The Age of Ice: A Novel (10 page)

• • •

A man who descends into the surreality of winter realizes all too late that the chatter of his road companions had been the lifeline that kept him skirting the spell, and now, in utter silence, he has no recourse—and he succumbs to it.

He drags on day and night. He eats and sleeps in his sleigh, letting the horse follow the tracings of the road beneath virgin snows. He empties his bowels at the roadside. He breaks to feed his horse, and if he can start one, he makes a small campfire to boil snow for water.

The purpose of his quest has sifted out of him and dispersed, like millet out of a punctured bag. His horse will fatigue, and the food he carries won’t even cover this journey, because it will be endless. He stares into the skies. A gunpowder-gray cloud is creeping over the heather grayness; flurries start. He sees a riding party approaching; it is so far away that it seems innocuous, although distance is his only, and temporary, protection. He is a captive of the road—the snow is too deep everywhere else. Unless the riding party turns away, it is bound to run into him.

The man who descends unharnesses his horse from the sleigh, and saddles him instead. He stuffs what he can into saddlebags. He leaves his Leib Guard uniform coat in the sleigh and dons a commoner’s coat, Cyril’s find. His grenadier miter hat has an ostrich feather and a copper badge with regimental insignia. He leaves it too, only rips the badge off and hides it on his body. He perceives himself as excruciatingly slow, especially when he loads his pistols from the cartridges Cyril had rolled for him—if he is lucky, the pan will remain dry for the next fifteen minutes. There are seven armed men in the party and they are not turning off the road. He mounts, tucks the pistols behind the flaps of his coat, and, after a moment’s hesitation, cocks them. If he feels anything at all, it is a tug of something inevitable, clumsy, and ugly.

They encircle him. They order him to get off his horse. He doesn’t. Their leader, the
ataman,
is in front of him, sitting askew on his horse, grinning. “Who are you?” the leader demands.

“Old Man Frost,” he mutters.

The ataman snorts. “Why’d you drop your sleigh? I watched you all the way from back there.” He waves a hand toward the horizon. “With a spyglass. Let’s take a look, shall we?” His henchmen produce a two-foot-long cylinder with a lens on one end and an eyepiece with some screws on another—so heavy that it takes two to hold it in front of the ataman’s eye. It ought to be the astronomers’ telescope, and it is trained on me. On Old Man Frost. “Whoa!” the ataman says. “I see every damn zit on his face! And check this out—he is upside down!” He pokes out from behind his “spyglass” and asks, “What was in your sleigh? What did ya hide?”

“The cruelty of ice, the kindness of snow,” Old Man Frost answers. Snowflakes fall thicker and thicker; he licks them off his lips, then spits them out.

The ataman looks into the eyepiece again. “I say, this fellow is upside down. Hey, Peter, Bulava, set the guy up straight, see what shakes out of him!”

They guffaw and edge toward him, readying to yank him from the saddle and flip him head down. So Old Man Frost pulls out his two pistols and shoots at Peter and Bulava.

Then he unsheathes his sword, dropping the pistols, and rides through the ataman and his two henchmen. He aims for exposed parts—necks and faces. He strikes once, and notes the impact only in passing, by the pain in the wrist of his sword hand as he keeps riding, that’s all.

All of this gives him a bit of lead time over the bandits, who turn around and give chase. And then, not two minutes later, a raging snowstorm descends, and neither chasers nor chased can see anything farther than the reach of their own arms.

• • •

I did not leave the road purposefully, more likely it veered away from my blind trajectory. Instantly, my horse was up to his underbelly in snow. I dropped off him, falling so deep into powder that I took all the slack out of the bridle. I managed to right myself and grabbed him by his halter. The wind howled between us. My mount heaved to free himself, but I hung onto him, I held his head down, and he looked at me in terror—as though I were drowning him. It seemed he would neigh for help. “No,” I whispered. I took off my greatcoat, threw it over him, and tucked him in.

Now I was all ears, trying to listen in the whine of wind and the rustle of snow for the approach of my pursuers. No sound came, or else it was coming from all sides at once—the storm kept playing with me until I gave up trying to hear beyond its orchestra. I accepted that I would stay
here, waist deep in snow, and if they were destined to find me, then find me they would.

• • •

When I came to, the skies were gray and quiet. This I did remember: there had been a blizzard, and it must have ceased. But who was I? What was I doing here? I did not know.

I had a horse next to me, a horse draped with a greatcoat; he looked unwell and his head was drooping with a certain submission to fate. The sight made me eager to help him, or at least change his position. He was reluctant to move, but I kept pulling and excavating—his reins were wrapped around my hand for a reason. We plowed into shallower snow and started walking—I in the lead, my beast companion, still in his overcoat, limping behind me. I had no idea where I was going.

We walked into a village; dogs discovered us and started barking. A boy popped out of a hovel and began screaming, pointing at us. “That’s him, that’s him, that’s Old Man Frost!” A woman joined the boy, and he yanked at her sleeve. “Mam, he’s the one who killed Dad!” But the woman only crossed herself and towed the boy back inside.

There must have been something strange about me that made her invoke the holy sign. I looked down at my jacket and brushed off a layer of snow. Or was it perhaps a snowcap that I wore on my head? My mind felt like a huge snowball; the name Old Man Frost, though familiar, was buried much too deep to make sense. I started walking again.

When I was twenty or so paces away, the boy appeared again and ran after me, his mother not too far behind. He carried a broom, its business end burning, and hurled it at me like a javelin just before his mother captured him. My horse yanked at his reins, terrified, and pulled me out of harm’s way; the blazing broom missed me and landed at my feet. I looked at it, at the boy, at other inhabitants of the village who started to congregate at the scene. The boy stared back, panting. Perhaps he was waiting for Old Man Frost to melt? The little fire at my feet was still burning—so yellow, so different . . . and so important. It made me remember two boys sitting in front of a campfire, surrounded by walls of ice and snow. My brother and I. I had my arm wrapped around his shoulders, and then glimpsed, in an epiphany, that he had something I lacked. And that I needed him. Andrei, who had set our palace of ice on fire. I opened my mouth. “Which way is Orenburg?”

Several hands pointed, so I headed that way.

• • •

I recall very little from the rest of my journey. At some point I lost my horse—I do not remember how, I only know I came out of the wild without him, without my winter coat, and without the foodstuffs that he carried in the saddlebags. Maybe the horse simply had been too slow to keep up, because I do remember running on more than one occasion. Running and chanting to the beat of my footfalls,
The kindness of snow! The cruelty of ice!

Orenburg revealed itself by gunfire. I walked for several days using those rumbles as my only guide. By that time I more or less knew who I was and that I was going there to meet my family. I had been teasing out these morsels of memory by staring at the flames, whenever I managed to kindle a fire and sustain it for minutes at a time with some brush:
Fire
.
Palace of ice. My brother and I. I need him.
The rest of the time, as my gaze glided over hills and dales, the snowball in my mind swelled—as if I were pushing it in front of me like some winterland Sisyphus.

I approached Orenburg from the north. I crossed the Sakmara River and could have sneaked along its wooded bank southwest to the Yayeek gate of the fortress. Instead, drawn to noise, I headed southeast into open fields in front of the Sakmara gate. There, a sortie of rebels—and here I employ the testimony of others rather than my own memory—had assumed possession of a cannon abandoned by the Orenburg troops. Attracting some fire from the walls, rebels were limbering the piece up, while others of their number were galloping by the walls in a display of taunts and jeers.

I crossed this scene at a run. Shortly after I took off I had a tail—a rebel on horseback pursued me, shouting. He gained on me; I turned around and ran at him, scooping snow as I ran, slapping it into snowballs, and hurling them at the rider. I wanted to catch him, bring him down, and stuff snow into his gullet until it ruptured. I pictured the man stuffed like a scarecrow, only with snow instead of straw. All of this made great sense to me at the time.

He halted his horse. I ran on. I was closing in. We made eye contact. There were shouts and gunshots; none crossed our line of sight, though. I had already stretched my arms to grab him when he yanked his horse to the right and whipped it into a gallop. I pursued for a bit, but was no match for his horse, so I turned and ran back toward the gate.

The gate opened for me. Some people were on the inside. I said, “Colonel Velitzyn. Colonel Andrei Velitzyn, please.”

• • •

So this thing, this
Old Man Frost
was what stood in the anteroom of the Velitzyn residence, when Andrei Junior, shouting, “Godfather Alexander!” charged me and wrapped his skinny arms around my waist as only a child can. Only a child, for whom a crust of snow on the jacket of his godfather was nothing out of the ordinary. If he hadn’t been the one who saw me first . . .

I recognized him but vaguely. He kept clinging to me, bobbing up and down and reciting, “Godfather is here, Godfather is here!” With the boy on my arm I let myself into the parlor and there, the burning fireplace instantly commanded my attention. The salvation, the memory trigger! I leaped to it, dropped down, and stared at the flames with the greatest focus ever, ignoring little Andrei’s questions and fidgets.

The snowball inside my head exploded: corpses, telescopes, snow, a boy with a burning broom, ice maggots, Paulie, Cyril . . .

I listed to one side, suddenly weak. I felt—I didn’t know whether metaphorically or literally—as if I were turning from ice to liquid, and I wetted—embarrassed to say it—my pants, if only as a consequence of becoming liquid. That was the state Anna found me in.

She shrieked. Maybe she was startled, afraid for her son, then she recognized me—perhaps—as I was sloping farther and farther to the side like a snowman in springtime. My godson squirmed out of my arms,
Mama, Mama, look who’s here!
—
Oh my God,
she kept repeating, and I was so sick, so terribly sick but also—happy. I clung to the mantel for support, muttering, “Give me a moment . . . don’t come near me . . . send somebody in . . . some warm water . . . please . . . just a bit of warm water . . . should do it.”

• • •

Three hours later, after having locked myself in a lean-to banya (Anna would call through the door from time to time,
Alexander, are you all right?
And I’d say
, Yes, just need a little more time
), after having peeled off my clothes one item at a time and seen—no, not the frostbitten arms or legs, patches of icy infestation, toes that one feared to find porcelain-hard, skin that peeled off as one crust with the fabric—no, none of that. What I saw was just my pale, filthy body, roughened and all too sensitive to warm water, but undamaged. And so, three hours later, I recovered enough self-presence to rejoin my family.

It was my mind. It felt ill. In me, Anna had acquired a patient; a second
one, unfortunately, because, when at long last I emerged from the bathhouse in my brother’s snug-fitting crisp-clean shirt and breeches, my dirty clothes bundled discreetly in one hand and all the coins and banknotes that I had found stashed in my clothes in the other; when I met Anna in the parlor again and surrendered the money to her, and saw—this time—that she was thinner and sadder than I remembered (for my memory grew clearer), and asked, therefore, “Where’s my brother?” she said, “He’s sick.”

• • •

I remember seeing him for the first time since my arrival: gaunt and unshaven, stretched out in bed. The last time he had been outside the city, he’d taken a bullet in the shoulder. Now he had a lingering wound and pneumonia. Approaching him, I felt like a teenager to his grown man. “Andrei?” I said.

He considered me. “Did we break the siege?”

I shook my head.

“No troops are coming?”

“They are staging. They will be en route shortly.”

“Staging, my ass.” He reviewed me more thoroughly. “You don’t look too good. You came alone?”

I nodded.

“What for?”

And the teenager that I felt all but apologized: “Just so . . . whatever happens, happens to us together. It felt better that way.”

• • •

The first meal I took with Anna and Andrei Junior was a thin soup of sour cabbage with hints of beef kidney. The soup’s meniscus reached beyond the bowl-shaped part of the plate only in my serving. There was gray bread—two slices for the boy, two for me, one for Anna. A shaving or two of butter on Junior’s and my slices. All this was defiantly served in snow-white, melodiously clinking china, on an immaculate tablecloth.

Anna cut up her son’s bread into tiny pieces. He ate with hungry abandon, but his eyes went an anxious blank just before he shut them, each time, while swallowing. Anna lingered, watching me. Exploring the soup with my spoon, I wondered, just what had I been eating on my march? Nothing, it seemed. It had been two weeks—the calendar claimed—since I’d faced the bandits. The thought was unsettling in and of itself, and worse, how was I to begin eating now? Then, a realization: this was scarcity,
and I was an extra, an unsolicited mouth to feed. Anna had taken from herself to give to me. I shrank, my elbows glued to my sides. “Just one piece of bread is good. I am not too hungry. I am sorry. And thank you.”