They know of her, of course, but had not seen her about. When I told them that I had heard she slept there, a look passed between the two, but then the larger one shook his head. You should go home, he told me. It will be dark before long.
The driver did not like the idea of my staying, either. I was only able to quell his misgivings by paying him double the usual fare and promising the same again if he would wait.
I set off down the path that cuts to the river, calling her name. My voice carried so loudly in that silent place that she would surely hear me if she was there, though this did not mean she would answer.
In summer, it is a pleasant place to visit. Past the edge of the city, it is so thick with birch and oak that it stays cool even in the worst of the heat. At Easter or in fine weather, there are others about, and I will sometimes see peasants bathing at the river. But now, in the autumn gloaming, the cemetery was desolate. With the floods, every depression had become a pond, and I had need to pick my way with care, stick in one hand, and to leave the path when it submerged. I should have been uneasy, alone there at dusk and surrounded by the dead, but I was not. Each marker was familiar: the wooden crosses of the earliest residents, the granite slabs with their more recent dates, the white marble tombs of the well-born.
At last I came to Andrei Feodorovich Petrov’s grave, an iron cross and a low fence frosted with new snow. It was deserted, the snow undisturbed. If she had been here, there was no sign of it but only the withered flowers I had left some weeks before.
“Andrei Feodorovich,” I called out, for she will not answer to Xenia. I listened for some answering sound. “Andrei Feodorovich, are you here?” If some person were to have come upon me, what might he have thought of my standing at Andrei’s grave and shouting his name? But I had no concern of being judged: the place was so empty at that hour that no one would come there who was not himself a little mad.
“It is Dasha. Please. I must see you.” This had been all of my plan—to go to Smolenskoye cemetery and find her. I wanted to warn her of the police, though I knew she would not care.
The cemetery was silent as no other place can be. There was perhaps a quarter hour of light left. I should do as I have been advised, I thought, and return home. Instead, I left Andrei’s resting place and followed the path to the river. This river separates the Orthodox buried on the left bank from the foreigners and infidels interred on the right. Across the little bridge, the cemetery is new and untamed, the few markers scattered amongst the trees. In death, as in life, they are lonely in their difference there.
His stone is granite, engraved in both Russian and Italian. It was crusted with snow, and I brushed this away.
I go to Gaspari’s grave nearly every week, and as I weed the plot and scrub lichen from the stone I will talk to him. Our conversation is now the reverse of what it once was, with my carrying the weight of it and his listening. I also look to his neighbors that need tending to, those dead, Germans mostly, without family here. After my work is done, I stay on. Though I am not so entertaining as he was, I have found I have much to say.
I tugged on the fig, but it would not pull up. “I’m sorry I did not come last week. Matveyushka came home with news. He has found a position.
“Princess Dashkova—do you remember her? She was a friend to Grand Duchess Catherine, and after you were gone she had a hand in putting her on the throne. Since then, well, you can imagine, her influence has only grown.” I used my stick to loosen the dirt around the roots. “Well, our Matveyushka will be overseeing the building of a greenhouse for her and will manage the orchards. He says she has two hectares given to stone fruits—plums and cherries and I cannot recall what else—but most of this is sent to market. She would like a greenhouse so she may have melons and cucumbers when there is snow on the ground.”
I yanked again, and continued to work. “He was flush with pride when he told me. For his sake, I made to celebrate. I had Masha bring out a bottle of your Madeira that I had been saving against I know not what. But he will be leaving Petersburg, dearest. And Troitskoye is at best a week from here. It is hard that he will be so far away.”
At last, the fig came up. I smoothed over the soil I’d disturbed.
“He wishes me to close up the house and follow him. ‘You are too old to stay on alone, Maman,’ he said. But how can I abandon the unfortunates? With winter there will be more of them coming to the door.”
The offices of love are obscure to me. I have often felt exhausted by this endless procession of the needful —the starving and lonely widows, the old men undone by illness or drink—but it grieved me to think of the door being shut against them. I thought of Martha: Martha who fretted and served and then was rebuked by Christ because it was her sister, Mary, who was doing what was needful, which was only to adore. I pictured these two sisters, and it was Xenia that I saw sitting at Christ’s feet and gazing up at him, her face radiant with joy.
“All week, I have tried to think what Xenia would have me do. After all, it is her house, too. But even could I ask her, she would express no view on the matter beyond telling me to listen. She says this and then is no more forthcoming than you, my dear husband. I think she means I should pray, but I have done this. God, too, is silent.”
The sky had grown dark, but the snow gave off a little light, making Gaspari’s stone and the nearest trees visible. There was a moon.
“I had thought I might find her here. The police came to our door this afternoon. They were looking for her. They said she had spoken out against the Empress. You and I know that cannot be true, but there is such madness afoot in the world these days. All this wild talk of blood and anarchy in France.
“Oh, and there is also a child come to the house today. Her mother brought her and then left. I do not think she is coming back. What then? If I take her to the foundling home, it is little different from killing her outright. I suppose I might take her with me if I leave. But I cannot take them all.”
I plucked up the few gray weeds that stuck through the snow until his plot was as clean as a new blanket.
“If I go, there will be no one left to tend to this. Perhaps you should not mind it so much, but I hate the idea of leaving you alone here. If you were in Italy, there would be family to visit you. I am so sorry,
“It is so simple to see what I might have done in the past, but I am no wiser for it. No, every year that passes, I know even less. What do you think, is this why I have lived so long? That I should eventually become a fool?”
I am not yet so muddled that I expected an answer, but I stopped talking. I was weary of my own fretting. The moon had risen, so bright that the snow gleamed like silver. I was stiff with cold.
“If I leave, I will come back,
I kissed Gaspari’s stone on the letters of his name. The tenderness I felt for him was so acute that I was certain his spirit was beside me. The dead are not gone, not entirely, not ever.
I returned by the way I came, using my stick, like a blind woman, to feel the lay of the path where it was in shadow. As I approached the cemetery’s entrance, the church came partially into view through the trees. By design, all elements of a church—its soaring height and gilded domes and the sumptuous ornament of its interior—are meant to suggest the magnificent presence in the world of Almighty God the Father. However, this church is still unfinished. The belfry is open to the sky on two sides, and the steeple that will top it must be imagined entirely. At night, unpainted and with scaffolding pinioned to the face, it had the insubstantial appearance of an abandoned relic or even a chimera conjured by the moonlight. It was the Holy Ghost that was invoked there, the unknowable mystery.
When I arrived, I had left the droshky at the front, but I did not see it now. It may be that the driver had given me up and left. I was so far from home that if I had to walk, it would take me till morning.
My eyes were drawn again to the face of the church by some movement. I stopped and strained to pull shapes from the darkness, but then decided it was nothing. Perhaps a bird that had made its nest there. Or clouds moving across the moon and playing tricks on the mind. A cemetery at night summons up unreasoning fears.
