The Age of Ice: A Novel (30 page)

“No,” he interrupted, and looked down at me with apostolic serenity. “Those were
Maman
’s choices. And you did what you had to do. You needed it . . . Right?”

I bit my tongue. I was not ready to answer. Under his stare my head made an equivocal nod while my shoulders shrugged.

He was a strange young man. And an angry one. As we walked back I asked him about service, and he berated his regiment: officers lived a life of leisure, while the rank and file ground keys and carved spoons on and
off duty. Is that military discipline, he lamented. Wives and mistresses showed in barracks and joined in revelries. He took no part in any of it. He was different.

And yet he did not know the half of it. When later that day Cyril and I went over the tally books, the truth was hard to miss. Anna could not have kept a household in St. Petersburg. Patching this old country house was all we could afford. No rebuilding, no improvements. “The city goods,” Cyril said, “your boots and pots and all these
manufactured things
are so dear, but your country goods—your grain, your dairy—now that sells for kopecks. How can anyone who still plows and sows for income make ends meet?”

We were damn near broke.

“Does our lady know?”

“In Her Ladyship’s heart she does. Her Ladyship will say: Cyril, you just make sure we send Andrei his allowance.”

We were nearly broke, and everyone was so eager to be misinterpreted. Anna sacrificed rooms and windows for her son’s lifestyle in the capital. Andrei thought his mother did it from morose inclination or because she longed for me. Cyril let them both believe they were better off than they were. And I was apologetic, made promises, and still . . .

And still I wouldn’t be distracted. I heard the bad news—and I filed it for later. The now—it was for sweet anticipation. Anna had accepted me. She said,
There must be something we could do
 . . .

When we had dinner, she took her wine with plenty of crushed ice. Andrei did not look surprised. But I could not take my eyes off her glass. My mind was so fixed, everything I saw pointed to one thing . . . Everything ice had to do with me, didn’t it—ice in her wine now, ice in her glass the night before were nothing but subliminal manifestations of her yearning for me, of her acceptance of my cold! It aroused me, when I watched her drink the wine together with the ice-slush. It still arouses me when I recall it.

What a fool.

• • •

Another night, another day and night. By the time we saw Andrei out—he was intent to go back to the regiment where, according to Anna, he was respected but not
liked
because he was so much better than anyone else—I was teeming with impatience. I wanted to be alone with her, in my bedroom, preferably.

We waved until Andrei galloped out of sight, and then our eyes stumbled into each other and retreated. Our insulating layer was gone. Now it was all bare ice, slippery and treacherous.

“He is a good son,” she said. “We try to give him the best. He needs to keep up his persona in the society. St. Petersburg is very demanding . . . What would you like for supper?”

“I’d like to have a long, unhurried talk with you. May I?”

“I suppose . . . yes.”

“Would you like to go upstairs to my study? We could have them serve the tea there.”

“I’ll make orders.”

I went upstairs, poked at the fire, added a log or two. She took forever to reappear, followed by Tata and the kitchen maid, carrying trays with tea and treats. Another forever was spent on arranging things and sending both maids out. Finally, we were out of forevers.

Oh, where to begin!

“Anna, I’ve spent nine years in places where life was reduced to a great simplicity. I may no longer be sufficiently sophisticated for a society man, and what I want to say may strike you as too plain and abrupt. But I’ll say it anyway: if I understand correctly that you are fully aware of my—coldness—then I want you to know that it is my greatest wish to be with you, in whatever measure and quality you will accept me. If you agree to it, I will take your hand in marriage, and I will be as much a husband to you as you find comfortable.”

Did I know, a week ago, that I’d be proposing a marriage? No. But that’s how those things work out. A man comes home from a place where life barely holds its ground against death and he throws himself headlong at the feet of a woman, because he suddenly realizes that she is
the salvation
. All he wants is to hide in her warm body, and he will do anything to get there.

What would she say in reply? That it’s been only three days since I stepped over the threshold of this house, and more than a decade since I last held her as a lover? Or would she have her own reasons to throw herself at me just as I wanted to throw myself at her?

Her breathing became more rapid as I held my speech. She raised a hand to her breast and stared into space ahead of her. When I finished, she took a while to calm down. She sipped at her tea, blotted her lips with a napkin. “I shall get up now,” she said softly, “and I will come sit in your lap. I am forty-six years old. Just want you to know.” She glanced at me.
“I will try to kiss you. Very gently. Just wait, don’t move.” Still, she did not get up, though she leaned on the armrests and held herself half-aloft. “Wait, wait,” she discouraged me from taking action. “Wait for me.”

True to her promise, she finally rose and approached my armchair, her face flushed, her gaze down, her lips tight. She lowered into my lap, “Wait,” lightly pushed my hands away, laid them back onto armrests, “let me.”
Wait, no, hold
—she kept arresting my motions, and I had to give in and close my eyes, let her examine my face with her fingertips—

“We have to learn—”

“Yes—”

“To be patient—”

“I am very patient—”

Her mouth came as her fingertips—exploring, indecisive; she studied my upper lip, withdrew, returned, probed my lower lip, paused, came back moistened—

“—like this—”

“—yes—”

“—do you like it?”

“—I do. Marry me. Please.”

“ I will. Just not right now.”

—licked the back of my upper lip—caught her breath, swallowed—returned for more—drew a line on my gum with the tip of her tongue—

“I can kiss you—”

“You can?”

“Yes.”

“Am I cold?”

“A bit.”

“Like ice?”

“No, not quite. You’re soft. You don’t taste like ice.”

“Do I melt in your mouth? I certainly feel as if I do.”

She chuckled. “Let me see—” and she took my lower lip and my tongue in and sucked at them, and at that moment the circle was complete, the dots connected, so sweepingly, that I almost came right there and then:
Let me be your suckling ice, your soft, cold craving, feast on me, lick me, crush me, eat me with your wine, because you admitted to it, you let your secret out, you did not even notice that you confessed you needed it—ice in your mouth—you’re guilty of it, you lust after it, so you are mine, mine, forever mine, I am your ice king, and you are my ice queen.

By then I could not help moving underneath her. She let me hold her by the waist and pressed herself in. She drove me over the edge just by riding in my lap, holding my face in her hands, and sucking my lips and tongue. When she knew I came, she sprang to her feet and waltzed across the room, flitting her hands in front of her heaving breast, cooling herself, repeating, “Oh, my God . . .”

“Look what you’ve done to me,” I said, and she fell into the armchair and burst into laughter like a little girl.

• • •

Merck would have said that the river we see is an average. Where waters flow today is but one of many routes along the valley that she could take, and the valley itself is no more than a floodplain multiplied by time. Some routes along it she’ll take tomorrow, some in a thousand years. You think you know a river, but all you know are a few general assumptions: freeze in winter, flood in spring. Anna, my river, is an average too. I don’t think I’ve ever known her, known what route she’d choose in any one of her seasons, much less the routes she could have but never had taken.

That night we bounced away from each other, overwhelmed by our explosive collision, took refuge in our respective rooms, to feast in privacy on the experience we just had—or at least that’s what I was doing. I was relishing and reliving the moment, but also the future it promised. Imagine what two complicit adults can achieve, who make mutual physical exploration their purpose in life! Sweet, sweet nights and days of consummate studies, of catching up for the years lost . . . Days and nights when all my Arctic memories would shrink into nothing, displaced by the wonder of lying next to her in bed for the first time, whispering to her, confessing,
there may be ice,
as I touched my finger to her pubic bone. And hearing just this in reply, a sweet, soft, hazy—
uh-huh.

Still, a peculiar detail. In those same days and nights, I asked her to marry me perhaps three, four more times, and every time she said,
yes
. But the next day she would never be the one to bring it up. Never volunteer to discuss the preparations, never start arrangements to make a dress. She would carry it as a hermetic secret, not a decision that enabled further actions. A mysterious smile on her face would make me think I had dreamed her
yes
. In retrospect, I think she was afraid. Not of tying the knot, and not of me, I don’t think. But afraid of what it would mean for her craving for ice. Of making a final and irrevocable commitment to her addiction. As if she knew, deep inside, that it was something that was killing her.

I hope I’m wrong. How can I know anything for certain? A river is an average.

When I managed to win Anna’s full cooperation, it was with an appeal to her son’s immediate prospects. “The truth is,” I said, “as long as I live an unmarried man, society will consider Andrei a side shoot. It is in his interest that you and I marry, that I adopt him, and that it becomes clear once and for all that he is the heir to whatever fortune we have.”

We wed in September 1794 in our village church. The bride’s ring beheld an ice diamond.

• • •

But I am getting ahead of myself.

Within a week after I arrived from Irkutsk I had to show up at the admiralty and be debriefed about the expedition. Abandoning the guise of a thermometrist, I pulled out, dusted, and donned my old Preobrazhensky uniform to match those who’d debrief me. But when I saw my brothers-in-ice in the vestibule of the admiralty, so awkward on the polished floor, waiting so humbly to be admitted to the cabinets of power—Sawyer, now with a rheumatic knee and a cane; red-faced, big-handed Robeck; Sarychev, scratching his round head under a brand-new wig; and even Billings, looking more haunted than ever—when I saw them, I knew with a kind of nostalgic longing that these were my people, these few, not Commodore Loginov, not the pantheon of potbellied, haughty-faced clubmen called the Arctic Committee, not the careerists, lover-boys, idlers, and politicians, not even the war generals and their garish lieutenants—in other words, none of the noble St. Petersburg.

“Mr. Sawyer, look! What’s that frippery, Mr. Velitzyn?” said Robeck.

“Mr. Robeck, we’ve been humbugged. It’s no frippery, it’s a Leib Guard uniform, I am afraid,” said Sawyer.

That’s what I loved these two for.

Later that day Sawyer and Robeck introduced me to British ale, which they purposely presented as a drink of the people (as opposed to all these aristocratic wines and liquors). The English colony on the Neva bank was flourishing at the time, there was a coffeehouse, a church, and the most coveted and the most exclusive of them all, the club. Sawyer’d been invited to join because several influential colonists had taken him under their wing (with his poor health from heroic adventures). Sawyer’s Arctic friends were welcome too. There, once the three of us worked up a good buzz, they asked me and I admitted: yes, I was a nobleman. A nobleman
who ran off into the Arctic when a woman he loved pushed him away. I said it so because I wanted to talk about Anna. Besides, that truth sounded better than the others: I had been exploring my relationship with ice. Or: I had been Loginov’s personal informer.

Robeck summed it up, “Blarm me! I knew he was a nib!”

“You did not! How would you know?” Sawyer disbelieved.

“Why, he acted nibsome! You think if your bosom-friend of ten years was a nib, wouldn’t you know, Mr. Sawyer?”

“What’s a nib?” I said.

“Gentry,” said Sawyer. He was holding back snickers. “In all honesty I too thought you were a gentleman—”

I said, “No worries. It does not amount to much in this town anyway.”

“—a gentleman in exile in Siberia. For something political perhaps. Then after Kolyma I thought maybe it wasn’t political. That you’d killed somebody . . . quite by accident . . . through no fault of yours . . .” Sawyer flushed red. “I’m sorry. I blather. Please don’t mind me, Mr. Velitzyn, I’m pretty well tipsy and I am—”

“A blunderbuss is what you are, Mr. Sawyer,” Robeck interrupted. “Taking my friend, a noble gentleman in self-imposed exile, for some kind of a troublemaker!” Both of them now looked flushed and embarrassed, waiting warily for my response.

And I—all I wanted was to talk about Anna. How she’d kissed me, sitting in my lap. I said, “You know, the lady . . . that lady I’d run from. She waited for me. Hear that? We made
amends
.”

I could see from the change in their faces that I too blushed. All three of us broke into smiles at once, exhaling.

• • •

Questioning, report writing, and testifying lasted through summer. The atmosphere was rather different than ten years ago; our affairs with Great Britain had been at the all-time low until Louis XVI lost his head, and though now we were reluctantly allying up against the French, it did not prevent a certain sourness toward Billings. There were allegations of bribes and misappropriations, and the fact that we all were made to sign the official opinion about the impassability of the Northeast Passage felt like betrayal of our ideals.