I found I could feed Xenia by pressing a spoon to her lips till they opened, ladling in a bit of broth, retrieving the spoon, and holding her jaw shut till she swallowed. It required the unflagging persistence of a mother bird. I took Andrei’s place in their bed that I might look after her, and my sleep was as restless as it had been when we were children and last shared a bed. Muffled sobs seeped into my dreams, along with muttered sounds that might have been words. Once, she cried out, “Blood! Blood!” her voice choked with anguish. When I tried to rouse her, she clutched blindly at my arm. “There is so much greed in the world.” She keened and mewled but could not be roused from sleep, and in the morning she was just as she had been, vacant-eyed and mute. Then one night I awoke and felt her watching me.
“How long has it been?” The voice, though feeble, was her own.
“A week and some. A week and two days.”
“You’ve returned, then.”
I answered that I had not left, except to go out for necessity.
“Moy solovushka,” she whispered.
It was her pet name for Andrei, “my nightingale.” I thought she was asking for him, and I was loath to tell her again what had broken her in the first place. I cast about for some way to couch the truth in gentleness or avoid it altogether.
“Do you suffer?” she asked.
Her gaze seemed directed behind me, and I looked there. The room was black and still, and I could see nothing. It came to me then: it is on the ninth day after death that the soul is said to leave the body. On the fortieth day, it departs this world. Between these two points lies a blank space that the Church does not account for, but peasants will tell you that the soul returns home and takes up residence behind the stove. She thought he was in the room with us.
My senses stretched taut against the darkness. Her breath caught. And released. Caught, caught again, then released, thick with tears.
“I thought it would be me,” she rasped. “Not you.”
Over the following days I tried to draw her out from her trance, talking on whatever subject came into my head. I shaped my discourse round familiar things, reminding her of times from our girlhood—the day she had fallen into the river, the bonfires built by the villagers to celebrate Shrovetide, the elephant that carried the jester and his wife—anything I could think that might spark some recognition in her face. I sometimes fancied she was listening, but she might only have been entranced by the movement of my lips or the sound of my voice.
Then, one afternoon, I suggested that the bedchamber might use a little airing. Struggling with the latch on the window, I pried it open. The bright smell of fresh snow washed into the room. “There, that’s better, don’t you think?”
“Ice.” The word popped out like a cork from a bottle.
Delighted, I encouraged her further. “Have you slept well?”
“Ice.”
“On the window?”
“The step. I was very cold.”
“Do you want me to close it up again?” She showed no comprehension, so I indicated the glass. “Shall I shut the window?”
“I am dead.”
I startled. During the past weeks I had sometimes had this very thought, that when Andrei died, she had died with him and had left behind a breathing corpse.
“You have been very near it,” I said, “but God has seen fit to bring you back to us.”
She took in the room slowly, as if she were at pains to recall it. Then her eyes lighted on me and recognition pierced her. Her features contracted with agony.
“You were at the palace. You saw what happened.”
“Yes.”
She waited for more.
“He fell down the steps and struck his head.”
She nodded as if to say she knew this much already.
“He didn’t suffer,” I assured her. “He fell and was gone.”
Her eyes drifted to the window and rested there for so long a time that I thought she had returned to her mute state. I was on the verge of slipping out when she asked, “Was he confessed and given the last sacraments?”
I had to admit that, no, he had died too suddenly.
Her eyes shut. “He was not ready.” Her voice was flat. “In the dream, it was me. It should have been.”
She awakened as if she had indeed been dead. But the person who returned to the world was not Xenia. Grief had unyoked her from herself. Dull-eyed, like an animal in extremis, she looked on her surroundings and her loved ones with indifference. Or she might suddenly begin to weep, even to tear at her nightclothes, but what emotions passed over her were like leaves borne on the surface of a river and caught in swirling eddies, unattached to anything visible.
Her speech, too, was oddly disjointed and followed no definite course. I might say a thing to her and she would answer me sensibly only to say another thing so discordant that I was thrown into confusion. Sometimes I would hear her talking in her room, and, answering as I came, find that I had been mistaken, had caught one voice of a private conversation and believed it addressed to me. In truth she had been talking to Andrei.
She did not leave her bed, and then one day I found her in the icon corner of her room, prostrate, and as feeble as if she had crawled across the steppes. This became her practice. She would kneel there for long hours, even through the length of the night, without slippers or a shawl, her gaze fixed on the image of the Virgin of Vladimir and seemingly in prayer. I say “seemingly” because, except that she had moved from her bed to the floor, the distinction between this state and her former oblivion was too subtle to observe. Her mournful appearance and drooping, shadowy eyes were so like the Virgin’s that they might have been reflected in a mirror.
Before the death of her child, she had not been devout beyond the ordinary, keeping the fasts and praying when it was right to do so and no more. But now, while the rest of the world celebrated Shrovetide, Xenia crossed early into a most extreme observation of Lent. She not only prayed but also fasted like a monk, taking only tiny morsels of bread and these only if I chided her. “You must eat if you would recover your health,” I insisted, but she was less pliable now than when I had spoon-fed her. “I do not wish to recover it,” she answered.
The Great Lent came to the rest of us in its customary time. On the first day, the house was readied, the rugs taken up, the curtains and shutters taken down, and everything scrubbed. Marfa and Masha went from room to room with a kettle and a copper bowl into which had been placed a hot brick and dried mint leaves. Pouring water over the hissing brick, they waved the medicinal steam under the beds and into each corner to chase out the wicked spirit of Lady Shrovetide. The good dishes and silver candlesticks were put away, and old sheeting was thrown over the pictures and furniture that we might forget earthly pleasures and prepare our spirits to fast. As custom dictated, we put on our oldest patched clothes and made to go to church.
Xenia surprised us by coming downstairs and professing the desire to go also. She had dressed herself, putting on light clothes unsuited to the season. In the six weeks since Andrei’s death, she had so wasted that they hung loose as sacking on her. Her pale hair was undone and floating about her head, her feet were bare—all this conspired to give her the appearance of a wraith and not a woman of twenty-six years.
“Xenichka, you are not well enough,” I said, but she had no care for her health, and when Ivan opened the front door she ran out into the snow on bare feet. She could not be persuaded by reason to return inside, not even to dress properly. I finally relented and had Masha bring stockings, shoes, and outer garments out to the sleigh. “Keep this about you,” I said, wrapping her in a fur pelisse. I put her feet into shoes and took her purse, which she had stuffed heavy with coins, that she might put her thin hands into a muff.
I blame myself. I should have bid Grishka carry her inside and sit guard at the door rather than take her with us. In the last hour of the service, she did not rise up from the prostrations and lay with her forehead resting on the cold stone floor. Looks and whispers were directed at her, but no matter; after the service I had more cause than this to rue my mistake.
Outside the church, a throng of beggars, the poor and those others whom we call blessed, were gathered to receive alms. The feeble and lame lay on the ground from the doors to the street, and those who were able-bodied crowded close round the emerging worshippers and murmured their supplications.
The sight of these beggars revived Xenia. She slipped from my supporting arm, took back her purse, and began to thread her way amongst the unfortunates, exchanging handfuls of coins for their blessings.
“Signorina.” A strange and gawky man in boots and a heavy fur cloak bowed to me, wishing me good morning. It was the musico Gaspari. Without paint, his features were almost plain, and I would not have known him except for his accent.
“I wish to offer you my sorrow.” The lilting voice was disconcertingly at odds with this likeness of a man.
“Thank you. You were most kind on that terrible night.”
He demurred, shaking his head.
“Did you stay on that night and pray over him?”
“I cannot read the Russian prayers, signorina. But yes, I stayed.” He clutched his cloak closer about him to ward off the cold.
Not only his appearance but also his manner was changed from our first meeting. To be sure, none of us is the same person at church as at a party, but without the trappings of female garb he seemed less in command of his person. The Roman goddess at the masquerade had been witty, even haughty, but this pallid creature was so undistinguished that even his extreme height did not lend him presence.
“His wife, Xenia Grigoryevna…” A delicate hand started to flutter and then, deprived of a fan, wilted. “I saw her inside. She is recovered?”
I looked about but did not see her. “She is not yet well but is better than she was.”
“I may call on her?”
From habit, I replied that she would be grateful, though in truth she certainly would not. She had received no one since Andrei’s death. I looked about for the sleigh, thinking that perhaps she was waiting in it, and I might get away. Near the street, a knot of people had gathered round a half-naked woman, one of the klikushi who are possessed by demons and are often taken with fits when they visit a church. Then I saw I was mistaken. It was Xenia.
When I got to her, she was trying to remove her chemise, but her fingers trembled so that she could not undo the laces. I grabbed her hands to still them. “Are you mad?”
“I am out of coins,” she said. Her voice quaked from cold, but otherwise she seemed unperturbed.
Looking for something to cover her, I saw the trail of her clothing, each garment now in the possession of a beggar—her skirt covering the lap of an old woman, and beyond that her shoes and overshoes, the fur pelisse and its matching muff, and so on to the empty coin purse.
I snatched the pelisse back and wrapped it round her shoulders. “Would you freeze to death? Is that your wish?”
She considered this; the prospect did not seem to disturb her.
That Lenten season, I had no need of bells to call me to prayer nor icons to put me in mind of our Savior’s suffering. I had Xenia. Very early every morning, she set forth to matins. I went with her, but my own piety was a fraud, compelled as it was by apprehension of what she might say or do were I not there to prevent it.
Before leaving the house, she stuffed her purse with kopeks and silver rubles she had taken from the household strongbox and filled a basket with bread she had taken from the kitchen. These she distributed to the unfortunates outside the church, who began to greet her by calling her matushka, “little mother.” As she emptied her purse and basket, she drew from them stories of how they had come to their situation, labyrinthine tales of illness and death, lost positions, failed crops, violent or cheating masters. Once when I was late in rising, she had already gone, and when I arrived at the church, I found her sitting on the ground in the company of the beggars, quite as though she meant to set out a begging bowl herself.
More respectable persons kept a discreet distance. Her look barred their approach, and those few who braved addressing her were rewarded with disinterest or, worse, her unmodified thoughts. A singer in the choir who had regarded himself as a rival to Andrei tendered his condolences to Xenia. He heaped extravagant praise on her husband and claimed a great affection for him.
Xenia cut him off. “You were jealous of him.”
“It was I who brought the largest wreath for his casket,” the man protested. “I might have expected a word of thanks.”
“You already have your reward. He is dead.”
Feeling the eyes of those round us, I hurried her into the church. “You should not have done that.”
“His compliments were lies. He showed no affection to Andrei while he lived.”
“He meant no harm,” I answered. “It is what people say when someone has died.”
She slapped my hand from her shoulder. “What do I care about that?”
When she was safely in prayer beside me, I tried to turn my mind to God but I could not, except in anger. Is this what you want, I demanded, that she should wreck herself so publicly?
After the service, she asked again to be taken to Smolenskoye cemetery. She had not yet been to his grave, for I had feared it might further unhinge her, but plainly I had no power to protect her from herself.
“As you wish,” I replied.
Her eyes sharpened inquisitively.
Yes, I knew the pettiness of my tone, the martyred weariness, but I thought myself justified in it.
For all my misgivings, the cemetery did not disturb her. She did not even weep at the sight of his grave but stood looking on the new stone and the raised mound of snow as though she were absorbing the truth of them. Then she sat right down on the ground beside his head. She ran her fingers over the letters of his name. After a while, she said, “Leave us.”
I hesitated. “I will wait in the sleigh.” She did not answer.
She was gone so long that I began to worry and to repent my former harshness, but at last she appeared from out of the trees and without a word climbed into the sleigh. I could not read anything in her countenance; she was only quiet.
The large circle of Andrei and Xenia’s friends who had called at the house after little Katenka’s death kept away now, as though so much sorrow and ill fortune were a contagion. I do not fault them. Had she been receptive to their sympathy then, she might have had it now. No matter; she did not want it. She would not receive even her own mother. After that incident, a friend of Aunt Galya’s would not be put off by my saying that Xenia was indisposed to visitors and insisted on going upstairs, since Xenia would not come down. “She only thinks she wants solitude,” said this woman whose name I have forgotten. She knew what it was to mourn a husband, the woman said, “but trust me, too much solitude is the worst cure.” Finding Xenia in her room, she tried to comfort her with assurances that this grief would pass.
“I thought I should have died with my husband,” Madam Somethingorother said. “Nothing could console me. My appetite suffered, and I took no pleasure from my friends. I could not be amused. Then one day”—the widow’s round face brightened at the memory—“I was brought a little china dish of strawberries and cream. Eating them, I thought I had never tasted anything so lovely. And after that, all my old delights returned to me, one by one.”
Xenia looked at her, impassive. “So you believe I may also become an idiot again?”
This is not to say we were entirely without company. Gaspari was insensible to her slights. The first time he called, she happened to wander into the drawing room shortly after him. She was wearing Andrei’s jacket, a habit she had acquired that seemed to comfort her. He stood and bowed, and she perused his person.
“Are you the eunuch?”
He answered with no sign that the question was rude. Thus encouraged, she sat down beside him. “Did it hurt when they cut you?”
“I do not remember it. I was given opium.”
“My heart has been cut out of me, yet I still feel such pain.”
He nodded. “There is no opium for this wound,” he said, touching his breast. “I am sorry for the loss of your husband.”
With matching graveness, she replied, “And I am sorry for the loss of your eggs.” They sat together without speaking for another few moments and then, abruptly, she stood. “I must return to my prayers.” And with this, she turned and left the room.
When he took his leave, he presented his card and asked me to extend to her his apologies for having come at an inopportune hour, promising to try again for a more agreeable time.
We were host as well to increasing numbers of beggars. Though Xenia was discourteous to her friends, she took exceeding care of those beneath her, and those most in need she brought back to the house with us. She offered them food and a place to sleep and whatever else they expressed a desire for. One cannot fault such behavior; those who have read the Domostroi will recognize that these acts conform exactly to its prescriptions for Christian charity. That said, so literal an interpretation was exasperating. Many of these unfortunates were pulsing with fleas and stank so strongly that Marfa would not tolerate their sleeping in the servants’ room. I tried to make Xenia see reason. Where were we to put them? Her answer was to bed the worst offenders in front of the stove in the drawing room that they might be out of the way, and to have their food brought there also. The stench could never be aired entirely from that room, but as we no longer had respectable visitors, it was, I suppose, a moot concern.
More troubling than what came into the house was what left it. I discovered that in addition to the bread, Xenia had been tucking into her basket whatever other thing caught her eye—the porcelain bonbonniere on her dressing table, a silvered candlestick. I could not curb her generosity. I tried bargaining her down to sensible sacrifices—an apple in place of the inkwell, an earthenware mug for a porcelain cup—but the ploy failed, and so I began to hide certain of her more precious things, reasoning that she might otherwise regret later having given them away.
One day, she pulled from the basket a particularly fine pair of gloves and handed them to an orphan. They were made of delicate white kid worked with silver thread, and I had coveted them once. When the child pulled them onto her filthy hands, I flinched.
“Xenia, if you must, it would be better to sell the finer things and then give the profits to the poor.”
She didn’t answer but looked on me with something like pity. I felt that she could read my thoughts.
“They are too thin,” I protested. “They will not even keep her hands warm.”
Perhaps it was to appease me that some days later she determined to pack up her court dresses and the rest of her finery and take them to a pawn shop. Heaped on the bed and floor was a colorful froth of skirts and bodices.
“Oh no, darling, I did not mean that you should sell these,” I said.
“I cannot stand the sight of them.”
“Maybe not now…” Someday, I thought, she would come out of mourning and return to society. She would want to marry again. I started to pick up a matching bodice and skirt, yellow brocade with gold lace trim, that I might return them to the wardrobe. “Later, you may think differently.”
“She is gone!” Xenia shrieked. “Are you too dull to see it? There is no point in keeping her things.”
She snatched the bodice from my hands and in doing so tore loose a piece of lace. Fiercely, she ripped it away from the sleeve and then tore the lace from the other sleeve for good measure. She grabbed up two handfuls of the skirt, meaning to rend this to pieces also, but the fabric would not give. Her features strained with the effort and then went slack, and quick as the storm had erupted it was spent, and she was overcome with remorse.
“I’m sorry.” She held the skirt back out to me. “Please take it. You should have something pretty to wear when your husband calls.”
“I do not need your dresses or your pity either.”
She nodded and let it fall to the floor. “You are right to be offended. I should not try to buy your forgiveness with rubbish. You see its worth. Oh, Dasha”—her face contorted in anguish—“when I recall my terrible thoughtlessness. I have let people starve that I might wear that lace.” She looked about her. “But I shall be naked before God. How shall I ever account for all this?”
The pawnbroker was more than willing to relieve her of her finery. Fingering a pink moiré silk, he tried to mask his greed with appraising looks, frowning at imaginary flaws and clucking. After thus inspecting each dress, he offered a very small sum for the lot, less than the worth of one alone. Xenia was content to take whatever he offered, but I would not allow it and haggled with the miser. He raised his price a little, then seeing Xenia’s disinterest in the outcome of our bargaining returned his attention to her.
“I can see that you know the worth of discretion. It is worth more than money, and I can promise you, no one shall know where these came from. I will be a cipher, a stone.”
She was as impassive as the Sphinx in reply.
Only by irritating him like a fly was I able to extract another fifty kopeks. From the shop to the church, I vented my annoyance at her having been swindled, but I could not persuade Xenia to share my grievance. She was as blasé about money as the Empress herself. When we reached the church, she handed the profits, purse and all, to the first beggar who held out his hand.
Gaspari called again, and again Xenia was at her prayers but said that I should entertain him in her place. Had he relied on me for this, we should have sat in silence. I am often tongue-tied with strangers and have what the philosopher Monsieur Diderot calls l’esprit de l’escalier, staircase wit: only long after a remark is made to me will my imagination supply the thing I should have said in reply. But I was further stricken with self-consciousness by Gaspari. There were no rules by which to steer conversation with a person who was neither man nor woman.
As it happened, though, Gaspari liked to talk, and even hampered by his poor Russian he was gifted at this. Left to choose a theme, he told me of his village in the north of Italy and described for me its varied charms—hillsides dotted with sheep, a sun that shone far warmer than it does here, the scents of rosemary and drying grasses that perfume the air.
“My mother’s garden has a fig tree in it,” he said, “and to eat one of these figs is to taste music on the tongue. I dream of this, to sit in the warm sun and eat a plate of these figs.”
I nodded.
He flattered me that I had a talent to listen. “Most persons, they are intent only to make the impression. But you are not this way. I see you at the ball; you do not care for what you look like, only to help your cousin.”
“I was mortified,” I admitted.
“I do not know this word.”
“Embarrassed.”
“Ah.” He nodded. “Mortified. It is the condition of life, yes?”
I gradually forgot my discomfort and even came to anticipate his next visit. If Xenia did not show herself—and she rarely did—he was content to pass an hour entertaining me with accounts of who had attended his performance on the previous night, what they had worn and said, who had snubbed or flattered whom. A keen mimic, he would adopt the guttural voice of a well-known attaché and this man’s habit of adjusting the weight of his stomach as he spoke, and then with the next breath he would answer in a comical falsetto that I recognized as belonging to a certain lady-in-waiting.
I confess, I wondered at first if Xenia might be fodder for amusement on his subsequent calls—she would be so easy to mock. I did not know how few doors were open to him, how alone he was in Russia. But more important, I did not know then how Gaspari judged the world, upside down. His barbed wit was reserved for his betters; those whom the rest of the world disdained he treated with courtesy. I think this accounted for the tolerance he showed to Xenia. When I apologized for her, he assured me there was no need.
“She is herself,” he said.
Though I could not agree, I did not correct him.
Xenia and I continued to work at cross-purposes, she pillaging her possessions and I hiding what of them I could in my room. Her methods were haphazard: when I went with her to Andrei’s grave, I might find small tokens she had left there on a previous visit—a swollen folio of music and the glass stopper that had belonged to a decanter—and I could only guess at what else may have been taken away by grave robbers. On one day, she went to the church with only an onion and a linen rag, but on the next she pulled from her basket pieces of silver that had been put away for Lent, handing a soupspoon to a bewildered beggar and a fork to the next. Coming to a lean man with leather skin and a beard so ratty it appeared to grow uninterrupted from his sheepskin, she fished about in the basket. She dug out something but then stopped short of giving it. Her eyes softened. “It is such a little thing,” she mused, turning the object in her palm. “The material world is so strong, Dasha. These things are worth nothing, yet they cling to my soul like vines.”
I recognized Andrei’s bone-handled shaving razor. It had been her morning habit to shave him with this. I imagine his hand was often not sufficiently steady to do it for himself, but she had also cherished this intimate ceremony between them and would caress his smoothed cheek and linger over the dimpled thumbprint above his lip. Now, she unhinged the blade and studied it. A cold fear seized me, and had she been a child I would have snatched the blade from her. But I could not do this. I watched as she put her forefinger to the edge. A scarlet thread appeared, and she looked at it without curiosity. After a long moment, she closed the razor and pressed it upon the beggar. “It is yours now. Take care with it,” she said.
In spite of what she said, most of her possessions seemed to have no hold on her whatsoever. She emptied her own wardrobe of even the undergarments. Other necessaries went missing. Marfa grumbled that she had no ladle for the soup. When I went to mend a stocking, the thimble was gone from the sewing basket, and one night the chamber pot was missing from under our bed. I felt about for it, increasingly discomfited, went into my room and discovered its chamber pot was gone also. At last I had need to stumble down the stairs and out into the frozen yard to relieve myself in the privy.
The mystery of one chamber pot’s disappearance was solved the next day when I saw this same article sitting on the church step. A fool whom Xenia had brought home two days prior was using it to collect coins. I was furious. “It’s all right,” Xenia assured me. “She did not steal it. I gave it to her.”
“It is not all right,” I fumed, and beside myself with anger, I snatched it up and, upturning it, showered coins into the fool’s lap. “It is not, not, not all right, Xenia.” I fled, still clutching the chamber pot until I had rounded the corner, where I threw it down and it shattered on the cobble.
One day, Marfa came to me and asked me to speak to her mistress. The servants were loath to disturb her solitude—whether out of courtesy or fear that she might fling something at them, I cannot say. “I would not trouble her, but there’s the matter of flour.”
“What of it?”
“There isn’t any. And the miller won’t put any more on credit without some payment.”
It turned out not to be so simple a matter as flour. When I looked, there was also no salt or lard and very little of anything else. Even by the spare measure of Lent, the provisions in the larder were meager: small handfuls of this and that, a single onion, a crock of pickled cabbage, a hard sausage that could not be eaten till Easter. Marfa was anxious to account for herself. “What with all the extra mouths,” she explained, “I have twice asked her for money, but she is too much distracted to remember.”
“Just make do with what’s here,” I said. “I’ll speak to her, but we can go for one day without bread.”
Marfa looked doubtful, and it came out that it was not only the miller who was owed.
I interrupted Xenia at her prayers, or what seemed to be prayers; as she did not speak them aloud, it was impossible to know with certainty.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, but I have need of money to settle some debts. It seems we owe all over town.”
She did not answer or give any sign that she had heard me.
“If you will lend me the key to the strongbox, I will get it myself.”
Again, there was no response. She was not being pious, I thought, but obstinate, and I determined to stand and wait until she acknowledged me, no matter how long that might be. It was not as if I were asking her to go round to these creditors herself, or to bake the bread or help with the washing. Looking on her back side, I reflected on the times she had left me to answer for her to callers, and to speak in a whisper so as not to disturb her. The servants went about on tiptoe and let the carpets collect dust rather than make a noise by beating them. Yet she could not be bothered in return to concern herself in the slightest with her own household.
Perhaps sensing that I would not go away, she spoke. “Can it not wait?”
“Not unless you can multiply loaves and fishes.”
She rose from her knees. Feeling about in a drawer, she produced a small iron key, went to the strongbox, and turned the key in its lock.
“Take what you need,” she said, and returned to the icon corner and knelt again.
Except for some papers in the bottom, the box was empty.
“Take what? Where is the rest?”
She regarded me with weariness. “What remains?”
“In here? Nothing. That is what I am telling you.” I turned the box upside down to demonstrate, and a single sheet of paper fluttered to the floor. “Is there some other place where Andrei kept money?” He was not poor. Besides a good salary, he had received lavish sums from the Empress and Count Razumovsky. Andrei and Xenia had never wanted for luxuries. “Perhaps in his desk or dressing table?”
She said nothing, but the blankness of her expression answered for her.
I thought back on the handfuls of coins I had seen her give away over the past month, and realized with horror that together with what had escaped my observation, the total sum of them might be anything.
“So there is nothing more?” I could not make myself believe it.
“Here.” She handed me the paper.
“What is this?”
“The deed to the house.”
“And what would you have me do with it?”
“Sell it.”
“To buy flour? Don’t be absurd, Xenia.” I thrust the paper back into her hand. “If you sell your house, where shall you live?”
“Our Savior lived without a house.”
“That is all fine and well, but what of the souls He has entrusted to you? Where shall they live? Or would you sell them, too?” I asked. “It is not only beggars in the street who depend on your charity, Xenia.” As I said it, I was not unmindful that I was included in this company.
“We have eaten today, and we shall eat again tomorrow.” She said this just as a child might, her face empty of any anxiety.
Something changed for me in that moment. Confronted with the empty strongbox and its promise of ruin, together with her complacency… I left her there and went from room to room with rising agitation, looking for something I might sell.
I felt like a thief, but one who has come to a house already robbed. How had I not seen it? Xenia had succeeded in removing most everything that would fit in her basket. I went to my room and looked over the meager hoard I had hidden away. The cloisonné clock. The jeweled earbobs that were her wedding present from Andrei. Little Katenka’s christening gown and cross. No, these were too precious to be sold. I settled on a brass candlestick chased with silver, half of the pair that had graced the sideboard. This I took to the wretched pawnbroker. It fetched sixty kopeks, just enough to appease the miller and fishmonger, but not the greengrocer. And we would need more wood for the pile and dried fruits for the Easter kulich. I returned to his shop with the clock and sold him the sideboard as well, and these bought provisions sufficient to last through the Easter feast.
Never in my life before or since have I awaited that day with such hunger. Dry as a raisin, some part of me still hoped nonetheless. Xenia’s desolation had so entwined with the Lenten season that she seemed an enlargement of its mood, almost as though she were an actor in a Passion play. I anticipated that with the arrival of Easter she would doff her mourning. It was Xenia’s resurrection I awaited.
At the midnight service, the chants poured into my soul like water, and as the light was passed from taper to taper, I felt my spirits lift on the rising glow. The holy doors were thrown open and we spilt out into the night and circled the church. Buoyed on an upwelling of joy, with the hundreds of voices around me in song, with the tumultuous pealing of the bells, I was exultant. The priest proclaimed, Christ is risen, and every voice answered fervently, Truly He is risen!
Together with Gaspari and a mother and child whom Xenia had found outside the church, we returned afterwards to the house lit bright and the table laden with food and decorated with pussy willows and flowers. The servants were happy to the edge of tears, and we exchanged colored eggs with kisses on the cheek. I gave Xenia her egg, kissing her thrice. She did not crack it but put it instead into her basket to be given to the poor. When Gaspari also presented her with an egg, she reciprocated by withdrawing mine from her basket for him. He was on the point of cracking it, but then stopped and handed it back, gesturing that she should return it to the basket.
Vodka was poured out and, raising my glass, I inhaled it like a clean, sharp draught of winter air. I have never felt such thirst, such hunger. We ate the kulich, the paskha, the lamb. It was wonderful. There were eggs and more eggs, wine and more vodka, and I ate and drank as though I had fasted for a year.
Xenia ate nothing but seemed content to sit at table and collect eggs. Several times throughout the meal, I saw Gaspari repeat this ritual of giving her an egg, accepting another in return, and then handing it back to her. At last, I thought to peek under the table and saw her basket on the floor beside her chair, heaped with red eggs as well as pieces of kulich.
The table was strewn with egg peelings and walnut shells, the plates wiped clean but for bits of gristle and bone. I was sated, heavy-limbed, and light-headed. Across the table, Gaspari stood. With no more preface than this, he clasped his hands at his breast, rested his gaze above our heads, and parted his lips.
The air was pierced with a startling sound, high and clear and powerful. The sound expanded and held for an impossibly long time before gliding to the next note and the next. He seemed not to breathe but only to exhale music, warbling and sliding over vowels and consonants as endlessly as water rounds over stones in a shallow stream.
How may one describe enchantment? As he sang, his countenance softened, and without benefit of costume or any other artifice of the stage, the Gaspari I knew faded and was transformed into something eerily beautiful. A delicate hand, rising and turning like a vine, seemed to unfurl this otherworldly sound into the air. Though I could not translate the words, there was no need, for the sound went straight to my soul, transcending the poor and broken language we mortals must use. I slipped gratefully out of my body and floated on the current of music, feeling that all of us round the table were a single spirit, a single being. I was filled with such love. The voice soared, wave upon wave, until the last note, quivering with tenderness, put us ashore again too soon.
The musici have since fallen out of favor, and I do not expect to hear such an ethereal sound again until the angels sing me home. It is just as well. Such radiance was not intended for mortals, and to achieve it, hundreds of boys were mutilated, made into monsters so that a few among the wounded might sing. That such beauty should come from such suffering… I see it in Xenia also. It is a terrible mystery.
The next morning, I awoke to stabbing light and the sound of church bells ringing, each clang so deafening that I might have been trapped within the bell itself, with the bronze tongue striking my skull. Anyone may ring the bells in Bright Week and so they rang incessantly, as I foresaw they would for days yet. Coupled with this misery, in the previous days the ice on the Neva had begun to break up, and in the lulls between chimes I heard the river’s painful groans, the screech of ice against ice. Against this noise, the promises of spring and our Lord’s resurrection seemed faint abstractions, and the bliss of Gaspari’s voice an improbable memory.
Xenia was in her accustomed place in the corner, her black shape bent before the Virgin of Vladimir. She was as still as a corpse, her countenance empty, her eyes sunken in shadow. Apparently, I had missed the morning service, but Xenia had not: the basket she had filled with red eggs the night before sat next to her, empty.
I saw the truth of our situation with the clarity of a drunkard’s remorse. There was nothing left in the larder, and I would have to sell the sleigh and horse.
That same week, Nadya and her mother came to call and brought with them intricately painted eggs, one for Xenia and another for myself.
“Xenia is at her prayers just now,” I said, “but she will be delighted by this.”
Aunt Galya smiled thinly and held fast to the egg meant for Xenia. “We can wait till she is finished. I should very much like to give it to her myself.”
I showed them into the drawing room, grateful as I did that I had not yet found it necessary to sell the chairs, or Xenia to give them away. The sideboard was gone, but the divan and two chairs remained.
They glanced about, poorly concealing their dismay. “A house always looks barren at Lent,” Aunt Galya remarked. “But why have you not put things back in their places?”
Nadya answered her. “Xenia has become a great benefactress, Maman. Isn’t that so, Dasha?”
I nodded. “She is very kind to the poor. They call her Matushka.”
Nadya looked as though she had eaten something bitter. “So kind she has given them even the clothes from her back?”
“Just the once.”
A look passed between mother and daughter, and Nadya made her aspect more pleasing. “Let us speak freely. Like sisters. My mother and I are greatly concerned for her. People are talking. Yesterday, it came back to us that she had been seen giving her corset to a person on the street.”
I turned the egg in my palm. On one side was painted the head of our Savior, his eyes two dark and elongated hollows of sorrow. The reverse showed a pastoral scene, a young lord and lady courting in a glade, she perched on a swing and he pushing her.
Aunt Galya put an affectionate hand on my shoulder. “I know you love her and would protect her, Dasha, but consider that you are protecting her from those who love her equally as well. Clearly, she is troubled, and we want to help.”
The promise of help overruled my scruples, and I spilt all the trials of the past weeks, how Xenia had emptied the strongbox, how one moment she was taciturn and the next was taking me to task for putting a portion of sausage on her plate. “She eats only bread now and too little of that. She has no appetite for anything but prayer. That she may do for hours. You may as well know that there is no point to waiting on her. She will not come down.”
Nadya was horrified. “She can’t have given away everything?”
“Not all,” I admitted. “I hid some things from her.”
“But the strongbox… is all her money gone, then?”
I said that it was, except for the few kopeks that remained from the sale of the sideboard. If Nadya might speak to Kuzma Zakharovich about a loan, I began, but her outraged look silenced me.
Aunt Galya was also distressed at her daughter’s misfortune. But she knew what it was to lose a husband and all one’s possessions, and perhaps it was this that made her better able to school her emotions.
“What did you hide, Dasha?”
“It is only that I thought she may desire them later.”
She nodded approvingly and encouraged me to list for her the various items, which I did.
“Odds and ends,” Nadya fumed.
A look of reproof passed from mother to daughter. “There are still the serfs. And the house and furnishings,” Aunt Galya said. “But she can’t be allowed to go on like this. We must do what is best for her, however hard.”
The following week, Xenia was served with a summons to show herself in court and answer to the charge that she was alienated, startled out of her mind. If she were found unfit to manage her own affairs, she would be declared one of the sumasbrodnye, mad, then dispossessed of her property and given into the custody of her family.
It may be that they were indeed trying to save Xenia from herself. Still, the word itself was shocking. For all her strangeness, I could not reconcile Xenia with that word. If she behaved rashly, well, had she not always been passionate and a bit wild? It was only her profound sorrow that made her like a foreigner amongst us now. Even stripping to her skin on the steps of the church might be deemed an excess of grief. True, I had never seen grief like this, but neither had I known anyone so completely possessed by love of her husband. One could not expect such passion, when ripped from its source, to fade gently. Given time, I thought, the wound might yet heal.
Xenia received the news of the summons with no visible concern. She wished only to return to her room, and when I expressed surprise that she could be so indifferent to her own fate, she asked if there was something else I would have her do.
It being common for persons to attempt to seize the property of their relations by falsely declaring them mad, all such cases bypassed the lower courts and were brought directly before the Senate. Thus, on the appointed day, we appeared at the long expanse of red and white buildings that make up the Twelve Colleges and were directed to a vast anteroom. It was teeming with persons, many more than the benches lining the walls would accommodate.
All who had business with the crown were gathered here like waters behind a dike and trickled through a single set of doors. Amongst these were foreign ambassadors hoping to influence the Senate to favor a trade agreement, nobles awaiting civilian appointments or promotions in rank, and merchants seeking military contracts or the rights to sell vodka. Those appealing the ruling of a lower court or seeking criminal review were also funneled here. And one must presume there were other persons in the room like Xenia, who might or might not be ruled mad.
Those petitioners without influence or means to bribe their way through these doors might well linger in the shallows for ten or even twenty years without their suits being heard, and this prospect was reflected in their behaviors. Like the denizens of Hades, they sat or stood in attitudes suggesting they had taken up residence here long ago and had since forgotten the manners of the other world. They scratched themselves freely, yawned, and even slept with their chins on their chests and their mouths gaping. Some had withdrawn so far into themselves that they resembled Xenia; others, more social, played at games of dice or cards and made such a noise that clerks who appeared at intervals to call forward the next case could not be heard above the din. The residents, apparently having lost hope of hearing their own names called, paid them no mind. Looking about, I wondered how a judge might sort the mad from the rest.
Kuzma Zakharovich found us in the midst of this crowd. He wished me good morning and then greeted Xenia in a louder tone as if she might be deaf. She gave him in return a penetrating look, which discomfited him.
“Does she not speak?” he asked me.
“If she is so inclined, but she cannot be depended upon for courtesy.”
He gave her another wary glance. “My wife and Galina Stepanovna are anxious of her whereabouts,” he said, and bid us join them.
Aunt Galya had not seen Xenia since Andrei’s death. “So thin and bleak,” she exclaimed, kissing her. “The Lord gave you such prettiness and only to take it away like this. My poor daughter.”
A hardly noticeable twitch unsettled Xenia’s features, as if her mother’s kiss were a fly lighting on her cheek.
“When we are through here,” Aunt Galya went on, “we shall take you home with us and see that you are properly tended to.”
“You see how she is,” Nadya said. “Your affection is wasted on her. It would be just as well to send her to a monastery.”
“You want feeling, Nadya, to say such things now.”
All of Kuzma Zakharovich’s remaining influence must have been wielded to turn the wheels of Justice, for Xenia’s case was called that same afternoon, and we were ushered past the residents and through the doors, and to a smaller chamber. A judge and a scribe sat behind a long table raised on a dais. The judge wore the robe and long, curled wig befitting his office, and the gray complexion of one who has not seen daylight for many years.
The clerk announced the case to His Excellency, who bid the former hunt-master to approach the bench and lay out the matter. This Kuzma Zakharovich did with meticulousness, listing each instance of Xenia’s supposed mad behavior as though he were recounting a season of hunts.
“Have you witnessed these things yourself, Gospodin Sudakov, or only heard them reported?” the judge asked.
“I am but the messenger, Your Excellency, but you may see with your own eyes how the woman behaves, in what manner she answers, and judge in your wisdom whether she conforms to the pictures I have painted for you.”
“Is this she?” The judge indicated Xenia, and when it was confirmed, he bid her step forward. “Do you understand the charge laid against you?”
She did not speak straightaway. I was anxious lest her silence prove the charge better than all of Kuzma Zakharovich’s words, but at last she seemed to find her answer on the floor.
“They say I am mad.”
“And how do you answer to this?”
“It would be a comfort.”
“Answer in a respectful manner. Are you mad or no?”
She looked up at him. “My reason tells me that my husband and child are dead. I long for less reason.”
The judge nodded slowly as she spoke, but it was impossible to read in his face the meaning of these nods.
“Do you understand that should this court find against you, you will not be permitted to marry again? Further, that you shall be remanded to the custody of your nearest relations, and to them shall also go whatever property you may own?”
“It’s no matter.” She turned and looked directly at her mother and Nadya. “They may have whatever they ask. I do not want it.”
“So it seems. Gospodin Sudakov here claims that you have already given the bulk of your property to beggars.”
She nodded.
“And are you aware that there is a law against almsgiving?”
She nodded again.
“How do you explain yourself, then?”
There was another long silence.
“You will answer the court.”
Xenia looked on him wearily. “I did it that I might give my husband’s soul rest. And mine also. But God will not bargain for so little.”
“The law is in place to protect Her Imperial Majesty’s subjects from charlatans who would prey on their sympathies.”
“That your son died was not her fault,” Xenia answered. “Her prayers for his soul were well worth thirty kopeks.”
The judge was surprised from his dignity. He looked her up and down with undisguised confusion, and an emotion burbling beneath his features threatened to unseat him. He waved the clerk to him. There was a whispered exchange between them that somehow also concerned the person of Kuzma Zakharovich.
At last having satisfied himself, the judge put on again his formal demeanor. He did not look again at Xenia.
“The court cannot condone the breaking of its laws. But if it were to declare mad all those who breached this law, the monasteries should overflow with half of Russia.
“Her speech shows reason, and I can find no cause to declare her sumasbrodnaya.”
With that, we were dismissed from his presence and other petitioners ushered in behind us.
As we made our way through the anteroom, Kuzma Zakharovich was philosophical. “It is true what they say. Tell God the truth, but give the judge money.”
“You might have thought of this before,” Nadya said.
“I was given assurances.” Kuzma Zakharovich shook his head. “By Prince Tatishchev himself.”
“Perhaps the Prince cares less for your welfare than you believe.”
At this, Xenia suddenly clutched her sister by the arm and said, “Your husband still lives and wants only your tenderness. Thank God for His mercy!”
Nadya wrenched herself from Xenia’s grasp. “You! I will not be preached to by you!” Her harshness caught even the attention of the residents, who left off their other diversions. I was reminded of the festival crowds that stop before a puppet theatre in the street to see Petrushka and his foes knock each other about the head.
“Collect yourself,” Aunt Galya said. She then took Xenia’s arm and with her free hand turned her daughter’s face to meet hers. “You said you would part with whatever we asked. So I will ask it: give up your people and your house, and I shall care for you.”
Xenia met her mother’s gaze. “If my peasants wish to serve you, they may. But the house is Dasha’s. It is my wedding gift to her.”
Aunt Galya turned on me, her voice brittle with suspicion. “What is this?”
“I do not know.”
“Have you schemed behind my back? After the love I have shown you?”
Someone in the crowd jeered and said I needed whipping.
“I do not deserve to be used so poorly,” she said.
I protested my innocence, but she shook me off, fury blooming in her cheeks. “Do not compound your sin with more lies.”