The Age of Ice: A Novel (16 page)

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Authors: J. M. Sidorova

BOOK: The Age of Ice: A Novel
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The night before the duel was terrible. I needed sleep or my aim would suffer, but could not get any. I had a glass of Cognac brandy and forced myself to part with the bottle. Or else—hangover, shaky hands. I wrote down my bequests (everything I owned went to Andrei Junior), then I wrote him a letter. Then I began to write one to Anna and tore it up, wrote another, and it followed the same fate.

It’s my fault. It’s your fault. I love you. I cannot love you anymore.

I imagined how at this same time, across town, a balding, forty-something-year-old boy with a belly-bulge, a formerly dashing not young anymore lonely Guards Major Svetogorov was scratching
his
last words on
his
sheet of paper. An ink-fingered, endangered man—just as I was—convinced that whatever words he’d choose, they would forever soothe—or hurt—the woman he wrote to. I grabbed my remaining flintlock and
ran to my sitting room, where I positioned myself in front of a mirror in my best duel stance (right side forward, stomach drawn in, right arm in line with chest), aiming into the face of my dim reflection. I asked, “Why did these people do this to you? Answer me! I don’t want to shoot at Paulie or fall out of love with Anna. I don’t want it!”

The obstinate mirror twin only glared back. “Fire!” I said. And—click. The pistol was unloaded, of course. I lowered my arm: my mirror twin still stood his ground. I took a candelabra and approached. The man in the mirror was the same me that I’d known for years. But what was it, frozen into his features? The kindness of snow? The cruelty of ice? Was it ice in his mouth?
So, whose blood are you reddened with, freak?

A pang of terror. I backed away, fled to my study. There, I wrote:
Anna, I loved you the only way I could. I was born with a mental and physical defect that would have hurt you if not for the water. I am sorry if I made you unhappy. I was too much in love with you to let you go.

• • •

The next morning: the March sun, fresh air. The arrival. The site was in a birch grove. A perfunctory call for reconciliation, refused. A pat-down for coins, badges, anything that could deflect a ball. Selecting a proper orientation of both parties to the wind. Then to the background and to the sun. Measuring of the distance. Loading of the pistols. Getting into position. Set . . . Fire!

We fired.

I kept standing. So did he. A ticklish stream of liquid reached my armpit and started flowing down the side of my trunk. Then he collapsed.

I remembered to lower my arm. I walked to the parked carriages, shaking blood off my fingers, but it kept trickling from inside the sleeve. I stuffed my hand in my pocket, burying it in the letters I brought with me. I waited for the surgeon to return from Svetogorov. “Well, nothing I can do there,” he said, “Let’s take a look at you, sir.” The surgeon pulled the ball out of my upper arm right on the spot, while I stared away, at Svetogorov’s body.

“Bed rest and hot water bottles,” the surgeon said. “Highly recommend. You show signs of shock, my dear sir.”

I nodded. Svetogorov’s voice in my head kept taunting,
So, whose blood are you reddened with, Alexis?

Yours, Paulie,
I whispered.

When he returned from the body, Loginov shook his head. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?” I repeated stupidly.

“Nothing.”

“Where did I hit him?”

“In the face.”

• • •

I will never know. Silence was the only message Paulie had prepared in the event of his death. Perhaps he truly had nothing to say. Perhaps he had already told Anna everything he wanted to say. All I know is, our fates had come full circle. Years ago, I had approached Anna to get closer to my brother. Now she may have approached Svetogorov to get closer to me. The rest followed.

After the duel, I asked Commodore Loginov to deliver the news of my survival to my sister-in-law. Then I headed straight for my country estate, twelve miles away. In just a couple of hours I climbed into my clawfoot tub, curled up, and closed my eyes. Sometime later came a knock on the door to the sauna. I so wished it would be Anna. It was Cyril, wondering if I needed anything.

• • •

Cut it off, bury it, leave it behind. In the weeks that followed, Anna and I made a truce, though it was as delicate as new ice crust. One had to tiptoe and follow very narrow, predefined paths. I continued to appear alongside her in those public places where such appearances mattered, and performed the parental responsibilities due to my godson—

No. We didn’t make a “truce.” I simply came back, much like my brother came back from the grave in my dreams in Orenburg and took his seat at the dinner table as if nothing had happened. It was Andrei Junior’s fencing lesson, so I’d come to pick him up as I always did. Afterward, Anna asked,
Would you like to stay for dinner,
and I did.

 . . . But to invite her to my heat chamber ever again, or even to broach the subject of
not
inviting her—a sheer, unthinkable impossibility.

• • •

If I had not been obsessed with hot water before, I now became a compulsive soaker. Feeling melancholy?—Soak it. Feeling angry, powerless, mistreated?—Soak it. Besides, water was my only conduit to her, the only medium of many precious memories. I would sit in my tub and reimagine, rerun, review. Once, I fell asleep in the tub and made love to her in my dream; the dream turned so real that my body was fooled. My paroxysm startled me out of sleep and, disoriented, I could not understand
why the water around me was so strange, covered with film—a fragile, breaking kind, a slough of my passion. Then I suddenly understood, and scrambled out of the tub in terror. It was ice. Ice formed over me when I dreamed of Anna. Had I slept there any longer I could have ended up embedded in it!

Later, sitting on the edge of the tub and watching the incipient ice floes melt and vanish, I thought of
seeding crystals
. In his
Prodromus Crystallographiae,
Capeller said that symmetry of crystals was underpinned by the sameness of their tiny building blocks—
moleculi
. And Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the famous
microscopist,
saw tiny building blocks of man’s seed, the moving, swimming
animalculi
. Were my
animalculi
more like
moleculi?
Did they form crystals instead of being alive, wiggling about? Was I less alive? I seeded crystals. I made icicles endure like diamonds—

Had I . . . those times when I’d made love to Anna, in this very hot tub, if I hadn’t withdrawn from her at the last moment, would I . . . have infested her with crystals of ice? Would I have harmed her?

I slumped to the floor, made sick by self-hate. I wanted to break my teeth gnashing at the tub’s edge.
No. No! I hadn’t harmed anybody!

He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

• • •

All that notwithstanding, I did not miss a single meeting of the Arctic Exploration Committee, which had by then become quite wrapped in politics. I thought it was our intent to keep the Britons out of the equation, what with the way we signaled to them with our League of Armed Neutrality, with wrangling over import tariffs, and with the rumors that our trade agreement that was set to expire in 1786 would not be renewed, at least not on “most favored country” terms. But one day we were introduced to a certain Sir James Harris, an envoy to the empress’s court, and from then on we suddenly found ourselves cooperating with the very country we sought to outperform in the matter of exploration of the higher latitudes.

At the time, Russian exploration was on a long break. If it proceeded at all, it was as a slow encroachment of Cossacks on native Siberian tribes. That’s what our Arctic committee, and Loginov foremost, had been droning into the empress’s ear for years: the Russian Empire needed to show organized effort, claim her own Northeast and put it on
her
maps. Loginov droned and droned, only to merit a mere nod of amusement from the empress. And yet—one pitch made by two foreigners, a certain Mr.
Coxe, who had published a book on Cook’s travels, and Dr. Pallas, a visiting scientist—and suddenly the expedition to the Arctic was an imminent reality.

Like other committee members, I felt a pinch to my national pride, until Loginov explained it all to me one evening in the privacy of his study over a well-chilled bottle of Swedish aquavit and a tray of black caviar canapés: Let the Britons need us, because, Lord witness, they do. Their best bet to find the Northwest Passage, the inimitable Captain Cook, had failed. So let us accept British help in money and fine scientific instruments, and swallow it, biting off the attached strings. Or some of the strings, at any rate. I argued, our trade treaty terms would soften toward the Britons now, wouldn’t they? That, they would, he opined. We toasted the future with our tiny shots of fine, imported aquavit.

Soon we heard that the British navy lieutenant Joseph Billings was the only qualified candidate to lead the expedition, according to Count Semyon R. Vorontsov, our ambassador in London. Granted, Billings had sailed with Cook, but merely as an astronomer’s assistant—the position Ivan Kuznetzov was in when I had met him on my road to Orenburg.

Speaking of which, the expedition needed astronomers and I thought of Ivan. By then, the poor student was nursing his life’s disappointments with melancholy poetry rather than doing anything practical. I felt culpable: it wasn’t just the crash of his tutoring career, the crash that Anna (and I—by inaction) had instigated. Let’s also say, I did not offer to put Ivan on the expedition’s roster in order to send him away from me—and prove to Anna that I was not attached to him. I named Ivan to Dr. Pallas, but he requested a written proposal for astronomical studies, a document Ivan could not draft in time.

The next time I called on Ivan, he was alone in his den—the basement apartment where I had partied more than once with him and his libertine friends. The room, damp and dark, oppressed me now. Or perhaps it was the way Ivan sat, crouching on a ridiculously low chair, a baby chair almost. He was sitting within a narrow rectangle of lit space, daylight squeezing through the window, three-quarters of which were below the street level. His knees were locked, his feet turned inward, a folio and some papers were in his lap, and an inkwell was on the floor to his one side, a bottle of vodka to the other. The sight pained me.

“Let’s take a ride,” I said. It was the end of April, a wet, breezy day. We drove all the way to the seaside of Vasilievsky Island, a raw windswept
beach, straight as a blade. We stood and watched a schooner struggle against headwinds to make way into the Gulf of Finland, past the guardian island of Kronstadt. Then I caught him staring at me. The cold light of the April sun was not kind to him. He’d never filled in, he’d remained boylike, only dried up a bit more, and he looked taut and brittle now, his skin approaching the texture and color of eggshell.

“They discovered a new planet,” he said. “Uranus.”

“Who?”

He waved his hand toward the West. His eyes were teary, abraded by the wind. That’s when I thought, What would have happened if I had let him love me? No, more: if he, not Anna had been my
lover
? Could I have lived that life? Could it have sustained me better than what I had—or had not?

Would any one of us be happier today?

He said, “It could have been me,” and I was fairly sure he spoke about discovering planets, but another meaning seeped through.
It could have been me, not Anna.

I hurried to change the subject. “Regarding your proposal. Timing is becoming yet more important. Mr. Billings apparently claims he would make the astronomical observations all by himself—he considers himself an expert. So, if you really want to get in, you have to act now.”

“Sir, I—”

“You are not going to do it.”

“It’s no use.”

“I’ll talk to the commodore. We’ll induce Pallas to make it less onerous.”

“Thank you, my Prince. You are too kind. But there is no point. Dr. Pallas I’m sure has his favorites. Besides, I am not built well enough to endure the Arctic.”

I started to walk back uphill to my ride.

“Prince Alexander . . .”

I stopped. “I can recommend you as a tutor to a family or two in Moscow. Or even farther out. St. Pete’s does not seem to agree with you.”

“Thank you for your kindness. I shouldn’t let you trouble yourself on my account.”

“And if I insist?”

“I’d rather stay here if I might.”

“Why?”

He tarried with the answer.

“Let me rephrase it. If I went with the expedition, would you come?”

Baffled, he only made a few helpless sounds. I watched him for several seconds, then continued on my way uphill. If he did manage to utter his
yes,
at long last, I did not hear him, the rustle of surf drowned his words.

• • •

I suppose one can live like that, year in, year out. But sooner or later, there comes a day . . . My nephew and I were in the imperial manège, where he was doing jumps for his aptitude test. I applauded his steady handling of his Arabian through a couple of bullfinches. The boy was proud of himself: that sprightly short gallop he elicited from his beast was a show-off; and afterward he dismounted next to me like a ready-made
garde à cheval
.

“Well done,” I said. “You’re already a better rider than me.” This may have given him courage to proceed.

“Uncle,” he said. “Why didn’t you marry
Maman
?”

So he knew. He’d pieced it together, my fourteen-year-old nemesis, who stood lightly blushing but not averting his gaze, a boy dark-eyed and clear-faced like Anna, and with hair the color of ripe wheat, like my brother. Shocked at first, I next felt an odd tingle of hope: what if I
could
share my secret with him? A young and open mind might well be just what it takes to accept me as I was, with all my anomalies. I took off my gloves. “You know how spouses are expected to be very close to each other? Close—skin to skin, that is what spouses do, right?”

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