The Mirrored World

Chapter Eleven

We returned from the courthouse even poorer than we had been. The judge had granted Xenia control over what little remained of her estate but at the cost of her family’s protection. She, in turn, had bequeathed me this same house as a wedding gift—and with it the enmity of the person charged with finding me a husband. Mine had been a lost cause well before this—I was then nearly twenty-five, well beyond the age of a bride—but I could no longer pretend otherwise.

In short, because it was untenable for us to remain as we were, two women alone and without means or prospects, I devised the only plan I could think of, that we should go to the country and live again under my father’s roof. I wrote to him asking that he take us in.

Xenia did not like my plan, though.

“Where shall they go if the door is locked against them?” she asked me.

I explained that Marfa would go to live with her brother; Ivan and his son, Grishka, to the village where he was born; Masha would be coming with us.

“And the rest?”

“Who?”

“All the others.” There was no one unaccounted for. She gestured at the window. “Them.”

I understood. She meant the beggars. I answered that they would be taken care of.

She looked at me as though this untruth was a visible blemish on my nose.

“You cannot provide for all the poor, Xenia. You cannot even look after yourself.”

“I do not matter,” she countered. “But if you stayed here, you might look after them.”

“And how shall I do that? I do not have even a kopek to my name.”

“God is bringing a husband for you. Then you shall want for nothing.”

I could bear it no more. I broke into sobs, and once I had started could not stop myself. Xenia patted and stroked my head, but this only loosened my grief further. I was alone and unloved. Only Xenia remained, murmuring in my ear that my husband was coming. But she, too, was gone. Bereft, I exhausted myself in tears.

Masha entered to say that Gaspari was downstairs. I had no desire to be seen in such a state, but neither would I send away our last friend in the city. “Say that I shall be down presently.” I splashed water on my face, then gathered myself together and went downstairs.

He met me with such a look of sorrow that I suspected Masha had already told him our news. But no, he was only mirroring what he found in my face.

“The court has sent away Xenia Grigoryevna?”

“It is not the court’s doing, but we must leave nonetheless.”

I told him all that had occurred at the courthouse, and what I had written to my father.

“I have some monies put away, and this I would give you. You must allow me to do this, dear friend.”

He had been setting aside sums every year so that he might return to Italy. I did not know the amount, but I knew its value.

“I cannot. I have no way to repay you, and it would only forestall what needs to be done.”

He looked stricken. An unaccustomed silence fell upon us. He seemed to be making an effort to say something further, but he could find no stories for me now. Xenia entered, wearing Andrei’s jacket over her dress. Gaspari stood up from his chair and, bowing, offered it to her.

Taking no notice of his courtesy, she announced to him, “I am going away. This shall be her house.”

“Yes. I am greatly saddened to hear it.”

She gave him a look of impatience. “This shall be her house,” she repeated, and pounded the wall as though to give proof there were no vermin in it.

“Xenia, please. Come and sit.” I gestured to Gaspari’s chair. “She is distressed by the prospect of our leaving.”

“Her distress is shared by all those who will miss you.”

“It is well built,” Xenia said, “a good marriage portion.”

Briefly, I held the hope that in his imperfect understanding of Russian, he might miss her meaning, but I saw in his flushed countenance that he grasped it too well. He fingered his handkerchief and seemed to scan it for flaws.

“Were I”—Gaspari faltered—“were I a man like others, nothing could halt me. But I am not… I cannot, how to say…” He fluttered his long fingers pitifully as though to conjure the words from the air. “I am not made for marriage.”

Xenia dismissed his objection. “None of us is made for marriage. It is made for us.”

I tried to put an end to his misery and mine. “Please. You needn’t. She doesn’t know what she says.”

His wretched gaze met mine. “No, she hears the cry of my heart. It does not want you to go. How will I stay on alone in this cold city? They praise my Orfeo and when I sing the part of Procris, they weep. They want to sleep with my Alexander. But I am still the monster. Even when I come to their beds. Who in this cold city hears my heart speak its own words and does not mock me? You, Dasha. If I were whole, I would ask for you so that you might stay.”

I felt the floor tip and slide, right itself, and slide in the other direction. I grasped my chair to steady myself and set the room to rights again. I found my tongue.

“Ask.”

And so he did. Gaspari made the journey to the country to speak to my father and claim me.

How could I have expected any other reception but that which he got? My father derided him. “So she wishes to marry the jester after all,” he said. Apparently, he readily agreed to release me, but he would not release my dowry. Why, he demanded, should he buy a breed horse that had been gelded? And was not his daughter already gaining a house by this marriage? It seems my letter had come to him in the same post with another from Aunt Galya, wherein she made complaints against my character, among them that I was scheming and ungrateful and had taken advantage of her poor daughter’s ruined wit to steal her house.

Gaspari bowed and left without protest. He was loath to tell me any of this at the time; when he returned to Petersburg, he said only that we had all we should expect from my father.

“I will ask my brother, Vanya, to speak with him,” I said, but Gaspari shook his head.

“A brother will not look on me more kindly.”

My humiliation turned to anger. This dowry was rightly mine. Without it, I had nothing to bring to a marriage and was no better than a beggar. With what dignity I could feign, I let Gaspari know that I released him from any obligation.

“Obligation?” He tilted his chin and knitted his brow in the way he had of seeming puzzled or vexed or both. I think it is the habit of someone who must continually question his understanding, for I noticed that he never wore this look when speaking his own tongue.

“It is your father does not want you, Dashenka. My feelings have not changed.”

We were wed quietly and without ceremony. The church would not condone such a marriage, but Gaspari bribed a priest to mutter a few words over us in the vestibule of the church, with Xenia and five musicians from the Italian Company as witnesses.

Upon leaving, Xenia invited the beggars on the steps to share in the wedding supper, and with the priest and this motley company we returned on foot to the house. It was high summer, and the servants had spread blankets in the yard that we might dine al fresco, as the Italians say, like peasants in the field at harvesttime.

Toasts were made with both vodka and a sweet liquor that tasted of licorice. One by one, the guests wished us wealth and happiness and long life. “Per cent’anni,” the Italians said. For a hundred years. And “Gor’ko!” the Russians answered. The vine is bitter, and to make it sweet the bride and groom must kiss.

Gaspari held my chin and put his mouth on mine. His lips were soft and insinuating. I had never been kissed and did not know that a shock of heat can travel between two bodies. I startled and drew back. About me, there were hoots and cheers.

In all this celebration, Xenia had sat apart with the priest. But on hearing the noise, she rose from her seat. “The time has come,” she said, and taking me by the hand led me into the house. At the top of the stairs, she turned into her room.

Her bed was dressed in the bridal linens I had stitched more than half my life ago, put away for this night, and then forgotten. Draped across these was a nightgown. I had not seen it for some dozen years, but it was so deeply familiar that my eyes instantly sought the place on the yoke where my mother had sewn a rosette. Next to it was my first imperfect copy—its stitches uneven and lumpy, the linen round it pulled and pricked—and round the yoke the record of my growing skill was visible in each successive flower. I felt again the remembered pressure of the thimble and needle in the tips of my fingers, my furrowed concentration as I had worked this bit of linen. Just as a peasant works his patch of earth—his sweat watering the soil, his prayers tilled into it season after season, and in turn, the soil worked into his brown palms and under his nails—we twine ourselves into a small piece of the world and it becomes us. My old life was suddenly very dear to me.

Xenia pressed a paper into my hand. It was the deed to the house. At the end of the faded document was fresh ink. In the name of Colonel Andrei Feodorovich Petrov, I bequeath to my cousin, Daria Nikolayevna Pososhkova, this house and all my worldly goods. May she use them to God’s glory and in memory of our love.

Below this, the priest had marked a place for her to sign and added another inscription saying that it was copied and witnessed on this date.

I hesitated, my eyes drifting back to the bed. “But where shall you sleep?”

Was there ever such a dolt? But Xenia did not mind my ungracious thanks. She began to unlace my dress. “You shall be with your beloved, and I with mine.” She helped me to remove my undergarments until I was naked and shivering, though the night was warm. Below the open window, the Italians had begun to serenade. Their high voices drifted up and snared in the limbs of the plane tree and fluttered its leaves so that they sparked with the last lights of the evening sun.

She slipped the gown over my head, and my arms into the sleeves, and the moment was upon us. The feeling rose up in me that I was departing on a long journey from which I should not return. Like all travelers, I wished to sit with her in silence for a time before I set out, but I could not give voice to this and so, as she started to leave, I impulsively threw my arms round her and clung as though we were about to be parted forever. She stroked my hair, and after a time loosened herself from my grasp. “He is waiting.” And with this, she closed the door behind her and left me alone.

I do not know how long I remained there before Gaspari knocked. It must have surprised him to enter and find such an immodest and eager-seeming bride standing just on the far side of the door.

“You are not in bed.” He, too, was dressed in a nightgown, and though this was unremarkable given the circumstances, I had not anticipated it. Transfixed, I stared at the curve of his breasts beneath the thin linen. In the baths, I had seen the bodies of men and of women, but I had never seen this.

He went to the window and closed it, muting the sounds of music. Then he pulled fast the drapery and, blessedly, dissolved from view. I allowed myself to be led to the bed and lifted up onto it. In the dark, I heard his breathing and felt his hand at my waist, very gentle.

My recollection of what followed has the quality of a fever dream in which the most astonishing happenings—such that could scarcely be imagined by the waking self—are met by the dreamer without question. My body, suddenly unfamiliar to me, was revealed to be a map that could be read by touch. His hands, soft as a woman’s, found those places where the soul lay just beneath the surface, like coals banked in a white ash of skin. His tongue worked in more secret places, speaking a hitherto unsuspected language. With quiet insistence, he coaxed from me a wild fluency. I writhed and cried and burbled gibberish and was by all outward and inward signs overtaken by a kind of lunacy from which I emerged spent and badly shaken. I began to weep. It frightened me how thin is the membrane that separates us from madness. I thought of Xenia.

“Did you not enjoy it?”

I did not know how to answer. “I thought I should die.”

“It is called the little death.”

I was hotly ashamed, but I had to know. “Is this what others do?”

“Most take their pleasure more directly. What they say, a means? To get children? But I was not created to get, only to give. However poor, it is my gift to please.” For all the seeming modesty of his words, there was pride in his voice.

“But if it gives you no pleasure—”

“No, no, it makes me very happy.” He found my hand. “You are like figs, Dashenka.”

Did you not enjoy it? Xenia had asked this same question of me several years earlier. I had accompanied her and Andrei to Grand Duchess Catherine’s summer palace, Oranienbaum. As a winter entertainment for Catherine’s court, an immense sliding hill had been constructed of timbered frames in the shape of an upended bow and bricked with polished ice so that one might slide down one slope and then up the facing side. It was smaller than the famed Flying Mountain that is there now, but more treacherous, for there was no track to hold the sledge to its course, nothing to prevent it from spilling over the edge.

At Xenia’s urging, we mounted the steps to the top. From this vantage could be seen the entire breadth of the park, the palace in the distance and, gleaming dully like a river, a long ribbon of ice falling away from the platform where we stood. Donkeys and serfs working with ropes were hauling a small sledge back upstream. It resembled a coffin fit with runners. They heaved it up onto the platform, and then waited on us with horrible expectancy.

Together with the driver, we were wedged into this conveyance, Xenia in front and I behind her. Then we were pushed to the lip of the precipice—and over. The sledge careened down the steep incline, ice rushing towards us and all else blurred by terrifying speed. I buried my eyes in the only solid thing, Xenia’s back. She was screaming. I felt the weightless velocity of our descent in my liquefied bones. Then, with a nauseating heave, we reversed course and began to slide backwards, falling and falling and falling. At long last, the sledge began to slow, and finally it came to a rest. We emerged, miraculously unharmed. Xenia was laughing, breathless and eager to ride again.

“It is like flying!” she said, and was puzzled that I did not share her euphoria.

The morning following the wedding, Xenia was gone from the house. I thought nothing of this, but when she did not return by late afternoon I sent Grishka to the church to fetch her. He returned and reported that she had not been seen there. I sent him directly back out to look for her at Andrei’s grave. So narrow were her habits that I could not conceive of any other destination, but even before he returned, a part of me knew she had gone much farther.

I found myself standing outside Andrei’s room. Since his death, the door had remained closed, but that morning it stood ajar. I entered. In the faded heat of the midsummer evening, the room was close. Everything in it was silted with a fine sheath of dust, but otherwise it seemed much as it had been while he was alive. Because he slept in Xenia’s room, it was not furnished with a bed but only a dressing table, a boot chair and commode, a standing mirror, and other such accoutrements as are necessary to a gentleman’s dressing room. His wig was now gone from its stand, and there were clean shapes on the dressing table where formerly there had been jars of pomade and powder and whatnot. She had given some of his things away, yet by comparison to the looted appearance of the rest of the house the room seemed overstuffed with possessions.

For this reason, perhaps, it was some moments before I saw Xenia’s black mourning dress, her last remaining garment, discarded on the floor of the empty armoire. When I picked it up, something fell from its folds: the delicate cross and chain she had worn round her neck since infancy. Apprehension knifed through me.

Still, I had only a foreboding and nothing material to pin it to. In the weeks that followed, I returned to the church and to Smolenskoye cemetery again and again, thinking I might find her or some sign that she had been there. I sought her out in increasingly unlikely quarters of the city as well, asking at churches and taverns and wherever people were congregated if any had seen a woman of about my years but more comely and answering to the name Xenia Grigoryevna. That by all appearances she had left the house unclothed would suggest that someone should have remembered seeing her, but it was as though she had been removed from the earth and no trace left behind.

We went to the authorities, but they were uniformly uninterested—women go missing all the time, murdered or escaped from husbands or fathers or masters. As Xenia belonged to no one, no husband or father or master, she might go where she pleased and they had no cause to find her and bring her back. Yes, said one uncurious officer, it was less common for a woman to leave behind even her clothing. But then again, he added, the rivers are full of madwomen.

When it was spoken aloud, my foreboding instantly assumed material form. I recalled the terms of her parting from me on my wedding night. “You shall be with your beloved, and I with mine.” How had I missed the portent in these words when she said them? Why would she give me her house except that she saw no further need of it herself? Why had I not questioned this gift?

The answer came to me that I had not questioned it because I had need of a house.

After this, I could not cross a bridge without my gaze drifting down to the water and seeking there her countenance, wavering dim and green in the depths. What I found was only my own reflection on the surface. I contemplated Lake Svetloyar and the pilgrims who had gone there and disappeared.

At the end of a fortnight, Gaspari was compelled to return to the Italian Company, which was still in summer residence with the court at Tsarskoye Selo. I could not bring myself to desert the city. “If she were to return…” I explained. He agreed, though I saw in his face that it was only out of kindness and an unwillingness to destroy what hope I had.

In truth, this hope was small and unsteady. Strung between unsettled expectation and despair, on some days I prayed fervently that God might bring her back to me and at other times I asked only for her bones that I might lay my grief to rest alongside them. Later still, my supplications were even more faltering and exhausted. Give me only this, I prayed, the reassurance of your presence. But my thoughts floated outwards and came back thin as an echo. I continued to look for her on the church steps, but she was never there, and I went less often. At some moment unmarked by me, the low flame of my faith guttered and went out.

Chapter Twelve

The musici were notorious for being temperamental—it was widely held that the sacrifice of their manhood unbalanced their humors—and Gaspari’s reputation in the court was no different. Stories of his unrestrained behavior circulated through the court: that he had insisted on being reseated above the salt at a supper and then left anyway, that he had ripped up a score because he did not like the composition, that he canceled performances for no better reason than that he objected to the weather. Of course, one cannot depend upon wags for the truth if it can be improved by exaggeration and falsehoods. In truth, the thin blood of Italians is unsuited to our climate, and Gaspari suffered most grievously in the winter. He was often wracked with terrible chills and coughs, and if he did not perform, it was because of this. And while it is true that he once called Alexi Bestuzhev-Ryumin a horse’s ass and refused to sing a note unless the Grand Chancellor was first removed from the building, it was not reported that the Grand Chancellor had earlier insulted him very grievously or that the whole matter came to nothing once it was discovered that there had been a misunderstanding and the Grand Chancellor was not, after all, present at the opera house that evening.

I doubt the world would have credited how unassuming a man Gaspari was within our walls and how generous to his friends, but he did nothing to help his own cause. Perceiving that most persons found him strange and repellent, he moved through society with a haughty air, stiffening at whispers and sensitive to imagined slights. And if any person had the temerity to talk while he sang or to applaud tepidly afterwards, that person was forever his enemy. Even fawning admiration, though he craved it, might arouse in him suspicions that he was being mocked, and he would then retaliate with a barbed wit.

As the cognoscenti prize most what is most rare and delicate, they tolerated what they deemed this capriciousness and even encouraged it. They wanted monsters, and so they had them.

In the year that followed Xenia’s disappearance, Araja announced that he would revive his Alessandro nell’Indie, the opera that had first brought Gaspari to the attention of Petersburg. With the singer Carestini gone to London, Gaspari anticipated taking the primo uomo role of the Indian King Poro who battled with Alexander the Great for the love of his Indian Queen, Cleofide.

Gaspari was violently offended, then, to learn that Araja had awarded the role instead to Lorenzo Saletti for his return to the Russian court. “It is the faithful dog is kicked,” Gaspari said.

He took up his old part, that of Alexander, but returned from rehearsal the first day frothing with bitterness towards Saletti, who was, he claimed, so past his vigor that his listeners must envy the deaf. “Squeak, squeak, squeak! I cannot bear it! I cannot pretend to a noble contest with this fat, old mouse. I should be chasing him about the stage with the broom!”

He grew increasingly distressed with each rehearsal. It physically pained Gaspari to hear a sour note, and though he did his best to shield himself from the assaults by covering his ears while Saletti sang, it was more than he could endure. He broke down into weeping one night, and I feared he would not last until the evening of the first performance.

It was my habit to watch his performances from the wings, where I could not be seen. Sitting in the house meant suffering the many eyes that peered at me from behind fans, the trail of titters that attended my coming or going. “The musico’s wife,” they would whisper, and I knew they were thinking of what we did in our bed.

And so, on the first evening, after I had helped Gaspari with his dressing, I tucked myself behind a bit of scenery, where I should be out of the way.

Saletti took the stage in his gold turban and striped robes, assumed a pose, and without yet singing a note brought the audience to a cheer. When he had drunk his fill of it, he began to sing. He was indeed past his strength, though not so terrible as my husband had portrayed him. I looked over to Gaspari, who stood in the shadow of the proscenium awaiting his own entrance. His painted features twisted at each wavering note, and I worried that he might turn and leave the theatre. But as I watched, he closed his eyes and shook loose his long limbs.

As Saletti scaled the last treacherous note of his aria, Gaspari strutted onto the stage, swishing his purple robe in glorious arcs of color, and planted himself in the center of the footlights. He did not wait even a beat after Saletti’s last note before he began to sing himself, and thus he deprived the older musico of any applause. For the length of the opera, Gaspari greatly embellished his part, departing from the score to weave in filigrees of trilling and florid ornamentation. The battle between Alexander and the Indian King for the love of Cleofide was a contest also between the two musici, and it was one that Saletti could not win. To hear them singing together was to see history reenacted and to understand how Alexander had so thoroughly vanquished and humiliated India.

At the end of the second act, Gaspari finished his final aria with an exquisite messa di voce, sustaining a single note, letting it swell and then fade almost to nothing before it rose again like a phoenix. The audience was stirred to its feet and shouted its bravos. Rather than exiting, Gaspari remained near the lip of the stage as Saletti sang, that he might relish the unflattering comparisons being made in the house.

This triumph did not appease Gaspari’s pricked vanity. He talked more frequently of quitting Russia—moving to Italy or even to Paris, where the climate was more temperate and he might be better appreciated—but he was too much rewarded in the employ of Her Imperial Majesty to give it up as yet for uncertain prospects. And so we continued to live a quiet life in the shadow of the court.

There was little left in the house to remind me of Xenia. So many of the furnishings had been sold or given away, and the repetitive tasks of domesticity—the sweeping and cleaning and polishing—gradually erased her signature from what remained. I did not forget her, but the sharp pain of her loss softened and became like a swollen joint or weakened back. One accommodates the ache, and it becomes a part of you.

Because I could have no expectation of children, I had schooled myself not to want them, having learnt from Xenia the peril of unchecked longing. I managed the household well and was attentive to my husband’s particular needs, keeping the stove fueled at night in the worst of winter and tucking cooked stones wrapped in flannel round his feet. When in spite of this he took ill, I stayed at his bedside and fed him strong broths. I also learnt to prepare dishes of his birthplace and even taught myself some few phrases of Italian that he might feel himself more at home here. As Xenia had for Andrei, I brought him warm kvas with honey and herbs for his throat. However, what had been at the heart of that little gesture—a passionate and unreserved love—I could not give. Perhaps I was unwilling to fall again into the abyss that had so frightened me on the first night of our marriage. I think I held myself a little apart.

Did he sense any shortcoming in my heart? I do not know. I think we were happy enough.

Season followed season, each alike except for the small changes that every year brings—a new opera or a new way to wear a wig, shifts in alliances between person and person or country and country—diversions that fill our days with seeming import but are then displaced by whatever newer thing follows. At some point during this time, the Empress engaged the architect Rastrelli to design a splendid new masonry palace on the site of the old Winter Palace. For this work, thousands of laborers were absorbed into the city and took up residence in huts near the site. They labored there for years, the enormous structure rising by such slow increments as to seem unchanging, as though it had always been there in its unfinished state.

The war begun against Prussia in 1756 also rumbled on ceaselessly, a tidal ebb and flow of battle lines that washed over the whole of Europe but was present to me only in the person of my brother, Vanya. Cut off by my family, I had no news of him until his death at Züllichau, which I learnt of when the rolls were published in the papers. In a dull fog, I was on the point of traveling to the country to console my parents, but Gaspari prevented it. “There is nothing there for you, Dashenka,” he said. “They do not love you. I am all your family now.” After that, I did not take an interest in the war again until I was forced to by circumstances that I will relate.

On Christmas Day of 1761, the tolling of the bells brought news of the death of Her Imperial Majesty. I remember feeling no shock. She was old—or so it seemed then, though it occurs to me that she was younger by several years than I am now—and she had been ill for so long, her death predicted so repeatedly that when it arrived it felt like the exhalation of a long-held breath.

No one of our acquaintance was happy at the prospect of her nephew, Grand Duke Peter, taking the throne, but I did not anticipate how this would change our lives or with what suddenness. Within two days of her death, the new Emperor dismissed the Italian Company from the service of the court. Only a fortnight before, Elizabeth had issued a decree to recruit more actors and musicians for the troupe. Now he ordered the theatre shuttered, with all its stock of scenery, effects, machinery, and costumes left inside to molder. Peter moved himself into the dead Empress’s still-unfinished palace and set about to wipe clean from memory all the graces of her reign.

Gaspari was then suffering the annual toll that our winters took on him, a perpetual weariness from always being cold, but this seeming reversal of his fortunes had a tonic effect. His spirits rose at the news and for this reason: there was nothing to keep us here any longer. He might now return to Italy. He had succeeded in putting by more than enough funds to keep us in comfort until he found a position. We might go first to the village where he had been born. He happily anticipated showing it to me—the terraced hills with their low stone walls, the lion’s head over the door of his mother’s house—and, in turn, showing me to his relations. These were, by his account, most all of the village.

I made an effort to share his joy, but he knew me too well not to feel the thinness of my enthusiasm. “I know what I ask, Dasha… but I will die if I stay here.” And then he tried to cheer me with this: so much of Petersburg, the palaces and canals and bridges, were but poor copies of what I should find in Italy. “And everything looks more happy there,” he added, “because it is where it belongs.” He wrote to his mother with the news that he was coming home and bringing with him his Russian wife.

The war had made private travel treacherous, and the route to Italy passed through Prussia, where we could not go. However, in his eagerness to quit Russia, Gaspari found a means. An envoy to the ministry at Leipzig had been appointed to announce His Majesty’s accession to the throne and would leave on this mission shortly. Gaspari approached Countess Stroganova, who was a devoted follower of the new Emperor, and secured from her the favor of our being attached to Prince Bezborodko’s travel party.

I gathered together the household and said that I wished to free them to settle their own futures. If they had a place to go, I would see to their papers; if not, they might serve my aunt Galina Stepanovna. With many tears, we began to pack our belongings that we should be ready to leave within the week. Passports were arranged for Gaspari and me, and because I could not bring myself to sell it, the house was put with an agent to let.

Christ instructed his disciples not to lay up their treasure on earth but in Heaven. For where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also. But the heart stubbornly attaches itself to familiar places and things and would rather have these, no matter how humble, than to exchange them for the promise of what is glorious but unknown. That Italy’s skies would be as yellow as Paradise did not console me; I preferred the granite shadows of this most bleak and most beautiful city. Even the history of my sadness here was dear to me.

On the day before we were to set out, I made to bid our dear Empress good-bye and joined the thousands of mourners lined up outside the old wooden palace where she lay in state. Though she had been his benefactress, Gaspari could not risk his health by lingering out of doors, but he urged me to go and to say his prayers for him. I was glad for the time to be alone with my thoughts; the grave sky and the mournful aspect of the crowd were well tuned to my mood.

I waited several hours to gain entrance to the death chamber, standing behind two women whom I took by their conversation to be soldiers’ wives. Reflecting that where I was going I should not hear my native tongue, I sucked in the earthy sounds of it. They began talking of the rumor that our new Emperor Peter would suspend hostilities against his beloved Frederick, the Emperor of Prussia.

“No, surely not,” said one, “not with victory so close.”

The other raised her brow meaningfully. “They say he speaks German with his advisors.”

My thoughts wandered elsewhere until I heard one of the women speak a familiar name. Andrei Feodorovich. “She foretold this, you know,” the woman continued to her companion. “I saw her outside the church. She was tearing at her clothes and crying out to passersby to go home and bake blinis.”

Hope startled awake in me, coursing into my veins as sudden and violent as a spring river.

“For a funeral supper?” the one woman asked.

The other nodded gravely. “What else would you make of it? And two days later, Her Majesty was dead.”

“Excuse me.” I interrupted their talk. “Who is it you are speaking of?”

“The Empress,” she answered.

“Yes, yes, but you heard someone foretell her death?”

The woman nodded.

“Whereabouts was this church?”

The woman’s features stiffened at my abruptness. “In St. Matthias parish,” she said, and then turned back to her friend.

“Please,” I implored. She eyed me once more, warily. “Just answer me this. Was the person’s name Xenia Grigoryevna?”

“No.”

In spite of this, I left my place in the line and hired a droshky to take me straightaway to the church in St. Matthias.

We crossed the river and drove until we came to a shabby neighborhood within this poorest of boroughs. Tumbledown wooden houses, shops, and huts were crowded together like broken teeth, seeming to be kept upright only by their leaning against one another. The unpaved streets were a quagmire, with pigs and starving dogs rooting about in the filth. The air was pestilential, and I kept my handkerchief over my face to blunt the stench. When we came upon the church, I leapt down from the droshky and hastily made my way to its steps.

I found no dearth of the afflicted there, but Xenia was not among them, nor did anyone know her name.

The repeated denials, and the sights and smells of this benighted place wore down my resolve and allowed a small, sensible voice within me to be heard. Why have you come here? The woman said that it was not Xenia. And there are many in the world by the name of Andrei Feodorovich. Would you be like her, seeking meaning in every coincidence?

Go with your husband to Italy. Everything is dead for you here.

Chapter Thirteen

I looked out the carriage window as we passed through the gate of the city and were swallowed into the forest. Later, the terrain changed to wintry swamp and meadows, with snow spread like linen over the sleeping earth. Except for a few feathery stands of birch, the panorama, earth to sky, was unbroken and peaceful. How does the soil rest, I wondered, where it is always warm and never dormant? But beside my misgivings was also curiosity. I had conjured pictures of a place that was like Petersburg in summer, but covered in vines, and I had peopled it with the Italians at court. The Italy of my imagination was a land of dark-eyed women and musici.

Gaspari kept up a steady conversation with an aide to the Prince, with whom we shared the carriage. I can only guess at what this aide must have thought privately of us, the Italian musico and his Russian wife, but when traveling one must put aside the scruples that govern one’s choice of company in the city, and Nikolai Yakovlevich was a young man of lenient character, not above being entertained by Gaspari. As I have mentioned, my husband was an excellent gossip, and our departure from Petersburg had freed him of any remaining constraints on his tongue. He felt no need for discretion, for he intended never to return there. His mood was expansive and, fueled by frequent draughts of vodka to keep off the cold, he amused himself and the young man with his appraisals of Petersburg’s fools and fops. When we stopped at an inn for the night, he ordered warm kvas and invited Nikolai Yakovlevich to sit by the stove with him that they might continue their talk.

“This I will say—” He rubbed life back into his hands. “She was strong as a man. No other country could a woman rule. I think it is these winters. It makes the woman… what is the word I want?”

Nikolai Yakovlevich smiled genially but was too politic to supply any word.

“Bold,” Gaspari pronounced. “That is it. These Russian woman is like new steel that is put in cold water to harden.” He gauged the young man’s expression and smiled ruefully. “I do not offend by this? Good. I admire. Myself, I was not made for this cold. I am like the little songbird that forget to fly away when the summer ends.”

At Novgorod, we left the road I knew and turned west to the sea. The journey from here to Riga is three long days at a gallop but five at the Prince’s more leisured pace, for he disliked being woken early. When poor horses were all that could be had at a post station, we added yet another day.

By the fourth, Gaspari’s spirits had subdued. He grew listless and quiet. Following Nikolai Yakovlevich’s glance out the window, he said, “White and white and then more white. Not a pretty village even to relieve the—” He coughed into his handkerchief. “Pardonnez-moi, to relieve the dullness. If you will travel on to Italy with us, my friend, you shall see such pretty villages.”

On the fifth day, Gaspari gave off talking entirely and huddled quietly under a fur lap robe, jounced out of a sluggish doze every so often by a rough patch of road or a fit of coughing. By the time we arrived in Riga, he was unmistakably ill.

We were to be guests there of the Governor General, in a castle which housed the local administration. It was an ancient, formidable hulk seemingly little changed in centuries. The Governor greeted the Prince and his entourage and escorted us into a gray hall that was more frigid than the out-of-doors. Here he made such ceremony of his welcome that Gaspari, unwrapped from his travel robes, began to shiver and look pale. I thought he might faint and was obliged to ask that he be shown directly to a room.

In spite of its furnishings, the room where he was taken had the appearance of a dungeon. Its dank stone walls were ill-concealed by tapestries and breathed a chill that was not dispelled by the stove in the corner. There was no good in putting him to bed there, so I entreated one of the servants to see that the banya be heated and when this was done took him there that he might sweat out the ill humors. He stayed in the bath almost all of the night and into the next day.

The Prince was to dine that evening with the Governor General, and it had been expected that Gaspari would sing. Much had been made of this, for though the Governor kept a serf orchestra, there was little variety to his entertainments. But when Nikolai Yakovlevich came to inquire after Gaspari, I had to tell him there was no question of it—though my husband’s color was somewhat better, his lungs were still so wet that he had only been able to sleep by being propped upright. In truth, I doubted that he should be well enough to travel the next day.

Nikolai Yakovlevich studied his hands, his mouth twisting thoughtfully. “I regret that the Prince’s chief concern must be the mission entrusted to him.”

His meaning broke over me like a sudden sweat. The Prince would not be inclined to delay his departure on account of an entertainer, more particularly one who could no longer entertain. Nor could we follow at a later time across the Prussian border, not without the diplomatic protection afforded by the crown. If Gaspari could not travel tomorrow, our only recourse would be to remain in Riga until he was recovered and then return to Petersburg.

“Perhaps he will be more rested by morning,” I said.

“We must pin our hopes to that.”

Gaspari would not hear of either staying or turning back. Feeble as he was, he insisted that he should be better on the morrow. “If I must sing for my supper tonight, I will do this also.” He rose and made to dress.

Never before had I seen him risk his voice for any cause. Not even Her Imperial Majesty could command a performance from him if he was sick. Yet, had he been able to dress unassisted, I do not think I could have dissuaded him from his rash course.

As it was, he was overtaken by a fit of coughing before he had gotten further than his stockings and garters. I helped him back into his bed.

“If you would travel, you will need all your rest.”

The next day, we continued on, through Courland and into Lithuania. His condition worsened throughout the day such that by the time we arrived in the evening at an inn, he was shaking with fever and had need to be lifted from the carriage and borne inside. A healer from the nearby village was sent for.

Perhaps the old woman was told something of her patient by the innkeeper’s wife, who brought her to the door. Or perhaps it was only a mistrust of all foreigners that caused her to peer in at Gaspari with such dourness. Whatever the cause, she would not cross the threshold of his room without first seeing the contents of my purse. After tucking the coins into her apron, she unpacked her glass cups and put them on the stove to heat.

“Are we in Prussia?” Gaspari whispered. His eyes were glazed.

“Very close.”

“How many days to Leipzig?”

“I do not know.”

He nodded and his eyes closed again.

The healer came to the bedside with a cup. When she turned back the coverlet and opened Gaspari’s nightshirt to put it on his chest, she started back at the sight of his bosom, and the cup dropped from her hand and shattered. She cried out something in German.

“He is a musico,” I said helplessly. I did not know the German word but doubted it would mean anything to her had I known it. “Look,” I said, and reached down to Gaspari’s throat and touched the cross round his neck. “Tell her,” I said to the mistress, “he was made like this for God’s glory.” The two women exchanged rapid, guttural words before the mistress turned back to me and shook her head.

“He is sick,” I pleaded, and I tried to offer more coins to the old woman, but she backed away from me as if I were a demon, hastily gathered up her paraphernalia, and left.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and rested my hand on his brow. It was hot and dry. A tear leaked from the corner of one of his closed eyes and trickled onto the pillow.

I went from the room and found the mistress in the passage, returning from having let the old woman out. I asked her for the makings of a plaster. “At the least, you can spare my husband some flour and mustard and a rag.” I was trembling with fury. “Oh, and a broom to sweep up the glass. I will not trouble you to sweep it yourself.” She looked on me with a closed and wary expression and shook her head.

“Not even this?” I was beside myself.

“More slow, please,” she said in halting Russian.

“A broom,” I repeated, and made the motions of sweeping. She nodded energetically and quite nearly ran down the passage, returning shortly with what I had asked for. When I nodded and held out my hand for it, she wagged her forefinger, and said something in German.

I followed her back to the room, and as she swept, I tried to think how my paltry words of German might be bent to acquire a plaster.

The Empress Catherine has since made it fashionable to play at dumb charades—my grandchildren love the game—but I doubt even the most skilled player could puzzle out such a challenge. I patted and rubbed my chest and then pointed to Gaspari. She nodded and lifted up her own bosom as if to say, yes, we all three shared this attribute in common. I shook my head and repeated my gestures, first miming scooping up paste into my hand, but fixed as she was on Gaspari’s deformity we made no headway. I asked her if there was someone who spoke Russian. She fetched the innkeeper, I found Nikolai Yakovlevich, and we four at last blundered our way to understanding, whereupon she took me to the larder and gave me what was needed. I returned to my husband.

“I am putting this on your chest, cuoricino mio.”

Gaspari’s eyes were closed, and he was past the effort of answering, but he nodded.

“It will be warm.”

I spread the rag over the delicate skin of his chest and then, dipping my fingers into the brown paste, gently smoothed it onto him. When I was finished, I wiped the paste from my hands and continued to smooth out the skin on his brow and temples. I knew each blemish, each line, the blue thread that ran under the skin on his temple, the mole on the lobe of his ear. Each in its familiarity was infinitely dear to me, and I tried to make him feel this through my touch. I ran my fingers down the long slope of his neck to the clavicle, and they came to rest in the hollow of his throat where an Adam’s apple would be on another man. His heart pulsed into my fingers. Memorize this, I thought.

His eyes opened and he reached up to grasp my hand. “I hoped…” he began. His voice was low and clotted. “ … To see Italy again.”

“I know, dearest. We shall go when you are well again. Nikolai Yakovlevich has said we might try again this summer. He thinks we shall have peace by then.”

“You won’t leave me here?”

“Leave you? No. I would never leave you.”

He was quiet for a moment. With my free hand, I smoothed his hair, felt his scalp.

“But you will go back to Russia,” he said, and then waited for me to understand his meaning. “So I shall return there, too.”

I observed the departure of the Prince and his entourage from the inn the next day, watching their carriages until they were only a line of black specks on the snow, listening to the last faint sound of harness bells, and then not even that. My German hosts spoke freely between themselves as though I were not there, and this sense of being a spectator to my own life was increased by my understanding nothing of what was said. By the quickness with which they averted their eyes when I looked, I suspected they were discussing my circumstances. This was affirmed by the mistress coming to me and, still speaking in German but more slowly, gesturing to the dining room and making the motion of putting fork to mouth. Certainly, it is a universal instinct to feed those who are troubled. I had no appetite, but courtesy forbade my declining, and so I sat at table with them and obligingly spooned food into my mouth. The husband and wife looked on with approval, and the serving girl watched from the corner.

“Sehr gut,” I said, though in truth I might have been gumming rubber and paste. “Danke.” They urged more on me, but their eyes were so full of sympathy that my throat closed up and I could not swallow any more. After this, I stayed in Gaspari’s room. A coach brought new guests to the inn; I heard the muted sounds of voices and of snow being knocked from boots.

Between the mistress and her servant girl, a steady rotation of this and that was brought to the door. Gaspari’s linens were changed and fresh plasters applied, the wicks trimmed, and the stove banked or fed. Upon leaving, they removed the untouched plates of food. For long hours, there was nothing left for me to do but wipe Gaspari’s brow and listen to the terrible bellows of his breath.

I remember thinking to myself, you are watching your husband die, and in a matter of hours, at most a day or two, he will be gone from this earth. I tested the assertion in my mind, and it seemed both unreal and irrefutable. Tears rose up and puddled in my eyes, but they were like drops leaking through a chink in a dam and gave no relief.

When the moment of his death did come, there was nothing to mark it but a cessation of breath and then a profound stillness. He was there and then, quite visibly, he was not. I marveled at this. Absent the spirit and the promise of heaven in his voice, what remained was so plainly a mask.