The Age of Ice: A Novel (31 page)

I did what I could to correct public opinion. My long-since-retired officer guise did not do much to intimidate the admiralty, but my Arctic explorer image was effective in the salons of St. Petersburg, though
telling about our adventures in a civilized form meant lying and omitting. Besides, the less graceful among the listeners blurted out things like “Prince Velitzyn, at last! We heard you had absconded to America!” or “Count such-and-such swore you had joined the savages,” while the more astute tended to ask me what I planned to do now, which made me uncomfortable. “So . . . What would you like to do now, Prince Alexander?”

Make mad love to Anna. As far as beyond that—I am utterly lost and purposeless, ladies and gentlemen, completely bankrupt, if not yet in a financial sense, definitely in an existential sense. I am forever damaged by l’Empire de Glace and I can’t find an occupation more worthwhile than (see above) besides getting together with my brothers-in-ice and drinking to our frostbitten lives
 . . . No, I would not say that, of course. Instead I’d say, “I think I will take a luxury of rest. Enjoy some quiet time. Perhaps develop an interest in agriculture or write a memoir.”

I actually did try agriculture. Like many Russian country gentlemen of my time, I fell victim to success stories emanating from the British Isles. I too took to reading Arthur Young’s books, and subscribed to magazines, and grew an urge to revolutionize production in my own estate in accordance with the advances of the English (my friendship with Sawyer and attendance at the club had enhanced my compulsion to do everything the way John Bull did it). I too ordered seed from abroad and attempted to change the age-old ways of my peasants. I too was taken by the notion that peasants would accept any scheme that promised more money in their pockets. Didn’t I, as many along with me, dream to be like Count Cheremetiev—who had managed to have his peasants grow so millionaire-rich in textile manufacture that thereafter he could live like a king off their tithes alone!

Well, for one Cheremetiev, there always are dozens of flops and failures. My peasants largely sabotaged my agricultural innovations in their usual passive way—they followed my commands, certainly on my portion of the fields, but they did it in a less than halfhearted manner, so that the disappointing results would speak for themselves and sour my enthusiasm.

It was summertime by then and that glass I had seen at Anna’s side the night I arrived, that special glass she kept her ice in, had transformed into a symbol of secret pleasure; while a certain chest in the house larder had become an hourglass, which I worriedly consulted every night, eyeing its dwindling stock of ice as I chipped away at it, preparing a treat for my
beloved. Yes, it had become my domain now. I was the one who brought it to her bed, I controlled it.

It was feverish. A
nuit blanche
in June, nightingales, and our ingenious mixture of bare and clothed, of sheets, nightgowns, and skin; our crazy perfection—through trial and error—of insulation and lack thereof between my body and hers; the favorite places we’d found, where I could go with my fingers as cold as I could be and give her pleasure. The river routes an ice cube would leave on her skin, her floodplain of desire, dew in the corners of her eyes, rivulets across her belly, following the landscape of hill and dale, melting, melting along the way, and then going inside—
did you know it feels just as good as if it were in your mouth
—and she would stretch out and moan, and shiver, until all of my ice is gone, gone, and my glass is empty, and I am drained of my cold.

• • •

Oh, how I wished to feel and think nothing more than what a butterfly feels and thinks on his mating flight. Let the old Europe go up in flames, France first. Let the whole world end in some cataclysmic, orgasmic way, and I’d still be in bed with Anna, telling her to close her eyes! Regretfully, the world had other plans. By the end of summer, the perpetrators of the revolutionary terror in France, Robespierre and Co., lost their own heads to their favorite tool of justice, the guillotine, and some observers timidly raised hopes of recovery. With the fancy asparagus spears of my imported agriculture barely showing their tips above the Russian soil, the sailboat of my estate could run aground well before the end of the world.

Autumn was drawing to a close; the time to pay interest on loans to the Assignat Bank was ever nearer. I could crawl back to the main trunk of the family, the old Moscow nest, admit my failure to cousins and uncles, and beg for a bailout. Or I could mortgage everything I had and go deeper into debt. Or—

• • •

It was a day in mid-November 1794, and Anna and I were on a walk. Lilac evening was descending and it started snowing—one of the first snowfalls of a new winter. Gentle flakes parachuted from the sky and settled on the mink fur trim of Anna’s pelisse and matching muff. I took my glove off and caught the biggest ever snowflake on the side of my forefinger. I was careful not to spook it off: it was a precious double star, completely intact: two tiny wheels with fernlike spokes, stacked together. I showed it to Anna. It sat on my skin in all its perfection and it did
not melt—because that was what I could do. That moment I felt like the grandmaster of snowflakes, the omnipotent tamer of ice. No matter what
l’Empire de Glace
had done to me, it could not take away this one moment of magic, when I could capture the most beautiful of these heavenly creations and offer it to my beloved. I took the snowflake to Anna’s lips.
Try it
. She lifted her face to look me in the eyes and kissed it off my hand.

I knew then what I would do. Everything, everything I accomplished in the next several years, was brought about by a singular purpose: to offer her the best ice I could make. Anna gave me the power to be the Great Master of Ice.

• • •

Also in the year 1794, Dr. and Mrs. Merck arrived in St. Petersburg and then went on to Germany. Merck was dispatched by Dr. Pallas and another German in Russian service, Baron Asch, to escort a load of ethnographic artifacts, including a complete Yakuti shaman’s outfit, to Professor Blumenbach at Göttingen University, and the spouses used this occasion to visit the ancestral grounds of the Darmstadt family on a belated honeymoon. At Professor Blumenbach’s, Merck met Goethe again, and attended a reading of the first part of
Faust,
where Mephistopheles convinces the eponymous doctor to sign over his immortal soul in exchange for infinite power and knowledge. Precisely on the famous line where Mephistopheles introduces himself to Dr. Faust as “a part of that power which is ever willing evil and ever producing good,” Merck had a fainting spell.

I learned it much later. At the time, when the couple returned to St. Petersburg and I beheld the clutzy old Merck, the blue-eyed and earnest-faced good doctor who still walked in a buttoned-up manner and lacked social graces, only now he held on his arm a lovely redhead wife whose smile turned heads and warmed hearts—at that time I was just happy that his life had taken a turn for the better. I wanted to help him make it better still. God knows, he deserved it. And so, by the spring of 1795, Dr. Merck landed a junior professorship at the academy—my efforts yielded fruit.

At the time, the virago Princess Dashkova, nicknamed Ekaterine the Minor, was effectively at the helm of the academy. Ingratiating myself with her was relatively easy. “I hear, my Prince,” she said when I kissed her hand, “you are a newlywed. You married your sister . . . in-law, have I heard it right?”

She did not use the Russian word
snokha,
which does not share a root
with
sister
. She flaunted her English at me, and made a long enough pause between
sister
and
in-law
for even the most unsophisticated of men to notice.

“You’ve heard it right, Madame,” I replied in English. “Aren’t those Britons the greatest economizers when it comes to language? They’ll use the same word for everything if they can. Nuances can get overlooked, though. Yes, I am a proud husband to Princess Anna, née Khitrovo, the mother of my”—I paused to smile—“
god
son.”

“Please pass my congratulations to Lady Anna. Why, it is quite a change for you, I reckon. After years and years of bachelorhood . . . Weren’t you the talk of the town in the late sixties? You were engaged to the youngest Countess Tolstoy, weren’t you, that lovely girl, what a tragic death. Didn’t she perish of influenza weeks after you proposed? You must have been so shaken.”

Not influenza, you old harpy, but pneumonia
. And she didn’t perish after my “proposal” but three years later, a married woman, by childbirth . . .

“That,” I said steadfastly, “was such a long time ago, that you and I, Madame, have every right not to remember it very well. Altogether too many things have happened since.”

Fortunately, that was all for the admission test. “Indeed.” She smiled. “So tell me about your marvelous adventures.”

Which in due course brought me a chance to make a favorable mention of the Arctic hero Dr. Merck, and his lovely wife, who needed the patronage of the most enlightened, most caring and considerate of the academic helmswomen. And if perchance this was where it started, the charming little rumor that Andrei Junior could have been my biological son—I saw no harm in it.

• • •

That winter I threw myself at the task I envisioned as my new purpose. Anna deserved ice as pure as an angel’s tear. She deserved extraordinary ice. I ordered one of the sheds on the property cleaned and made an ice nursery out of it. I wanted to make cubes of ice, balls of ice, bullets of ice, stars of ice. I expropriated kitchen pans, I stole carafes and stemware from Anna’s cupboards and vials from her boudoir; I bought wines and brandies just for their bottles. I filled them all with water. Some glass broke when the water froze, its ice-fruit ripe for harvest. Some I broke myself, cracked like a shell that got in my way. No matter, I’d get new ones.

Later, I would rally woodcarvers, potters, and a blacksmith of my estate to make me wooden, earthen, and tin molds, and I made my own mold designs, ever more complicated. Later yet—I would no longer need molds. But for now—icicles, the long, gorgeous icicles, they were a dime a dozen in March, but think of having them in December! I loaded ice and snow on slanted wooden trays, percolated water through them, then harvested icicles after the night’s freeze, and stored them whole or sawed into perfect bite-size pucks. It wasn’t easy to get the right trickle rate, I had to troubleshoot, perfect the ways of manufacturing. And there was more, there was always more. If ice was going to touch her lips, why not sweeten it? Sorbet ice, shaved ice, creamed ice. Chocolate ice. Milk ice. Tea ice. Wine ice. If ice was to lie on her velvet belly, why not scent it? Rosewater ice. Lavender ice.

I had many failures. I had to learn, to experiment. I unpacked my remaining thermometers, pulled out and leafed through my yellowing notes. I obtained quantities of niter and employed it to make the cold colder. Still, all that was not good enough. It lacked sophistication. It borrowed from the existing tricks. But Anna deserved impossible. Magical ice. The kind of ice you glimpsed in the heart of the
Empire de Glace,
at the end of your line, when you thought you were done with and then you saw it—a filigree of beauty and hope. The lace ice, needle ice, and above all, the ribbon ice, ruffle ice, the ice good enough to be a precious necklace on her bare shoulders, to be a glittering flower in her dark hair.

Now, that was a challenge worthy of a grandmaster. How many days and nights did I spend under my open canopies, watching my ice germinate! How many tree twigs—birch, larch, alder, dead or alive, I immersed into bowls of water set out for the night! How I prayed for an insight—for that promise of kinship and understanding that would let me into the secret!
What makes you want to be born? What fancy, what desire, what seduction whispers in your atoms and wakes you up to develop into a once-in-a-century blossom and not into an everyday slab, sheet, powder, mash, hail?
Could I make snowflakes? Could I make ice of that heavenly tint of blue that I had seen in the Icy Sea? Could I draw hoarfrost patterns never before seen on earth—just by tracing them with my finger over a glass pane, in the night, out alone in my shack, an alchemist of ice? An alchemist, yet also a victim of the
Empire de Glace,
battling Darkin’s ghosts with half-submerged twigs, battling visions of self as a frozen fish—with incantations, thermometers, and controlled evaporation out of a pan of
cold water onto a cloth of fine cotton gauze suspended just inches over it and then slowly raised as ice needles grew; and knowing, even as my first ice flower bloomed on a dead reed stalk sticking out of an ice-cold, wet bed of wood pulp, that the more I practiced my witchcraft, the more Darkin would be peering over my shoulder, that my grandmastery of ice came loaded with this curse, just as every deal with Mephistopheles goes rotten . . .

On a practical note, all this activity was not improving my financial situation. It was consuming resources instead. The salvation, when it came, arrived from the sidelines. One day in early February Anna decided to throw a dinner party. When she told me what tasks she’d assigned me, I was surprised: to make ice for the cold courses: colored ice beads for cheeses and hams, ice butters for meat pies, ice glasses for vodkas and aromatic bitters. But above all, to reveal my very special dessert—little floats of ice in a bowl of punch, each bearing a dollop of blueberry sorbet with creamy topping. My
Icy Sea Floes!
Until then, I had served them only in bed, to a naked Anna. It’s too private, I fussed, the guests would be scandalized if they gleaned any hint of what it meant to the two of us; and your friend Baroness d’Anglairs, well,
she
would read us like a book the moment it’s served!

Anna gave me a stare. Her lips bunched as if she was sucking on a candy, and her brow quivered with whimsy. “So?” she said. “Will you do it?”

That’s all that was needed to win me to her side—a little zest in her smile, and I was her eager co-conspirator. I went to work on her dinner plan the very next day.