Debra Dean - The Mirrored World

It was my habit to watch his performances from the wings, where I could not be seen. Sitting in the house meant suffering the many eyes that peered at me from behind fans, the trail of titters that attended my coming or going. “The musico’s wife,” they would whisper, and I knew they were thinking of what we did in our bed.

And so, on the first evening, after I had helped Gaspari with his dressing, I tucked myself behind a bit of scenery, where I should be out of the way.

Saletti took the stage in his gold turban and striped robes, assumed a pose, and without yet singing a note brought the audience to a cheer. When he had drunk his fill of it, he began to sing. He was indeed past his strength, though not so terrible as my husband had portrayed him. I looked over to Gaspari, who stood in the shadow of the proscenium awaiting his own entrance. His painted features twisted at each wavering note, and I worried that he might turn and leave the theatre. But as I watched, he closed his eyes and shook loose his long limbs.

As Saletti scaled the last treacherous note of his aria, Gaspari strutted onto the stage, swishing his purple robe in glorious arcs of color, and planted himself in the center of the footlights. He did not wait even a beat after Saletti’s last note before he began to sing himself, and thus he deprived the older musico of any applause. For the length of the opera, Gaspari greatly embellished his part, departing from the score to weave in filigrees of trilling and florid ornamentation. The battle between Alexander and the Indian King for the love of Cleofide was a contest also between the two musici, and it was one that Saletti could not win. To hear them singing together was to see history reenacted and to understand how Alexander had so thoroughly vanquished and humiliated India.

At the end of the second act, Gaspari finished his final aria with an exquisite messa di voce , sustaining a single note, letting it swell and then fade almost to nothing before it rose again like a phoenix. The audience was stirred to its feet and shouted its bravos. Rather than exiting, Gaspari remained near the lip of the stage as Saletti sang, that he might relish the unflattering comparisons being made in the house.

This triumph did not appease Gaspari’s pricked vanity. He talked more frequently of quitting Russia—moving to Italy or even to Paris, where the climate was more temperate and he might be better appreciated—but he was too much rewarded in the employ of Her Imperial Majesty to give it up as yet for uncertain prospects. And so we continued to live a quiet life in the shadow of the court.

There was little left in the house to remind me of Xenia. So many of the furnishings had been sold or given away, and the repetitive tasks of domesticity—the sweeping and cleaning and polishing—gradually erased her signature from what remained. I did not forget her, but the sharp pain of her loss softened and became like a swollen joint or weakened back. One accommodates the ache, and it becomes a part of you.

Because I could have no expectation of children, I had schooled myself not to want them, having learnt from Xenia the peril of unchecked longing. I managed the household well and was attentive to my husband’s particular needs, keeping the stove fueled at night in the worst of winter and tucking cooked stones wrapped in flannel round his feet. When in spite of this he took ill, I stayed at his bedside and fed him strong broths. I also learnt to prepare dishes of his birthplace and even taught myself some few phrases of Italian that he might feel himself more at home here. As Xenia had for Andrei, I brought him warm kvas with honey and herbs for his throat. However, what had been at the heart of that little gesture—a passionate and unreserved love—I could not give. Perhaps I was unwilling to fall again into the abyss that had so frightened me on the first night of our marriage. I think I held myself a little apart.

Did he sense any shortcoming in my heart? I do not know. I think we were happy enough.

Season followed season, each alike except for the small changes that every year brings—a new opera or a new way to wear a wig, shifts in alliances between person and person or country and country—diversions that fill our days with seeming import but are then displaced by whatever newer thing follows. At some point during this time, the Empress engaged the architect Rastrelli to design a splendid new masonry palace on the site of the old Winter Palace. For this work, thousands of laborers were absorbed into the city and took up residence in huts near the site. They labored there for years, the enormous structure rising by such slow increments as to seem unchanging, as though it had always been there in its unfinished state.

The war begun against Prussia in 1756 also rumbled on ceaselessly, a tidal ebb and flow of battle lines that washed over the whole of Europe but was present to me only in the person of my brother, Vanya. Cut off by my family, I had no news of him until his death at Züllichau, which I learnt of when the rolls were published in the papers. In a dull fog, I was on the point of traveling to the country to console my parents, but Gaspari prevented it. “There is nothing there for you, Dashenka,” he said. “They do not love you. I am all your family now.” After that, I did not take an interest in the war again until I was forced to by circumstances that I will relate.

On Christmas Day of 1761, the tolling of the bells brought news of the death of Her Imperial Majesty. I remember feeling no shock. She was old—or so it seemed then, though it occurs to me that she was younger by several years than I am now—and she had been ill for so long, her death predicted so repeatedly that when it arrived it felt like the exhalation of a long-held breath.

No one of our acquaintance was happy at the prospect of her nephew, Grand Duke Peter, taking the throne, but I did not anticipate how this would change our lives or with what suddenness. Within two days of her death, the new Emperor dismissed the Italian Company from the service of the court. Only a fortnight before, Elizabeth had issued a decree to recruit more actors and musicians for the troupe. Now he ordered the theatre shuttered, with all its stock of scenery, effects, machinery, and costumes left inside to molder. Peter moved himself into the dead Empress’s still-unfinished palace and set about to wipe clean from memory all the graces of her reign.

Gaspari was then suffering the annual toll that our winters took on him, a perpetual weariness from always being cold, but this seeming reversal of his fortunes had a tonic effect. His spirits rose at the news and for this reason: there was nothing to keep us here any longer. He might now return to Italy. He had succeeded in putting by more than enough funds to keep us in comfort until he found a position. We might go first to the village where he had been born. He happily anticipated showing it to me—the terraced hills with their low stone walls, the lion’s head over the door of his mother’s house—and, in turn, showing me to his relations. These were, by his account, most all of the village.

I made an effort to share his joy, but he knew me too well not to feel the thinness of my enthusiasm. “I know what I ask, Dasha… but I will die if I stay here.” And then he tried to cheer me with this: so much of Petersburg, the palaces and canals and bridges, were but poor copies of what I should find in Italy. “And everything looks more happy there,” he added, “because it is where it belongs.” He wrote to his mother with the news that he was coming home and bringing with him his Russian wife.

The war had made private travel treacherous, and the route to Italy passed through Prussia, where we could not go. However, in his eagerness to quit Russia, Gaspari found a means. An envoy to the ministry at Leipzig had been appointed to announce His Majesty’s accession to the throne and would leave on this mission shortly. Gaspari approached Countess Stroganova, who was a devoted follower of the new Emperor, and secured from her the favor of our being attached to Prince Bezborodko’s travel party.