Debra Dean - The Mirrored World

Xenia was like a she-bear with its cub, her affection was so fierce. She could not tolerate the briefest separation from the baby, and though I had cleared my things from my room, the distance from her own room was too great; she had the cradle hung next to her bed so that she might hear if the infant whimpered. She would not even give it up to a wet nurse but insisted on feeding it herself. Her mother’s horror at this did not dissuade her; to Aunt Galya’s protest that she was still unclean, she said, “Why should God give me milk unless He meant it to feed my baby?”

After the baptism, when Xenia was permitted to return to society, she did so with reluctance. While out, she marked the hours till she could return home again. Aunt Galya warned her that such unchecked love for a child was dangerous. “You should not give your whole heart to anything mortal, daughter.” Xenia was too far gone to heed her mother’s counsel, so Aunt Galya appealed to Andrei. “If you indulge her in this,” she warned, “you will ruin mother and child both.”

However, Andrei was himself smitten with the child, and he could not be shamed into exercising his authority. He permitted Xenia to name the child Catherine, which served no purpose, being neither the child’s saint nor the name of anyone else who might protect her, and was only a fancy prompted by the news that the Grand Duchess was also with child again. When Xenia wished to make me the godmother, he did not object to this either, though it would have been wiser to choose a person with influence. For the baptism, he bought a gold cross for the infant’s neck and a smock edged in lace, and nearly every week, he returned home with some new gift: a glass pendant to hang over the cradle, a silk pillow for the baby’s head. If the child fussed and Xenia could not calm it, he sang airs to it himself, even leaving his guests downstairs to do so.

Aunt Galya threw up her hands. “How may a child learn obedience if she rules the parents? The egg cannot teach the hen.” There was nothing more for her to do than leave this topsy-turvy household and return to Nadya’s.

Xenia did indeed seem under the spell of her child. She would unswaddle the baby many times a day only to stare, fascinated, at the perfection of its tiny limbs. It was pretty, no harm can come from saying it now, though none of us would breathe it aloud at the time. She would giggle and say, “Is she not the ugliest creature you have ever seen?” and then she would kiss its toes and round belly and press her nose into its skin to inhale its yeasty smell.

Babies die, it is a sad but common fact of life.

There are mysteries that cannot be reasoned. Hail falls out of a clear sky and crushes the ripening field to rubble in an instant. The peasant who looks on and sees his broken stalks and blackened field may have lived well and piously or not, it does not change that his family will starve. And just so, a woman wakes one morning and finds her beloved daughter glazed with fever. The child shrieks and cannot be soothed. She twists away from the breast, her brow is hot as a stove, and even Saint-John’s-wort and Epiphany water will not cool it. The doctor is called but can do nothing. And though the woman prays desperately and unceasingly, the child’s cries shred the air for hours on end until, the only thing worse than these cries, they weaken and stop. By next morning, the child has grown too languid even to move her limbs, and there is only the rise and fall of her ribs, soft and rapid as a trapped bird. The hours eclipse, day to night to day again, before the tiny flame gutters and goes out.

Though we may try to tilt the universe with prayers and spells, medicines and every precaution, in the end the rain falls equally on the just and the unjust. What can be done but to face this mystery squarely and go on?

But Xenia could not accept it. “The air hurts.” She said it with a wide-eyed wonder at her own pain. She suffered agonies of self-reproach, blaming herself for every sin her mother had cautioned her against—obstinacy and indulgence and putting another before God—and others that no one would have thought to reprove her for. If only she had done this or refrained from that: she continually uncovered fresh faults.

“When I think how I have lived…” She said this to Nadya, choking on her tears and then going on with rigid determination. “When I recall that I have spent whole days pondering whether to have a gown styled in the French or the Spanish fashion, how my hair should be arranged, whether to put a beauty mark on my cheek or on my shoulder, as though any of it mattered! As though it were not all foolishness and frippery!”

Nadya was offended. “You might think that no one had ever lost a child before you. This was not even a son.”

Xenia scourged herself further, saying that Nadya was right, her grief showed a lack of humility before God’s will. She wept bitterly and long at this.

Five days after the death of Xenia’s child, the Imperial family was at last given an heir, the Grand Duke Paul. Overjoyed, the Empress whisked the new infant from his mother’s arms and installed him in a room adjacent to her own that she might look after him personally. Or so it was reported. The Grand Duchess, having acquitted herself of her duty, was left untended in her birthing bed for days. It was from this bed that she received report that Elizabeth had sent her lover, Saltykov, off to Sweden to announce the birth to the king. When he returned in the new year, he would be sent away again.

Petersburg drowned in celebration. Such giddy exultation—every night a supper, a ball, a concert, and more than the usual number of drinking parties. Hymns were composed to glorify the infant, and Andrei was continuously called upon to perform the celebratory offices of the choir, though these did not fully account for his many long absences.

There was talk, of course—half the English Embankment had been woken by loud and ribald singing, and the next morning Andrei had arrived late to the Empress’s chapel, wobbly-legged and with stains on his waistcoat—but Xenia did not hear the talk, for she could no longer tolerate society. The prospect of enduring endless, nattering gossip, of having to dance and pretend to gaiety… she could not do it. Invited by Madame Polianskaya to yet another supper honoring the royal birth, she told Andrei that she would rather the skin were flayed from her flesh. He was left to devise a more suitable explanation for her absence.

The face Andrei kept turned to the world remained merry, but inside his own door he swung at times to the other extreme and became morose, as though mirth had exhausted him. But whether gay or sad, he drank as though feeding a fire, and his mood would burn itself out only after hours or even days of intensity.

Xenia had never seen her husband’s excesses as faults. She had once explained it to me thus: an unrestrained nature came with his gift. It was what made him sensitive to every note of music, why his voice could move others to tears. Araja or Teplov might pen the notes, but Xenia saw their scores as merely a poor representation, as far from the music itself as a drawing of a horse is from animate flesh and breath.

“They’re only scratches on a page,” she said. “But when he sings, one feels the presence of God in the air. It reverberates in the bones. Truly, it shatters me, it is so real.” Andrei was an open conduit through which this terrible power surged; how could he be other than passionate?

Now, though, she was too far sunk in her own misery to recognize the form his grief took. Nightly, we sat up awaiting his return and listening to the crackle and boom of fireworks that convulsed the sky over the city. When he finally came home, so dissipated that he could not keep his feet, she brought him his kvas, warmed with honey and herbs for his throat, and then sat in silence, watching him drink.