The Age of Ice: A Novel (19 page)

That was my hope too.

• • •

One day in late October the weirs across the Yasachnoi trapped four dozen fat
nalime
—burbot. Oh how we feasted! The fish kept coming, dearth turned to glut for a week—and then back, as was the way of things in Siberia. Then flour shipments started arriving now and then from the Middle Kolyma Fort. We ate it boiled in fish oil. And between shipments we learned to venture out and scavenge what cargo or carrion had been abandoned by the wayside of our supply line. Packhorses had been falling and dying along it for miles.

The crew started building two sloops, fifty and thirty-six feet in keel. The timber had to be felled two miles away and dragged to the river. The beasts of burden did not last long, but new ones were procured from local
tribes. The end-of-the-world land was apparently populated. There was livestock and habitation, trade and travel. People
lived
here, the natives—Yakuti tribes mostly, hunters and fishermen who belonged to the same widespread race as Inuit and Mongols, and the Russians—were transplants from lands back west. They lived here year-round. Couldn’t
we
? I wedged a thermometer into a crack in my wall. I lay and watched how a tail of mercury in the glass tube above my head got shorter and shorter, as if it were crawling away from me, into the ground.

Days were shrinking and with the darkness came the cold. I took to measuring temperatures several times a day, a night. The temperature next to the hearth inside our hut was +12º Réaumur; the temperature next to my wall was +3º. I prayed for wind, not for my own but for others’ sake. Wind meant warmer weather, snowfall. Quiet meant a deep freeze. November 5, 4 a.m., ‒35º Réaumur. November 13, 12 noon, ‒38.5º. 12 midnight, ‒40º. November 17, ditto. 18, ditto. Ten ounces of mercury in a stopped vial froze in three hours, brandy became thick as molasses, day became a thinner shade of night.

At ‒40º Réaumur, axes bounced off tree trunks and shattered. Something snapped and shot in the forest, as if trees exploded like firecrackers. At ‒40º, a man’s exhalation froze in front of his face and fell to the ground as snow. Everyone’s inhalation, including mine, made a tearing sound. Everyone but me complained of pain in the chest. Everyone’s eyeballs hurt but mine. At ‒40º, men stayed in confinement of their hovels. Everything stopped. I worried. A frightful fancy hatched in my mind: if the temperature fell below negative forty-five, the lowest setting on all my thermometers, something intractable and calamitous would happen. Humans and beasts would turn into porcelain. Wood into iron. Air into dust. Earthly elements would become as strange as the northern lights, which ignited daily by now.
Negative forty-five will be the temperature point of transfiguration
.

On November 20, I went outside in the middle of the night, thermometer in one hand and in the other, a long cedar splinter burning at the tip, to illuminate the thermometer’s scale. While the column of spirit kept sinking into its reservoir, I stood and listened to my body.
What do you feel? Do you feel cold?
 . . .
Anything?

The sky, enormous, black, and star-studded, pressed down on us, squeezing us into a thin pelt. Within it, every hovel plus the forge burned wood feverishly, hummed with voices—the crazed glow of a sick ward.
A door slammed, something wooden cracked. Somebody wallowed out stringing obscenities. A discordant song flared elsewhere, morphing into a fight. A woman’s voice rose in a plaintive chant of distress there is no English word for—but there was always a Russian one,
prichitanie—
and a deranged male voice unloaded abuse on the woman. Only our horses were silent, packed into a dark, patient crowd next to the smithy. And high above it all, the northern lights played, self-absorbed, a supreme radiance that brought neither light nor warmth. I listened.
What do you feel? I feel worried. Other than that, nothing.

I went inside: through a rickety door, a stiff bearskin, two sheets of canvas. My companions huddled around a fire. No one could sleep. Sawyer read to Robeck out of Fénelon’s tome. Merck sat with his eyes closed, indifferent to Sawyer’s English. They looked shrunken, frightened. Sawyer said, “How goes it, Mr. Velitzyn?”

“Northern lights,” I said.

“Local Yakuti think it’s spirits warring in the air.”

Robeck addressed me amicably, “
Some blindo outheieh
?”

I looked to Sawyer for translation.

“Mmm . . . A sustained drunkenness?” Sawyer said.

“
Zapoi
?” I offered.

“
Za-poi,
” Robeck affirmed. “
Theyougo
.
Whadotheysay bau Cossacks
?
Thamon isasot
.”

Sawyer: “Which man?”

Robeck: “Our Mr. Feodor.
Ablody boozington
.”

“Oh,
that
man.” Sawyer shook his head. “Bad apple.”

I took some of my fur garb off and sat down. Merck opened his eyes, saw my thermometer. “How cold is it, Mr. Velitzyn?”

“Forty-two below zero. Cold.”

“
Kholod,
” Robeck repeated after me. “Cold.
Kholod
. Same word.”

“No,” Sawyer said, “it’s in between
cold
and
hold
. It’s the cold that holds you in its grip.”

Veritably so!
I said, “What about
moroz
?
A
nd
stoozha
? And
metel, viyuga, purga, buran
?”

“Frost—” Sawyer began but Robeck sprang in, “That’s
morose,
and
stogy,
and—
whawasit?
—
purgatory? Purge
!”

Now the mood improved. Sawyer scratched his nose. “Let’s see: flurries, then blizzard, a bigger blizzard, and a ferociously tremendous blizzard! And what is
stoozha,
Mr. Velitzyn?”

“Very big
kholod
.” I hazarded a mixture of English and Russian, which caused further merriment. Even Merck cracked a smile.

“That’s right,” Robeck said, laughing, “a
stogy
cold. A
morose
cold!”

Thus went our first English‒Russian lesson, thank God for it. Thank God for the languages we first grasped from their back end, learning twenty words for
liquor
and
drunkard
and ten words for
chamber pot
before the word for
mother
or
God;
learning that there were many more Russian than English words for bitter frost but many more English than Russian words for jest, and that most of those Russian words for jest had been borrowed from English anyway. Thank God for learning all that and even for never quite knowing whether the words I’d adopted could be found in a general vocabulary of the British nation or were Robeck-Sawyer inventions—because we made our own pidgin as we went, the language of an eighty-square-foot country of an earthen hut entrenched in the deep Siberia, a language where extreme cold was called a
stogy morose
and was thereby rendered less frightening. Thank God for that.

• • •

And yet it was cold. December clenched us in its hold as I learned my English from
Jack and Jill
and the Lord’s Prayer. Then I learned from Sawyer’s books. Sawyer had come to Siberia prepared. Along with Fénelon he’d lugged in
Gulliver’s Travels, Utopia,
and adventures of Sir John Mandeville and of Thomas James, the latter a true account of a maritime ordeal in the Arctic. Sawyer was ready to meet his share of novelties—be they giants, one-legged people, or merely a perfect social order. “Thus says Fénelon,” he’d read. “ ‘
Remember that the countries where the power of the sovereign is the most absolute are those where the sovereigns are the least powerful.’
Back home, Mr. Velitzyn, this book is in so high a regard, they hold contests among fourteen-year-old girls for the best French-to-English translation of selected passages. And yet you tell me you have not heard about
Telemachus
! Come: the son of Odysseus embarks on a journey to find his father, accompanied by Mentor, who is Athena in disguise. No? Mentor teaches Telemachus the enlightened ways to arrange and govern a human commonwealth. Still no?”

I only read
Gulliver,
I’d say, and compared to your tender-aged British lassies, I was a manifest ignoramus. He’d respond cheerily,
Well let me educate you then
 . . .

And still, it was cold.

• • •

So cold and dark that the shipbuilding work slowed, and our party could do little more than pray and hold on, subsist till the winter bottomed out. So cold . . . but the truth was, if I did not have a thermometer by my side at all times, if I did not observe others, did not catalog meteorological portents, I would not have known how cold it was.
I did not feel anything
. I pretended. A negative thirty or forty felt the same as negative twenty. If the world reached the temperature point of transfiguration, what would become of me?

At ‒43, the brandy finally froze solid in my test vial. The night after that, a fire broke out in the forge and spread to the next shack, which happened to hold our whole store of brandy. The alcohol started exploding, horses screamed, men spilled out of their hovels and attacked the flames, their zeal perhaps invigorated by a threat of losing all the booze. We beat down the fire and dragged the casks out of harm’s way.

Fighting fire in ‒40º weather took its toll—in frostbite. The hardest-hit casualty was one of the coopers, Semyon. His hands were white and unmoving. He held them aloft, repeating, “Winked them off!” They gave a sound like stones when knocked together, which demonstration the wretch kept performing upon request. Flesh
did
turn into porcelain. I peeled back Semyon’s sleeves, tempted to see the boundary where white turned into pink. It was so abrupt. I scraped at the skin: it was rough and perfectly hard. “Hold ’em over fire?” he asked.

Robeck made orders for a bucket of cool water. Soon after Semyon submerged his hands, the water iced up. I could not believe my eyes. I urged Robeck to wait to change the water until I took a thermometer reading. The mercury slid below zero.

It took an hour to turn porcelain back into flesh. Overnight, it became dark red and swollen. What
is
the temperature of living flesh?

• • •

Sawyer said he’d read in Sir Mandeville that in a situation such as ours, stranded in the Arctic archipelago of Nova Zembla (the man had managed to get that far in the bloody fourteenth century, he would add; this meant we could do much, much better!), Mandeville’s crew was confronted by a crippling side effect of frost: their words would freeze straight out of their mouths and hang in the air like lines of laundry. No one could hear anything anyone said, only read it if they were literate—a rare skill then. But when the weather turned, everything ever said, including oaths and curses, blasphemies and defamations uttered in various
moments of hardship, thawed and began bouncing “about the ears of the astonished company.”

“Imagine,” Sawyer said, “if but a fraction of our foul-mouthed Mr. Feodor’s utterances was inadvertently preserved and thawed at the wrong moment. Imagine what an earful Captain Billings would get!”

I did imagine. Below the negative forty-five, as everything would be
transfigured,
everyone will freeze surrounded by his last words. Semyon the cooper will freeze supine in a pool of his groans. Only his hands—now engorged and with a blackening and cracking skin—will stick out. Sawyer will freeze dressed in a fine hoarfrost of Fénelon’s sayings. And Cossack Feodor—with a long, stout blasphemy racking his gullet like some medieval device of torture.

After the fire, Captain Billings held an inquiry. He blamed the incident on Feodor—or at the very least on the spirit of drunken irresponsibility embodied by Feodor. Sawyer spent hours interpreting, saw plenty of Feodor and his bloodshot eye. And plenty of Feodor’s pregnant wife.

She was Yakuti, and judging from her looks, barely out of childhood; a tiny girl in Russian-style garb much too big for her that made her into a tapered bundle, her face circumscribed by a giant red kerchief. She was skittish but curious, watching our comings and goings whenever she assumed we weren’t looking. She was four or five months pregnant. She often appeared with an older woman at her side (her mother perhaps?) who lived in a yurt not far from Feodor’s izba.

The pair would often shovel snow to clear the passage to the izba. One day, I remember, she was trying to break ice off the porch. Due to Feodor’s habit of emptying buckets of waste water in every direction, the ice was very thick there. Her wooden shovel was inadequate for the job; the fire poke only marginally better. Sawyer stepped out of the izba’s door right when she slipped and fell—or maybe his appearance on the scene was what caused her fall in the first place. She gathered herself on all fours, holding the bottom of her belly. Her brittle mother was fluttering over her but she was not getting up. Sawyer knelt and offered a hand.

The girl did not take it. She rose on her own, the unclaimed hand still there, just a foot away from her face—as if the offer itself lifted her. Sawyer had to pick up her fire poke instead.

Sawyer’s command of Russian—it should be said—was quite remarkable, most of the time. Only when very anxious, he would slip into the language of his childhood, the pidgin of sailors and tradesmen he had
soaked up in Solombala, Archangel’s port of entry. Then he would say
slooshte
as an address, which is corrupted Russian for
hey, listen
; or
tvoya,
for everything from
you
to
your
to
he
or
she
.

Thus, now: “
Slooshte, tvoya
 . . . name what?”

She did not dare understand him or look him in the eye. But he still held the fire poke hostage.

He hefted it, said, “It’s no good.”