Debra Dean: The Mirrored World

“They wished to see you ride in the parade.”

“No, I think they have come to see the elephant,” Uncle Petya said. “Is that not so, girls?” He looked up the avenue. “Ah, even as I speak…”

What looked to be a mud-and-wattle hut was erected in the center of the avenue on four stone gray pillars. Atop this was strapped an iron cage, like a second storey. The whole contraption towered over the onlookers, of a scale more rightly associated with the surrounding buildings than with a living creature. But the pillars were not stationary after all, and they were bearing the hut towards us.

Even when I recognized it as an animal, its features were bewildering. What appeared to be a long tail hung from the approaching end, swaying from side to side like a pendulum. Flaps like dusty carpets waved at each side of its head. It had no fur but was cloaked in an ill-fitting gray hide that hung from its bones like poorly tanned leather, and in its lumbering wake it left a trail of prints in the snow as large and deep as soup tureens. As it drew alongside us, the beast’s eye looked out at the world with the patience of an elderly monk.

Within the cage on the elephant’s back was the bridal couple. In their appearance they were as startling as the beast on which they were conveyed. The woman was dressed in the finery of a bride, but her face was shriveled as an old cabbage, and she shrugged beneath the weight of a large hump growing from her left shoulder. The groom, decades younger than she, was the most unhappy man I had ever seen. Something in his glum physiognomy was familiar.

The crowd began to hoot and make clucking noises.

“It’s the Easter hen!” Xenia said.

“What’s this?” Uncle Petya asked.

Xenia told him where we had last seen the bridegroom: on the previous Easter, he had been made to sit in a huge straw nest at the entrance to the Winter Palace and give out eggs as gifts from the Empress. When commanded, he would begin to cluck, to bob his chin and flap his arms, and then he would withdraw from beneath himself a colored egg for the petitioner. What had made the performance amusing to the crowd was his great, pained dignity: even as he flapped his arms like wings, his expression had remained that of a man trying by force of will to rise above his own ridiculousness.

“I do not think he liked to give up his eggs,” Xenia said.

Uncle Petya laughed. “I should not want to give up my eggs, either. What say you to that, Nikolai Feodosievich? Would you not be sad to give up your eggs?”

My father remained grave. “I say that Prince Golitsyn should have considered this before he defied his sovereign to marry.”

“Is that why he looks so sad?” Xenia asked.

“This wife is his punishment for the first. She was a papist.”

Xenia asked my father what was a papist, and he answered that it was one who followed the Pope in Rome.

“Is it wrong to marry a papist?”

“It is a sin. And an even weightier sin to defy the Empress to do it.”

Her eyes followed the iron cage. “Did he love the papist very, very much?”

My father’s expression hardened slightly more. “That does not matter. It is too dear a price.”

“I shall pay more, I think.”

Behind the bride and groom, scores of couples were parading two by two astride all manner of beasts. It was akin to Noah’s menagerie, had he been asked to collect two of each people as well. A couple with the tawny skin and slant eyes of Tatars rode on camels. A pair of Finns followed on dogs, others on bulls, donkeys, miniature horses, and reindeer. The riders themselves were as various as the beasts that bore them, and were costumed in curious native garb. A Tatar bride with a ring in her nose balanced atop her head a tall red beehive ornamented with pieces of tin and coins. Her dress was similarly adorned with bells, so that she jangled musically as she rode. A red-haired pair from the far North was clothed from hood to boot in fancifully worked skins, and another couple, the man indistinguishable from his mate, was costumed in pantaloons with an open skirt and sash.

“Now, there’s a striking fellow,” Uncle Petya said. The man he indicated resembled the knights in old tales, clad in a tight-fitting waistcoat and breeches and carrying a bow and quiver. He had long whiskers, and his head was capped with metal like a silvered melon. “Xenia, would you like your uncle to buy you a husband like that? He is not your Prince Golitsyn, but I’ll wager he’s a prince of some sort.”

Xenia was strangely quiet and only shook her head.

“No? What of you, Dasha? What, no takers for this fine fellow?” Uncle Petya turned to Nadya. “But I am forgetting myself; it is the eldest sister who chooses first.”

“Doesn’t he already have a wife?” Nadya asked.

“Quite right,” Uncle Petya said with mock solemnity. “He does. Ah well, girls, don’t despair. There are a hundred more here to choose from. We shall find you husbands yet.”

There was not quite a hundred more but so many that by the time the last couple brought up the rear of the pageant they were trailed by lamplighters, and the Admiralty clock was chiming three.

I did not understand then what I know now, that half the jest lay in asking us our opinion. Tsar Peter had made it law that a girl could not be married without her consent, but it was a law observed mostly in the breach. No good father would allow such an important decision as marriage to rest on the affectionate inclinations or disinclinations of a girl. To be led by the heart was foolhardy: one need only look to the terrible fate of Prince Golitsyn to know this.

The next day, we went to the river to see the folly that had been built there. All these years later, I cannot recall my first glimpse of it without a shiver. Seen from a distance, the jester’s palace seemed to shimmer and float just above the surface of the frozen Neva, a trick of the eye, like a dwarfed reflection of the Imperial palace looming on the far shore. As we approached, though, the chimera did not dissolve. If anything, it grew more wondrous.

In every aspect but size it was the counterfeit of a real palace—it had fine windows and even a pediment adorned with statues—but it was fashioned entirely from ice. Guarding it were cannons also made of ice, and at intervals they fired crystalline balls. Two glassy rows of statuary shaped like potted orange trees beckoned us towards the front doors. We walked past the balustrades. Through milky blue walls, shadowy figures could be seen moving about within. It had the appearance of a spectral dwelling that housed souls caught between this life and the next. Night hovered close at the gloomy edges of the February afternoon. Another cannon report shattered the air like thunder.

We climbed the steps. Passing through a doorframe resembling translucent green marble, we entered into the cold blue light of the anteroom. The room and everything in it was fashioned from ice. Light glowed softly through the walls. Objects shimmered like apparitions and rather than casting shadows emitted a subtle radiance. The effect of this was to confuse the senses. As one moved, shapes emerged from the air, what was not quite visible from one perspective taking form when viewed from another angle. On the longer wall of the room, artisans had etched the counterfeit of a tapestry showing a stag-hunting scene. The finely detailed picture could only be viewed straight on; I stepped to one side and the stag and its pursuers vanished. As I moved back again, they reappeared. How long I was thus occupied I do not know, but when I looked up, Xenia and Olga and Nadya had all disappeared. A doorway wavered at the far end of the room, and through it I saw shadows walking about in the blue gloom, but a tingling unease kept me from passing through the door. Instead, I waited. A cluster of people was gathered before a table, and I inserted myself amongst them. On the table stood a clock; it was this they were admiring. One could see through the face of the clock and into a glassy interior filled with an intricate mechanism of cogs and gears.