by Debra Dean
“Of course, with God’s love”—she set the empty pot back on the table—“there is no end to it. It keeps pouring and pouring.”
She seemed to be waiting on me to agree, and so I did, though my mind was still fixed on my carpet and the wasted tea.
She went to the door. “I am needed.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I am needed,” she said again, and she left. By the time I had gathered my wits to follow her outside, she was already gone from sight, and though I combed the nearby streets, she had disappeared entirely.
I returned the next morning to St. Matthias parish. Asking shopkeepers and various persons in the street, I learnt that the woman I described was a well-known personage in the neighborhood, but her name was not Xenia. She answered to Andrei Feodorovich.
She was, they said, a holy fool, and they proved this by citing miracles she had performed: not only had she predicted the death of the late Empress but there were also boils and rotted teeth healed, a baby cured of grave illness only by her rocking it in her arms. A young woman, it was said, had been prevented from marrying a charlatan by Xenia’s warning her mother against the handsome young man. Xenia helped another young woman to marry by sending her to a graveyard where a man was mourning his late wife.
Mostly, these stories were hearsay, excepting one merchant who told me that his own reputation had been saved from ruin by her intervention. Just a year before, he said, in Apostles’ Week, Andrei Feodorovich had burst into his shop as he was dipping honey from a barrel for a customer.
“She rushed in and threw herself against that barrel until it tipped. A new barrel, just delivered that morning, and the purest honey to be had. Ask who you will, I am known by everyone to be an honest businessman.” He was intent on securing this point before he continued his story.
“Well, all that fine and costly honey spilt across my floor. But then, out from the bottom of the barrel floated a rat. A huge rat! Drowned and bloated and slick as an otter. She saved my good name.”
Being a pious man, he had taken a handful of coins from his apron and tried to press them into Xenia’s hands, but she let them fall through her fingers. This had left no doubt in him that she was holy.
I asked him where I might find her.
Whenever she came onto his street, he said, he endeavored to draw her into his shop that she might bless the barrels. “She has a taste for honey, and I give her all she will eat.” But where she went afterwards, he could not say.
Though everyone seemed to know of her, no one could tell me where she lived. Nor could any say with certainty how long ago she had arrived there or from where, though there was no want of conjecture on this. Some said she had come from a monastery and that she had studied with an elder there to learn their ascetic ways. Others said she had come from some place in the north. When I said that I was her cousin, that I lived across the river and sought her that I might take her home again, they bowed to my claim but with visible reluctance. They seemed to feel she belonged to them.
Wherever I went, she had been there only recently but was not there now. Or someone had heard report of her at another place. Piecing together various sightings, I made my way north and towards the far edge of the parish, which was worse even than the heart of it. Here, every person in the street had such an air of menace that I no longer dared ask after Xenia.
I turned into another street and another, and then she was there, not fifty feet away, walking in my direction and singing some tune. Trailing behind her was a gang of rough boys. They were throwing mud at her. Burbling her private singsong, she tried to disregard their persecution, but when a hard clot hit her in the back of the head it jolted her from her music. She turned and railed at them, thrashing her stick, and chased them back up the street like a fury. I ran after her, shouting her name, and caught her by the arm.
“Xenia,” I cried.
She was rocking back and forth on her heels. Her countenance was a study of grief and her lips made fast little burbling noises, a pattern of guttural utterances that were not quite language.
“Andrei Feodorovich?”
My voice did not reach her nor did she respond to my touch on her arm.
After a time, the rhythm of her babbling slowed and began to separate into words.
. . . to help me Lord make speed to save me Lord make haste to help me Lord make speed to . . .
Over and over, for I do not know how long a space of time, these same words tumbled like a fast brook, broken only by her breath. Gradually, the words became too soft to hear and only her lips continued to move. Her rocking slowed and at last she grew calm.
“Xenia?”
Her gaze rested on the air. “Listen,” she said.
I heard nothing out of the usual. “What? What is it?” I asked.
She did not answer, but closed her eyes. I closed my eyes as well and heard the angry squabbling of a cock, and at a farther distance the faint clattering of wheels and hooves on cobblestone. Perhaps I had misunderstood. I opened my eyes again. Xenia remained just as she had been, a pleasant smile on her lips, like a person lost in reverie.
My poor Xenia. Had she wandered here in these terrible streets all these years, too addled to find her way home? Had something happened to her to cause her to forget herself, to forget where she lived? She had not seemed to know the house when she saw it, or Masha either. She had not called me by name. Perhaps we were strangers in her eyes.
“Xenia?” My voice seemed loud as shattering glass. “We cannot stay here in the street. Let us search out a droshky, shall we?”
She consented to return to the house, and when we had arrived there, I tried to impress on her that this was her home. She need not ever go back to that place. We cleaned the mud from her and washed it from her garments. Masha roasted a duck for our dinner, and she ate it with relish.
When she had eaten, she stood.
“You may have your old bed,” I said. “I have put fresh linens on it.” I reminded her of the night when she had bequeathed this same bed to me, but if she recalled this, she did not show it. Just as she had done on the previous day, she said that she was needed, and behaved like one who has an appointment to which she dare not arrive late.
I grasped her hand and urged her to sit again. “You are needed here. Please.”
“I have a place to be.” She said it with good humor but was resolute and would not sit.
I knew not what else to do. I let go her hand. “What place is that?”
“Oh, you know, with God.”
“With God. And where is He?” I pressed. If she would go again, at least I should know where to find her.
Assuming a frantic disposition, she mimicked pulling something apart in her hands. “Where is it? Where is the onion’s heart?” she wailed in mock despair. “Nothing but onion, onion, onion.” She chuckled and invited me to share her merriment.
When I could not, her eyes softened with compassion.
“It is all good. All of it. Listen.”
And then she turned and was gone.
Again and again, I retrieved her from the streets of St. Matthias parish. I found her huddled beneath the eaves of the church, or in some lonely alley or stable, out of the wind perhaps but without even the sheepskin and stockings and boots I had bought for her. Even when the snows came, she remained out in the open. That she did not catch her death is, I suppose, all the proof one might want that she was indeed blessed by God, but it frightened me to see that her feet were black and swollen.
“You think them ugly?” She sat next to me in the droshky, wiggling her toes as though she were delighted by them.
“It’s not so much their appearance, but I fear you shall lose them to frostbite.”
She shook her head. “They are hard as a dog’s pads. Feel.” She lifted up a foot that I might touch it. When I hesitated, she b
arked and made growling noises, then laughed at her jest.
“God lives in my feet. They do not feel the cold.”
Not feeling the cold is the mark of frostbite, but I knew there was nothing to be gained by this argument. I might offer her yet another pair of shoes, but if she agreed to take them they would only end up on someone else’s feet. By slow measures, I allowed that my love would not keep her here, and I could not be her jailer. Instead, I brought food and clothing to her wherever I found her, until I saw that she did not need this help either. I had this small consolation: for one who lived in the streets and on the charity of her fellow man, Xenia did not want for anything if only she would have it. She would not accept alms unless perchance the coin was stamped with the image of Saint George on horseback—and taking this she promptly gave it away again—but because she was thought to be holy, wherever she stopped on her irregular rounds she was tempted with food. She might walk into a merchant’s shop and with impunity help herself to a pickle from the barrel or a fistful of raisins. If she deigned to eat, the merchant believed he would have good luck for the remainder of the day. Similarly, drivers vied to offer her rides so that they might get wealthy customers afterwards.
At irregular intervals separated by a day or a month, she began to call here of her own will. Just as she used to when she still answered to Xenia, she often brought with her a beggar or unfortunate to be fed or otherwise tended to.
It was never only to visit; always she came with some pretext that she was needed. One afternoon, she arrived by coach and burst through the door like the fire brigade, shouting, “Tell Masha to put on the kettle! I am here!” just as though I had urgently sent for her.
I had not, of course, but as it happened, her visit aligned with my feeling my loneliness acutely. I had that morning passed the shop on Galernaya Street where I had used to buy Gaspari’s tea. I had turned and gone inside. The merchant, a man in his middle years, was brown and thin as a tea leaf himself. I imagined him to be of Mongol blood, a cousin perhaps of one of the traders who led the camel caravans up from Peking on the tea road. It was said to be a journey of more than a year through mountainous terrain, and breathing in the aromas of the shop I could not help but call up exotic scenes of men dressed in rough furs and turbans and huddled round a smoking campfire, their beasts laden with the precious cargo.
He remembered me, though it had been a very long time, and asked after the health of my husband. I cannot say why, but I did not want to tell him that Gaspari had died, and so I bought a small packet of tea. For the length of my walk home, I had reproached myself for such foolishness. You are as wasteful as Leonid Vladimirovich, I thought, but you do not have a daughter or son who will take you in when you become a pauper. I had made myself miserable with worry and self-loathing.
Now, I offered Xenia the more comfortable chair, but she preferred to stand at the stove. She held her gnarled hands close over the tiles to thaw them. Masha brought the tea, and the room filled with a cottony quiet.
Ours was an odd kind of visiting. She could not be engaged by idle gossip, for what happened yesterday or the previous week did not hold her interest. I had learnt not to ask after her health and she did not ask after mine; the body and its various aches and failings did not concern her. Living so entirely in the present moment had also made her immune to either expectation or worry for the future, so there could be no talk of civic affairs. If I told her of what I was reading, her attention drifted and she would begin to hum.
Indeed, she had so entirely lost the art of conversing that we sat for the better part of an hour without a word passing between us. Strange as it may seem, though, I was not bothered by this. A wonderful peacefulness came to me merely by my being in her presence.
“Do you remember Leonid Vladimirovich Berevsky and his daughter?” I said at last. “Do you remember the evening you rescued her little dog from dancing?”
She gave no sign to indicate whether she did or did not but only sat in that way of hers, smiling benignly.
The steam from my glass unfurled the scents of smoke and camel’s sweat. I looked at her and she at me, and in that moment it did not matter whether she recalled any of our shared past or what we had been to one another; in her gaze, I felt utterly and inescapably beheld.
Chapter Fifteen
I had passed six years as a widow when Kuzma Zakharovich died. Perhaps it was only to observe the forms that caused Nadya to send me the notice, or perhaps the years had softened her bitterness towards me. I went to the house the next morning.
There was a wreath on the door and many persons already in the anteroom. I supposed several of them to be Kuzma Zakharovich’s children. I looked about for my aunt but did not spy her, nor anyone else I knew. But Nadya was there with the priest and several others, in the next room where her husband lay. In the threshold, I watched her leaning on the arm of a young officer of perhaps eighteen or twenty years. She was weeping. Though she had always had a capacity to act what was needed, her grief looked genuine. It emboldened me. I went to her and offered my condolences. She seemed faintly puzzled to see me but was courteous and introduced me to her son, who was a child when I had last seen him.
“And the baby, little Sasha, is he here also?”
She pointed him out, and two others who had come after him. I confess, I felt a prick of envy, but I was glad for her, too, that she had children to cushion her grief. I admired them to her, and she accepted my compliments.
I asked Nadya if her sister knew of Kuzma Zakharovich’s death.
Nadya’s mouth hardened. “To what address should I have sent the notice? And to what name?” She did not wait on an answer. “It does not matter. Surely she knew of his death even before I did. Is this not her reputation?”
I agreed that it was.
Xenia was known widely to have predicted the death of our beloved Empress Elizabeth and again, more recently, the murder of the Empress’s predecessor, Ivan Antonovich. Poor Ivan. While but an infant, he had been unseated from the throne by Elizabeth Petrovna and then locked away in a dungeon for twenty years. It was said by some that his confinement had deprived him of his wits. And then to be murdered in his cell by his guards, the only companions he had known all his days. On the heels of this sad rumor had come the further rumor that Xenia had predicted it. On the day before his death, it was said, she had walked the streets of her parish, weeping loudly and shrieking of blood.
I was reminded of her dreams. Of her husband’s death and the blood pooling round his head. Of her subsequent horror at the sight of her own blood. But the general populace could not know these things. They did not know Xenia, only the holy fool called Andrei Feodorovich.
I left Nadya’s house and walked. I altered my route home that I might pass by the old Winter Palace, which was then being dismantled. It was open to the sky, the roof and walls stripped down to the timbers, and birds swooped in and out of what had been the grand ballroom and the reception rooms and private quarters.
The old opera house attached to one end of the palace was still intact; it was being saved for some other use. As I watched, laborers emerged from the open back wall, carting rubbish to the street—heaps of old rope, moldering canvas, and a ceramic shell I recognized, one of several that had once hid the footlights. I followed a laborer inside.
The interior was dim and musty and sadly decayed. Emptied of its chairs and draperies and gilded fixtures, it was like a great beast being stripped to the bone. A few warped backdrops and set pieces leaned against the side walls, and one of these was familiar to me. Most of the paint had flaked from it, but the scene still ghosted from the canvas: stands of palms and hanging flowers, a plashing fountain, faded peacocks and tigers and, like bookends with their trunks raised, a pair of elephants. It was the garden of Poro, the Indian King.
The memory of Gaspari’s ethereal voice slipped between my ears, sharp as a newly honed knife.
&n
bsp; As I stood in the empty theatre, I remembered that I had now been widowed in almost equal measure to the time I had been married. I was not quite thirty-six years of age, and years stretched before me, years that I would have need to endure without him or children who might remind me of him.
I recalled Xenia saying that this emptiness was sweet. Perhaps the saints are right in thinking that the depth of one’s love is measured by the capacity for suffering, yet one cannot help but question those who court it with such fervor. Even Christ, who submitted willingly to his suffering, first prayed that the cup might be taken from him.
The next week, as I was sitting at my mending, I heard the sound of Xenia’s stick upon the stair. I was glad it was she, for my bleakness on the day of Kuzma Zakharovich’s funeral had not left me. I was taken aback, then, when she crossed the threshold shouting.
“Get up!” she scolded. “Why do you sit and sew buttons when your son waits on you?”
“I am Dasha,” I reminded her. “I do not have a son. Here.” I set aside my mending and patted the cushion beside me. “Calm yourself. I will tell Masha to make us tea.”
But she would not sit. “There has been an accident. Your son,” she insisted, shaking her head in violent little jerks. “Your son.”
I wondered if she had confused my door with someone else’s. I knew she visited others; stories trailed her erratic rounds, and among these were accounts of her coming to a house with tidings of death or illness. I could not entirely discount the possibility that somewhere in Petersburg was a woman looking for her son, and Xenia had brought terrible news of him to the wrong address.
“Hurry,” she commanded, and she turned and went back down the stairs. There was never any arguing against her. I followed.
She had kept a droshky waiting at the door, and the driver conveyed us over to the Petersburgskaya Storona and then to the particular corner where she directed. A carriage was stopped in the middle of the street, and a crowd had gathered round it. Seeing us alight from the droshky, someone recognized Xenia and escorted us into the crush.