The horrible days of his death and the slow journey back to Petersburg with his coffin strapped to the rear of the public coach—I recall this with more grief than I felt at the time. I was cloaked in numbness.
For one whose voice had inspired fervent admiration, Gaspari had left behind in Russia hardly enough mourners to bear his coffin to its resting place. His tailor and three stranded members of the Italian Company put him in unconsecrated ground. As his coffin was lowered, I remember worrying that come winter the ground would be too cold for him, much colder than if he had been in Italy.
I brought Masha back—I was obliged to buy her from Nadya, though I had not sold her—and I attempted to take up my old life, remaking my routines round the absence at their center. A stranger to myself, I kneaded bread enough for a larger household. I forgot and then remembered a dozen times in a day that there was no cause now for the glass of kvas or the plate of anchovies, no need to build the fire so hot.
During this same time, Catherine seized the throne from her husband, the new Emperor, by riding into Petersburg at the head of the Imperial Guards. Within days, Peter the Third was dead by mysterious hands. These momentous happenings were like thunder heard at a great distance: they did not touch me. I slept at odd hours and then was wakeful through the night. What came to me in these hours were all my sins of omission, those small tendernesses I might have shown Gaspari while he still lived, and words I might have said to ease his passage into the hereafter. Dear friend, I might have said—as I have said a hundred times since—you were a great gift to me.
These regrets haunted me even into the day. I attempted to escape them through working, and when this failed I fled the house to distance myself from its associations. Going out to take the air, I would later find myself in some unfamiliar place, and with no memory of how I had come there.
I had no cause to return to St. Matthias parish. But I rose early one morning after another night of broken sleep, hired a droshky, and directed the driver to take me across the river. On the steps of the church there, I distributed coins to the poor. If I had hoped by this to gain some relief, I did not; the squalor of the place and the desperate circumstances of the people only increased my despondency. I could not bear even to stay for the service. Thinking only how to get away quickly, I gave up protecting my skirt against the foulness in the street and set off in search of another droshky to take me home. A short distance from the church, I found the same one I had dismissed, stopped before a tavern. The driver was not about, but thinking he would return momentarily I got in it to wait.
There was such a menagerie in the street, both man and beast, that I took no special notice of a fool approaching the droshky, thin and shabbily dressed and talking to the air—there are many such creatures in Petersburg, and they are generally harmless and pitiable souls. He stopped and fastened his attention on the horse, then extracted a parsnip from the jacket of his pocket. The horse nickered and bobbed at its bridle, and the fool, bobbing his head in response, began to sing as it fed from his hand.
It was his tune that snagged my attention.
“This poor sinner only prays”—the fool nuzzled the nose of the horse with his own as he sang—“to be kissed to Paradise.”
All at once and with a shock, I knew.
Even had she not been dressed as a man, I might not have recognized Xenia except by the song. She was filthy, her hair matted as felt, and her garments stained and worn to threads.
Steadying myself, I came down from the droshky and approached her with the quiet demeanor one would use to tame a wild bird. “Xenia?”
Her gaze turned at my voice.
“It is Dasha,” I said.
“Are you looking for Xenia?” she asked. There was such a sweetness in her face—it is beyond my poor powers to describe—as if all of life’s harshness had been wiped clean from it, leaving her soft and unscarred.
I nodded. “I looked everywhere. We thought you had …” In spite of my intent, my voice broke.
The horse was nudging her pocket. “He could use another.”
“Where did you go, darling?” I asked.
“Do you have one?”
“A parsnip?”
“Any vegetable will do. He is not particular.”
“No.” I asked her again where she had gone.
She cocked her head. “I am here. This is all of me.”
Never mind for now, I thought. I held fast to this: she had returned to me. For the moment, it was more than enough. I took both her hands in mine, and she did not resist this.
“Let us go home,” I said.
She was content to get into the droshky, but for the length of our journey Xenia said nothing. Her attention was entirely taken up by the passing scenes, and she seemed equally pleased by all prospects. As we approached the house, I expected some change in her aspect, but there was none. The driver stopped before our door.
“Do you not remember your house?” I asked.
“I do not have one of these,” she answered cheerfully.
“Of course you do. This is your home.”
The driver would take no fare. “Not for her,” he demurred. I wondered briefly at this, but it was one with the strangeness of the morning.
Masha opened the front door. Upon seeing Xenia, she knew her instantly and burst into tears and kissed her shoulders. Xenia received these affections and allowed herself to be led inside.
“We shall have tea, but would you like to bathe first?” I asked.
“Would you like me to?”
Truth be told, her stink was bad, but I answered that I was thinking only of her comfort.
She laughed brightly. “My comfort is not your concern. Or mine either.” She was perfectly amenable to bathing if it would please me; I confessed that it would please me very much.
She stained the water brown as a flood stream. When at last she was clean, she looked to put on her breeches again.
“I have a dress for you.” I offered one of mine, but she shook her head and would not take it.
“It is black.”
“Yes. I am a widow now, too.”
“I wear red and green, you know.”
I could make nothing of this, but as she was immoveable on this point I was compelled to retrieve her garments, which Masha was on the point of burning.
“She wants them back,” I said.
Masha crossed herself. “They are his,” she said, and began to weep again.
The jacket and breeches were Andrei’s old military uniform, the same that had been altered so many years before that Xenia might wear them to the metamorphoses ball. The green jacket was scarcely more than a rag now and the breeches darkened with filth to the color of dried blood.
“They should be burned,” Masha said.
“I think we shall have to humor her for the present. Here now—” I handed her my handkerchief. “Come inside and make us tea.”
Tea is not the extravagance now that it was then. When Gaspari was still alive, I had brewed it by the thimbleful to cure his cough, and a little remained. I instructed Masha to put the last of it in the pot.
When I returned the clothes to Xenia, I suggested that I might have others of the same cut and color made for her. She answered just as she had to the bath: if it would please me she was amenable.
After she had dressed, we went into the drawing room. Masha brought in a tray with the tea things, a fat wedge of mutton pie, and a raisin cake. When she saw Xenia, her eyes filled again and the glasses tinkled unsteadily on the tray.
I motioned her to set it down. “I will pour.”
Masha bowed and, wiping at her eyes with the corner of her apron, fled the room. Xenia’s eyes, alert as a deer’s, followed her.
“It has been a long time,” I explained, “and she has missed you. Meat or sweet? Xenia?”
Her attention remained on the doorway. I put the pie on a plate.
“Tea?” I did not wait on an answer but poured some into a glass and stirred in two spoons of honey. I invited her to sit and she did, though on the floor beside the chair rather than on the chair itself. I handed her the glass, cautioning her as I did to be mindful that it was hot. Obediently, she set it down on the floor beside her. I poured another glass.
“You are here,” I said. I could not entirely absorb the fact of her presence. It is usual when two dear friends have been parted for many years to slake their thirst for one another’s company with talk, but Xenia seemed not to feel the need. “I thought you were drowned.”
Did she nod? I cannot remember, but I had the distinct impression that she knew this already, though she did not say so and it makes no sense that she would.
“I, too, have missed you,” I said. “Terribly.”
Though she did not utter a word, her placid gaze was so sympathetic that I talked for us both. I poured out all that had passed in her absence, my life with Gaspari, our intent to go to Italy, and how he had died. Nothing I said surprised her; she only nodded, but with such pure and simple understanding that I unburdened myself further.
“I failed to love him,” I said.
This thought had tormented me, a sliver buried in the flesh, but when I spoke it aloud, I saw it was untrue.
“No, I loved him. But I failed to know it.”
My love for Gaspari had been there all along, for how many years, so quiet that I had been no more aware of it than the pulse of my own blood. Only when he was gone did I feel it, and then as a terrible, aching absence.
“I opened myself so narrowly.” As I said this, tears formed. “And now he is gone, I am hollowed out, opustoshyonnaya, and can feel nothing.”
She smiled at me with exquisite gentleness.
“In nothing, we have all we need. This emptiness is sweet.”
How could she say that she had all she needed? My dear cousin had been deprived of everything that was life to her: her child and her husband and finally her reason. She had not even a kopek to her name. And perhaps not even her name, I thought, recalling that when I found her she had referred to herself in the third person. There could be nothing sweet in this.
She lifted her glass and drained the cold tea in a single, long swallow. “The vessel must be empty before it can be filled,” she said, and then shrugged as if to say this much was common knowledge. Standing, she then took up the pot and began to pour more tea into her glass. I was on the verge of telling her that this would be cold also, that I would have Masha warm it, when the tea reached the rim and began flowing over into the saucer. She continued to pour, looking on with delight as the saucer also filled and then spilled over onto the table and onto the floor. She watched until nothing more came from the spout.
“Of course, with God’s love”—she set the empty pot back on the table—“there is no end to it. It keeps pouring and pouring.”
She seemed to be waiting on me to agree, and so I did, though my mind was still fixed on my carpet and the wasted tea.
She went to the door. “I am needed.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I am needed,” she said again, and she left. By the time I had gathered my wits to follow her outside, she was already gone from sight, and though I combed the nearby streets, she had disappeared entirely.
I returned the next morning to St. Matthias parish. Asking shopkeepers and various persons in the street, I learnt that the woman I described was a well-known personage in the neighborhood, but her name was not Xenia. She answered to Andrei Feodorovich.
She was, they said, a holy fool, and they proved this by citing miracles she had performed: not only had she predicted the death of the late Empress but there were also boils and rotted teeth healed, a baby cured of grave illness only by her rocking it in her arms. A young woman, it was said, had been prevented from marrying a charlatan by Xenia’s warning her mother against the handsome young man. Xenia helped another young woman to marry by sending her to a graveyard where a man was mourning his late wife.
Mostly, these stories were hearsay, excepting one merchant who told me that his own reputation had been saved from ruin by her intervention. Just a year before, he said, in Apostles’ Week, Andrei Feodorovich had burst into his shop as he was dipping honey from a barrel for a customer.
“She rushed in and threw herself against that barrel until it tipped. A new barrel, just delivered that morning, and the purest honey to be had. Ask who you will, I am known by everyone to be an honest businessman.” He was intent on securing this point before he continued his story.
“Well, all that fine and costly honey spilt across my floor. But then, out from the bottom of the barrel floated a rat. A huge rat! Drowned and bloated and slick as an otter. She saved my good name.”
Being a pious man, he had taken a handful of coins from his apron and tried to press them into Xenia’s hands, but she let them fall through her fingers. This had left no doubt in him that she was holy.
I asked him where I might find her.
Whenever she came onto his street, he said, he endeavored to draw her into his shop that she might bless the barrels. “She has a taste for honey, and I give her all she will eat.” But where she went afterwards, he could not say.
Though everyone seemed to know of her, no one could tell me where she lived. Nor could any say with certainty how long ago she had arrived there or from where, though there was no want of conjecture on this. Some said she had come from a monastery and that she had studied with an elder there to learn their ascetic ways. Others said she had come from some place in the north. When I said that I was her cousin, that I lived across the river and sought her that I might take her home again, they bowed to my claim but with visible reluctance. They seemed to feel she belonged to them.
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.
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.
I had 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.
I left 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.
However, it was not only from her injuries that she suffered. The woman was large with a child, and the blow had jarred it in her womb. They had tried already to carry her from the street, but the woman was too broken to endure being moved. It seemed evident she would die. Because no one knew her, the woman’s family could not be located, but a midwife had been found to do what she could.
I think some in the crowd hoped that Xenia might save her, for they parted to allow us to come next to the woman, and even the midwife did not object when Xenia squatted down and, rocking on her heels, began to whisper soft noises near the woman’s ear.
The midwife had made a tent of the woman’s skirts and said to me, “Hold up your cloak. At the least, she should not be exposed to all these eyes.” I did as I was told. It was a small mercy, perhaps, that the woman was too far gone to take notice of those about her. She lay there with her eyes closed, insensible in her pain, by all appearances near death. Then all at once, her face contorted and she arched up and let loose a long, terrible scream, as though she were being torn apart on the rack. The midwife bid her to bear down, though the woman seemed incapable of hearing. When her pains subsided, she panted jaggedly. Xenia’s soft babbling increased.
This continued for what might have been an hour, the woman reviving only when the child stirred within her and caused her to shriek. Increasingly, she was too exhausted even for this and only opened and closed her mouth like a fish. The police came and went away again. The carriage and its occupants left also. Much of the crowd had dispersed and because my arms were too weary, I had long since let the cloak drop.
The woman arched in a final agony, then deflated and went still. “Get the knife from my pack.” The midwife reached back a hand without looking and waggled her fingers. She took it from me. “And the rags as well.” She reached under the woman’s skirts and working there at last extracted a small, bloody mass. She slapped it till a shrill cry broke loose. Then she wiped it clean with the rags and wrapped the scrawny thing in a swath of muslin. She handed me the bundle, no larger or heavier than a loaf of bread, while she finished tending to the poor woman.
Framed in the swaddling was a tiny face, dark and shriveled. Its pale eyes squinted into the light—they were surprisingly patient and knowing. It is perhaps foolish to say it, but I felt I glimpsed some recognition in them—not of me, but of unseen things—as though it had carried into this world some perception from its former realm. I looked to Xenia, but she had gone, slipped away without my notice.
Its mother had died. There being no one to claim the infant, I said I would take it until the family could be found. The weary midwife said it was probably too small to live.
“Poor little motherless thing.” She sighed. “It’s probably just as well it returns to God.”
It was already too late for me to share this view.
For the safety of his soul, I had him baptized at once. I hired a wet nurse, and then we waited to see if he would last the night. He did, and the next day as well, and my anxiety for him lessened by fractions as each day passed. A notice appeared in the Gazette of the accident, the death of the woman, and of the surviving infant. I anticipated the grieving husband or grandmother who would arrive at my door. I imagined, too, how their sorrow might be a little lessened when I put this child in their arms. But despite my noble intentions, I was vastly relieved when many weeks had gone by without such a scene. For a year or two after, though, I carried in my breast an apprehension that was awakened by every knock on my door.
I did not name him straightaway, for I did not yet believe he was mine to name. Having need to call him something, I called him Matvey, gift of God. I thought of the son whom God gave to Sarah in her old age. Sarah laughed at God’s messenger when he said she would bear a son. She was ninety-nine years old, who would believe such a thing? And who would believe that the widow of a eunuch might also become a mother? But when the child is delivered and put into your arms, how can you continue to scoff?
I will grant it is possible that Xenia may have come upon the carriage accident quite by happenstance. I have considered this myself. She may have perceived that the mother would die from her injuries and then come to fetch me there. Even my poor intellect can conceive an argument against divine interference. But any mother must surely feel as I did when she first holds her child. Against this wondrous and inexplicable goodness, reason is a poor adversary. Matvey was my faith, and I was foolish for him.
When he was older and had need of a patronymic, I gave him Gaspari’s name. I did not deceive him concerning his parentage; of course, he knows we are not his true parents. Still, I think of him as our child, as much ours as if he were from our flesh. I sometimes see Gaspari’s gentleness in him. I see, also, Gaspari’s heightened consciousness of his place outside the tightly drawn circles of society. Without relations to advance his cause, an orphan may breach them, if at all, only by great talents or extraordinary charms. Matvey lacks these—he is like me in this—but he will work at a thing until his back is bent and his fingers raw, and for this reason he has recently found a good position on an estate to the south of Moscow. Though he would not have left Petersburg otherwise, and though he asked me to move there with him, there was no question in the end but that he would go and I would not. We are like two stout Tatar horses: made for the humble work of pulling whatever is yoked to us. This is our way.
We had only just sat down at table last month when the bell was ringing downstairs. Briefly, absurdly, my heart rose, thinking it was Xenia come to bid Matvey farewell, but she had not visited here for nearly half a year and she never rings. Masha came to the table to say there was a woman downstairs wanting food for her child. “Well, invite her in,” I said, but Masha replied that I should come to the door. I excused myself from my company and made my way down the stairs, feeling vexed by each of the fourteen steps to the bottom, and lifted the latch.
The woman on the far side of the door had the thin and exhausted look of one who has lived from hand to mouth for some time. I told her she was welcome and stepped back to let her pass.
“God bless,” she answered, but she showed reluctance to cross the threshold. “It’s not for me that I come.” She drew forward a child hidden in her skirts. Of perhaps three or four years, it was pale and bruised-looking. “I was told I might leave her here. Only for an hour or two.”
“There is enough for you as well.”
“God bless,” she repeated. “It’s only that…” Her glance strayed nervously to the street. My eyes followed, but there was only the drowse of midday and nothing out of the ordinary. The sky outside had turned woolly, signaling that it would snow before long. I had felt it in my joints since I woke that morning, age making me as prescient as Xenia, though my predictions are confined to the weather.
“I left a blanket,” she said. “Near the Anichkov Bridge. I’m afraid someone may steal it. If you will take her, I’ll go back and fetch it.”
I nodded, and she began to pry the child’s fingers loose from her skirt. “The good babushka here will look after you,” she said. The child eyed me with the wariness of a feral cat and desperately tried to reattach herself to her mother. “It cannot be helped,” the mother said sternly, but she was visibly distressed also, and turned and ran away.
I took one of the child’s arms. It was thin as dry tinder. “Come,” I coaxed. “There is food upstairs.”
The others looked up when I returned with a child.
“Where is the mother?” Matvey asked.
“She will be back shortly.” I said this to reassure the child, but in truth I did not believe it.
“Here, you may sit with us,” I said to the child. Osip slid down the bench to make room next to himself, which was generous, as he has come here almost daily for years now and is very proprietary about his place at the table.
Masha fetched a plate, spooned some cabbage and a bit of sausage onto it, and we resumed the talk the child’s arrival had interrupted. Matvey was telling the company what he knew of his new employer.
Although the child was clearly starved, she was too upset to eat. She looked warily round the table, and I cannot say as I blamed her. We made for a strange lot. Besides Osip and Matvey, there was Varenka, who was once a dancer kept by Peter Sheremetyev in his harem until she lost too many teeth and was put out. And next to her, Marie de l’Église, who is stranded here by the troubles in France. There were also Nikita, a laborer Xenia sent here after his leg was shattered in a fall from a roof, and Stepanov-Nelidov. He was formerly a prosperous fur trader, though you would not guess it now. He astonishes me by finding his way here when he is otherwise too drunk to remember even his own name. He eats a little dinner, sleeps, and then takes his leave when he is sober again, full of repentance and devastated courtesy. I am never lacking for company if I do not mind whose company it is.
I have said to Masha that I will ruin myself, just as old Leonid Vladimirovich did, by keeping an open house and table. The jest only half conceals a real anxiety. Every year, I draw water from a little closer to the bottom of the well, and I have feared outliving my money. I also worry that by spending on strangers, I am depriving Matvey of an inheritance. He has never spoken a word of reproach. Still, when I am gone and have left nothing behind, might he not think that I loved him no more than the flotsam that washed onto my doorstep?
In spite of this, I have continued to take them in, those that Xenia sends as well as those who seem to arrive of their own volition. After Gaspari died, I sent half of his money to his mother, thinking that what remained would be sufficient to keep me. Naturally, I had not accounted for the feeding of so many guests. In spite of every frugality, most of the remaining sum was run through in eight years. To make ends meet, I rented the downstairs of the house, but even this did not cover my expenses. I began to look on each person who came here as another debit and to consider how I might prevent Xenia from bringing more.
Then my father died. My mother, who had been by all accounts in the most perfect health, followed him into the hereafter within a few short weeks. I would not have thought her so attached but have learnt it is unwise to judge these bonds by their outward appearance.
In short, being the only remaining heir, I was left the estate unencumbered, and it was sold. Between the modest proceeds and what I receive in rent from the glovemaker downstairs, I have the means to continue on here for perhaps another two or three years. After that, we shall see. I have no gift to foretell the future, not even from one day into the next.
Seeing that the child would not touch her plate, I excused myself and took her away from the table to a quieter corner of the room. I pulled her onto my lap and rocked her. I hummed aimlessly, following with one ear the conversation that continued at the table. Because Matvey would be stopping one night in Moscow, Varenka was telling him something of the city, though it seems doubtful she was ever there. Without teeth, her speech is very mumbled, but the others listened politely—even Marie, who understands no more than a few words of Russian. All except Stepanov-Nelidov. He has most certainly visited Moscow but could add nothing to the general wisdom, as he had drifted into sleep, his chin on his chest and a light snore emanating from his open mouth.
The child squirmed, then gradually her restlessness slowed, and at last she could not fight sleep any longer. As she drifted off, limp and open-mouthed, her breath was a rasping whisper. I adjusted the sharp little elbow that was digging into my side. Except that her belly distended unnaturally, she seemed not to have enough flesh on her to anchor her to this life. Then again, children are sturdier than I credit them or none would live past his first year. With sufficient bread and meat, who knows.
By ones and twos, my guests excused themselves and took their leave. I do not think a one of them has a particular place to go, but they are careful to pretend that they do. In the worst of winter, some will return here at night to sleep, but even then only the sick remain past the morning.
It was nearly two o’clock when the bell rang again. Two policemen were at the door. The more senior of the two asked for “the one who is called Andrei Feodorovich.” I could not tell whether his phrasing denoted honor or suspicion.
“Andrei Feodorovich has been dead now for more than thirty years,” I said.
“We are looking for the fool who goes by that name.”
I was able to say with honesty that I had not seen her since late spring and, for the moment, to be grateful of this.
“What is it you want with her?” I asked.
“There is talk that this person has spoken out against Her Imperial Majesty and means harm to her.” He then cited a rumor that Xenia had been seen in the streets ranting about rivers of blood.
“Yes, yes, so they say.” The rumor had been repeated for some twenty-five years, ever since the murder of Ivan Antonovich. “Even if there were anything to it,” I said, “it is cold gossip indeed.”
He was not pleased by my impertinence. They had been ordered to find Xenia and bring her in.
I expect the recent insurrection in France has made Her Imperial Majesty newly fearful for her crown and alert to any stirrings in the population here. Emigrés fleeing from Paris to Petersburg are bringing with them alarming reports of soldiers and priests and commoners rising up in arms against their nobles and their king.
For all that Catherine is well-loved, it has not been forgotten by some that she came to the throne by means of a coup and that perhaps others had a more rightful claim to it. And while it is strange to think of our most reason-loving Empress being made uneasy by a fool, she would hardly be the first. Elizabeth before her kept poor babbling Ivan Antonovich a prisoner of the crown all her days. Even so, they say, it was fear of him that kept her awake nights. And before that, Saint Basil is said to have caused Tsar Ivan Grozny to tremble when the holy fool presented him with a slab of raw meat, saying that a murderer needn’t bother with keeping the fast. Our Sovereign may not herself credit the rantings of fools, but others do, and when the world has gone topsy-turvy, even a fool may be dangerous to the crown. Especially one such as Xenia, who will not keep silent.
“Do you know her whereabouts?” the officer asked.
“She is a wanderer,” I said, “and comes and goes according to her own dictates. She may stay for five hours or five minutes, but where she goes after is anyone’s guess.”
This was not the whole truth. I did not know where she was at that moment, but only recently one of the unfortunates who come here had brought with him a report that she sleeps in the Smolenskoye cemetery. Then again, gossip needs no carriage, and her fame has grown so great that she is rumored to be everywhere, within the city and without it. If all claims were believed, she would be pilgrimming continually from one holy site to another, for reports of her have returned from as far away as Siberia.
“Truly,” I added, “there is no cause to seek her further. Andrei Feodorovich would do no harm to anyone. She has been touched by God”—I tapped my temple—“but she always loved Her Imperial Majesty most particularly.”
He crossed himself, but instantly put on again his opaque manner and informed me that I was obliged to alert officials if she should come to this house or if I should hear anything pertinent to her whereabouts, and with that they left. I feared for Xenia if the police succeeded in finding her, for she would certainly be unable to give her interrogators satisfaction.
It is a peasant belief that, as we are all equal in God’s eyes, He must surely confer on fools unseen, compensatory gifts. And so our peasants attend fools with great reverence and scrutinize their gibbering for veiled wisdom and prophecy. Even the more enlightened prefer them in their charity over the ordinary poor. For this reason, the streets are thick with counterfeit fools who don chains and profit by feigning madness. The credulous lump all these together and call them the blessed ones.
Because I have known Xenia as she was—bequeathed every worldly advantage of wit, modesty, and riches—I know she is not a pretender. At the same time, it is hard for me to accept the loss of these advantages as a sign of God’s favor. I should still choose for her the easier blessings.
As so often happens in Petersburg at this time of year, the sun made its first, brief appearance that day even as it was setting. Unexpectedly, it peeked from beneath sodden clouds, flared, and then dropped into a narrow band of sky on the horizon gone suddenly bright. The world, gray since dawn, saturated with color. On the church, the unpainted brick glowed warm as a stove and the tiny icicles on its cornices glittered. The hem of the clouds was streaked vermilion, and even the air itself was amber as honey. For a few moments everything was luminous, like a hand-tinted drawing. And then it was over. The band of light dissolved, and the sky began to fade.
A new church is being built on the grounds of the cemetery. I have watched it go up for two years, until now only the belfry remains to be finished. This last is the slow labor of ants, for the workers must climb to the top of the scaffold and then pulley up each load of bricks. Recently, though, the tower has grown more rapidly, so that it will certainly be completed soon. The workers know me—I go there most every week to tend the graves—and they will wave when I pass. At that hour, though, only two remained, packing their tools, and they expressed surprise to see me.
“This is no time to visit the dead, Matushka.”
I said that I was looking for the fool Andrei Feodorovich.
They know of her, of course, but had not seen her about. When I told them that I had heard she slept there, a look passed between the two, but then the larger one shook his head. You should go home, he told me. It will be dark before long.
The driver did not like the idea of my staying, either. I was only able to quell his misgivings by paying him double the usual fare and promising the same again if he would wait.
I set off down the path that cuts to the river, calling her name. My voice carried so loudly in that silent place that she would surely hear me if she was there, though this did not mean she would answer.
In summer, it is a pleasant place to visit. Past the edge of the city, it is so thick with birch and oak that it stays cool even in the worst of the heat. At Easter or in fine weather, there are others about, and I will sometimes see peasants bathing at the river. But now, in the autumn gloaming, the cemetery was desolate. With the floods, every depression had become a pond, and I had need to pick my way with care, stick in one hand, and to leave the path when it submerged. I should have been uneasy, alone there at dusk and surrounded by the dead, but I was not. Each marker was familiar: the wooden crosses of the earliest residents, the granite slabs with their more recent dates, the white marble tombs of the well-born.
At last I came to Andrei Feodorovich Petrov’s grave, an iron cross and a low fence frosted with new snow. It was deserted, the snow undisturbed. If she had been here, there was no sign of it but only the withered flowers I had left some weeks before.
“Andrei Feodorovich,” I called out, for she will not answer to Xenia. I listened for some answering sound. “Andrei Feodorovich, are you here?” If some person were to have come upon me, what might he have thought of my standing at Andrei’s grave and shouting his name? But I had no concern of being judged: the place was so empty at that hour that no one would come there who was not himself a little mad.
“It is Dasha. Please. I must see you.” This had been all of my plan—to go to Smolenskoye cemetery and find her. I wanted to warn her of the police, though I knew she would not care.
The cemetery was silent as no other place can be. There was perhaps a quarter hour of light left. I should do as I have been advised, I thought, and return home. Instead, I left Andrei’s resting place and followed the path to the river. This river separates the Orthodox buried on the left bank from the foreigners and infidels interred on the right. Across the little bridge, the cemetery is new and untamed, the few markers scattered amongst the trees. In death, as in life, they are lonely in their difference there.
His stone is granite, engraved in both Russian and Italian. It was crusted with snow, and I brushed this away. Francesco Gaspari. 1718–1762. I brushed again. Beloved. The fig I planted in May had dropped its leaves; the first hard freeze would kill it. Every winter, I pull up the dead shrub, buy a fruit, and start another from seed, nursing the tender shoot indoors until it can be planted in late spring. When Matvey was a child, it gave him pleasure to grow this fig for his father, and it became a tradition with us.
I go to Gaspari’s grave nearly every week, and as I weed the plot and scrub lichen from the stone I will talk to him. Our conversation is now the reverse of what it once was, with my carrying the weight of it and his listening. I also look to his neighbors that need tending to, those dead, Germans mostly, without family here. After my work is done, I stay on. Though I am not so entertaining as he was, I have found I have much to say.
I tugged on the fig, but it would not pull up. “I’m sorry I did not come last week. Matveyushka came home with news. He has found a position.
“Princess Dashkova—do you remember her? She was a friend to Grand Duchess Catherine, and after you were gone she had a hand in putting her on the throne. Since then, well, you can imagine, her influence has only grown.” I used my stick to loosen the dirt around the roots. “Well, our Matveyushka will be overseeing the building of a greenhouse for her and will manage the orchards. He says she has two hectares given to stone fruits—plums and cherries and I cannot recall what else—but most of this is sent to market. She would like a greenhouse so she may have melons and cucumbers when there is snow on the ground.”
I yanked again, and continued to work. “He was flush with pride when he told me. For his sake, I made to celebrate. I had Masha bring out a bottle of your Madeira that I had been saving against I know not what. But he will be leaving Petersburg, dearest. And Troitskoye is at best a week from here. It is hard that he will be so far away.”
At last, the fig came up. I smoothed over the soil I’d disturbed.
“He wishes me to close up the house and follow him. ‘You are too old to stay on alone, Maman,’ he said. But how can I abandon the unfortunates? With winter there will be more of them coming to the door.”
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.