The Mirrored World

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 cloisonne 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.

The musici have since fallen out of favor, and I do not expect to hear such an ethereal sound again until the angels sing me home. It is just as well. Such radiance was not intended for mortals, and to achieve it, hundreds of boys were mutilated, made into monsters so that a few among the wounded might sing. That such beauty should come from such suffering… I see it in Xenia also. It is a terrible mystery.

The next morning, I awoke to stabbing light and the sound of church bells ringing, each clang so deafening that I might have been trapped within the bell itself, with the bronze tongue striking my skull. Anyone may ring the bells in Bright Week and so they rang incessantly, as I foresaw they would for days yet. Coupled with this misery, in the previous days the ice on the Neva had begun to break up, and in the lulls between chimes I heard the river’s painful groans, the screech of ice against ice. Against this noise, the promises of spring and our Lord’s resurrection seemed faint abstractions, and the bliss of Gaspari’s voice an improbable memory.

Xenia was in her accustomed place in the corner, her black shape bent before the Virgin of Vladimir. She was as still as a corpse, her countenance empty, her eyes sunken in shadow. Apparently, I had missed the morning service, but Xenia had not: the basket she had filled with red eggs the night before sat next to her, empty.

I saw the truth of our situation with the clarity of a drunkard’s remorse. There was nothing left in the larder, and I would have to sell the sleigh and horse.

Chapter Ten

That same week, Nadya and her mother came to call and brought with them intricately painted eggs, one for Xenia and another for myself.

“Xenia is at her prayers just now,” I said, “but she will be delighted by this.”

Aunt Galya smiled thinly and held fast to the egg meant for Xenia. “We can wait till she is finished. I should very much like to give it to her myself.”

I showed them into the drawing room, grateful as I did that I had not yet found it necessary to sell the chairs, or Xenia to give them away. The sideboard was gone, but the divan and two chairs remained.

They glanced about, poorly concealing their dismay. “A house always looks barren at Lent,” Aunt Galya