Debra Dean - The Mirrored World

“Do you know he is laid out in a woman’s dress? With only a priest praying over him, and some strange woman? His friends shall think Xenia unfeeling. There is no coffin lid at the door, and the girl told me that no preparations have been made for the funeral dinner.”

When I answered that these duties were quite beyond Xenia’s capacity, that she could not even rise from her bed, Nadya went up the stairs, thinking, I suppose, to scold her sister into action. Finding her immune to rebuke did not soften Nadya’s mood.

“Has she been bled?”

I replied that she had not.

“I shall send my surgeon.” Shaking her head, she left.

Andrei was without family, excepting some distant cousins in Little Russia. As for Xenia’s close relations, evidently Aunt Galya was too distraught by the news of her daughter being widowed to come to the house, and Nadya was too vexed to return. There being no more immediate candidates in line for the offices of family, I elected myself. With Masha, I first washed Andrei’s body and dressed him in his uniform, then had a casket sent from the cabinetmaker. There is a tremendous amount to do when someone leaves the world. I ordered more flour and nuts and vodka, boiled wheat for the kolivo , and set Marfa in the kitchen to making blinis. Masha was charged with watching Xenia and changing her bedding while I gathered up her clothes for dyeing. When the surgeon came, I left off plucking a goose and escorted him upstairs.

The surgeon was a brisk man. He gave Xenia hardly a glance before unpacking his instruments and setting the cups onto the stove to warm. Pulling a chair to her bedside, he took her limp arm, pushed up its sleeve, and tied it off above the elbow with a strip of linen. He worked the arm like a pump and then studied its length, flicking his middle finger against the skin.

“She has been like this for near two days now,” I said.

He nodded and took up the other arm. His self-possession was comforting. When he found a vein to his liking, he removed a lancet from its case, cocked the spring, and by means of a button released it, driving the blade into her flesh. Xenia jerked, blood bubbled up, and he covered the wound with one of the heated glass cups. The cup was shaped like a hand bell topped with a brass nipple. Into this he fastened a syringe. This further encouraged the vein to breathe by sucking out the blood and ill humors. When the cup was full, he instructed me to fetch a bleeding bowl from his box. He emptied the cup and put on another. At this, Xenia turned her dull, fish-eyed gaze upon her arm. The sight of her blood seemed to provoke a terror in her, for she started to shriek, to tremble all over, and to sputter unintelligible noises. The surgeon, far from being alarmed, expressed satisfaction at her liveliness and drew yet more blood until her agitation subsided and she went slack again.

“I shall come back this evening,” he promised.

Andrei was laid to rest the next day. My parents had arrived from the country, my brother, Vanya, from his regiment, and together with the other mourners—all but Xenia—we set out just before dawn, our heads veiled, and followed his hearse on foot through sleeping streets. We approached the church, its spires black against a watery sky streaked with red, like bloody rags. The bells began to toll the dirge, from high to low, the last knell so deep it entered the bones.

Inside, the full Imperial choir had gathered to sing the service for their fallen brother. Even Count Razumovsky, together with his brother Ivan, was in attendance. Xenia might have been happy to see Andrei so honored, I thought, and close at the heels of this thought followed the worry that I had not laid in sufficient provisions to feed so many afterwards.

The choir began the Kathisma hymn for the dead, their solemn chants reverberating in the stony air. I listened for a void made by the absence of Andrei’s voice, but in truth I could not hear it. I then fell into the stupor that comes with long and familiar rites and emerged only when the priest called the mourners to the last embrace.

Come ye, therefore, let us kiss him who was but lately with us; for he is committed to the grave; he is covered with a stone; he taketh up his abode in the gloom, and is interred among the dead.

I have heard it remarked by foreigners, in particular the English, that our mourning is a cacophony compared with their own more muted grief. I remember Gaspari once said that not even the warm-blooded Italians make such a noise as Russians. Our serfs rend their garments and pull their hair, nor is it thought unmanly to weep. Even by the measure of our own customs, though, the grief for Andrei was loud.

He made a handsome corpse. Across his forehead lay the crown, a paper band with lettering that petitioned God’s mercy on his soul. But for this, one might have thought he was only sleeping off a night of immoderate pleasure rather than a life of it. I kissed him good-bye.

We emerged from the church, blinking into a day gone bright as a mirror. The sounds of sleigh bells and laughter rang in the thin air, for it was Christmastide. We seemed out of step with the calendar, sealed up in a private and unseasonable grief. I pondered the strangeness of this, that his death could rend to pieces the little sphere I lived in, yet leave no mark on the world beyond. Merrymakers, seeing our solemn procession to the cemetery, crossed themselves, but we did not dampen their revelry. It was considered good luck to be passed by a funeral procession, and they would not see in the open coffin a picture of their own ends.

As for the supper after, it was little different from others but for the absence of the widow, who lay upstairs. Cleansed by their tears, the mourners ate and drank heartily. Silently, they raised their glasses to Andrei’s empty chair with its glass of vodka and black bread.

Ifound I could feed Xenia by pressing a spoon to her lips till they opened, ladling in a bit of broth, retrieving the spoon, and holding her jaw shut till she swallowed. It required the unflagging persistence of a mother bird. I took Andrei’s place in their bed that I might look after her, and my sleep was as restless as it had been when we were children and last shared a bed. Muffled sobs seeped into my dreams, along with muttered sounds that might have been words. Once, she cried out, “Blood! Blood!” her voice choked with anguish. When I tried to rouse her, she clutched blindly at my arm. “There is so much greed in the world.” She keened and mewled but could not be roused from sleep, and in the morning she was just as she had been, vacant-eyed and mute. Then one night I awoke and felt her watching me.

“How long has it been?” The voice, though feeble, was her own.

“A week and some. A week and two days.”

“You’ve returned, then.”

I answered that I had not left, except to go out for necessity.

“Moy solovushka,” she whispered.

It was her pet name for Andrei, “my nightingale.” I thought she was asking for him, and I was loath to tell her again what had broken her in the first place. I cast about for some way to couch the truth in gentleness or avoid it altogether.

“Do you suffer?” she asked.

Her gaze seemed directed behind me, and I looked there. The room was black and still, and I could see nothing. It came to me then: it is on the ninth day after death that the soul is said to leave the body. On the fortieth day, it departs this world. Between these two points lies a blank space that the Church does not account for, but peasants will tell you that the soul returns home and takes up residence behind the stove. She thought he was in the room with us.