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.”
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
