Debra Dean - The Mirrored World

Together with Gaspari and a mother and child whom Xenia had found outside the church, we returned afterwards to the house lit bright and the table laden with food and decorated with pussy willows and flowers. The servants were happy to the edge of tears, and we exchanged colored eggs with kisses on the cheek. I gave Xenia her egg, kissing her thrice. She did not crack it but put it instead into her basket to be given to the poor. When Gaspari also presented her with an egg, she reciprocated by withdrawing mine from her basket for him. He was on the point of cracking it, but then stopped and handed it back, gesturing that she should return it to the basket.

Vodka was poured out and, raising my glass, I inhaled it like a clean, sharp draught of winter air. I have never felt such thirst, such hunger. We ate the kulich , the paskha, the lamb. It was wonderful. There were eggs and more eggs, wine and more vodka, and I ate and drank as though I had fasted for a year.

Xenia ate nothing but seemed content to sit at table and collect eggs. Several times throughout the meal, I saw Gaspari repeat this ritual of giving her an egg, accepting another in return, and then handing it back to her. At last, I thought to peek under the table and saw her basket on the floor beside her chair, heaped with red eggs as well as pieces of kulich .

The table was strewn with egg peelings and walnut shells, the plates wiped clean but for bits of gristle and bone. I was sated, heavy-limbed, and light-headed. Across the table, Gaspari stood. With no more preface than this, he clasped his hands at his breast, rested his gaze above our heads, and parted his lips.

The air was pierced with a startling sound, high and clear and powerful. The sound expanded and held for an impossibly long time before gliding to the next note and the next. He seemed not to breathe but only to exhale music, warbling and sliding over vowels and consonants as endlessly as water rounds over stones in a shallow stream.

How may one describe enchantment? As he sang, his countenance softened, and without benefit of costume or any other artifice of the stage, the Gaspari I knew faded and was transformed into something eerily beautiful. A delicate hand, rising and turning like a vine, seemed to unfurl this otherworldly sound into the air. Though I could not translate the words, there was no need, for the sound went straight to my soul, transcending the poor and broken language we mortals must use. I slipped gratefully out of my body and floated on the current of music, feeling that all of us round the table were a single spirit, a single being. I was filled with such love. The voice soared, wave upon wave, until the last note, quivering with tenderness, put us ashore again too soon.

The musici have since fallen out of favor, and I do not expect to hear such an ethereal sound again until the angels sing me home. It is just as well. Such radiance was not intended for mortals, and to achieve it, hundreds of boys were mutilated, made into monsters so that a few among the wounded might sing. That such beauty should come from such suffering… I see it in Xenia also. It is a terrible mystery.

The next morning, I awoke to stabbing light and the sound of church bells ringing, each clang so deafening that I might have been trapped within the bell itself, with the bronze tongue striking my skull. Anyone may ring the bells in Bright Week and so they rang incessantly, as I foresaw they would for days yet. Coupled with this misery, in the previous days the ice on the Neva had begun to break up, and in the lulls between chimes I heard the river’s painful groans, the screech of ice against ice. Against this noise, the promises of spring and our Lord’s resurrection seemed faint abstractions, and the bliss of Gaspari’s voice an improbable memory.

Xenia was in her accustomed place in the corner, her black shape bent before the Virgin of Vladimir. She was as still as a corpse, her countenance empty, her eyes sunken in shadow. Apparently, I had missed the morning service, but Xenia had not: the basket she had filled with red eggs the night before sat next to her, empty.

I saw the truth of our situation with the clarity of a drunkard’s remorse. There was nothing left in the larder, and I would have to sell the sleigh and horse.

That same week, Nadya and her mother came to call and brought with them intricately painted eggs, one for Xenia and another for myself.

“Xenia is at her prayers just now,” I said, “but she will be delighted by this.”

Aunt Galya smiled thinly and held fast to the egg meant for Xenia. “We can wait till she is finished. I should very much like to give it to her myself.”

I showed them into the drawing room, grateful as I did that I had not yet found it necessary to sell the chairs, or Xenia to give them away. The sideboard was gone, but the divan and two chairs remained.

They glanced about, poorly concealing their dismay. “A house always looks barren at Lent,” Aunt Galya remarked. “But why have you not put things back in their places?”

Nadya answered her. “Xenia has become a great benefactress, Maman. Isn’t that so, Dasha?”

I nodded. “She is very kind to the poor. They call her Matushka .”

Nadya looked as though she had eaten something bitter. “So kind she has given them even the clothes from her back?”

“Just the once.”

A look passed between mother and daughter, and Nadya made her aspect more pleasing. “Let us speak freely. Like sisters. My mother and I are greatly concerned for her. People are talking. Yesterday, it came back to us that she had been seen giving her corset to a person on the street.”

I turned the egg in my palm. On one side was painted the head of our Savior, his eyes two dark and elongated hollows of sorrow. The reverse showed a pastoral scene, a young lord and lady courting in a glade, she perched on a swing and he pushing her.

Aunt Galya put an affectionate hand on my shoulder. “I know you love her and would protect her, Dasha, but consider that you are protecting her from those who love her equally as well. Clearly, she is troubled, and we want to help.”

The promise of help overruled my scruples, and I spilt all the trials of the past weeks, how Xenia had emptied the strongbox, how one moment she was taciturn and the next was taking me to task for putting a portion of sausage on her plate. “She eats only bread now and too little of that. She has no appetite for anything but prayer. That she may do for hours. You may as well know that there is no point to waiting on her. She will not come down.”

Nadya was horrified. “She can’t have given away everything?”

“Not all,” I admitted. “I hid some things from her.”

“But the strongbox… is all her money gone, then?”

I said that it was, except for the few kopeks that remained from the sale of the sideboard. If Nadya might speak to Kuzma Zakharovich about a loan, I began, but her outraged look silenced me.

Aunt Galya was also distressed at her daughter’s misfortune. But she knew what it was to lose a husband and all one’s possessions, and perhaps it was this that made her better able to school her emotions.

“What did you hide, Dasha?”

“It is only that I thought she may desire them later.”

She nodded approvingly and encouraged me to list for her the various items, which I did.

“Odds and ends,” Nadya fumed.

A look of reproof passed from mother to daughter. “There are still the serfs. And the house and furnishings,” Aunt Galya said. “But she can’t be allowed to go on like this. We must do what is best for her, however hard.”

The following week, Xenia was served with a summons to show herself in court and answer to the charge that she was alienated, startled out of her mind. If she were found unfit to manage her own affairs, she would be declared one of the sumasbrodnye , mad, then dispossessed of her property and given into the custody of her family.