Debra Dean - The Mirrored World

Wherever I went, she had been there only recently but was not there now. Or someone had heard report of her at another place. Piecing together various sightings, I made my way north and towards the far edge of the parish, which was worse even than the heart of it. Here, every person in the street had such an air of menace that I no longer dared ask after Xenia.

I turned into another street and another, and then she was there, not fifty feet away, walking in my direction and singing some tune. Trailing behind her was a gang of rough boys. They were throwing mud at her. Burbling her private singsong, she tried to disregard their persecution, but when a hard clot hit her in the back of the head it jolted her from her music. She turned and railed at them, thrashing her stick, and chased them back up the street like a fury. I ran after her, shouting her name, and caught her by the arm.

“Xenia,” I cried.

She was rocking back and forth on her heels. Her countenance was a study of grief and her lips made fast little burbling noises, a pattern of guttural utterances that were not quite language.

“Andrei Feodorovich?”

My voice did not reach her nor did she respond to my touch on her arm.

After a time, the rhythm of her babbling slowed and began to separate into words.

… to help me Lord make speed to save me Lord make haste to help me Lord make speed to …

Over and over, for I do not know how long a space of time, these same words tumbled like a fast brook, broken only by her breath. Gradually, the words became too soft to hear and only her lips continued to move. Her rocking slowed and at last she grew calm.

“Xenia?”

Her gaze rested on the air. “Listen,” she said.

I heard nothing out of the usual. “What? What is it?” I asked.

She did not answer, but closed her eyes. I closed my eyes as well and heard the angry squabbling of a cock, and at a farther distance the faint clattering of wheels and hooves on cobblestone. Perhaps I had misunderstood. I opened my eyes again. Xenia remained just as she had been, a pleasant smile on her lips, like a person lost in reverie.

My poor Xenia. Had she wandered here in these terrible streets all these years, too addled to find her way home? Had something happened to her to cause her to forget herself, to forget where she lived? She had not seemed to know the house when she saw it, or Masha either. She had not called me by name. Perhaps we were strangers in her eyes.

“Xenia?” My voice seemed loud as shattering glass. “We cannot stay here in the street. Let us search out a droshky, shall we?”

She consented to return to the house, and when we had arrived there, I tried to impress on her that this was her home. She need not ever go back to that place. We cleaned the mud from her and washed it from her garments. Masha roasted a duck for our dinner, and she ate it with relish.

When she had eaten, she stood.

“You may have your old bed,” I said. “I have put fresh linens on it.” I reminded her of the night when she had bequeathed this same bed to me, but if she recalled this, she did not show it. Just as she had done on the previous day, she said that she was needed, and behaved like one who has an appointment to which she dare not arrive late.

I grasped her hand and urged her to sit again. “You are needed here . Please .”

“I have a place to be.” She said it with good humor but was resolute and would not sit.

I knew not what else to do. I let go her hand. “What place is that?”

“Oh, you know, with God.”

“With God. And where is He?” I pressed. If she would go again, at least I should know where to find her.

Assuming a frantic disposition, she mimicked pulling something apart in her hands. “Where is it? Where is the onion’s heart?” she wailed in mock despair. “Nothing but onion, onion, onion.” She chuckled and invited me to share her merriment.

When I could not, her eyes softened with compassion.

“It is all good. All of it. Listen.”

And then she turned and was gone.

Again and again, I retrieved her from the streets of St. Matthias parish. I found her huddled beneath the eaves of the church, or in some lonely alley or stable, out of the wind perhaps but without even the sheepskin and stockings and boots I had bought for her. Even when the snows came, she remained out in the open. That she did not catch her death is, I suppose, all the proof one might want that she was indeed blessed by God, but it frightened me to see that her feet were black and swollen.

“You think them ugly?” She sat next to me in the droshky, wiggling her toes as though she were delighted by them.

“It’s not so much their appearance, but I fear you shall lose them to frostbite.”

She shook her head. “They are hard as a dog’s pads. Feel.” She lifted up a foot that I might touch it. When I hesitated, she barked and made growling noises, then laughed at her jest.

“God lives in my feet. They do not feel the cold.”

Not feeling the cold is the mark of frostbite, but I knew there was nothing to be gained by this argument. I might offer her yet another pair of shoes, but if she agreed to take them they would only end up on someone else’s feet. By slow measures, I allowed that my love would not keep her here, and I could not be her jailer. Instead, I brought food and clothing to her wherever I found her, until I saw that she did not need this help either. I had this small consolation: for one who lived in the streets and on the charity of her fellow man, Xenia did not want for anything if only she would have it. She would not accept alms unless perchance the coin was stamped with the image of Saint George on horseback—and taking this she promptly gave it away again—but because she was thought to be holy, wherever she stopped on her irregular rounds she was tempted with food. She might walk into a merchant’s shop and with impunity help herself to a pickle from the barrel or a fistful of raisins. If she deigned to eat, the merchant believed he would have good luck for the remainder of the day. Similarly, drivers vied to offer her rides so that they might get wealthy customers afterwards.

At irregular intervals separated by a day or a month, she began to call here of her own will. Just as she used to when she still answered to Xenia, she often brought with her a beggar or unfortunate to be fed or otherwise tended to.

It was never only to visit; always she came with some pretext that she was needed. One afternoon, she arrived by coach and burst through the door like the fire brigade, shouting, “Tell Masha to put on the kettle! I am here!” just as though I had urgently sent for her.

I had not, of course, but as it happened, her visit aligned with my feeling my loneliness acutely. I had that morning passed the shop on Galernaya Street where I had used to buy Gaspari’s tea. I had turned and gone inside. The merchant, a man in his middle years, was brown and thin as a tea leaf himself. I imagined him to be of Mongol blood, a cousin perhaps of one of the traders who led the camel caravans up from Peking on the tea road. It was said to be a journey of more than a year through mountainous terrain, and breathing in the aromas of the shop I could not help but call up exotic scenes of men dressed in rough furs and turbans and huddled round a smoking campfire, their beasts laden with the precious cargo.

He remembered me, though it had been a very long time, and asked after the health of my husband. I cannot say why, but I did not want to tell him that Gaspari had died, and so I bought a small packet of tea. For the length of my walk home, I had reproached myself for such foolishness. You are as wasteful as Leonid Vladimirovich, I thought, but you do not have a daughter or son who will take you in when you become a pauper. I had made myself miserable with worry and self-loathing.