Debra Dean - The Mirrored World

“Obligation?” He tilted his chin and knitted his brow in the way he had of seeming puzzled or vexed or both. I think it is the habit of someone who must continually question his understanding, for I noticed that he never wore this look when speaking his own tongue.

“It is your father does not want you, Dashenka. My feelings have not changed.”

We were wed quietly and without ceremony. The church would not condone such a marriage, but Gaspari bribed a priest to mutter a few words over us in the vestibule of the church, with Xenia and five musicians from the Italian Company as witnesses.

Upon leaving, Xenia invited the beggars on the steps to share in the wedding supper, and with the priest and this motley company we returned on foot to the house. It was high summer, and the servants had spread blankets in the yard that we might dine al fresco , as the Italians say, like peasants in the field at harvesttime.

Toasts were made with both vodka and a sweet liquor that tasted of licorice. One by one, the guests wished us wealth and happiness and long life. “Per cent’anni,” the Italians said. For a hundred years. And “Gor’ko!” the Russians answered. The vine is bitter, and to make it sweet the bride and groom must kiss.

Gaspari held my chin and put his mouth on mine. His lips were soft and insinuating. I had never been kissed and did not know that a shock of heat can travel between two bodies. I startled and drew back. About me, there were hoots and cheers.

In all this celebration, Xenia had sat apart with the priest. But on hearing the noise, she rose from her seat. “The time has come,” she said, and taking me by the hand led me into the house. At the top of the stairs, she turned into her room.

Her bed was dressed in the bridal linens I had stitched more than half my life ago, put away for this night, and then forgotten. Draped across these was a nightgown. I had not seen it for some dozen years, but it was so deeply familiar that my eyes instantly sought the place on the yoke where my mother had sewn a rosette. Next to it was my first imperfect copy—its stitches uneven and lumpy, the linen round it pulled and pricked—and round the yoke the record of my growing skill was visible in each successive flower. I felt again the remembered pressure of the thimble and needle in the tips of my fingers, my furrowed concentration as I had worked this bit of linen. Just as a peasant works his patch of earth—his sweat watering the soil, his prayers tilled into it season after season, and in turn, the soil worked into his brown palms and under his nails—we twine ourselves into a small piece of the world and it becomes us. My old life was suddenly very dear to me.

Xenia pressed a paper into my hand. It was the deed to the house. At the end of the faded document was fresh ink. In the name of Colonel Andrei Feodorovich Petrov, I bequeath to my cousin, Daria Nikolayevna Pososhkova, this house and all my worldly goods. May she use them to God’s glory and in memory of our love.

Below this, the priest had marked a place for her to sign and added another inscription saying that it was copied and witnessed on this date.

I hesitated, my eyes drifting back to the bed. “But where shall you sleep?”

Was there ever such a dolt? But Xenia did not mind my ungracious thanks. She began to unlace my dress. “You shall be with your beloved, and I with mine.” She helped me to remove my undergarments until I was naked and shivering, though the night was warm. Below the open window, the Italians had begun to serenade. Their high voices drifted up and snared in the limbs of the plane tree and fluttered its leaves so that they sparked with the last lights of the evening sun.

She slipped the gown over my head, and my arms into the sleeves, and the moment was upon us. The feeling rose up in me that I was departing on a long journey from which I should not return. Like all travelers, I wished to sit with her in silence for a time before I set out, but I could not give voice to this and so, as she started to leave, I impulsively threw my arms round her and clung as though we were about to be parted forever. She stroked my hair, and after a time loosened herself from my grasp. “He is waiting.” And with this, she closed the door behind her and left me alone.

I do not know how long I remained there before Gaspari knocked. It must have surprised him to enter and find such an immodest and eager-seeming bride standing just on the far side of the door.

“You are not in bed.” He, too, was dressed in a nightgown, and though this was unremarkable given the circumstances, I had not anticipated it. Transfixed, I stared at the curve of his breasts beneath the thin linen. In the baths, I had seen the bodies of men and of women, but I had never seen this.

He went to the window and closed it, muting the sounds of music. Then he pulled fast the drapery and, blessedly, dissolved from view. I allowed myself to be led to the bed and lifted up onto it. In the dark, I heard his breathing and felt his hand at my waist, very gentle.

My recollection of what followed has the quality of a fever dream in which the most astonishing happenings—such that could scarcely be imagined by the waking self—are met by the dreamer without question. My body, suddenly unfamiliar to me, was revealed to be a map that could be read by touch. His hands, soft as a woman’s, found those places where the soul lay just beneath the surface, like coals banked in a white ash of skin. His tongue worked in more secret places, speaking a hitherto unsuspected language. With quiet insistence, he coaxed from me a wild fluency. I writhed and cried and burbled gibberish and was by all outward and inward signs overtaken by a kind of lunacy from which I emerged spent and badly shaken. I began to weep. It frightened me how thin is the membrane that separates us from madness. I thought of Xenia.

“Did you not enjoy it?”

I did not know how to answer. “I thought I should die.”

“It is called the little death.”

I was hotly ashamed, but I had to know. “Is this what others do?”

“Most take their pleasure more directly. What they say, a means? To get children? But I was not created to get, only to give. However poor, it is my gift to please.” For all the seeming modesty of his words, there was pride in his voice.

“But if it gives you no pleasure—”

“No, no, it makes me very happy.” He found my hand. “You are like figs, Dashenka.”

D id you not enjoy it? Xenia had asked this same question of me several years earlier. I had accompanied her and Andrei to Grand Duchess Catherine’s summer palace, Oranienbaum. As a winter entertainment for Catherine’s court, an immense sliding hill had been constructed of timbered frames in the shape of an upended bow and bricked with polished ice so that one might slide down one slope and then up the facing side. It was smaller than the famed Flying Mountain that is there now, but more treacherous, for there was no track to hold the sledge to its course, nothing to prevent it from spilling over the edge.

At Xenia’s urging, we mounted the steps to the top. From this vantage could be seen the entire breadth of the park, the palace in the distance and, gleaming dully like a river, a long ribbon of ice falling away from the platform where we stood. Donkeys and serfs working with ropes were hauling a small sledge back upstream. It resembled a coffin fit with runners. They heaved it up onto the platform, and then waited on us with horrible expectancy.

Together with the driver, we were wedged into this conveyance, Xenia in front and I behind her. Then we were pushed to the lip of the precipice—and over. The sledge careened down the steep incline, ice rushing towards us and all else blurred by terrifying speed. I buried my eyes in the only solid thing, Xenia’s back. She was screaming. I felt the weightless velocity of our descent in my liquefied bones. Then, with a nauseating heave, we reversed course and began to slide backwards, falling and falling and falling. At long last, the sledge began to slow, and finally it came to a rest. We emerged, miraculously unharmed. Xenia was laughing, breathless and eager to ride again.