The Age of Ice: A Novel (11 page)

Anna said, “This is not municipal bread. We bake our own.” She sounded apologetic. I could not understand why and felt bad. I truly wasn’t hungry, my body seemed not to have realized its warm needs yet.

My mind alone was suffering through the disabling stages of thaw. Reperfusion of mind with thought. Return of painful emotions. Necrotizing areas of missing memories. It was hard for me to listen to Anna when she explained that merchant granaries had been municipalized, bread rationed; that the municipal bread dough had been augmented with downer cattle hides, fried and minced, and some people had taken ill. On the black market (there was one still, thank God!), a pound of flour went for sixteen rubles. Andrei had not approved of this and insisted on living as miserably as his soldiers, she said.

I nodded but barely made sense of her words. Anna appeared—on my disabled scale—too new and unfamiliar, a stranger, I could not be at ease with her. I needed, had to fall back to things that were ingrained in my deepest, least frostbitten memories.

• • •

Word of my arrival spread to every Orenburg officer within hours. Visitors began to call the very next day: Wallenstern the commandant, Reinsdorp the governor; Major Naumov, who served under Andrei; Major Varnsted, who’d come from Bugulma in November; Brigadier Korf, who’d retreated his corps to Orenburg from Ural fortresses that had fallen into enemy hands. Anna served the men tea in dainty porcelain cups, while their wives slipped her jars of rhubarb jam and sachets of dried echinacea for Andrei. My brother dragged himself out of the bedroom and, propped on an ottoman and ignoring entreaties to spare himself, took part in an impromptu war council where I was made to testify about Kazan, the road, and Freiman’s plans. Andrei drilled me until he hit the gaps in my recall.
How many troops in Bugulma? What kind? Which regiments? Have they received our letters?

I did not know.

Reinsdorp, it seemed, took me for a harbinger of victory, and Wallenstern for a fraud. Reinsdorp said that we all ought to march out of two gates and strike Pugachev on three sides at once. Andrei’s voice rose
above the others, “The cavalry! You can’t nail him without it. Have our cavalry cross the Sakmara, go up the right bank, and strike Pugachev from the north!” This suggestion was met with bewilderment. Wallenstern warned, “Andrei Mikhailovich, have mercy. One must think in cannon and infantrymen at this time.” Andrei protested, mentioning hundreds of dragoons and Cossacks. These must have been phantoms of his fever, because he was roundly ignored. Reinsdorp bent toward me and confided, sotto voce, “We haven’t got horses. He knows. He just forgets.” Then he signaled the end of the meeting. “We’d better let our colonel rest. Take care of yourself, Andrei Mikhailovich, listen to the doctor. Do not forget that rhubarb.” Andrei, red in the face, glanced sheepishly after the departing men as if they had exposed a foolishness in him. I felt bitter pity for my brother. Before he left, Reinsdorp gave me a pat on the back. “I do expect
your
visit, Guards Captain. We need to talk more about our strategy.”

I had no strategy to talk about, and Andrei was beyond help of rhubarb and echinacea.

• • •

Anna and I helped Andrei back to bed, and after that I did not quite make it out of his bedroom, an act as selfish as it was helpful: I was not feeling right, I was hiding from Reinsdorp and company. He needed a nurse. A perfect match.

Nay, more than that. Together, we embarked on a journey, each of us at once a Virgil and a Dante to the other.

Through fever and sickness, around the clock, from present to past. He cursed, he taunted me, he spoke in riddles: “The word is out. Killing a noble is just as inconsequential as killing a chicken. Pugachev? He’s a drunken puppet!” He spoke of atrocities: “Cowled over face with skin of own scalp and chased into fields hands tied behind can’t unblindfold himself !” and I felt sick imagining how I would be smothered by a mat of my own hair turned inside out and pulled over my nose and mouth, the hood of skin tightening, shrinking in the sun as I stumbled on . . . To whom had it been done? And by whom?

But I had to keep up with my brother, who rushed forth, revisiting every battle, releasing every memory he had kept locked up in the cellar of his mind. He descended—and I followed—from the Turkish conflict to the Seven Years’ War; he hallucinated parched flats of the Sea of Azov; salty wind; two toothless old men, a master and his slave; one fished for
another and then they ate out of one bowl; taking of Taganrog, dust devils, not a shot fired; then forests of Moldova, minarets of the Izmail fortress and the dome’s up-horned crescent above the wafts of gunsmoke, a Wallachian youth who jumped off the wall onto Russian bayonets; then wading the Danube’s estuaries in a fog where tresses of willows touched one’s face like women’s hands and pelicans disturbed by cannon fire flew overhead; then bell towers and cobblestones of Berlin, chains of Prussian footmen in dirty-white uniforms marching in inhuman unison to be butchered between the Oder River and the Russian artillery batteries at Kunersdorf—

“Bone is yellow blood is dark meat is dirt,” he cried, “and they’re bringing their teacups and wig powder! Do you understand me?”
Yes, yes, I do,
I said, though I didn’t. My brother was wiser—or sicker than me, I thought. And he kept racing, all the way to his very first battle: sunrise in August in a forest at Gross-Jagersdorf, springy carpet of needles underfoot, the
softness
of the realization that the vanguard column had lost its way and scattered; the unlikely feeling of peace,
like home
; discovering a bright clutch of chanterelles, and then cannonballs and shells started crashing all around and one did not know where to run and stood hugging a fir tree and picked with shaky fingers at its scales and sap leaks, and was so afraid, so afraid, so afraid.

And I was whispering,
It’s all right. You’re safe. It’s all over now.
And it was. We were past all the wars, down to our own battle, brother and brother.

Once, Anna came in with a plate of broth and stared as if afraid of us both. He whispered,
Tell her to leave, I’m not decent
. I covered him and I said to Anna,
Let me feed him.
He would not eat more than two spoonfuls at a time by then. I would help him onto a chamber pot.
I’ve got you, I’ve got you
. He would laugh, all coughs and wheezes, his breath sour.
Look at me, can’t hold myself up on a shitter. What, I’m so light you can lift me up now, little brother?
His fever kept climbing. His wound had opened like a slit in a leavened loaf, and the doctor only shook his head at it.

I waxed, Andrei waned. He sweated, hallucinated, vomited his memories out, while I gained mine back. I picked out my memories among his expelled ones. His wound smelled of decay. We were up to our necks in our childhoods now, far away, and I felt I had recalled everything. I said,
Remember how we used to charge into each other?
Said he,
I do
.

I said, “I never wanted to be at war with you. Why were we?”

“That is the harshest kind of war,” he said and drifted, momentarily, out of touch.

“Andrei?”

“Mmm? . . . I’ve been jealous of you.”

“You shouldn’t be. I am a freak—”

“You bet you are. Not of this world. Nothing sticks to you. Father hated us but you don’t care. I was ashamed of our birth, you were proud. You somehow made it into this—”

“—and I’ve been jealous of
you,
because I am abnormal. A virgin, for one. You know why?”

“—into this wonder. Don’t know how you do it. Just saunter through life and it keeps parting before you . . . no ass-kissing . . . nor kicking . . . and I go and there is a wall . . . My head’s burning up.”

“Andrewsha?” But he’d drifted again. “What I mean is my body is freakish, not just . . . my mind,” I insisted. “Let me show you,” and I put my hand on his forehead—

He returned, “Good to have you. My damned lucky little brother. Spare us some. Save my wife and son for me. Promise.”

I pressed my hand to his forehead and imagined snow, fields of it, all the chill of broken hopes, all the gelid drafts of ravaged homes, all the anger, all the lust—I needed to cool his head, now, I so wanted to relieve him.

He jerked his head. “Let go already! You’re heating me up!”

What?!
I recoiled. I stared at my palm. “Is my hand not cold?”

“Alexasha. Serious now. Get your sweaty hands off me. My wife and son. They are your responsibility now. Do you understand?”

Had I been cured of my cold?

Dumbstruck, I muttered, “Yes, yes. But you’ll pull through. We’ll do it together.”

He drifted off. I called his name once, twice, to no avail, then pitched my voice high, like a child, and howled, “Andrewsha-a-a-a . . .” as if we were running toward each other down an enfilade of sunlit rooms . . . His mouth opened but not his eyes. “Go to war,” he whispered hotly, as if in a bad dream.

• • •

Andrei died at three in the morning of the next day, December 31. When the priest confirmed that he was no longer breathing, I finally left the room and went into the open air. I hadn’t been out in days. I didn’t even
remember these houses, this street now before me. I said, “Brother, you wouldn’t mind now if I double-checked, would you?” and picked up some snow.

I had not been cured. The cold was back, or it had never left, only tricked me, denied me a single, the first and the last, favor I begged of it—to cool my dying brother’s brow.

I would have screamed, wept, raged. But that would have frightened Anna and little Andrei.

• • •

On January 1, Wallenstern transferred the command of Andrei’s men to me—fifteen hundred infantry of the garrison, including invalids and elderly. Ranks of the Leib Guard were regarded as two levels higher than those of the regulars, so my leisurely guards captainship was just one down from my late brother’s hard-won colonelship.

On January 3, we met at Reinsdorp’s to “outline the plan of military action.” Good Lord.

On January 6 I dreamed that Andrei came back from the grave to live with us. He claimed his wound had healed, but I did not believe him and wanted to call the doctor to confirm. My distrust was the only bad aspect of this good dream.

On the thirteenth before dawn we all marched out in three columns—a surprise attack. But the rebels noticed Korf’s troops on the heights above the Sakmara River beforehand, and launched their chaotic free-for-all. South of Korf and Wallenstern, Naumov and I made a modest advance, then stood firing for a while, then saw others beat a retreat and followed suit. The fear of being cut off from the gate was sharp on men’s faces, like a fear of seeing one’s own flesh sawed off. I had to run to keep up with the soldiers. I ran into a bombardier crew whose pair of starved horses could not pull a cannon out of a snow drift, even when a few of us stopped to push. One horse fell, the other wavered. We spiked the cannon and salvaged one of the horses. Then we ran.

I was back home for dinner, to a heavy silence. Anna wept, soundlessly. My widow-in-law. I could see bumps of vertebrae on her inclining, porcelain-white neck—punctuation marks of hunger. The sight made me want to hit myself.

My consolations were clumsy at best; my arm more levitated than rested over her shoulders. How was I to care for her and my godson if I was afraid to hold her hands in mine, for at least two reasons: what if I
became cold and what would my brother say about it? I was no good for anything.

• • •

In my dreams, Andrei, roused from the grave, lived with us still. I watched him eat; he did so with gusto. He said, chewing,
She altered my jacket to fit you, I see
. I said,
Shouldn’t I step down as your wife’s and son’s guardian now that you’re back?
He shook his head.
No
. If not for his refusal, it would have been a good dream.

At least I could give the boy a brief hug, say, “Your dad is watching over you, unseen.” But with Anna . . . Her grief disabled me, made me feel inadequate, made me loathe myself.

By February, Orenburg’s hunger became life-threatening. We knew there was grain in the Upper Lake fort, about a hundred miles up the Yayeek River. They just would not send it our way, given the dangers of the road. We had to come and get it. I volunteered to lead out a convoy. Yes, I dreaded venturing out into the wild—what if it cursed me with the
ice spell
again?—but I had to do it. I was no good for anything else.

I don’t like to talk about those two and a half weeks.

The Yayeek’s right bank was Pugachev land, then Bashkir rebels, while the left bank was Kyrgyz rebels. We moved by night whenever we could, hugging the river, and hid in its groves by day. Everyone who went with me had a family in Orenburg, the only loyalty I hoped they’d retain. I barely slept, stayed close to people, and kept my eyes on the fire when there was one. I coaxed myself into a mania, and as a maniac, I drove, and shamed, and threatened—and yes, inspired, I suppose—the men to do what was necessary. I also ordered them to capture or shoot every man, woman, or child who saw us. On the way back we shot a boy, no older than ten. The charge hit him mid-stride and he flipped.
Like a hare,
the jaeger said, looking up from the rifle. It terrified me that I perceived fresh blood on fresh snow as a beautiful sight,
like a blush on the snow’s cheek.

We returned on March 5. Anna ran to me across the yard where we were unloading our sleighs. She wrapped her arms around my trunk. “Lord our God, blessed, giving, and merciful.” And I? I went stiff and only replied, “We met success.”

Then I learned that government troops had finally crossed into Orenburg Province and that Pugachev’s main force had gone from Orenburg down the Yayeek. Then I slept for thirty hours straight and dreamed that Anna, my brother, and I held hands and spun in a happy dance. If it
wasn’t snow we were dancing on, it would have been a perfectly good dream.

On March 22, the dashing Major General Prince Peter Velitzyn, a distant relative, gave Pugachev a beating thirty miles away at the Tatisheva Fort and then another beating, a few days later, at the heart of the enemy’s encampment just northeast from us. Pugachev escaped with only a handful of followers. The siege of Orenburg was over.