Debra Dean: The Mirrored World

Now, I offered Xenia the more comfortable chair, but she preferred to stand at the stove. She held her gnarled hands close over the tiles to thaw them. Masha brought the tea, and the room filled with a cottony quiet.

Ours was an odd kind of visiting. She could not be engaged by idle gossip, for what happened yesterday or the previous week did not hold her interest. I had learnt not to ask after her health and she did not ask after mine; the body and its various aches and failings did not concern her. Living so entirely in the present moment had also made her immune to either expectation or worry for the future, so there could be no talk of civic affairs. If I told her of what I was reading, her attention drifted and she would begin to hum.

Indeed, she had so entirely lost the art of conversing that we sat for the better part of an hour without a word passing between us. Strange as it may seem, though, I was not bothered by this. A wonderful peacefulness came to me merely by my being in her presence.

“Do you remember Leonid Vladimirovich Berevsky and his daughter?” I said at last. “Do you remember the evening you rescued her little dog from dancing?”

She gave no sign to indicate whether she did or did not but only sat in that way of hers, smiling benignly.

The steam from my glass unfurled the scents of smoke and camel’s sweat. I looked at her and she at me, and in that moment it did not matter whether she recalled any of our shared past or what we had been to one another; in her gaze, I felt utterly and inescapably beheld.

Ihad passed six years as a widow when Kuzma Zakharovich died. Perhaps it was only to observe the forms that caused Nadya to send me the notice, or perhaps the years had softened her bitterness towards me. I went to the house the next morning.

There was a wreath on the door and many persons already in the anteroom. I supposed several of them to be Kuzma Zakharovich’s children. I looked about for my aunt but did not spy her, nor anyone else I knew. But Nadya was there with the priest and several others, in the next room where her husband lay. In the threshold, I watched her leaning on the arm of a young officer of perhaps eighteen or twenty years. She was weeping. Though she had always had a capacity to act what was needed, her grief looked genuine. It emboldened me. I went to her and offered my condolences. She seemed faintly puzzled to see me but was courteous and introduced me to her son, who was a child when I had last seen him.

“And the baby, little Sasha, is he here also?”

She pointed him out, and two others who had come after him. I confess, I felt a prick of envy, but I was glad for her, too, that she had children to cushion her grief. I admired them to her, and she accepted my compliments.

I asked Nadya if her sister knew of Kuzma Zakharovich’s death.

Nadya’s mouth hardened. “To what address should I have sent the notice? And to what name?” She did not wait on an answer. “It does not matter. Surely she knew of his death even before I did. Is this not her reputation?”

I agreed that it was.

Xenia was known widely to have predicted the death of our beloved Empress Elizabeth and again, more recently, the murder of the Empress’s predecessor, Ivan Antonovich. Poor Ivan. While but an infant, he had been unseated from the throne by Elizabeth Petrovna and then locked away in a dungeon for twenty years. It was said by some that his confinement had deprived him of his wits. And then to be murdered in his cell by his guards, the only companions he had known all his days. On the heels of this sad rumor had come the further rumor that Xenia had predicted it. On the day before his death, it was said, she had walked the streets of her parish, weeping loudly and shrieking of blood.

I was reminded of her dreams. Of her husband’s death and the blood pooling round his head. Of her subsequent horror at the sight of her own blood. But the general populace could not know these things. They did not know Xenia, only the holy fool called Andrei Feodorovich.

Ileft Nadya’s house and walked. I altered my route home that I might pass by the old Winter Palace, which was then being dismantled. It was open to the sky, the roof and walls stripped down to the timbers, and birds swooped in and out of what had been the grand ballroom and the reception rooms and private quarters.

The old opera house attached to one end of the palace was still intact; it was being saved for some other use. As I watched, laborers emerged from the open back wall, carting rubbish to the street—heaps of old rope, moldering canvas, and a ceramic shell I recognized, one of several that had once hid the footlights. I followed a laborer inside.

The interior was dim and musty and sadly decayed. Emptied of its chairs and draperies and gilded fixtures, it was like a great beast being stripped to the bone. A few warped backdrops and set pieces leaned against the side walls, and one of these was familiar to me. Most of the paint had flaked from it, but the scene still ghosted from the canvas: stands of palms and hanging flowers, a plashing fountain, faded peacocks and tigers and, like bookends with their trunks raised, a pair of elephants. It was the garden of Poro, the Indian King.

The memory of Gaspari’s ethereal voice slipped between my ears, sharp as a newly honed knife.

As I stood in the empty theatre, I remembered that I had now been widowed in almost equal measure to the time I had been married. I was not quite thirty-six years of age, and years stretched before me, years that I would have need to endure without him or children who might remind me of him.

I recalled Xenia saying that this emptiness was sweet. Perhaps the saints are right in thinking that the depth of one’s love is measured by the capacity for suffering, yet one cannot help but question those who court it with such fervor. Even Christ, who submitted willingly to his suffering, first prayed that the cup might be taken from him.

The next week, as I was sitting at my mending, I heard the sound of Xenia’s stick upon the stair. I was glad it was she, for my bleakness on the day of Kuzma Zakharovich’s funeral had not left me. I was taken aback, then, when she crossed the threshold shouting.

“Get up!” she scolded. “Why do you sit and sew buttons when your son waits on you?”

“I am Dasha,” I reminded her. “I do not have a son. Here.” I set aside my mending and patted the cushion beside me. “Calm yourself. I will tell Masha to make us tea.”

But she would not sit. “There has been an accident. Your son,” she insisted, shaking her head in violent little jerks. “Your son.”

I wondered if she had confused my door with someone else’s. I knew she visited others; stories trailed her erratic rounds, and among these were accounts of her coming to a house with tidings of death or illness. I could not entirely discount the possibility that somewhere in Petersburg was a woman looking for her son, and Xenia had brought terrible news of him to the wrong address.

“Hurry,” she commanded, and she turned and went back down the stairs. There was never any arguing against her. I followed.

She had kept a droshky waiting at the door, and the driver conveyed us over to the Petersburgskaya Storona and then to the particular corner where she directed. A carriage was stopped in the middle of the street, and a crowd had gathered round it. Seeing us alight from the droshky, someone recognized Xenia and escorted us into the crush.

At its center, a young woman lay on the ground, moaning. She had been struck by the carriage. Though it was forbidden to go at a gallop within the city, it was a law widely flouted, and these carriages were a menace. The onlookers said she had been knocked down as it flew wide round the corner, and she was trampled beneath the wheels. There was much blood, and one of the woman’s arms lay at an unnatural angle.