The Age of Ice: A Novel (15 page)

• • •

At the crowning moment my undine, my precious water nymph passed out. The human comedy! She did not look cold—her face was rosy, but still, I feared the worst. I rushed her out of my heat chamber and sank onto the floor by the door, she in my lap, wrapped in sheets.
Anna. Anna, wake up!
Once a cold draft of air in the hallway had worked its way into her covers and my breath had cooled her brow, she opened her eyes and mumbled in a voice that was so sweetly intoxicated, “Alexander? I must have passed out.”

“Were you cold?” I whispered.

“Cold? Silly. I was too hot.”

“Don’t tell Baroness d’Anglairs,” I said. “She won’t understand.”

• • •

Did this happen before or after my lifelong friend Paulie Svetogorov proposed to my Anna? It
had
to have been
after
. He proposed, and she
rejected him, and then made a decision to go with me to my country home.

And if so, when did Svetogorov learn that we had consummated our passion? The moment he saw her again, I am sure. Or the moment he saw me. A certain glow in her face, a certain bounce in my step. One cannot conceal such things from a hungry eye.

And yet, if she ever imagined that our routines of coexistence would change, that I would visit her bedroom as a lover, as a secret husband would, she was wrong. I longed to be with her, but the formidable logistics limited me to but a few carefully orchestrated occasions. Thereby she was to learn that whenever I presented myself to her as her lover, I was—how to put it?—in a hot tub. In other words, the dark swan, the prince of her dreams turned out to be a man of bizarre and restrictive sexual tastes, a water fetishist.

She
was
willing to put up with me, at least at first. And not just put up. I’ve seen how her passion exploded in my hands—an undertow heavy and inescapable that would burst through—a muted shriek, the craned neck. So what salt then eroded her trust? Not the mordant wit of the Baroness d’Anglairs, I hope. Not the dogged persistence of Svetogorov, a poor knight at her service, ready to turn his ear to her grievances!

What demon kept whispering to her that the kind of treatment she was getting from me was suggestive of disrespect? What confusion of faith indoctrinated her that doing it in the water world was more sinful and perverse than to be plastered on the sheets of dry land?

One time she asked me, probing the hot water with her hand, “Is this necessary, Alexander?” And I answered as best I could, which was not enough, “Yes. I am sorry I cannot explain it very well. But it is not a fancy. It is a necessity. Please, forgive me.” She gifted me with a strange, melancholy passion that night, and her eyes were as still as water that is about to freeze.

• • •

By then Ivan Kuznetzov no longer tutored in Anna’s school—she dismissed him. “He is a bad influence on the boys,” she said. Any gossip in St. Petersburg would have told her that I had never looked at another woman; by God, she could see it herself, but I suppose the possibility of Ivan as her competitor could still entrap her mind. This was perhaps the true reason why I backed out of making him my personal secretary—an appointment that he would have loved to accept now that his stipend had fallen through, as had Ivan’s other dream—a private laboratory with
me as some sort of Lord Cavendish, a nobleman-scientist, and him as my trusted assistant and inspired colleague. Let’s just say, my brothel-exsanguination fiasco made me averse to experimentation. I fled to the safety of pure theory.

Cold is not simply an absence of heat.
I read that some considered heat an element
caloric,
which, when united with other elements, raised their temperature. By the same token, cold was thought of the same way—an element called
frigorific,
whose mode of action was fundamentally similar: Caloric plus water made steam. Frigorific plus water made ice. Clearly, I carried too much of the frigorific, that’s all. A comforting thought.

• • •

It was at about that time, 1780, I believe, that I met a certain Commodore Loginov from the admiralty, in the salon of Baroness D’Anglairs. The conversation with Loginov, superfluous at first, soon touched on a subject that ignited my interest. “The empress is beginning to realize,” the commodore mused, “that we have to apply ourselves to geographical exploration. We could either leave the turf open for the British or we could claim it for ourselves. Is it really a choice? Because it is only a matter of time that what they call the Northwest Passage—it will be a Northeast Passage to us—will be found.”

He was talking about the search for a shortcut between Europe and the western coast of the Americas. The coveted passage through the Arctic Ocean, which was supposed to be free of ice, according to experts. The passage that James Cook was sent to find, only to suffer a horrendous death at the hands of aborigines in 1779.

An exploration of the Arctic! A tremor passed over me—to go there and beyond, to the places where stately palaces of ice glide serenely over the pale blue abyss of the ocean!

Before long I was a member of the Arctic Exploration Committee at the admiralty. It is not that I believed that I would actually sail anywhere, I just felt I was in the right company rubbing shoulders with people who discussed topics such as
When does winter glaciation occur in the Bering Strait?
and
How do Inuit people battle snow blindness?

• • •

And then, one day in March 1781, right at the plateau of my limited, guarded, cautious happiness, an officer knocked on my door and handed me a letter. It was a challenge to a duel, issued by none other than Guards Major Svetogorov. The grounds? The honor of a lady.

The lady in question was, of course, Anna.

This I regret: I told her about the duel. I called on her, still holding Svetogorov’s challenge in my hand. Her apartment was a scene of domestic peace: the boys were reciting something in German behind the doors of the study, and Mme Knopf, by the sound of it, was in the kitchen, tasting the cook’s béchamel sauce. None of it stopped me. I all but pushed Anna into her bedroom. I think—I think, for a brief second, she nonetheless expected to hear something good, something emotional and urgent, but wonderful. And then I said, shaking the letter in the air, “What is Svetogorov to you that he has appointed himself as a defender of your honor against me?”

She was dumbfounded. She could not even understand at first. By the time the word
duel
came out, it was a fight already, shouts breaking through whispers, because she kept begging me—through tears—to lower my voice—for the boys’ sake—but I would not, I hounded the one truth I was after, dislodging many more than I was ready for—chains, trains, coils of stowed-away and festering upsets, one linked to another. So, when I cried, “You’ve had him as a suitor for years and you didn’t tell me,” she rebuked me, “You hardly tell me anything about yourself, so why should I? After all these years you are no more approachable, you keep me at arm’s length. Your friend Paulie whom you think stupid but who is just a normal man with a good heart who courts and proposes a marriage to a lady—your friend told me more about you than you did in a decade!”

“And you believe him,” I went on. “
A good heart!
Don’t you know what fantasy he’s capable of, don’t you understand
anything at all
?!”

And at last she shouted, “Do you think that I told him to do it? Is that what you think?!”

My anger turned inward. “God, Anna, I’m sorry. Forgive me. I shouldn’t have come.” I slumped to my knees, then lower yet, sat on my haunches. I reached to hold her by the hem of her skirt.

She curled her lips. “Yes you should have. How else would we have talked?”

I laid the hem over my knee, stretched and smoothed it. “I’ve upset you. I hate to upset you because I can’t handle it. I can handle
my
upsets, I can just kill them and bury them, but your upsets are so much worse—”

“
Kill
and
bury
?”

“My upset emotions, I mean.”

She blotted her eyes dry. “I’ll go to him and tell him to reconsider. He will listen to me.”

This
he will listen
seared me with jealousy again. My fists trapped the hem of her dress. I wanted to twist and crumple the fabric. “No, absolutely not, never. Promise me you won’t do it.”

“I can’t.”

“WHY?”

“What if you die?”

“I don’t care! I’d rather die than have you go begging a madman for my life!”

“Do you want me to become a widow twice over? How do you think I’ll live?”

“Don’t you understand? Svetogorov won’t listen to you, no, he’ll
bargain
with you. So what exactly are you prepared to
offer
him in exchange for one chance to take a shot at me, for a chance—not a sure thing—that I’ll be hit?”

“He is not like that, he is a decent man!”

“Are you defending him again?”

Fresh tears filled her eyes. “You are being cruel. Let go of my dress. Let go!” She pulled the hem out of my hands and went to the window; she looked outside, repositioned the drapes. I got to my feet. I said, “This is how it is going to be. You shall not go to him, write, or speak to him about this matter. Understood?”

She did not reply. She was facing away from me. She pulled her shoulders up, stiff, as if she felt chilled. I stood for a while, then I left the room.

• • •

What if I told her that I myself was considering seeing Svetogorov?

He was in his sitting room, playing with his blade when I entered, tossing up candles and chopping them midair. He also had a jolly officer company gathered around, and at least half of them sprang up on seeing me, formed a cordon between us, and went on to remind me about the code of honor. “Hey hey hey—Alexander
Mikhailovich—Prince Velitzyn—you can’t be here on your own behalf ! Where is your second, sir?”

Paulie made a show of sheathing his sword. “Look who’s here.” He strutted back and forth. I said, “I need to have a word with him and I will.” The men closed in around me. “Come now,” I said, “stand back. What are we going to do—fight?
That
part is already penciled in for later.” One of the men, a veteran with an eye patch, told me, sotto voce, “Alexander Mikhailovich, but you know how this works, don’t you, my friend? We won’t leave you two alone, so whatever you say may be rendered ineffectual by the very fact of our presence.”

I said, “I’ll give it a try.” As they eased off, I pleaded to Svetogorov, “Paul—look at me. Let your guests bear witness: I don’t care if my visit is considered cowardly, I am here to remind you of something. I challenged you years ago, remember that day? You said you wouldn’t fight me. It was the right thing to do, the best thing a friend could do. I was not myself then and you were right to point it out. I owe you that. So here I am now and I’m urging you—reconsider. We can sort this out. We don’t have to go to extremes to resolve this, it is not a Gordian knot. Reconsider, Paul.”

I thought I’d got through to him. I thought I had. He seemed to be introspecting, but it turned out he was merely searching for the sharpest riposte. “Hmm, let me see if I’ve got this right. Prince Velitzyn is telling me I am deranged and he is sensibility incarnate. Why, thank you.” He furrowed his brow in mock pensiveness. “The way I remember it, I had said then that you need to fix yourself first. Well, I see you’ve fixed yourself quite well, a purveyor of good sense. So we can fight then, I surmise!”

And that was it. The eye-patch bearer turned to me. “You did what you came here for. Now you’d better go.”

I took a breath, studying Paulie—not a crack in his visage of amusement. Why would I not turn around and leave? Because, whatever else I may have thought about it, I had not come here to seek peace alone. I’d come to get him to talk about Anna—peace or war—to glean what he had been to her. So I said, “All right. Then let’s make it clear: what will we fight about? About me calling you a fool twenty years ago? Or about you appointing yourself to protect the honor of the lady who in fact has not requested any of your protection?”

Now
I’d got through. He bristled. “Has not requested? Then how do I know about your escapades in the first place? About the way you use her, denying her the decency of marriage?”

Those words were like a surprise cannon going off. Had she . . . indeed told him everything about us? I drew forward, “You lying son of a bitch!”

“Freak!”

Paulie’s pals grabbed me like brambles, pushing me back and bouncing Paulie in the other direction as I shouted,
You have no honor! You’re just out to hurt her for rejecting you!
while Paulie raged,
I should have
whipped your ass with the full ten lashes instead of five that day, I should’ve flicked my wrist to teach you a damned good lesson from the get-go—

They goaded me out. I was back at the front door now and it had been closed; only the eye-patch veteran remained with me, restraining—or steadying—me by the forearm.
“Flicked his wrist?”
he repeated and shook his head. “See now, Alexander Mikhailovich, what comes out of this kind of talk?”

I rubbed my face. My hands were shaky, as if not my own. “I suppose . . . Who is his second?”

“I am,” he said, and introduced himself—Major Kaledin. He let go of my forearm and watched me, as if testing whether I’d stand or fall.

“I suppose you’ll hear from my second before tomorrow,” I replied.

“Will do.”

I turned and took the stairs down.

• • •

He is lying.

She had not told him anything about me. No. Yes. No.
My mind, like a rabid dog, kept chasing itself around the triangle—Anna, I, Svetogorov—picking and dropping blame, pity, hate.

I enlisted Commodore Loginov as my second. He and Kaledin organized everything splendidly: the time, the place, pistols inspection. The rules. One shot at twenty paces was all we would get. Misfires, failures to spark, et cetera, counted as shots. Loginov said, “If either of the parties would like to make a final statement, to be disclosed in the event of death, please write it and leave it in your pocket for us to discover.”