Debra Dean - The Mirrored World

That He will make them glad in the beholding of sons and daughters, let us pray to the Lord.

Ah, well, rooster today, feather duster tomorrow.

Lord, have mercy.

Strange that I cannot entirely tease apart which impression belongs to which day. Perhaps it is that every wedding is so much the same—such endless repetitions and circlings are required to make two persons one. But the more likely explanation is this: though marriage was the end towards which we’d been unspooling since birth, I was stunned by the arrival of it. There is no word in the language to denote being orphaned of sisters by marriage. Did it exist, it would describe my inchoate and confused emotions. Even Nadya’s leaving was so peculiarly painful to me that I recoiled from feeling the greater loss of Xenia. I pretended poorly to the general happiness.

Over the immense royal doors behind the altar, Christ is enthroned and is judging the proceedings. He is flanked by a solemn jury of saints—John the Baptist, Theotokis, the archangels Gabriel and Michael, the apostles Peter and Paul. Thin feet hang beneath their rigid robes; their long fingers gesture stiffly. Their impassive countenances suggest that though they pity the dwarfed creatures below, their thoughts are elsewhere. In orderly rows, their elongated figures tower up and up towards heaven.

That He will grant them and us all our petitions which are for salvation, let us pray to the Lord.

A priest stands beneath the saints. In his stiff-collared stole and miter, he resembles one of their number come to life. He presides with equanimity over the stumbling flock that comes before him in endless, faceless pairs to be joined. Taking their hands into his, he asks them if they wish to have one another and to live together. He asks thrice.

Be exalted, O Bridegroom, like unto Abraham.

He hardly looks the part of the joyous groom.

Do you of a good free and uncoerced will and with good intention take to yourself as wife this woman whom you see here before you?

Kuzma Zakharovich, I see him now, pondering the lit candle grasped in his fat fingers. He turns his face to the priest before him and then to the girl beside him, with the muddled look of a man who finds himself placed in an awkward position.

Do you of a good free and uncoerced will and with good intention take to yourself as wife this woman whom you see here before you?

The Grand Duke’s demeanor is even more strikingly discordant. Though dressed like a monarch, he has the sallow appearance of a sickly child. His recent illness has left him horribly pocked and plucked-looking. He slouches in boyish defiance, makes faces, answers the priest in petulant tones, and pretends to a haughty boredom that he cannot pull off. Every twitch betrays him, as though the clothes are too heavy.

The priest places the crowns upon their heads, he holds out the goblet with the warm red wine for them to drink, and he leads them thrice round the altar table. He beseeches Christ and the saints to bless their goings out and their comings in, and to bless their union with fruitfulness, to increase their numbers.

Bride, be exalted like unto Sarah; and exult, like unto Rebecca: and multiply, like unto Rachel.

Happy and delighted—such words are too much employed for frivolous emotions. The bride is called to be exultant. Xenia has such a look. Her profile is radiant, she is so entranced by her beloved that she might be on an island and he the only other inhabitant. She is very far away.

And rejoice in your husband, fulfilling the conditions of the law: for so is it well-pleasing unto God.

Tears are streaming down my cheeks.

Of Nadya, my only memory is the moment when the priest placed the wedding crown upon her head. It might have been made of thorns. I watch her lift her chin slightly, her throat pulling into taut lines. Her features, set in an attitude of resignation, stiffen. And then she reaches up with one hand to straighten the crown on her hair, and I gasp, thinking of grain clattering onto the floor.

But no, this must be the Grand Duchess, after all, for the sleeve that lifts to adjust the crown is of richly embroidered silver cloth and is slit open to reveal a lining of white swan’s down.

Replenish their life with good things. Receive their crowns into Thy kingdom, preserving them spotless, blameless, and without reproach, unto ages of ages.

Afterwards, in a shower of hemp seed, Xenia ducks her head into Andrei’s shoulder, and he covers her protectively. I am bereft. When the wedding party tries to pull apart the bride and groom, I forget the spirit of the game and tug at Xenia with childish, heartsick ferocity. Dazed with joy and clinging to Andrei, she smiles straight through me.

Later, her bridal sheets are brought to the wedding banquet and hung so all can see the bloody stains on them. A cheer goes up, and there is much laughter. Love is brutal.

Iam conscious that I have violated a tradition of storytelling: a wedding shall signal the happy close to a tale. At this moment, any couple may yet stand in for every other; they are the blank slate on which are chalked our hopeful expectations.

What comes after the wedding, this is the province of nurses and mothers. They lay bare the mystery with commonplaces. Love and eggs are best when they are fresh. The wife who invites her husband to visit her while she is dressing invites his eventual disinterest. Take your thoughts to bed with you, they intone, for the morning is wiser than the evening.

For all this common wisdom, though, the heart of each particular marriage remains hidden. While sorting my mother’s effects after her death, I found the packet of letters my father had sent her so many years earlier from the front. They bore no relation to the heartsick professions Nadya had improvised in our games but were, instead, the most conventional of exchanges concerning the progress of the war and the management of my father’s estate and household. Try as I might, I could parse no feeling in them. Each was signed “Your husband, Nikolai Feodosievich,” as though she might not otherwise have known him. And yet she kept these letters until the end of her days. I am desirous to think that my mother and father may yet have loved each other, but their true feelings were so commingled with obligation that it is impossible to know. My father would not have known even how to frame such a question. He was a soldier and hence disposed to thinking not in terms of affection but only in terms of duty.

For her part, my mother was probably more alike him than he suspected, the chief difference being that showing her husband affection was among her duties. Though she might harshly reprimand a servant or child, in his presence she was always soft-spoken and demure. She deferred to his opinions, flattered his vanities, and endured his rebukes with meekness. Love was a choice she made, and then made again daily for the remainder of her life. From her I learnt that a woman should not expect her happiness to come from the man himself, but from those acts of devotion she showed to him.

Nadya did not learn this lesson. As Aunt Galya had predicted, Kuzma Zakharovich demanded little of her, but she found married life trying nonetheless. Chief amongst her complaints was Kuzma Zakharovich’s eldest daughter, at seventeen only two years younger than Nadya herself.

“She conspires to turn my husband against me,” Nadya complained. “She even allows the servants to be insolent. I ring and ring and no one will bring my coffee. They pretend they do not hear me, but I am ringing loudly enough.”

Nadya even insisted that the girl was trying to kill her. Her proof of this charge was that the daughter had insisted on cooking mutton in the house though Nadya was by then expecting a child and the smells of food made her ill. When the baby came, Nadya claimed to see Kuzma Zakharovich’s daughter give the infant the evil eye. “She denied it, of course, but I know what I saw. If this child dies, it will be on her head.”