The Mirrored World

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 blase 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 attache and this man’s habit of adjusting the weight of his stomach as he spoke, and then with the next breath he would answer in a comical falsetto that I recognized as belonging to a certain lady-in-waiting.

I confess, I wondered at first if Xenia might be fodder for amusement on his subsequent calls—she would be so easy to mock. I did not know how few doors were open to him, how alone he was in Russia. But more important, I did not know then how Gaspari judged the world, upside down. His barbed wit was reserved for his betters; those whom the rest of the world disdained he treated with courtesy. I think this accounted for the tolerance he showed to Xenia. When I apologized for her, he assured me there was no need.

“She is herself,” he said.

Though I could not agree, I did not correct him.

Xenia and I continued to work at cross-purposes, she pillaging her possessions and I hiding what of them I could in my room. Her methods were haphazard: when I went with her to Andrei’s grave, I might find small tokens she had left there on a previous visit—a swollen folio of music and the glass stopper that had belonged to a decanter—and I could only guess at what else may have been taken away by grave robbers. On one day, she went to the church with only an onion and a linen rag, but on the next she pulled from her basket pieces of silver that had been put away for Lent, handing a soupspoon to a bewildered beggar and a fork to the next. Coming to a lean man with leather skin and a beard so ratty it appeared to grow uninterrupted from his sheepskin, she fished about in the basket. She dug out something but then stopped short of giving it. Her eyes softened. “It is such a little thing,” she mused, turning the object in her palm. “The material world is so strong, Dasha. These things are worth nothing, yet they cling to my soul like vines.”

I recognized Andrei’s bone-handled shaving razor. It had been her morning habit to shave him with this. I imagine his hand was often not sufficiently steady to do it for himself, but she had also cherished this intimate ceremony between them and would caress his smoothed cheek and linger over the dimpled thumbprint above his lip. Now, she unhinged the blade and studied it. A cold fear seized me, and had she been a child I would have snatched the blade from her. But I could not do this. I watched as she put her forefinger to the edge. A scarlet thread appeared, and she looked at it without curiosity. After a long moment, she closed the razor and pressed it upon the beggar. “It is yours now. Take care with it,” she said.

In spite of what she said, most of her possessions seemed to have no hold on her whatsoever. She emptied her own wardrobe of even the undergarments. Other necessaries went missing. Marfa grumbled that she had no ladle for the soup. When I went to mend a stocking, the thimble was gone from the sewing basket, and one night the chamber pot was missing from under our bed. I felt about for it, increasingly discomfited, went into my room and discovered its chamber pot was gone also. At last I had need to stumble down the stairs and out into the frozen yard to relieve myself in the privy.

The mystery of one chamber pot’s disappearance was solved the next day when I saw this same article sitting on the church step. A fool whom Xenia had brought home two days prior was using it to collect coins. I was furious. “It’s all right,” Xenia assured me. “She did not steal it. I gave it to her.”

“It is not all right,” I fumed, and beside myself with anger, I snatched it up and, upturning it, showered coins into the fool’s lap. “It is not, not, not all right, Xenia.” I fled, still clutching the chamber pot until I had rounded the corner, where I threw it down and it shattered on the cobble.

One day, Marfa came to me and asked me to speak to her mistress. The servants were loath to disturb her solitude—whether out of courtesy or fear that she might fling something at them, I cannot say. “I would not trouble her, but there’s the matter of flour.”

“What of it?”

“There isn’t any. And the miller won’t put any more on credit without some payment.”

It turned out not to be so simple a matter as flour. When I looked, there was also no salt or lard and very little of anything else. Even by the spare measure of Lent, the provisions in the larder were meager: small handfuls of this and that, a single onion, a crock of pickled cabbage, a hard sausage that could not be eaten till Easter. Marfa was anxious to account for herself. “What with all the extra mouths,” she explained, “I have twice asked her for money, but she is too much distracted to remember.”

“Just make do with what’s here,” I said. “I’ll speak to her, but we can go for one day without bread.”

Marfa looked doubtful, and it came out that it was not only the miller who was owed.

I interrupted Xenia at her prayers, or what seemed to be prayers; as she did not speak them aloud, it was impossible to know with certainty.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, but I have need of money to settle some debts. It seems we owe all over town.”

She did not answer or give any sign that she had heard me.

“If you will lend me the key to the strongbox, I will get it myself.”

Again, there was no response. She was not being pious, I thought, but obstinate, and I determined to stand and wait until she acknowledged me, no matter how long that might be. It was not as if I were asking her to go round to these creditors herself, or to bake the bread or help with the washing. Looking on her back side, I reflected on the times she had left me to answer for her to callers, and to speak in a whisper so as not to disturb her. The servants went about on tiptoe and let the carpets collect dust rather than make a noise by beating them. Yet she could not be bothered in return to concern herself in the slightest with her own household.

Perhaps sensing that I would not go away, she spoke. “Can it not wait?”

“Not unless you can multiply loaves and fishes.”

She rose from her knees. Feeling about in a drawer, she produced a small iron key, went to the strongbox, and turned the key in its lock.

“Take what you need,” she said, and returned to the icon corner and knelt again.

Except for some papers in the bottom, the box was empty.

“Take what? Where is the rest?”