Chapter 8 - Anton
Seldom in life does one have the opportunity to know precisely why they are plagued with an unshakeable sense of déjà vu.
Today is like that for me. It feels somehow crueler that I’ve inflicted it on myself, and I’m entirely aware of it—but that’s life, isn’t it?
Some days are just designed to test whether you truly are who you think you are.
This time, I’m not in a cathedral in St. Petersburg.
I stand in a church in Boston, with a priest in peripheral view.
It isn’t early autumn; it’s the middle of December.
Time has weathered me more than I was at thirty years old, in ways that have little to do with the silver peppered throughout the golden strands of my hair.
Yet, today, that dwindled decade is reduced to the blink of an eye.
My hands are cold, and it’s because I am frozen in time.
What remains constant is how much stock I put into being present, being aware and prepared, constantly clocking every detail around me. Accounting for it. Because that’s the job.
I work tirelessly to remain in my body. Always.
But, from the moment I woke up today, with my temples throbbing from knocking back far, far too much Scotch with Anastasia the night before, all bets have been off. I’d like to say that rattles me, but the truth is that I’m not sure I feel anything at all. I am the negative of a person.
It feels like nothing more than a grotesque tableau to be standing at this altar, trussed up in a crisp white shirt and suffocating tuxedo, awaiting the most beautiful woman I have ever laid eyes on, who happens to be nearly two decades younger than me, like I’m some lovestruck fool that I can’t afford to be ever again.
This is a part I’m playing today, and I can’t even fucking do it right.
Of course I can’t. How can I be anything but a tragic failure of a man—a miserable fucking widower—when Irina is all I see everywhere I look?
Where Darya has curls black as a raven’s feathers, Irina’s had been a chestnut brown spill of waves down her spine.
Darya steps onto the runner and walks down the aisle, her deep blue eyes glaring right at me, and I remember how Irina hadn’t been able to lift her stone-grey eyes to mine when she’d glided towards me, led by her father.
Her hands had shaken as she’d put them in mine.
Darya doesn’t offer me hers. She looks at me not with trepidation, but with overt disdain.
I lose myself in memories.
The ceremony unfolds, and I’m in two places—here and where this has already happened before.
The first step: the priest turns to me, his heavy, black-and-gold vestment rustling, and asks, “Do you have a good, free, unconstrained will and a firm intention to take as your wife this woman whom you see before you?” His voice booms through the church, ricocheting off the walls and striking me like a boomerang to the fucking throat.
“I have, Father,” I admit.
“You have not promised yourself to any other woman?”
“I have not, Father,” I perhaps lie.
Somewhere, tears spill down Irina’s cheeks. I did promise. What’s the statute of limitations on my promise, now that she’s dead?
Darya must have passed the test with flying colors without my attention. We’re already progressing towards the Office of Betrothal when I seem to come to.
Unlike it had been that day, it isn’t Anastasia, but rather Darya’s sister, who brings forward the pair of wedding rings on a tiny platter.
The priest blesses them, first with the sign of the cross over her and then over me.
He places her ring on my finger, and mine on hers.
We exchange the rings three times in a trinity of a commitment that’s nothing more than blind faith, if that.
Nadya stands there as our sponsor and assists with each exchange.
My hands are numb, but they remember, moving from memory alone.
The servant of God, Anton, is betrothed to the servant of God, Darya.
The same words, binding me to a different woman.
A different woman with whom I’m led to the nave for the Service of Crowning.
We are led to a pair of ceremonial crowns, bound together by a ribbon the color of Darya’s wedding dress.
He lifts the first to hold over my head—”The servant of God, Anton, is crowned unto the servant of God, Darya, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ”—and the second over hers.
There are no tears in Darya’s eyes.
As with the rings before, the crowns, too, are exchanged thrice. On the side, Nadya’s face is clouded with concern, and none of it feels real to me. Nothing about this does.
It’s as if there’s a partition between me and the rest of the church.
I hear the words from far away as the Father reads a passage from the Epistle of Paul.
The same one that had poured out in a different house of worship in a different country—about submission and sacrifice, as if either the woman in front of me or I were capable of either form of surrender.
We share wine from the common cup, signifying the interweaving of our lives forevermore. Darya’s mouth rests where my lips met the rim of the chalice. When her hand is placed in mine, it’s by the priest pressing her palm there and ensnaring it in his epitrachelion.
I’ve walked these circles around the altar before.
Rejoice, O Isaiah, the people fill a holy place with holy song once more. The Virgin was with child, and bore a son, Emmanuel, God and man.
Irina and I walked those circles with our eyes locked, once. Even as she kept blinking through her tears, she absorbed the promises my eyes made her.
I can’t look at Darya.
Irina and I almost had a daughter. Her name would’ve been Anfisa; our flower. Who never bloomed. With her, Irina too had withered, crushed by complications I should’ve seen coming and hadn’t. Both losses haunt me. What’s the weight of a crown in front of that boulder on my back?
Here, the crowns are removed from our bent heads. The priest anoints us with a final blessing, as if those save anything or anyone. In tandem, my bride and I turn to face the congregation.
It’s done.
What God has joined together, let no man put asunder.
But God can, can’t He? He has before.
***
I try to roll the agitation off my shoulders, and it doesn’t work. This day is fucking endless. Such an exercise in torture that one wouldn’t think it’d be possible to make it worse—but it is.
“Introduce us to your lovely bride,” a man says, gesturing to the woman by my side. The woman who has remained by my side since we descended from the altar, as a matter of fact.
What do I say? I’d love to, you moldy motherfucker, but I don’t know your fucking name right now. Yeah. Somehow, I don’t see that going over too well.
My mouth opens, then closes, like a fish.
Another voice fills the vacuum, “Oops. He’s too dazzled by his bride right now to fathom introductions.
Luckily, his lovely bride can produce herself, Mr. Belova.
” Darya holds out her hand, allowing him to take it and press his wilted lips to her knuckles.
The black diamond weighing her hand down winks in the afternoon light. “I’m Darya Yuri.”
“Zakharov,” I correct automatically.
“I was getting there, malysh.” She clucks her tongue at me. She’ll have to come up with the cover for why my jaw drops over her casual issuance of an endearment. “I’m hyphenating.”
What... the actual fuck?
“A representation of two great families,” Belova commends.
“Absolutely.”
I tune out for the rest of the exchange.
When the waiter swirls around with a tray our way, fucking finally, I pluck a flute of champagne from it.
And then another so that I can hand the first to my unexpected savior.
Her pristine smile never falters. It still makes my teeth clench in annoyance at the surprise that flashes in her eyes.
Jesus, I’m not that much of a bastard, am I? It must not matter to her, regardless. Her gaze slides back to a different guest, seamlessly replying about some recent addition to Belova’s art collection, and she still manages to shock the hell out of me by guiding my hand to her hip.
Never—never would I have believed you if you were to tell me that Darya Yuri would lead my hand around her body and stake my hand in a spot like it’s mine to claim. And still, that’s reality today.
It helps a little to discover within minutes that it’s meant to be a leash.
One she utilizes deftly, guiding me through the party, and digging her talons into the inside of my wrist when she lines up the pathway for my response.
Every time, it undoes me. I’m sure I’m failing to school my features, too, no matter how adept I typically am at the task.
I expected a production from her today. All month, she’s given me enough previews and my cards enough of a workout to assure me of that.
Even some frigid disdain is warranted, given how this has come together.
Not for a second have I mistaken Darya’s enthusiasm for planning as excitement about being bound to me.
It’s safe to say I couldn’t have predicted she’d carry me through this event like a yoke on her back, without complaint, with a fucking gun to my head. Not in a million years.
It just about cuts me off at the knees.
To the point that it’s a sick kind of gratitude that burns me blue when Darya, at last, deposits me with Anastasia with a private, withering look and goes off with a gaggle of her sisters.
An hour and a half into this marriage, and I’ve already failed her.
In theory, this tuxedo is tailored to the most specific measurements.
But it feels like a strange and suffocating garment.
It occurs to me in the middle of the spectacle of a reception that it’s my skin I feel this way about: too tight around my bones, squeezing in protest as it’s stretched beyond its limitations.
Stasi doesn’t get much of a chance to talk me through it before the music cuts off, and I startle at a hand slipping into mine.