold.
“If I leave, I will come back,
cuoricino mio
.” It may be a long time yet, but I have asked Matvey to bury me there, though it is unconsecrated ground.
I kissed Gaspari’s stone on the letters of his name. The tenderness I felt for him was so acute that I was certain his spirit was beside me. The dead are not gone, not entirely, not ever.
I returned by the way I came, using my stick, like a blind woman, to feel the lay of the path where it was in shadow. As I approached the cemetery’s entrance, the church came partially into view through the trees. By design, all elements of a church—its soaring height and gilded domes and the sumptuous ornament of its interior—are meant to suggest the magnificent presence in the world of Almighty God the Father. However, this church is still unfinished. The belfry is open to the sky on two sides, and the steeple that will top it must be imagined entirely. At night, unpainted and with scaffolding pinioned to the face, it had the insubstantial appearance of an abandoned relic or even a chimera conjured by the moonlight. It was the Holy Ghost that was invoked there, the unknowable mystery.
When I arrived, I had left the droshky at the front, but I did not see it now. It may be that the driver had given me up and left. I was so far from home that if I had to walk, it would take me till morning.
My eyes were drawn again to the face of the church by some movement. I stopped and strained to pull shapes from the darkness, but then decided it was nothing. Perhaps a bird that had made its nest there. Or clouds moving across the moon and playing tricks on the mind. A cemetery at night summons up unreasoning fears.
But no, the shadow was moving. It was not my imagination: a black silhouette was climbing the scaffolding, moving very slowly and steadily up towards the stunted tower. It appeared to be a hunchback. I watched, transfixed. At long last, it reached the top and emerged onto the moonlit platform, and I saw that it was not a hunchback after all, but a thin figure bent under the weight of something carried on its back. It set down this bundle and opened it. Bricks. The apparition was stacking bricks onto a large pile that already awaited the mason’s trowel. I did not remember noticing these when I arrived. Having added its bricks to the pile, it then did something even more strange. It bowed low to each of the four corners of the earth in turn. Having performed this priestly rite, it descended again and, upon reaching the ground, disappeared into the darkness. After some moments, it appeared again, hefting another load on its back.
I cannot say how long I stood watching the repetition of this. Or how long before I understood what I was witness to. No sudden spark of perception but, rather, a slow-growing recognition that it was Xenia.
She was climbing again. Once onto the platform, she unloaded her bricks, no more than eight or ten, for this was all she could carry. I might have gone and fetched more to help her, but I did not. Nor did I think to interrupt her work. The need I had felt so urgently to speak to her had left me.
The quiet gathered. It was very deep, this silence, as though the woods and the church were sunk beneath water. I allowed myself to rest into it, to let the silence close over me. My mind also became still and soft. It was like being on the floor of a sea, like being in the drowned city of Kitezh.
Again, she bowed low to the east and held there. In the bleached and shadowed moonlight, her bent figure was like stone. Then she prayed to the west and again to each direction. I imagined the prayers floating up, not only hers but innumerable others, a city of prayers. The air was filled with them. I imagined the waters rising above our waists and then our shoulders and heads. And how I would see this but not panic. I imagined descending into a perfect quiet and letting go all my fears.
I bowed to Xenia, though she did not see me. I thought to myself how she is accustomed to excusing herself when she leaves by saying she is needed. This, I have come to think, is what it means to be blessed.
Upon rising, I wrapped my headscarf more securely and knotted it beneath my chin, feeling grateful for my good boots and for the sturdy feel of my stick against my palm. The moon lit the way out from the cemetery. There was nothing to do but follow the path, to put one foot in front of the other until I reached home.
