Debra Dean: The Mirrored World

The offices of love are obscure to me. I have often felt exhausted by this endless procession of the needful—the starving and lonely widows, the old men undone by illness or drink—but it grieved me to think of the door being shut against them. I thought of Martha: Martha who fretted and served and then was rebuked by Christ because it was her sister, Mary, who was doing what was needful, which was only to adore. I pictured these two sisters, and it was Xenia that I saw sitting at Christ’s feet and gazing up at him, her face radiant with joy.

“All week, I have tried to think what Xenia would have me do. After all, it is her house, too. But even could I ask her, she would express no view on the matter beyond telling me to listen. She says this and then is no more forthcoming than you, my dear husband. I think she means I should pray, but I have done this. God, too, is silent.”

The sky had grown dark, but the snow gave off a little light, making Gaspari’s stone and the nearest trees visible. There was a moon.

“I had thought I might find her here. The police came to our door this afternoon. They were looking for her. They said she had spoken out against the Empress. You and I know that cannot be true, but there is such madness afoot in the world these days. All this wild talk of blood and anarchy in France.

“Oh, and there is also a child come to the house today. Her mother brought her and then left. I do not think she is coming back. What then? If I take her to the foundling home, it is little different from killing her outright. I suppose I might take her with me if I leave. But I cannot take them all.”

I plucked up the few gray weeds that stuck through the snow until his plot was as clean as a new blanket.

“If I go, there will be no one left to tend to this. Perhaps you should not mind it so much, but I hate the idea of leaving you alone here. If you were in Italy, there would be family to visit you. I am so sorry, cuoricino mio . It pained me to leave Petersburg when I thought I would never see it again, but I might have been more cheerful for your sake. There is no use for these regrets. Still, you should know. I would gratefully follow you anywhere now.

“It is so simple to see what I might have done in the past, but I am no wiser for it. No, every year that passes, I know even less. What do you think, is this why I have lived so long? That I should eventually become a fool?”

I am not yet so muddled that I expected an answer, but I stopped talking. I was weary of my own fretting. The moon had risen, so bright that the snow gleamed like silver. I was stiff with cold.

“If I leave, I will come back, cuoricino mio .” It may be a long time yet, but I have asked Matvey to bury me there, though it is unconsecrated ground.

I kissed Gaspari’s stone on the letters of his name. The tenderness I felt for him was so acute that I was certain his spirit was beside me. The dead are not gone, not entirely, not ever.

I returned by the way I came, using my stick, like a blind woman, to feel the lay of the path where it was in shadow. As I approached the cemetery’s entrance, the church came partially into view through the trees. By design, all elements of a church—its soaring height and gilded domes and the sumptuous ornament of its interior—are meant to suggest the magnificent presence in the world of Almighty God the Father. However, this church is still unfinished. The belfry is open to the sky on two sides, and the steeple that will top it must be imagined entirely. At night, unpainted and with scaffolding pinioned to the face, it had the insubstantial appearance of an abandoned relic or even a chimera conjured by the moonlight. It was the Holy Ghost that was invoked there, the unknowable mystery.

When I arrived, I had left the droshky at the front, but I did not see it now. It may be that the driver had given me up and left. I was so far from home that if I had to walk, it would take me till morning.

My eyes were drawn again to the face of the church by some movement. I stopped and strained to pull shapes from the darkness, but then decided it was nothing. Perhaps a bird that had made its nest there. Or clouds moving across the moon and playing tricks on the mind. A cemetery at night summons up unreasoning fears.

But no, the shadow was moving. It was not my imagination: a black silhouette was climbing the scaffolding, moving very slowly and steadily up towards the stunted tower. It appeared to be a hunchback. I watched, transfixed. At long last, it reached the top and emerged onto the moonlit platform, and I saw that it was not a hunchback after all, but a thin figure bent under the weight of something carried on its back. It set down this bundle and opened it. Bricks. The apparition was stacking bricks onto a large pile that already awaited the mason’s trowel. I did not remember noticing these when I arrived. Having added its bricks to the pile, it then did something even more strange. It bowed low to each of the four corners of the earth in turn. Having performed this priestly rite, it descended again and, upon reaching the ground, disappeared into the darkness. After some moments, it appeared again, hefting another load on its back.

I cannot say how long I stood watching the repetition of this. Or how long before I understood what I was witness to. No sudden spark of perception but, rather, a slow-growing recognition that it was Xenia.

She was climbing again. Once onto the platform, she unloaded her bricks, no more than eight or ten, for this was all she could carry. I might have gone and fetched more to help her, but I did not. Nor did I think to interrupt her work. The need I had felt so urgently to speak to her had left me.

The quiet gathered. It was very deep, this silence, as though the woods and the church were sunk beneath water. I allowed myself to rest into it, to let the silence close over me. My mind also became still and soft. It was like being on the floor of a sea, like being in the drowned city of Kitezh.

Again, she bowed low to the east and held there. In the bleached and shadowed moonlight, her bent figure was like stone. Then she prayed to the west and again to each direction. I imagined the prayers floating up, not only hers but innumerable others, a city of prayers. The air was filled with them. I imagined the waters rising above our waists and then our shoulders and heads. And how I would see this but not panic. I imagined descending into a perfect quiet and letting go all my fears.

I bowed to Xenia, though she did not see me. I thought to myself how she is accustomed to excusing herself when she leaves by saying she is needed. This, I have come to think, is what it means to be blessed.

Upon rising, I wrapped my headscarf more securely and knotted it beneath my chin, feeling grateful for my good boots and for the sturdy feel of my stick against my palm. The moon lit the way out from the cemetery. There was nothing to do but follow the path, to put one foot in front of the other until I reached home.

For all the talk about writing being a solitary endeavor, I was hardly lonely while writing this novel. I had a lot of help.

For assistance in my research, I am indebted to Professor Sara Dickinson, Università degli Studi di Genova; Sister Ioanna of St. Innocent Religious Community in Minnesota; Professor Derek Offord, University of Bristol; and Professor Christine Worobec, Northern Illinois University. For the gift of their perceptive early reads, I am grateful to Lynne Barrett, Debra McLane, and especially to my dear friend Kyra Petrovskaya Wayne for her help with all things Russian. What errors and infelicities remain are mine alone.

I am beholden to Claire Wachtel, a truth teller, for insisting that it must be better and then waiting another year while it got that way; and to the rest of the folks at HarperCollins who have turned a bunch of bytes into an objet d’art and then sent it out into the world. My thanks to Marly Rusoff and Michael Radulesçu for their friendship and wise counsel; I am just so lucky to know such mensches. That goes for Rachelle and Mitchell Kaplan; Kimberly and Les Standiford; Ellen Kanner and Benjamin Bohlmann; Michael and Paula Gillespie; and James W. Hall and the Lady Evelyn: our lives here in Miami would be a bust without them.