Debra Dean - The Mirrored World

“It is like flying!” she said, and was puzzled that I did not share her euphoria.

The morning following the wedding, Xenia was gone from the house. I thought nothing of this, but when she did not return by late afternoon I sent Grishka to the church to fetch her. He returned and reported that she had not been seen there. I sent him directly back out to look for her at Andrei’s grave. So narrow were her habits that I could not conceive of any other destination, but even before he returned, a part of me knew she had gone much farther.

I found myself standing outside Andrei’s room. Since his death, the door had remained closed, but that morning it stood ajar. I entered. In the faded heat of the midsummer evening, the room was close. Everything in it was silted with a fine sheath of dust, but otherwise it seemed much as it had been while he was alive. Because he slept in Xenia’s room, it was not furnished with a bed but only a dressing table, a boot chair and commode, a standing mirror, and other such accoutrements as are necessary to a gentleman’s dressing room. His wig was now gone from its stand, and there were clean shapes on the dressing table where formerly there had been jars of pomade and powder and whatnot. She had given some of his things away, yet by comparison to the looted appearance of the rest of the house the room seemed overstuffed with possessions.

For this reason, perhaps, it was some moments before I saw Xenia’s black mourning dress, her last remaining garment, discarded on the floor of the empty armoire. When I picked it up, something fell from its folds: the delicate cross and chain she had worn round her neck since infancy. Apprehension knifed through me.

Still, I had only a foreboding and nothing material to pin it to. In the weeks that followed, I returned to the church and to Smolenskoye cemetery again and again, thinking I might find her or some sign that she had been there. I sought her out in increasingly unlikely quarters of the city as well, asking at churches and taverns and wherever people were congregated if any had seen a woman of about my years but more comely and answering to the name Xenia Grigoryevna. That by all appearances she had left the house unclothed would suggest that someone should have remembered seeing her, but it was as though she had been removed from the earth and no trace left behind.

We went to the authorities, but they were uniformly uninterested—women go missing all the time, murdered or escaped from husbands or fathers or masters. As Xenia belonged to no one, no husband or father or master, she might go where she pleased and they had no cause to find her and bring her back. Yes, said one uncurious officer, it was less common for a woman to leave behind even her clothing. But then again, he added, the rivers are full of madwomen.

When it was spoken aloud, my foreboding instantly assumed material form. I recalled the terms of her parting from me on my wedding night. “You shall be with your beloved, and I with mine.” How had I missed the portent in these words when she said them? Why would she give me her house except that she saw no further need of it herself? Why had I not questioned this gift?

The answer came to me that I had not questioned it because I had need of a house.

After this, I could not cross a bridge without my gaze drifting down to the water and seeking there her countenance, wavering dim and green in the depths. What I found was only my own reflection on the surface. I contemplated Lake Svetloyar and the pilgrims who had gone there and disappeared.

At the end of a fortnight, Gaspari was compelled to return to the Italian Company, which was still in summer residence with the court at Tsarskoye Selo. I could not bring myself to desert the city. “If she were to return…” I explained. He agreed, though I saw in his face that it was only out of kindness and an unwillingness to destroy what hope I had.

In truth, this hope was small and unsteady. Strung between unsettled expectation and despair, on some days I prayed fervently that God might bring her back to me and at other times I asked only for her bones that I might lay my grief to rest alongside them. Later still, my supplications were even more faltering and exhausted. Give me only this, I prayed, the reassurance of your presence. But my thoughts floated outwards and came back thin as an echo. I continued to look for her on the church steps, but she was never there, and I went less often. At some moment unmarked by me, the low flame of my faith guttered and went out.

The musici were notorious for being temperamental—it was widely held that the sacrifice of their manhood unbalanced their humors—and Gaspari’s reputation in the court was no different. Stories of his unrestrained behavior circulated through the court: that he had insisted on being reseated above the salt at a supper and then left anyway, that he had ripped up a score because he did not like the composition, that he canceled performances for no better reason than that he objected to the weather. Of course, one cannot depend upon wags for the truth if it can be improved by exaggeration and falsehoods. In truth, the thin blood of Italians is unsuited to our climate, and Gaspari suffered most grievously in the winter. He was often wracked with terrible chills and coughs, and if he did not perform, it was because of this. And while it is true that he once called Alexi Bestuzhev-Ryumin a horse’s ass and refused to sing a note unless the Grand Chancellor was first removed from the building, it was not reported that the Grand Chancellor had earlier insulted him very grievously or that the whole matter came to nothing once it was discovered that there had been a misunderstanding and the Grand Chancellor was not, after all, present at the opera house that evening.

I doubt the world would have credited how unassuming a man Gaspari was within our walls and how generous to his friends, but he did nothing to help his own cause. Perceiving that most persons found him strange and repellent, he moved through society with a haughty air, stiffening at whispers and sensitive to imagined slights. And if any person had the temerity to talk while he sang or to applaud tepidly afterwards, that person was forever his enemy. Even fawning admiration, though he craved it, might arouse in him suspicions that he was being mocked, and he would then retaliate with a barbed wit.

As the cognoscenti prize most what is most rare and delicate, they tolerated what they deemed this capriciousness and even encouraged it. They wanted monsters, and so they had them.

In the year that followed Xenia’s disappearance, Araja announced that he would revive his Alessandro nell’Indie , the opera that had first brought Gaspari to the attention of Petersburg. With the singer Carestini gone to London, Gaspari anticipated taking the primo uomo role of the Indian King Poro who battled with Alexander the Great for the love of his Indian Queen, Cleofide.

Gaspari was violently offended, then, to learn that Araja had awarded the role instead to Lorenzo Saletti for his return to the Russian court. “It is the faithful dog is kicked,” Gaspari said.

He took up his old part, that of Alexander, but returned from rehearsal the first day frothing with bitterness towards Saletti, who was, he claimed, so past his vigor that his listeners must envy the deaf. “Squeak, squeak, squeak! I cannot bear it! I cannot pretend to a noble contest with this fat, old mouse. I should be chasing him about the stage with the broom!”

He grew increasingly distressed with each rehearsal. It physically pained Gaspari to hear a sour note, and though he did his best to shield himself from the assaults by covering his ears while Saletti sang, it was more than he could endure. He broke down into weeping one night, and I feared he would not last until the evening of the first performance.