by Debra Dean
One day, she pulled from the basket a particularly fine pair of gloves and handed them to an orphan. They were made of delicate white kid worked with silver thread, and I had coveted them once. When the child pulled them onto her filthy hands, I flinched.
“Xenia, if you must, it would be better to sell the finer things and then give the profits to the poor.”
She didn’t answer but looked on me with something like pity. I felt that she could read my thoughts.
“They are too thin,” I protested. “They will not even keep her hands warm.”
Perhaps it was to appease me that some days later she determined to pack up her court dresses and the rest of her finery and take them to a pawn shop. Heaped on the bed and floor was a colorful froth of skirts and bodices.
“Oh no, darling, I did not mean that you should sell these,” I said.
“I cannot stand the sight of them.”
“Maybe not now . . .” Someday, I thought, she would come out of mourning and return to society. She would want to marry again. I started to pick up a matching bodice and skirt, yellow brocade with gold lace trim, that I might return them to the wardrobe. “Later, you may think differently.”
“She is gone!” Xenia shrieked. “Are you too dull to see it? There is no point in keeping her things.”
She snatched the bodice from my hands and in doing so tore loose a piece of lace. Fiercely, she ripped it away from the sleeve and then tore the lace from the other sleeve for good measure. She grabbed up two handfuls of the skirt, meaning to rend this to pieces also, but the fabric would not give. Her features strained with the effort and then went slack, and quick as the storm had erupted it was spent, and she was overcome with remorse.
“I’m sorry.” She held the skirt back out to me. “Please take it. You should have something pretty to wear when your husband calls.”
“I do not need your dresses or your pity either.”
She nodded and let it fall to the floor. “You are right to be offended. I should not try to buy your forgiveness with rubbish. You see its worth. Oh, Dasha”—her face contorted in anguish—“when I recall my terrible thoughtlessness. I have let people starve that I might wear that lace.” She looked about her. “But I shall be naked before God. How shall I ever account for all this?”
The pawnbroker was more than willing to relieve her of her finery. Fingering a pink moiré silk, he tried to mask his greed with appraising looks, frowning at imaginary flaws and clucking. After thus inspecting each dress, he offered a very small sum for the lot, less than the worth of one alone. Xenia was content to take whatever he offered, but I would not allow it and haggled with the miser. He raised his price a little, then seeing Xenia’s disinterest in the outcome of our bargaining returned his attention to her.
“I can see that you know the worth of discretion. It is worth more than money, and I can promise you, no one shall know where these came from. I will be a cipher, a stone.”
She was as impassive as the Sphinx in reply.
Only by irritating him like a fly was I able to extract another fifty kopeks. From the shop to the church, I vented my annoyance at her having been swindled, but I could not persuade Xenia to share my grievance. She was as blasé about money as the Empress herself. When we reached the church, she handed the profits, purse and all, to the first beggar who held out his hand.
Gaspari called again, and again Xenia was at her prayers but said that I should entertain him in her place. Had he relied on me for this, we should have sat in silence. I am often tongue-tied with strangers and have what the philosopher Monsieur Diderot calls l’esprit de l’escalier, staircase wit: only long after a remark is made to me will my imagination supply the thing I should have said in reply. But I was further stricken with self-consciousness by Gaspari. There were no rules by which to steer conversation with a person who was neither man nor woman.
As it happened, though, Gaspari liked to talk, and even hampered by his poor Russian he was gifted at this. Left to choose a theme, he told me of his village in the north of Italy and described for me its varied charms—hillsides dotted with sheep, a sun that shone far warmer than it does here, the scents of rosemary and drying grasses that perfume the air.
“My mother’s garden has a fig tree in it,” he said, “and to eat one of these figs is to taste music on the tongue. I dream of this, to sit in the warm sun and eat a plate of these figs.”
I nodded.
He flattered me that I had a talent to listen. “Most persons, they are intent only to make the impression. But you are not this way. I see you at the ball; you do not care for what you look like, only to help your cousin.”
“I was mortified,” I admitted.
“I do not know this word.”
“Embarrassed.”
“Ah.” He nodded. “Mortified. It is the condition of life, yes?”
I gradually forgot my discomfort and even came to anticipate his next visit. If Xenia did not show herself—and she rarely did—he was content to pass an hour entertaining me with accounts of who had attended his performance on the previous night, what they had worn and said, who had snubbed or flattered whom. A keen mimic, he would adopt the guttural voice of a well-known attaché and this man’s habit of adjusting the weight of his stomach as he spoke, and then with the next breath he would answer in a comical falsetto that I recognized as belonging to a certain lady-in-waiting.
I confess, I wondered at first if Xenia might be fodder for amusement on his subsequent calls—she would be so easy to mock. I did not know how few doors were open to him, how alone he was in Russia. But more important, I did not know then how Gaspari judged the world, upside down. His barbed wit was reserved for his betters; those whom the rest of the world disdained he treated with courtesy. I think this accounted for the tolerance he showed to Xenia. When I apologized for her, he assured me there was no need.
“She is herself,” he said.
Though I could not agree, I did not correct him.
Xenia and I continued to work at cross-purposes, she pillaging her possessions and I hiding what of them I could in my room. Her methods were haphazard: when I went with her to Andrei’s grave, I might find small tokens she had left there on a previous visit—a swollen folio of music and the glass stopper that had belonged to a decanter—and I could only guess at what else may have been taken away by grave robbers. On one day, she went to the church with only an onion and a linen rag, but on the next she pulled from her basket pieces of silver that had been put away for Lent, handing a soupspoon to a bewildered beggar and a fork to the next. Coming to a lean man with leather skin and a beard so ratty it appeared to grow uninterrupted from his sheepskin, she fished about in the basket. She dug out something but then stopped short of giving it. Her eyes softened. “It is such a little thing,” she mused, turning the object in her palm. “The material world is so strong, Dasha. These things are worth nothing, yet they cling to my soul like vines.”
I recognized Andrei’s bone-handled shaving razor. It had been her morning habit to shave him with this. I imagine his hand was often not sufficiently steady to do it for himself, but she had also cherished this intimate ceremony between them and would caress his smoothed cheek and linger over the dimpled thumbprint above his lip. Now, she unhinged the blade and studied it. A cold fear seized me, and had she been a child I would have snatched the blade from her. But I could not do this. I watched as she put her forefinger to the edge. A scarlet thread appeared, and she looked at it without curiosity. After a long moment, she closed the razor and pressed it upon the beggar. “It is yours now. Take care with it,” she said.
In spite of what she said, most of her possessions seemed to have no hold on her whatsoever. She emptied her own wardrobe of even the undergarments. Other necessaries went missing. Marfa grumbled that she had no ladle for the soup. When I went to mend a stocking, the thimble was gone from the sewing b
asket, and one night the chamber pot was missing from under our bed. I felt about for it, increasingly discomfited, went into my room and discovered its chamber pot was gone also. At last I had need to stumble down the stairs and out into the frozen yard to relieve myself in the privy.
The mystery of one chamber pot’s disappearance was solved the next day when I saw this same article sitting on the church step. A fool whom Xenia had brought home two days prior was using it to collect coins. I was furious. “It’s all right,” Xenia assured me. “She did not steal it. I gave it to her.”
“It is not all right,” I fumed, and beside myself with anger, I snatched it up and, upturning it, showered coins into the fool’s lap. “It is not, not, not all right, Xenia.” I fled, still clutching the chamber pot until I had rounded the corner, where I threw it down and it shattered on the cobble.
One day, Marfa came to me and asked me to speak to her mistress. The servants were loath to disturb her solitude—whether out of courtesy or fear that she might fling something at them, I cannot say. “I would not trouble her, but there’s the matter of flour.”
“What of it?”
“There isn’t any. And the miller won’t put any more on credit without some payment.”
It turned out not to be so simple a matter as flour. When I looked, there was also no salt or lard and very little of anything else. Even by the spare measure of Lent, the provisions in the larder were meager: small handfuls of this and that, a single onion, a crock of pickled cabbage, a hard sausage that could not be eaten till Easter. Marfa was anxious to account for herself. “What with all the extra mouths,” she explained, “I have twice asked her for money, but she is too much distracted to remember.”
“Just make do with what’s here,” I said. “I’ll speak to her, but we can go for one day without bread.”
Marfa looked doubtful, and it came out that it was not only the miller who was owed.
I interrupted Xenia at her prayers, or what seemed to be prayers; as she did not speak them aloud, it was impossible to know with certainty.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, but I have need of money to settle some debts. It seems we owe all over town.”
She did not answer or give any sign that she had heard me.
“If you will lend me the key to the strongbox, I will get it myself.”
Again, there was no response. She was not being pious, I thought, but obstinate, and I determined to stand and wait until she acknowledged me, no matter how long that might be. It was not as if I were asking her to go round to these creditors herself, or to bake the bread or help with the washing. Looking on her back side, I reflected on the times she had left me to answer for her to callers, and to speak in a whisper so as not to disturb her. The servants went about on tiptoe and let the carpets collect dust rather than make a noise by beating them. Yet she could not be bothered in return to concern herself in the slightest with her own household.
Perhaps sensing that I would not go away, she spoke. “Can it not wait?”
“Not unless you can multiply loaves and fishes.”
She rose from her knees. Feeling about in a drawer, she produced a small iron key, went to the strongbox, and turned the key in its lock.
“Take what you need,” she said, and returned to the icon corner and knelt again.
Except for some papers in the bottom, the box was empty.
“Take what? Where is the rest?”
She regarded me with weariness. “What remains?”
“In here? Nothing. That is what I am telling you.” I turned the box upside down to demonstrate, and a single sheet of paper fluttered to the floor. “Is there some other place where Andrei kept money?” He was not poor. Besides a good salary, he had received lavish sums from the Empress and Count Razumovsky. Andrei and Xenia had never wanted for luxuries. “Perhaps in his desk or dressing table?”
She said nothing, but the blankness of her expression answered for her.
I thought back on the handfuls of coins I had seen her give away over the past month, and realized with horror that together with what had escaped my observation, the total sum of them might be anything.
“So there is nothing more?” I could not make myself believe it.
“Here.” She handed me the paper.
“What is this?”
“The deed to the house.”
“And what would you have me do with it?”
“Sell it.”
“To buy flour? Don’t be absurd, Xenia.” I thrust the paper back into her hand. “If you sell your house, where shall you live?”
“Our Savior lived without a house.”
“That is all fine and well, but what of the souls He has entrusted to you? Where shall they live? Or would you sell them, too?” I asked. “It is not only beggars in the street who depend on your charity, Xenia.” As I said it, I was not unmindful that I was included in this company.
“We have eaten today, and we shall eat again tomorrow.” She said this just as a child might, her face empty of any anxiety.
Something changed for me in that moment. Confronted with the empty strongbox and its promise of ruin, together with her complacency . . . I left her there and went from room to room with rising agitation, looking for something I might sell.
I felt like a thief, but one who has come to a house already robbed. How had I not seen it? Xenia had succeeded in removing most everything that would fit in her basket. I went to my room and looked over the meager hoard I had hidden away. The cloisonné clock. The jeweled earbobs that were her wedding present from Andrei. Little Katenka’s christening gown and cross. No, these were too precious to be sold. I settled on a brass candlestick chased with silver, half of the pair that had graced the sideboard. This I took to the wretched pawnbroker. It fetched sixty kopeks, just enough to appease the miller and fishmonger, but not the greengrocer. And we would need more wood for the pile and dried fruits for the Easter kulich. I returned to his shop with the clock and sold him the sideboard as well, and these bought provisions sufficient to last through the Easter feast.
Never in my life before or since have I awaited that day with such hunger. Dry as a raisin, some part of me still hoped nonetheless. Xenia’s desolation had so entwined with the Lenten season that she seemed an enlargement of its mood, almost as though she were an actor in a Passion play. I anticipated that with the arrival of Easter she would doff her mourning. It was Xenia’s resurrection I awaited.
At the midnight service, the chants poured into my soul like water, and as the light was passed from taper to taper, I felt my spirits lift on the rising glow. The holy doors were thrown open and we spilt out into the night and circled the church. Buoyed on an upwelling of joy, with the hundreds of voices around me in song, with the tumultuous pealing of the bells, I was exultant. The priest proclaimed, Christ is risen, and every voice answered fervently, Truly He is risen!
Together with Gaspari and a mother and child whom Xenia had found outside the church, we returned afterwards to the house lit bright and the table laden with food and decorated with pussy willows and flowers. The servants were happy to the edge of tears, and we exchanged colored eggs with kisses on the cheek. I gave Xenia her egg, kissing her thrice. She did not crack it but put it instead into her basket to be given to the poor. When Gaspari also presented her with an egg, she reciprocated by withdrawing mine from her basket for him. He was on the point of cracking it, but then stopped and handed it back, gesturing that she should return it to the basket.
Vodka was poured out and, raising my glass, I inhaled it like a clean, sharp draught of winter air. I have never felt such thirst, such hunger. We ate the kulich, the paskha, the lamb. It was wonderful. There were eggs and more eggs, wine and more vodka, and I ate and drank as though I had fasted for a year.
Xenia ate nothing but seemed content to sit at table and collect eggs. Several times throughout
the meal, I saw Gaspari repeat this ritual of giving her an egg, accepting another in return, and then handing it back to her. At last, I thought to peek under the table and saw her basket on the floor beside her chair, heaped with red eggs as well as pieces of kulich.
The table was strewn with egg peelings and walnut shells, the plates wiped clean but for bits of gristle and bone. I was sated, heavy-limbed, and light-headed. Across the table, Gaspari stood. With no more preface than this, he clasped his hands at his breast, rested his gaze above our heads, and parted his lips.
The air was pierced with a startling sound, high and clear and powerful. The sound expanded and held for an impossibly long time before gliding to the next note and the next. He seemed not to breathe but only to exhale music, warbling and sliding over vowels and consonants as endlessly as water rounds over stones in a shallow stream.
How may one describe enchantment? As he sang, his countenance softened, and without benefit of costume or any other artifice of the stage, the Gaspari I knew faded and was transformed into something eerily beautiful. A delicate hand, rising and turning like a vine, seemed to unfurl this otherworldly sound into the air. Though I could not translate the words, there was no need, for the sound went straight to my soul, transcending the poor and broken language we mortals must use. I slipped gratefully out of my body and floated on the current of music, feeling that all of us round the table were a single spirit, a single being. I was filled with such love. The voice soared, wave upon wave, until the last note, quivering with tenderness, put us ashore again too soon.
