The Age of Ice: A Novel (25 page)

He was not.

It was a memorable scene, later at the “local dungeon,” where I waited for Sawyer to bring Billings. At length, Sawyer arrived alone and shook his head to my silent question. He went to break the news to Ledyard while I stayed in the guards’ tearoom. Almost in no time Ledyard was marched through, handcuffed and wedged between two officers—a swift efficiency quite surprising for our authorities. “Ah, Mr. Velitzyn,” Ledyard addressed me, his quick eyes scouring the room. “My so-called
friends
are abandoning me!”

Sawyer and I followed him outside, where a kibitka with four sturdy, government-issue ponies was already waiting for him. “What royal conveyance! I must be an important spy,” Ledyard went on jesting. “Farewell, my dear Sawyer! Remember your old colonel, you whippersnapper!” He tried to leap into the kibitka with gallantry but the handcuffs and his two ungraceful handlers made it quite impossible. The doors clasped, the whip swished, the horses clumped off.

I took a glance at Sawyer: his lips were white with ire. “You gammy brat,” he muttered. I perceived that if one ever wanted to end a friendship with Sawyer, one only had to call him a
whippersnapper
. The rest, however, was a puzzle.

We took a stroll back to our lodgings, down a street lined with picket fences. Well-kept houses behind the fences had lace-curtained windows that glowed with warm light. We walked in manifest silence, Sawyer half a step ahead, arms crossed, I—behind, musing. The Ledyard incident disturbed me. I was about to part ways with my fellows; how unfortunate that we would do so on such a muddled, off-key note. I said, “Mr. Sawyer—I want you to know, I don’t always find my country’s incarceration decisions well informed or justifiable. I wish this lightning-bolt efficiency was reserved for the likes of Feodor. Alas, his type waxes on their fiefs like decade-old ticks, while a traveling foreigner is plucked out. I am sorry this had to happen.”

“Don’t be,” Sawyer dropped over his shoulder.

I thought he was irate still. “Mr. Billings must have found no way to help Mr. Ledyard.”

“He had no such intent.”

“Beg your pardon?”

Sawyer stopped, as if making up his mind. Then he turned toward me, his face brightening up a bit. “Strictly between you and me, you might like to know, Mr. Velitzyn, that Mr. Billings brought Mr. Ledyard—and you—here to rid himself of you both. He asked the authorities for this. The Governor General. Do you know what he was told? Mr. Velitzyn—out of the question. Mr. Ledyard—by all means.”

I was dumbstruck. “Us
both
 . . . me? Why?! Not because—” I froze, rubbing my forehead, while Sawyer smirked, explaining, “Mr. Ledyard—I suppose because he blathered embarrassing stories about Mr. Billings as a youngster. And about how he had won the United States their independence from us. And you”—his brow fluttered—“you know, your
hibernation,
perhaps. And—well, the
Feodor incident
.”

My heartbeat boomed in my head. “I don’t know what to say to that.”

He smiled, closemouthed, his chin and lower lip crimping into a sad but—dared I hope?—sympathetic aspect. “No worries, Mr. Velitzyn. Robeck and I, if you must know, pleaded for you before Mr. Billings, so we are far from disappointed. And since we’re talking about it . . . we don’t care what had happened, exactly. We’ve always thought you might have had a hand in Feodor’s accident. And we don’t mind that. This botch of an expedition is better with you than without you. That’s all.”

• • •

I stayed with the expedition. Not because Billings wanted me out. Not because someone, Commodore Loginov, most likely, had indicated to the governor that removing me was above his or Billings’s station. I stayed because I wanted to. Because my friends wanted me to stay.

For the next year and a half I stayed, while we moved supplies from Irkutsk to Okhotsk. And in July 1789 I stayed, when, in Okhotsk, we were—at last!—launching our brand-new ships, the
Slava Rossii
(
Glory of Russia
) and the
Dobroe Namerenie
(
Good Intent
), and the latter wrecked on a shoal within hours, and to add insult to injury, an imperial dispatch arrived ordering us to abort the sailing if we hadn’t sailed out yet, and recall our navy officers to the new war with Sweden. We hadn’t sailed out yet, but now we did, in one ship instead of two and grimly ignoring the order because, after four years of failures and preparations, to give up now was more than anyone could bear. We sailed, and I was aboard, despite reading in a letter from Andrei, now a twenty-year-old officer who no longer asked me any questions in his letters,
I do believe Maman no longer regards you with umbrage. Though she would not say it, I think
she misses you. She may not have even realized how long your absence would be. I certainly feel as if you’ve been away forever. Do write her a letter, Uncle, it will please her mightily.

I replied,
Please tell your mother for me that I keep her in my prayers,
and in seven months I received a response.
Maman tells me to tell you that she wishes you good health and fortune in completing the grand task and returning home.

Still, I stayed. I stayed as we wintered in the St. Peter and Paul Harbor in Kamchatka and then went to the Aleutian Islands and the American coast in a surprise detour to inspect Russian furrier operations, had a few close calls and, come fall, limped back to Kamchatka on two out of three masts and almost out of fresh water. I stayed for another year, to sail out again, this time—finally!—for the Bering Strait. I stayed till the life we led had become the only life I knew. Till everyone—excepting Billings—changed to fit Siberia, and learned how to stock up on good salted meat and booze, and where to find cheap and obedient labor, and whose word not to trust; till Robeck learned Russian, I learned English, and we both learned how to outcuss any Cossack; till Sawyer forgot Ouchapin and had a breakdown and a major falling-out with Billings; till Merck stopped sending nervous glances my way and, locked contentedly in the loneliness of his mind, dedicated himself to collecting flora, fauna, and minerals everywhere we went.

I stayed till the opinion that Billings was inadequate for the job became a matter of fact. The poor man was cursed not just with the
lack
but with the
opposite
of charisma. He clung to his tea service and tasked his servants to display and use it in the most rugged and hostile environments. He acquired a pet water spaniel. In a different man, a quest to stay civilized would have elicited respect, in Billings it elicited snickers.

Still I stayed.

• • •

One winter in Kamchatka, Billings sent me to map out and study the area’s hot springs. I joined Merck, draftsman Voronin, jaeger Lapin, who knew taxidermy, and two Kamchadal guides.

Kamchatka, one must observe, is a restless cauldron. Rumbles, shivers, and shakes of the land were commonplace. Smoking volcanoes abounded: Alaid, Opalsky, Avacha, Tolbachik, Klyuchevskoy. But nowhere was this anger more evident than near hot springs. It was in the air—in the smell of sulfur, in the humid, mineral exhalations from the earth’s fissures.
Steaming—even boiling—water gushed, sprayed, and oozed out of holes in the earth like serum breaking through taut skin. It was winter, but ice kept its distance from the springs. Its vanguard edge thinned, it seemed a deflected, if not defeated, army—and I liked that.

Truly, I did.

It had been three years since my freeze-and-thaw miracle, and Merck and I had long settled on keeping our interactions to a reticent though respectful minimum. But one evening around a campfire I broke this routine—feeling mellow and safe with all that heat around us, I suppose. I asked Merck what had brought him to the Russian Siberia. He set aside his writing and answered, “My uncle.” That uncle, Johann Heinrich Merck, was the one member of the family in Darmstadt who had interests outside pharmaceuticals and ailments. He had fascinated young Carl with stories of faraway countries, lands that ran east, uninterrupted, almost as far as the New World. He was a friend of Dr. Pallas’s. He had even hosted a group of writers, the Circle of Sentimentalists. (
Kreis der Empfindsamen,
Merck enunciated.) Herr Goethe was among them, he said.

“Johann Wolfgang Goethe? The author of
The Sorrows of Young Werther?
”

“Yes,” Merck said. “I saw him once or twice at the uncle’s. Have you read his book?”

“But of course!”

That book had been the talk of the town back in 1777 when it reached St. Pete’s. I remembered how Anna and I, not yet lovers, had sat in her parlor and talked about it—about unrequited love, raw, forceful, and suicidal. How thrilling it had been.

I wanted to hear more about Goethe. What did Merck think of him? Merck shrugged. “I don’t know. I was only thirteen. I wouldn’t have met him if not for my uncle. They still correspond, Herr Goethe and Uncle. Uncle wrote me not so long ago that Herr Goethe was contemplating an epic poem, a rework of Mr. Marlowe’s
Doctor Faustus
.”

I was not familiar with it. Merck explained, “It harks back to an old legend about a natural philosopher, an alchemist, who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and power.”

I was amused. In my country, devils were thought of as filthy tricksters hardly in possession of any knowledge worth having—though also unlikely to bargain for what they wanted. “A devil?”

“Yes,” Merck said, “
the
Devil.”

“And the Devil observed his end of the deal?”

Merck shrugged, looking confounded. “I . . . don’t know.”

• • •

A week later I was sitting in a hot pool, with a thermometer (a balmy and comfortable +50º by Réaumur) and a notebook by my side on a rocky edge, where I duly recorded the smell (a whiff of a rotten egg), the feel (the water made my fingers slippery), the appearance (cloudy sediment on the bottom, crusty white deposits), the fauna and flora (little black snails and patches of algae had attached themselves to the walls). I mused about the contrarian springtime that we were enjoying in the middle of winter, a springtime fueled by hellfire of the underworld. Was the eternally good clime of Paradise, its freedom from seasons, also supported by its intimate proximity to the furnaces of Hell?

Unhurried, burly clouds filled the sky above me, and a breeze diluted the vapors of the underworld with a sweet scent of snow. I closed my eyes; my thoughts found their way to my hot tub back home—

Merck approached, apologized for the intrusion, and took a water sample. Several drops went into a vial with vitriol (he explained) with no visible effect; another portion into a vial with silver solution, to cause a fluffy precipitate. He decanted the rest into a vial with formalin and corked it. He said with rehearsed nonchalance, “That time in Yakutsk you suggested there must be a natural explanation to your survival. I have been thinking about it. An eruption of near-freezing water perhaps, in abrupt contact with colder air, could have preserved your vital functions by extremely rapid congelation. Only an experiment can tell. With your permission, I would like to pursue it experimentally. I believe I have a duty to try. With your permission, of course.”

He had my ear this time.
What if  ?
What if the ice that had trapped me on the Yasachnoi
had
been but a random eruption of near-freezing water from the riverbed? An old temptation to take refuge in science, to be consoled that I am a
natural, common phenomenon,
visited me again. Maybe I
could
tell him, after all. Not this very moment, but—soon? On a more formal occasion, when I was not sitting in a pool in my underwear?

“If you think it worth your time, Dr. Merck,” I said cautiously.

He glowed. “Yes, of course. Thank you.”

I thought he’d leave now but he lingered. “So . . . how will you experiment?” I probed. “Not with me, I take it?

“No, of course not! It wouldn’t be . . . No, on mice. Yes, that’s a place to start.”

I nodded. He lingered still, at once intense and awkward. I felt the need to lighten the air. “So, what do you think about these environs, Dr. Merck? Aren’t they amazing? Look at this unnatural springtime—it’s like eternal youth attained through a pact with the Devil, akin to the story your friend Herr Goethe is working on.”

Merck’s eyes widened and his lower jaw and neck muscles tensed up. He backed away a few steps, as if involuntarily, shook his head, and mumbled, “There is no devil in nature. Only God’s glory!”

“Assuredly so. I was making but a frivolous joke.”

“Yes of course.” He forced a smile. Then he turned and all but ran away.

• • •

The month of April found us at the Opalsky hot springs. The place could serve as a perfect backdrop for Dante’s
Divine Comedy
: a barren valley under the volcano of the same name, boulders, pumice, and volcanic rock everywhere. The biggest hot spring was a geyser that sprayed boiling water to a height of five feet. My imagination conjured gates of Hell behind every sizable boulder on the mountain slopes.

The evening of April 2 was unremarkable. We went to our tents at about ten o’clock, and I was sound asleep not fifteen minutes later. I am guessing it was in a few hours that I was woken up by wind, and just as I came to my senses, my tent was torn off its stakes and flew into the darkness. What I beheld was beyond anything my idle imagination could conjure. We were in the middle of a snowstorm. More than that. What bombarded us was a wild mixture of snow, hail and gunpowder, or so it looked—black and grainy against a rapidly building layer of white. The thunder boomed, the wind howled. Our fire was extinguished, our horses gone, our boxes of specimens knocked down and cracked open. Feathers, twigs, dust, dirt, and sheets of paper—Merck’s field notes, Voronin’s drawings—hurtled past us. I got on my feet and walked into the storm, my face and chest flogged by gales of grit and hail. My heart was thumping with fear—or thrill?—because the deflected army of ice was on counteroffensive. It found me even here, even in the sanctum of heat!