The Age of Ice: A Novel (28 page)

Somebody kept snuffling. I let go of Darkin’s neck. Merck was staring at me. I rose to my feet.

“Dr. Merck, would you please care to check, is he alive?” said Billings.

Merck pulled his mittens off with his teeth. His hands were an all too familiar sight, blackened and swollen. “Allow me.” Lehman stepped in and kneeled. He was thorough. “No,” he said when he was done.

• • •

Ivan and Jon helped me dig. We buried Darkin’s body right there in the yaranga, under a foot of snow, and then lay around the grave through the night. When we took the yaranga down in the morning, it seemed to me that the spot screamed of murder, that anyone who cared to look at the snow’s pockmarked, crumpled, and lacerated surface, would know immediately. That is how it appeared in my dreams ever since: a patch of trampled snow illuminated by the full moon. Lumpy snowflakes are falling all around, but the spot remains exposed.

• • •

Nothing
changed. On the first morning after the
chance-medley,
as I have heard Billings refer to it, I shadowed the young men in charge of fetching and harnessing the deer. After much running and bumping into antlers—to no gain—I corralled not a beast, but a man who was already in possession of one. That day we had to pull only two sleds with our own hands, not three. The day after that—one. Then all three sleds again. Then none.

On occasion, natives spoke to us, but we could not understand what they were saying. Their words were just another kind of silence. Once, the woman who was Darkin’s wife in the clan came along and trooped next to us for a while.
Nikola? Nikola?
None of us replied. It was easy to ignore her—my companions were barely putting one foot in front of the other. Eventually, Merck shook his head, spread his hands:
qeshem
. She hung on for some more, then left us behind.

Merck still talked to me, I remember, but others—I have no memory about others. “You are
bare-handed,
Alexander Mikhailovich.”
Am I?
I do, however, remember Ivan and Philimon being with me in the herd as we circled and sieved, our arms open wide.

On another day Merck and I saw the Chukchi unload frozen salmon, big logs of them. Merck waddled over with an outstretched hand, saying
qemi
—to eat. They watched him and bantered. I came and grabbed a salmon that one of them held. He didn’t let go; I forced my fingers under the frozen, crunching gill-covers and yanked hard. I wrestled and twisted the salmon free of his hands and tossed it Merck’s way, then pulled my parka off and hurled it at my opponent’s feet. I roared at him like a sea lion, like a rearing bear. I bellowed so my throat seized with razor-sharp pain. “I want to be Old Man Frost!”

“Alexander Mikhailovich. Please let’s go.” Merck was behind me, shaking.

• • •

On another day the clan had a big celebration, with beating on tambours, shamanic dances, incantations, raging fire, reindeer sacrifice. I foraged in the crowd and robbed the revelers of their treats of boiled meat. Enough to keep us going for a while longer.

I lost count as the days passed. It was a surprise when one evening we saw smoking chimneys, fences, log cabins, the ispravnik.

• • •

To thaw.

There were rye bread and red-hot embers in a stove, a ceiling and a floor, timber walls, benches and beds, alcohol. I learned that we reached the outpost two weeks and four days after we’d killed Darkin. I remember soaking a whole chunk of dried bread in a mug of pungent and weedy tea or brown rotgut Astrakhan brandy, folding the chunk into my mouth, chewing slowly, carefully, trying to discern the taste. I remember sitting back against a wall and weeping, my mouth full of bread. And sitting in a steamy bathhouse with my head hung low, staring at my bluish-yellow, long-nailed toes, and feeling as if a vise was tightening around my abdomen, as if a weight was growing inside, as if all that frozen flesh that I’d consumed in the six months of our peregrination—whale, salmon, reindeer—stayed as it was—my own personal permafrost.

I wrote letters. I wrote a report to Loginov, wringing my memory of what little it held on the subjects of distances and directions, terrain and weather. I took a masochistic pleasure in omission. I kept writing out the phrase
we suffered countless hardships
until I could do it without a quiver in my fingers, until the few facts I chose to put on paper were reduced to loops and spikes of practiced penmanship and betrayed no emotion whatsoever. Then I tried to write a letter to Anna.
My beloved friend
—
my dearest
—
your forever loving
—no matter how I wrote it, loops and spikes were all that came out.

After the first night at the outpost, with its celebratory meal, hugs, tears, and jubilations, we all but avoided each other, preferring the company of strangers. When each took his long, slow journey west—eventually—it was with separate parties, via different routes, on different dates. No one ever said it, but every one of us knew: we were done, finished. Nothing else we could do, not anywhere in Siberia.

We made no complaints against the Chukchi to the ispravnik. The
chance-medley,
as far as I know, never ever made way into any official reports. Batahov—he died of the elements. And our overland march? It
amounted to exactly nothing. We never got to see the coast of the presumed Northeast Passage, much less map it.

This was February 1792. Revolutionary France was about to declare war on Austria and Prussia.

• • •

I reached Irkutsk in early 1793, after a journey that, thank God, lasted long enough to let me if not recover then at least scab up while I rode—or not, waiting out the seasonal calamities: the spring thaw, the mosquito-infested height of summer, the chaos of autumn before frosts.

My “reintegration” into civilization began with the news of the execution of Louis XVI, the king of France. On February 8, Empress Ekaterine imposed an embargo on France. All travel to and from France was forbidden. All French newspapers and books—banned. All French subjects residing in the Russian Empire, with the exception of those of noble rank, were to be deported. The French common folk could receive asylum, but only if they denounced their seditious country and, moreover, were vouchsafed by “French princes,” the titled nobility, that is. The same month, February, France declared war on Britain. I had returned to a different world.

A tragicomic circumstance forced me to recall that I was a nobleman. In the household of the Irkutsk governor, the deportation edict came as a blow to the chef of uncounted years, a pillow-cheeked fellow named Didier Vassour, who, in the governor’s family, went by the name Diadya Vasya (i.e., Uncle Vasya). Diadya Vasya had no desire to return to France, but he knew no French prince who could vouch for him. The governor was terrified of getting blacklisted as a harborer of the French, but Madame Governor could not imagine life without Diadya Vasya’s brioches. (The cook claimed they were of the same recipe as the one used in the Versailles kitchens; as a result I’ve since considered Marie Antoinette’s famously ill-timed
“Qu’ils manget de la brioche,”
a sign of appreciation of Diadya Vasya’s baking skills.) Before long, I, as Prince Velitzyn, was writing to St. Petersburg in support of the French subject Vassour, winning for myself the patronage of Madame Governor, and a standing invitation to Diadya Vasya’s catering.

• • •

Toward the end of winter Merck arrived and a month later he surprised me mightily: he asked me to be his groomsman. The wedding was delayed till Merck’s hands healed—he had a few digits amputated on both, but on August 14, 1793, I found myself standing in a Russian Orthodox church, where our shy Carl Heinrich, a Lutheran hastily rebaptized, was entering
into a union with a girl named Nadya, a redhead with almond eyes, and lips that always seemed on the verge of a smile. She was a daughter of the Irkutsk hospital’s superintendent and his Yakuti wife. Even more remarkable was the fact that they had met before Merck had joined the expedition! She could hardly have been more than a child back then. Could any one of us ever have conceived that he had a bonny girl waiting for him for
eight
years?

The priest put the wedding ring on Merck’s right hand, Russian-style, where Merck had a stump for it. Then the bride and groom exchanged their rings, as customary, three times, and the bride did it with such reverent tenderness and Dr. Merck blushed so raw, a Young Werther, no less, that I, now a hardened fifty-two-year-old man full of dead-weight permafrost and bad memories—I barely held back tears and was screaming on the inside, envious to the bone, aching about the loss of things I never had. I yearned to be a thirty-year-old, handsome, wounded hero of the Arctic; and longed to stand by the altar, next to the purest, gentlest girl, Marie and Anna at once, and watch her touch her lips to the Virgin Mary’s icon and be crowned unto marriage—with me, for me.

There was a grandiose wedding banquet. The courses were courtesy of the governor, and the grateful Diadya Vasya exceeded himself, not just in the opinion of my feral palate, but in the unanimous opinion of all the sponsors and benefactors of the Irkutsk hospital. The
Confit d’Oie
was heavenly. The
Selle de Veau
boggled the mind. The
Glace au Pain d’Epices
was like a new love springing where no love, you thought, could spring again.
Ah, Dr. Merck, two years ago, could we imagine ourselves in a scene like this? Could we ever
 . . .

• • •

In January 1794 we reunited with Sawyer, Robeck, Sarychev, and the rest; all alive if not entirely well (they’d been fighting scurvy wintering on Oonalaska while we marched across the Chukchi Peninsula). There was much jubilation. After a dinner for all and subsequent libation with my bosom-friends, when Robeck was already snoring in my bed and the only ones left sitting were myself and Sawyer, the latter betraying considerable inebriation by his droopy eyelids—at that opportune moment Sawyer said, “Alexander Michaelovich, what happened on the Chukchi Peninsula, if you don’t mind my asking?” to which I answered, “It was very hard on us. That’s all.”

“Voronin said that”—he suppressed a hiccup—“if not for you, none
would’ve survived. That you pulled them out, in a manner of speaking—and fact—with a sled harness on your shoulder.”

My stomach—no, what I now thought of as my
permafrost,
heaved. “Everyone pulled, in a manner of fact. Voronin is being modest.”

Sawyer’s gaze remained unfocused, lost in memories. But now it seemed he saw something worrisome there. His brow fluttered. “But he also said . . . he said you were—strange?—toward the end. He said he was afraid of you. I don’t know what he meant.”

Permafrost, rising from beneath, pushing at my dangling heart. Said I, “I don’t know either. I may have had
Arctic hysteria,
a disease,” and repeated what I’d heard about it from Merck.

“Oh, blimey. There
is
one like that?” Sawyer yawned. “Good Lord, what a . . . It’s time to go home, isn’t it? Rascally Merck married without us. Couldn’t wait, could he? I can’t wait either. I am leaving. It’s OVER.”

“Mr. Sawyer,” I said, “you’re barely holding upright. I suggest you join Mr. Robeck. There is a trunk you can sleep on.”

Like a child, he disputed me on particulars, but the moment he stretched out in my bedroom, only my greatcoat between him and the floor, he was asleep.

And I stayed up.

• • •

In three days Sawyer and Robeck joined me on the road to St. Petersburg. They too wanted to detach, disengage, shake
l’Empire de Glace
off themselves.

However, it is not possible to look
l’Empire de Glace
in the eye, in her crazy, glacier-blue, lizard eye, and return unaltered. As we traveled west, a strange foreboding presence was aloft—perhaps because now there were more iron foundries, fewer forests along the way than ten years ago, or perhaps because the news of the infamous year 1793 of France, the
Vendée,
the industrial revolution of mass murder and test runs of its political apologia, the Jacobin reign of terror,
La Terreur,
were already permeating the air, spreading eastward like glaciation? Or was it the opposite: Siberian cruel ice was spreading west, to Europe?

The Great War was here—did I understand it then, or is it just hindsight? Or else why is it that since then everything got so mixed in my head—Ice and the French revolution, Ice and the human landscape of casual cruelty?

The Russian verb
tlet’
means both to smolder and to decay, reflecting perhaps people’s intuitive conviction that decomposition is a form of combustion—which is of course true.
Zeittlenkeit
—a smoldering or perhaps decaying of time was one of the mixed-language words that Merck used in his late writings—he would write in his mother tongue but here and there break into Russian, Aleut, Chukchi—sometimes within the span of one word.

Zeittlenkeit
was how he referred to his last years, the brief time he had before a stroke claimed his life in 1799. He was thirty-eight. I have picked the name up and carried it with me for another six years. Zeittlenkeit is the time between our return from the Arctic and the battle of Austerlitz.

Go on then, fearless Mr. Velitzyn, open that door and step over the threshold—meet Anna, meet your twenty-four-year-old godson.

• • •

My home Nikolskoe sent a kibitka with a pair of horses and a postillion to the main post station of St. Pete’s. I did not recognize the fellow who met me as one of my own serfs. I rolled in late in the afternoon, and the next day we performed the chores I had on my list (get a haircut and a shave, shop for boots, and make final adjustments at the tailor’s so I could wear the new garments I had ordered). We also lost time tarrying, since I feared meeting my family. I knew they would be horrified at how feral I’d become. How different from the balanced, untroubled man they had been envisioning based on my letters. Letters lie. They are just full of words.