The Mirrored World: A Novel

by Debra Dean

When I finally returned with the brew—how long should it boil, I wondered, and in how much water? One frets such things to tatters when the real worry cannot be addressed—I had time enough to glimpse Xenia through the opened door, wretched, white, and slick with sweat.

  A few hours later, the daughter emerged again to report that Xenia had delivered a girl and both were well.

  “May I see her?” I asked.

  “She wants the father.”

  I went to fetch Andrei and told him that he had a daughter. He looked at me and said nothing, and I thought he might be disappointed by the news of a girl. But he was only slow to understand from having drunk too much. “A daughter, did you say?” He rushed up the stairs and did not emerge again for an hour. When he came out holding a little coffin—it was the afterbirth, to be buried under the house for good luck—he was as happy as I have ever seen a person.

  It is custom to wash the newborn with cold water or roll it in the snow to harden it, but Xenia would not give up her child for this, no matter that the midwife contended that this would protect it from weakness and diseases. When the woman attempted to take charge of the matter forcibly, Xenia pushed her away and ordered her out of the house.

  Xenia was like a she-bear with its cub, her affection was so fierce. She could not tolerate the briefest separation from the baby, and though I had cleared my things from my room, the distance from her own room was too great; she had the cradle hung next to her bed so that she might hear if the infant whimpered. She would not even give it up to a wet nurse but insisted on feeding it herself. Her mother’s horror at this did not dissuade her; to Aunt Galya’s protest that she was still unclean, she said, “Why should God give me milk unless He meant it to feed my baby?”

  After the baptism, when Xenia was permitted to return to society, she did so with reluctance. While out, she marked the hours till she could return home again. Aunt Galya warned her that such unchecked love for a child was dangerous. “You should not give your whole heart to anything mortal, daughter.” Xenia was too far gone to heed her mother’s counsel, so Aunt Galya appealed to Andrei. “If you indulge her in this,” she warned, “you will ruin mother and child both.”

  However, Andrei was himself smitten with the child, and he could not be shamed into exercising his authority. He permitted Xenia to name the child Catherine, which served no purpose, being neither the child’s saint nor the name of anyone else who might protect her, and was only a fancy prompted by the news that the Grand Duchess was also with child again. When Xenia wished to make me the godmother, he did not object to this either, though it would have been wiser to choose a person with influence. For the baptism, he bought a gold cross for the infant’s neck and a smock edged in lace, and nearly every week, he returned home with some new gift: a glass pendant to hang over the cradle, a silk pillow for the baby’s head. If the child fussed and Xenia could not calm it, he sang airs to it himself, even leaving his guests downstairs to do so.

  Aunt Galya threw up her hands. “How may a child learn obedience if she rules the parents? The egg cannot teach the hen.” There was nothing more for her to do than leave this topsy-turvy household and return to Nadya’s.

  Xenia did indeed seem under the spell of her child. She would unswaddle the baby many times a day only to stare, fascinated, at the perfection of its tiny limbs. It was pretty, no harm can come from saying it now, though none of us would breathe it aloud at the time. She would giggle and say, “Is she not the ugliest creature you have ever seen?” and then she would kiss its toes and round belly and press her nose into its skin to inhale its yeasty smell.

  Babies die, it is a sad but common fact of life.

  There are mysteries that cannot be reasoned. Hail falls out of a clear sky and crushes the ripening field to rubble in an instant. The peasant who looks on and sees his broken stalks and blackened field may have lived well and piously or not, it does not change that his family will starve. And just so, a woman wakes one morning and finds her beloved daughter glazed with fever. The child shrieks and cannot be soothed. She twists away from the breast, her brow is hot as a stove, and even Saint-John’s-wort and Epiphany water will not cool it. The doctor is called but can do nothing. And though the woman prays desperately and unceasingly, the child’s cries shred the air for hours on end until, the only thing worse than these cries, they weaken and stop. By next morning, the child has grown too languid even to move her limbs, and there is only the rise and fall of her ribs, soft and rapid as a trapped bird. The hours eclipse, day to night to day again, before the tiny flame gutters and goes out.

  Though we may try to tilt the universe with prayers and spells, medicines and every precaution, in the end the rain falls equally on the just and the unjust. What can be done but to face this mystery squarely and go on?

  But Xenia could not accept it. “The air hurts.” She said it with a wide-eyed wonder at her own pain. She suffered agonies of self-reproach, blaming herself for every sin her mother had cautioned her against—obstinacy and indulgence and putting another before God—and others that no one would have thought to reprove her for. If only she had done this or refrained from that: she continually uncovered fresh faults.

  “When I think how I have lived . . .” She said this to Nadya, choking on her tears and then going on with rigid determination. “When I recall that I have spent whole days pondering whether to have a gown styled in the French or the Spanish fashion, how my hair should be arranged, whether to put a beauty mark on my cheek or on my shoulder, as though any of it mattered! As though it were not all foolishness and frippery!”

  Nadya was offended. “You might think that no one had ever lost a child before you. This was not even a son.”

  Xenia scourged herself further, saying that Nadya was right, her grief showed a lack of humility before God’s will. She wept bitterly and long at this.

  Five days after the death of Xenia’s child, the Imperial family was at last given an heir, the Grand Duke Paul. Overjoyed, the Empress whisked the new infant from his mother’s arms and installed him in a room adjacent to her own that she might look after him personally. Or so it was reported. The Grand Duchess, having acquitted herself of her duty, was left untended in her birthing bed for days. It was from this bed that she received report that Elizabeth had sent her lover, Saltykov, off to Sweden to announce the birth to the king. When he returned in the new year, he would be sent away again.

  Petersburg drowned in celebration. Such giddy exultation—every night a supper, a ball, a concert, and more than the usual number of drinking parties. Hymns were composed to glorify the infant, and Andrei was continuously called upon to perform the celebratory offices of the choir, though these did not fully account for his many long absences.

  There was talk, of course—half the English Embankment had been woken by loud and ribald singing, and the next morning Andrei had arrived late to the Empress’s chapel, wobbly-legged and with stains on his waistcoat—but Xenia did not hear the talk, for she could no longer tolerate society. The prospect of enduring endless, nattering gossip, of having to dance and pretend to gaiety . . . she could not do it. Invited by Madame Polianskaya to yet another supper honoring the royal birth, she told Andrei that she would rather the skin were flayed from her flesh. He was left to devise a more suitable explanation for her absence.

  The face Andrei kept turned to the world remained merry, but inside his own door he swung at times to the other extreme and became morose, as though mirth had exhausted him. But whether gay or sad, he drank as though feeding a fire, and his mood would burn itself out only after hours or even days of intensity.

  Xenia had never seen her husband’s excesses as faults. She had once explained it to me thus: an unrestrained nature came with his gift. It was what made him sensitive to every note of music, why his voice could move others to tears. Araja or Teplov might pen the notes, but Xenia saw their scores as merely a poor representation, as far from the music itself as a drawing of a horse is from animate flesh and breath
.

  “They’re only scratches on a page,” she said. “But when he sings, one feels the presence of God in the air. It reverberates in the bones. Truly, it shatters me, it is so real.” Andrei was an open conduit through which this terrible power surged; how could he be other than passionate?

  Now, though, she was too far sunk in her own misery to recognize the form his grief took. Nightly, we sat up awaiting his return and listening to the crackle and boom of fireworks that convulsed the sky over the city. When he finally came home, so dissipated that he could not keep his feet, she brought him his kvas, warmed with honey and herbs for his throat, and then sat in silence, watching him drink.

  “Go to bed,” he implored us. I bid him good night and waited for Xenia on the stair, but she did not follow.

  “I cannot sleep,” she said to him. “My heart is too loud. It keeps beating and beating, like an imprisoned creature pounding to get out. I beg God to still it, but He will not.”

  “You might yet have another child, even many more.”

  It was said with gentleness, but she was stricken. “I have lost my happiness. Do you think I may simply forget our Katenka? I don’t have your capacity.” She hid her face in her hands and did not see what I saw: the surprise of hurt in his eyes, the way his jaw slowly worked at this bile before swallowing it. Afterwards, he often stayed away past dawn and even for days at a time.

  The air in Petersburg was thick with talk of the infant Grand Duke. We refrained from any mention of it in Xenia’s presence, but the world is full of babies, including one under her own roof that belonged to the servant Masha. This child’s crib hung from a rafter in the corner of the kitchen, close to the hearth and out of the way. It lay there most hours unnoticed, sucking on its soska, the little cloth bag of gruel that kept it mostly quiet. But Xenia was so susceptible to this child’s presence that if it did cry, wherever she might be in the house she heard it. Her mouth and eyes would tighten as though she were being tortured, as though the Secret Chancery were pulling out her fingernails one by one. If no one happened to be in the kitchen to still the child, Xenia was compelled to go to it; she could not help herself. I sometimes found her at the crib, clutching the baby to her breast and soothing it. But more often, her own face mirrored the tearful infant’s, and then she would rebuke Masha for allowing the child to be soiled or hungry. Masha was not neglectful, or no more so than any mother whose labors are divided, but because Xenia was so sensitive, the whole household tried to keep the child from her notice as much as was possible.

  Of all Xenia’s former pleasures, only hymns that were sung in the church still soothed her. You might not think it to see her—she would listen with water coursing down her cheeks—but no, she said, the music was a relief. “I do not think.” Sometimes at home she hummed a line of the litany, repeating the same phrase over and over. If I happened upon her then, she would startle, bewildered, as though she had wakened in a strange place, and then her countenance would assume its remembered sorrow.

  Chapter Six

  Four months after the death of the child and a week before Christmas, Xenia sent for me where I was dining at Kuzma Zakharovich’s. Aunt Galya had arranged it in order that I should meet a certain gentleman there, an acquaintance of Kuzma Zakharovich visiting from Moscow. I knew nothing else of him except that he was unmarried and in need of a wife. I suspect Aunt Galya had only surmised the latter, for when we were introduced, it was evident he knew nothing of me either and was surprised to have me sprung upon him, as it were.

  We had not yet sat down to supper when Xenia’s houseboy, Grishka, came with a message saying that his mistress required me urgently. I immediately made my apologies and departed.

  When I arrived at the house, I saw Xenia’s figure through the open doorway of the drawing room. “I’ve come as quickly as . . .” The words dried on my tongue when she turned and I saw it was Andrei. He was wearing an apricot-colored damask gown of Xenia’s that had been let out and refashioned for him, but not skillfully. His broad chest strained against the bodice, and incongruous tufts of dark hair curled over the top. Balancing on his head was a lady’s powdered wig.

  My surprise and discomfort were reflected in his own face. “It’s another of her wretched fancies.” He waved a naked forearm—like a mutton shank edged in white lace—in the general direction of the Winter Palace.

  The Imperial ball that evening was to be a metamorphoses, the men compelled to dress as women and the women to don breeches and jackets.

  Our sovereign, he mused, was partial to these evenings because she had once looked so well in men’s clothes, with her fine legs shown off to advantage. “No doubt, her pleasure is increased by how ludicrous everyone else looks.” He swayed across the room, swatting at his skirt with annoyance. “Have you come to gawk at me?”

  I didn’t know where to rest my eyes. “Is Xenia ill?”

  “No, cousin, not ill.” He picked up a wineglass sitting beside an empty decanter. The glass was all but empty as well, but he lifted it to his lips anyway and, tilting back his head, caused his towering wig to list dangerously. He caught at it and grimaced, as though the victim of a prank.

  “She slept poorly and has been in a state all day, insisting that we mustn’t go to the palace tonight.”

  He readjusted the wig, trying without success to prop it in such a way that he might rescue the last drops from the bottom of his glass. “God knows, I would happily oblige her if I could, but we have been particularly invited.”

  Empress Elizabeth’s constant entertainments, once a source of delight, had become a tedious obligation and a formidable expense. By Imperial edict, dresses might be worn at court only just the once, and to enforce this, pages were set at the door to dab ink on the skirts of departing guests.

  Still, those favored with an invitation to the Winter Palace balls were compelled to attend, and Andrei worried that Xenia’s absence might be reported. The recent poor health of Her Imperial Majesty had made her intolerant of others’ excuses. Last month, she had sent cadets to Alexi Arkharov’s home to see if he was indeed ill. When he was discovered with nothing more than a slight cough, she had ordered him dragged out into a snowbank and left there until he was adequately sick.

  “Perhaps my wife will listen to you,” Andrei said. “I cannot bend her.”

  “I shall try.”

  “And if you would indulge me further, tell Ivan to fetch up another bottle.”

  I found Xenia in bed, sunk against a raft of pillows. Since little Katenka’s death, she had lost all color in her face and her eyes had become dull, but tonight they held a glitter like fever.

  “He must think I do not love him. I promised obedience, and now when he asks it . . . I thought I would give up my life for him, but it seems I cannot.”

  I put my hand to her forehead. “In heaven’s name, what are you talking about?”

  She grasped my hand to still it. “I dreamt my own death.” Her eyes were far away. “I was falling. I was tumbling down the front steps of the palace, but I could see it happening, as though I were watching from a high window. Someone screamed, and then I was lying on the snow at the bottom of the steps.” She gazed at the far wall as though a drama were playing out before her, and she narrating as it unfolded. “A darkness bloomed round my head. At first I thought it was a shadow thrown on the snow by torches.” Her voice broke, and she fell silent for a moment before resuming. “There was a confusion of voices, but I remember someone said to send for a priest. Another person argued no, a priest might arouse the suspicions of Her Imperial Majesty. ‘If she asks,’ this person said, ‘you must say only that a guest has fallen. You know how she abhors any mention of death.’ That is how I knew.”

  “Xenia—” I began.

  “I felt such agony, and when I woke, I knew it was a warning from God.”

  What answer could I make to this?

  Xenia, though, had devised a plan. I should go in her place. It was a metamorphosis, after all. If I wore her
costume, kept to myself, and said nothing, no one might discover the ruse.

  An outlandish scheme, perhaps—only in plays are such swapped identities believed—yet saying no to Xenia was more unthinkable to me than her plot. Perhaps it was not such a leap as I imagined. After all, who knew her better than I? I allowed myself to be persuaded.

  Her costume had been laid out over a chair: one of Andrei’s uniforms, a pair of stockings, and small buckled shoes in a man’s style. The jacket and breeches were too long for my person, but this did not dissuade Xenia.

  “Grishka is of your proportions.” She sent for him, and when he appeared asked him to relinquish his new livery. The poor boy misunderstood and was distraught at what he might have done to provoke the loss of his position. Xenia explained that I was merely borrowing his garments for the evening, which did nothing to relieve his confusion. “Go on”—she motioned for his baize jacket, which he abashedly removed. She waited for the rest, but then relented. “See that your breeches are sent back up straightaway.”

  “We can tack some lace at the sleeves and neck,” she said to me.

  Once we had bound my breasts, the jacket fitted me, as did the rest of the livery. With my hair pulled back into a tail, I resembled to the passing eye a boy in service. But I bore no likeness to Xenia.

  “Nor would I resemble myself if I were costumed. That’s the entire point of the metamorphosis.”

  Had he been sober, who knows if Andrei would have allowed this charade to go forward. As it was, when we came downstairs he was far enough into his wine to have abandoned discretion. He gaped at me, making me painfully conscious of my legs, their shape exposed in the tight cloth of the breeches.

  “What is this? Are you coming to the ball as our footman?”

  Xenia revealed her plan, and Andrei laughed. “So I am to go as you, Xenia? And Dasha is also to go as you? If only you will come as yourself, we might be a holy trinity.”