The Age of Ice: A Novel (12 page)

• • •

And who rolled into town on March 26 with the liberator’s cortege, to the adoration of the grateful citizens, to fireworks, peals, and cheers? My friend Paulie Svetogorov.

We came face-to-face at a celebration, a dinner and a dance in the city hall. Anna and I stood on the edge of the crowd like winter’s ghosts, reluctant to give in to the good times. Anna still wore black. Paulie, fattened and radiant with a sense of accomplishment, barreled to us from the hors d’oeuvres table, one hand readied for a shake and the other for a shoulder slap. “Alexis!”

“Paulie,” I said, and remained static.

Cleverly, he switched his attention to Anna. “Madame—I have heard. Do accept my deepest condolences.” His bow was as deep as his condolences, and he cradled her hand in both of his. She glanced at me, uncertain what to make of him. I said, “Guards Captain Paul Svetogorov and I served together.”

He looked encouraged. “And so we continue! Prince Peter has your leave papers, and will be asking you to join us on our rebel chase . . . there he is, in fact. Major General! May I introduce—”

Paulie, Paulie.
He never stopped to amaze me. In no time he drew to us Prince Peter and many more well-nourished people radiant with their accomplishments, and he trapped us in polite conversation. Prince Peter remarked, “We’ve heard about your deeds, kinsman. Your bread convoy saved this city, I am told. Superbly executed.”

Anna’s cheeks showed a trace of blush. I said, “Major General, if anyone saved this city, it is you. The convoy was palliative at best.”

“Kinsman—modesty looks good on a girl. Who was always last through the gate, spiking cannons with your own hands, I heard, and your . . . Had you really just walked up to the gate all by yourself last December and even chased off a rebel cavalryman? Like Siegfried reddened in dragon’s blood?”

My heart sank.
In blood?
“I—I was not myself,” I fumbled, stealing a glance at Anna. And—lo and behold—she came to my rescue. With a kind of chill charm that was to become a public face if not a second nature to her widowhood, she said, “Fortunately, my laundress knows just what to do to lift dragon’s blood stains off an officer’s uniform: a handful of soap and a pinch of common sense.”

Peter laughed and changed the topic, but Paulie, who had not failed to see my discomfort, was less accommodating. When I excused myself from the company, he found a way to join me. “Siegfried, huh? So, in whose blood were you reddened?”

I glowered at him.

“Fine, keep it a secret. We didn’t twiddle our thumbs either. Ask them about the attack I executed at Tatisheva. The sons of bitches had fortified themselves since December, built ice ramparts as tall as your wall, which we mounted frontally—”

I said, “Paul.”

He hastened to attack “frontally”: “You didn’t
wait
for me, Alexis.”

“I waited.”

“Not long enough.”

“You hadn’t taken your sword from the banya. You knew you’d return to it.”

“Pray, what makes you think so? I acted on the spur of the moment. I simply forgot it!”

And what do you know, I cast suspicion on the logic of my snow-insane mind all over again:
What if  ?
He saw that I relented, and was more forgiving than defensive when he said, “Let’s just put it to rest, shall we? We have important work to do. Chase Pugachev down. Right?”

Said I, “Sure.”

Paulie, Paulie. His quick little wits buzzed like bees, flew circles around the molasses in January that was my mind. I saw those bees, I just didn’t care enough—or didn’t have the talent—to swat them.

• • •

At least one thing was deeply agreeable: with the troops came my Cyril. And with him, my portmanteau. I no longer had to dress in Andrei’s clothes.

Prince Peter took lodging with us, and in no time the air of the household changed from morose to joyous. The yard filled with Peter’s wonder-lads, who chopped firewood, hauled water, and dragged in lashings
of edibles from the Major General’s personal stash. Anna’s maid blossomed like a crocus, Anna’s cook ran around with trays of pierogi, Anna herself uttered more words in a day than I’d heard from her since my arrival. And I? I had my first ever unchaste dream about her: I went into her bedroom, watched her undress, slipped into bed with her, pushed my knee between her thighs—

If not for the fact that Andrei was in the house—as he always was because he went on living with us—it would have been a good, a very good, dream. But Andrei was just across a thin wall from us, in his bedroom, and I worried that his wound had reopened.

• • •

The leave paper Prince Peter had brought for me was really a reassignment, ordering me to join his command. I broke the news to Anna before dinner one day, when she was going around the table correcting minute imperfections of the tableware’s arrangement. She stopped. She turned a fork tines down.

I could feel the pall descending, I just did not want to understand the reason why it should be. I said, “I had told you that I would escort you to Moscow, and I will. But the road is not safe yet, we both know it. You have to stay here for a little longer.”

She turned the fork on its side.

“Just for another month or two.”

She was looking down, at the now misaligned fork. “Stay alive, please?”

It could be said that I felt a cowardly relief when I left with the troops.

• • •

Go to war,
my brother had said.

It wasn’t a month or two. Whichever way Pugachev ran, thousands sprang to war like hair bristling on the land’s spine. Some joined the rebellion on their own, some were forced. Our army was sprawled over Orenburg Province till June, swinging at uprisings in front of our eyes, scratching at gangs and terrorists at our backs. Then we extended due north, then morphed out toward the east.
That was my war, Andrei.

A war within a war within a war. Christian against Mussulman, nomad against settler, native against transplant, thief against owner, Russian against Russian. Some lashed out and snapped at everything that moved; some didn’t know which way to run, whom to pledge to, what to become. Clergymen dressed as Cossacks, Cossacks as clergy, women dressed as men, men dressed as women to save themselves, and children
turned adults much too soon. Spring turned to summer, summer burned away, and three, four, then five armies crawled blindly upon the land, merged and fissioned, digested and redigested whole villages, revisited their own tracks, bones, and battlegrounds; shot, cut, flogged, flayed, hanged by the rib, mutilated what rose on them, again and again. Every grain field yielded corpses, not bread; every river, corpses, not fish. Dead men caught on plows, caught in weirs. Wives looked for their husbands among the catch, released the unfamiliar ones to float downriver to sea.
That was my war.

Was my war better than yours, Brother? Or worse? Did you—or did you not—let your arm drop, commanding men to push other men into a ditch bristly with stakes? While other men in powdered wigs finished their reports to St. Petersburg, sipping out of teacups?

Svetogorov was made a Guards Major and given a commendation for the Order of St. George. I achieved a reputation of a personally brave but indecisive commander.

• • •

By early September, Pugachev was cavorting between the Volga and the Yayeek, far southwest of Orenburg. Anna packed up the household, took Andrei Junior, and traveled northwest to Moscow with just a handful of servants and occasional armed couriers as road companions. Pugachev was executing his
après nous le déluge,
squeezed between three armies, us included, but still, thousands died. Anna fled from another autumn and winter in Orenburg, and a looming famine, for few had worked the land in summer. Pugachev’s own henchmen hand-delivered him to us, in the end. Anna, my most courageous widow-in-law, made it home safe.

I did not know she’d left when I returned to Orenburg at the close of September, after Pugachev’s capture, and saw the empty house. I stood gaping, until a military wife from the house next door came out and explained. She offered me a place to stay the night. I left within an hour.

Andrei stayed behind.

I
ce is a chrysalis of degradation. The first coat of ice, when it forms on a live creature, is paper thin and translucent; it humbly repeats every curve and crease of the creature’s body. It could be just a second skin, a molting layer. It could, one fancies, reveal a beauteous metamorphosis when shed—a firebird, an angel. However, ice is never shed. It thickens, instead, not a skin now but a cocoon; no longer humble, it soon abandons any resemblance to the creature it covered. A lump, a rock, it joins with other rocks; a sheet, a glacier; it never releases those it had captured.

I dreamed of Anna. I touched her bare shoulders only to feel the first skin of ice under my fingers. It terrified me, because it was I who infected her with ice.

And yet. Abductive reasoning is, I believe, what they would call it years later. Faced with a surprising observation, a mind won’t rest until it conjures a cause from which the observation follows necessarily and logically. That the cause itself may be an oddity is a different matter; besides, given enough time we can construct a whole chain of causes, each progressively less unusual. Thus: why had I been so bizarre on the road to Orenburg? Because I had suffered a temporary debilitation of mind. And why had I suffered such a condition? Due to emotional distress, of course! There was nothing outrageously unusual about any of it, it had no connection to my cold, and it was obviously a onetime ailment, after which I must have developed some sort of tolerance, not unlike a smallpox vaccination.

I truly wanted to believe this. Even when I’d wake up in a sickly gray predawn light, my fingertips still tingling after a dream of having touched Anna’s ice-coated shoulders. Even when I would leave “my” bank of the Neva, the imperial and military bank, with its Winter Palace, its collegiums, its barracks of the Guard, and wander across the bridge
to Vasilievsky Island, where a small building of the Academy of Sciences had made its home. I would see black-clad, wigged, gentlemanly nature-philosophers going in and out with purposeful vigor and busy youths loaded with folios skipping steps up and down the staircase; I would hear French and German speech made unfamiliar by mysterious terms such as
dephlogisticated air
. I would watch how a glass vessel as big as a chair, round-bottomed and long-necked, and sitting in a nest of straw in a wooden cage, would be unloaded from a cart and ascend the stairs, regal as a king in a palanquin. Ushered in by our own genius of science, Mikhail Lomonosov, the Age of Enlightenment had truly arrived, I felt. These practitioners of rational method surely knew all the answers, while I wallowed in my dark age of unknowability. If only I approached them and had the courage to admit that I was profoundly abnormal, in body
and
in mind, and asked for help, would they not help me? Would they not, in fact, rejoice, recognizing in me another
natural phenomenon
?

Or would they declare me a monstrous madman and put me in a cage?

I approached no one. I would turn and cross back over the bridge, to my fears and repressions, and to my military service. On the bright side, I only had to endure the latter for another three years—I was almost done with my mandatory twenty-five (counting since my enlistment at the age of twelve).Then I could retire and dedicate myself to avoiding all emotional distress. Anna was in Moscow, I in St. Petersburg. We both were just grateful that neither had perished, and we looked forward to our respective
ever afters
of peace and quiet. We said and wrote this much to each other on several occasions. End of story.

• • •

In 1776 my father passed away of old age and I found myself owner of the slightly run-down estate of Nikolskoe, about twenty miles away from St. Pete’s. I promptly moved out of the barracks into an apartment of my own, beginning my detachment from the regiment. Then, in the spring of 1776, Anna wrote that she was coming for a visit.

I remember: a bell rang, Cyril opened the door. I poked out of my study—I had been hiding there from the cooking smells that the chef, borrowed from my landlord for the occasion, was producing. I saw Anna in the doorway at the end of the hallway. Her outfit was cream and lettuce-green. Short of breath after climbing two flights of stairs to my floor, she held the hand of Andrei Junior, now a shy seven-year-old. She
did not look grief-stricken anymore. She smiled quizzically at Cyril, as if seeking encouragement—and then stepped over the threshold.

Her maid and a porter with luggage in both hands followed her, and my hallway, almost visibly dim with emanations of beef roast and caramelized sugar, became crowded. She was lifting her hat, carefully, so as not to disturb her hair, and when I approached, she handed the hat to the maid. Her hands were gloved, so I took them in mine. Her thin, bumpy wrists, her pliant, curling palms, her runaway fingers; the smell of road dust and something verdant and moist like cut tulip stems added curiously to my roast and caramel; then she extracted her hands out of my part affectionate, part restraining hold and ran them over my shoulders, past my cheeks, onto my temples, inviting me to bend my neck, and when I did, she stood on tiptoes and drew her cheek snug to mine.

I lurched back, then crouched to greet my godson. Thank God, Cyril and the porter made a bumbling duo. They bumped me on the shoulder with Anna’s portmanteau, and after their apologies, the moment, just like that, was all behind us. “Alexander, is something burning?” Anna asked. “An overzealous cook,” I said.

We must have talked for hours that day, but all I remember was that she thought of moving to St. Petersburg. She said she would like to find a place to rent. Andrei needed the education only the capital could provide. Since the death of my father, I was the only close family left, and the boy needed family.

I kept nodding.