Debra Dean - The Mirrored World

I gathered together the household and said that I wished to free them to settle their own futures. If they had a place to go, I would see to their papers; if not, they might serve my aunt Galina Stepanovna. With many tears, we began to pack our belongings that we should be ready to leave within the week. Passports were arranged for Gaspari and me, and because I could not bring myself to sell it, the house was put with an agent to let.

Christ instructed his disciples not to lay up their treasure on earth but in Heaven. For where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also. But the heart stubbornly attaches itself to familiar places and things and would rather have these, no matter how humble, than to exchange them for the promise of what is glorious but unknown. That Italy’s skies would be as yellow as Paradise did not console me; I preferred the granite shadows of this most bleak and most beautiful city. Even the history of my sadness here was dear to me.

On the day before we were to set out, I made to bid our dear Empress good-bye and joined the thousands of mourners lined up outside the old wooden palace where she lay in state. Though she had been his benefactress, Gaspari could not risk his health by lingering out of doors, but he urged me to go and to say his prayers for him. I was glad for the time to be alone with my thoughts; the grave sky and the mournful aspect of the crowd were well tuned to my mood.

I waited several hours to gain entrance to the death chamber, standing behind two women whom I took by their conversation to be soldiers’ wives. Reflecting that where I was going I should not hear my native tongue, I sucked in the earthy sounds of it. They began talking of the rumor that our new Emperor Peter would suspend hostilities against his beloved Frederick, the Emperor of Prussia.

“No, surely not,” said one, “not with victory so close.”

The other raised her brow meaningfully. “They say he speaks German with his advisors.”

My thoughts wandered elsewhere until I heard one of the women speak a familiar name. Andrei Feodorovich. “She foretold this, you know,” the woman continued to her companion. “I saw her outside the church. She was tearing at her clothes and crying out to passersby to go home and bake blinis.”

Hope startled awake in me, coursing into my veins as sudden and violent as a spring river.

“For a funeral supper?” the one woman asked.

The other nodded gravely. “What else would you make of it? And two days later, Her Majesty was dead.”

“Excuse me.” I interrupted their talk. “Who is it you are speaking of?”

“The Empress,” she answered.

“Yes, yes, but you heard someone foretell her death?”

The woman nodded.

“Whereabouts was this church?”

The woman’s features stiffened at my abruptness. “In St. Matthias parish,” she said, and then turned back to her friend.

“Please,” I implored. She eyed me once more, warily. “Just answer me this. Was the person’s name Xenia Grigoryevna?”

“No.”

In spite of this, I left my place in the line and hired a droshky to take me straightaway to the church in St. Matthias.

We crossed the river and drove until we came to a shabby neighborhood within this poorest of boroughs. Tumbledown wooden houses, shops, and huts were crowded together like broken teeth, seeming to be kept upright only by their leaning against one another. The unpaved streets were a quagmire, with pigs and starving dogs rooting about in the filth. The air was pestilential, and I kept my handkerchief over my face to blunt the stench. When we came upon the church, I leapt down from the droshky and hastily made my way to its steps.

I found no dearth of the afflicted there, but Xenia was not among them, nor did anyone know her name.

The repeated denials, and the sights and smells of this benighted place wore down my resolve and allowed a small, sensible voice within me to be heard. Why have you come here? The woman said that it was not Xenia. And there are many in the world by the name of Andrei Feodorovich. Would you be like her, seeking meaning in every coincidence?

Go with your husband to Italy. Everything is dead for you here.

Ilooked out the carriage window as we passed through the gate of the city and were swallowed into the forest. Later, the terrain changed to wintry swamp and meadows, with snow spread like linen over the sleeping earth. Except for a few feathery stands of birch, the panorama, earth to sky, was unbroken and peaceful. How does the soil rest, I wondered, where it is always warm and never dormant? But beside my misgivings was also curiosity. I had conjured pictures of a place that was like Petersburg in summer, but covered in vines, and I had peopled it with the Italians at court. The Italy of my imagination was a land of dark-eyed women and musici.

Gaspari kept up a steady conversation with an aide to the Prince, with whom we shared the carriage. I can only guess at what this aide must have thought privately of us, the Italian musico and his Russian wife, but when traveling one must put aside the scruples that govern one’s choice of company in the city, and Nikolai Yakovlevich was a young man of lenient character, not above being entertained by Gaspari. As I have mentioned, my husband was an excellent gossip, and our departure from Petersburg had freed him of any remaining constraints on his tongue. He felt no need for discretion, for he intended never to return there. His mood was expansive and, fueled by frequent draughts of vodka to keep off the cold, he amused himself and the young man with his appraisals of Petersburg’s fools and fops. When we stopped at an inn for the night, he ordered warm kvas and invited Nikolai Yakovlevich to sit by the stove with him that they might continue their talk.

“This I will say—” He rubbed life back into his hands. “She was strong as a man. No other country could a woman rule. I think it is these winters. It makes the woman… what is the word I want?”

Nikolai Yakovlevich smiled genially but was too politic to supply any word.

“Bold,” Gaspari pronounced. “That is it. These Russian woman is like new steel that is put in cold water to harden.” He gauged the young man’s expression and smiled ruefully. “I do not offend by this? Good. I admire. Myself, I was not made for this cold. I am like the little songbird that forget to fly away when the summer ends.”

At Novgorod, we left the road I knew and turned west to the sea. The journey from here to Riga is three long days at a gallop but five at the Prince’s more leisured pace, for he disliked being woken early. When poor horses were all that could be had at a post station, we added yet another day.

By the fourth, Gaspari’s spirits had subdued. He grew listless and quiet. Following Nikolai Yakovlevich’s glance out the window, he said, “White and white and then more white. Not a pretty village even to relieve the—” He coughed into his handkerchief. “ Pardonnez-moi , to relieve the dullness. If you will travel on to Italy with us, my friend, you shall see such pretty villages.”

On the fifth day, Gaspari gave off talking entirely and huddled quietly under a fur lap robe, jounced out of a sluggish doze every so often by a rough patch of road or a fit of coughing. By the time we arrived in Riga, he was unmistakably ill.

We were to be guests there of the Governor General, in a castle which housed the local administration. It was an ancient, formidable hulk seemingly little changed in centuries. The Governor greeted the Prince and his entourage and escorted us into a gray hall that was more frigid than the out-of-doors. Here he made such ceremony of his welcome that Gaspari, unwrapped from his travel robes, began to shiver and look pale. I thought he might faint and was obliged to ask that he be shown directly to a room.