Page 22 of Arranged for the Russian Pakhan

His eyes are as hollow as the night I first approached him.

Like he isn’t there at all.

My brain bemoans, What have I done?

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.