The Age of Ice: A Novel (35 page)

We didn’t have to go via the Neva’s bank, but Anna liked that route so much: to scrape the Neva’s side with the kibitka’
s
runners, and just as snow-devil whirlwinds arise in the wind-tunnel of her frozen bed, to dive right, under the protection of the Senate building; then jingle the sleigh bells through the snow-stunned park and join the merry-go-round on the Nevsky Prospect . . .

It’s just that once on the Neva, I couldn’t help seeing across the ice, through skeletal masts of wintering barques, to the other side, where hardly a light flickered at this hour—and where the Imperial Academy stood. I couldn’t fail to notice a window lit in the academy, the window that
undoubtedly
belonged to Dr. Merck. The certainty of it filled me like freezing water fills a crucible.

“I need to make a detour,” I said. “Across the river.”

Anna kept calling to reason, but I had already ordered our driver to turn the horses onto the bridge.

I ran up the staircase of the academy and knocked on the door with a brass ring handle. To no avail: the porter was fast asleep, while upstairs a madman was achieving his outrageous ends. I returned to the kibitka and ordered the driver to go around—to the service doors and warden’s cottage.

There, I beheld . . . At once I made us halt and told Anna to stay inside. “What is it? What is going on?” she asked, but I neglected to answer and got out instead. The searing freshness of frost, the crunchiness of snow—oh,
the merry face of cruelty! Our driver, our foot servant looked at me quizzically. “Your Nobleship? What now?”

“Hold where you are.”

I walked forward. Merck was too absorbed to notice my approach, what with all the hissing and chugging of the pump. He was working the crank in jittery jerks, as if agitated, as if he didn’t propel the machine but was propelled by it, its flailing appendage.

“Dr. Merck!”

In front of the nozzle: firewood stacks, a pallet propped against them, and a man standing fixed to the pallet. Leaning askew in his bounds, glistening weirdly, like a fish, coated with the strange slime of water that wanted to be ice; when the water spray lessened as Merck dropped the crank and instead moved the nozzle around for better coverage, the man made a guttural noise and arched to the side; inhumanly, a reflex, a red muscle twitching to a blade’s touch, a flapping salmon, and yet Merck would not relent, no, he would not.

“Stop this!”

He noticed me, only to crank faster.

I grabbed Merck’s hands and he let go easily, as a child would; I knocked the nozzle off target. I was next to Merck’s victim, looking to untie his bonds, when the water spray hit me, in the back and then in the face, when I whipped around.

Merck was back at the crank, pumping away.

It was a strange feeling . . . I felt a chill, but not from the spray. It was from the inside of me, like a chill of recognition. Of discovery. Of joyous anger. I stood, absorbed. I felt deliriously alive, younger, taller. Merck was right all along—there
was
no natural explanation for me, because I
was
his demon—and I could laugh at Merck for seeing it and being destroyed by it. I could forsake all pity, all responsibility for him and his victim and—

Then I saw in a blurry distance—whenever the water spray moved away from my eyes—a lady in a dress gown, blue silk on white snow, white chiffon sleeves, naked shoulders, blue ribbons in her black hair, powdered gray . . .
Anna? Why are you here? Why are your arms so white and bare, your hands so clenched? Where is your pelerine?

A thought of warmth. I made a step forward, toward Merck.

When I laid my hands on him for the second time, my two servants were there to help. We subdued Merck and ripped a hole in the pump’s
bellows to stop it for good. The servants lugged Merck’s lifeless subject and his pallet indoors. Merck hurried after them with a peculiar air of a busy administrator. He hadn’t yet uttered a single word.

“Oh, I’m
fine,
” I answered to Anna’s silent question. “You
know
I am fine. Please go without me. I’ll follow shortly. You can send the kibitka back for me.”

“No.” She spoke through clattering teeth—she tried to suppress it but she shivered and shook even with her pelerine on. “You have
ice
on your face!”

I fingered my cheeks to discover scabs of ice; I scraped and swiped vigorously. I grew embarrassed of my thrill and fearful that more ice would form on my face and appall Anna beyond repair—she hadn’t ever seen me this
icy
. “I am sorry,” I begged. “It will stop in no time. I need to go inside and see to—”

She snuffled. She held on the very brink of hysterics. “No. I shan’t leave without you. Get the porter, get the night warden to take care of your
doctor
.”

“Anna—”

“I—I
hate
your Arctic.”

Did she see right through to my soul? Warmth is guilt.

• • •

I did as Anna bade. I left her side for just one moment, to get help. I saw that Merck had cajoled my servants into hauling his subject upstairs to his study. He now sat at his desk, and the prostrated man on the pallet was mounted right on the desktop, over papers and books. Merck waited like a well-mannered little boy at the dinner table. He waited—for a treat, for a miracle. That’s the last I saw of Merck that night, before I found the warden and told him to bring in gendarmes.

I am told that Merck remained calm and composed as long as they let him sit next to his victim. From time to time he rose to wipe the trickling water and check for vital signs, then sat tamely back down. But it took a doctor and two gendarmes to part him from the man, now dead. I am told Merck had his stroke en route to the policemaster’s, which was—sadly—for the better. Better to be an invalid than a madman.

And I? I followed Anna to the ball. Assuming the burden of complicity and embarrassment, my dearest wife arranged with Count Stroganov’s butler that I could dry myself inconspicuously. I know not what lies she made. Then I unveiled my ice creation. In my dreams, it sits in the grand
ballroom as it did then—amidst wreaths and garlands—and splendorous couples swirl past it in a Viennese waltz. Only, if I look closer, I see that it’s not my fountain, my firework, my cornucopia. It is Dr. Merck’s dead man, glazed in ice.

• • •

He wasn’t a monster, he really wasn’t. He was just a man desperate for a higher purpose in life. And he was sick: strangely, bewilderingly, incurably sick. The responsibility is not his, it’s mine.
I
am the monster.

After the stroke, his right side became weak, and when he recovered, he was a different man, yet again. A delicate, tentative man. No more fits of rage or interest in science. He spent time with Nadya and played with Sophichka. He drew a seal, an octopus, a whale for her.

He sired a son.

It was a brief reprieve before the final act of his sickness.

Merck died of his second stroke in 1799, shortly after the birth of his son, Friedrich Carl Wolfgang. Before that he gradually lost his faculty of speech. One by one, the languages he commanded abandoned him. Only his native German stuck with him till the end—it suffered loss after loss, disfigured, but it stayed.

It was so tempting to believe he did not think of me as a demon anymore. He never chased me away when I sat by his bed. His hands lay on his chest, and the ringed stump was peacefully still—though not of its own volition—his right side was paralyzed by then. Now I realize it could have been but acceptance: him giving in and letting a vulturish demon stay by his side and wait for his soul to vacate his dying body. Even making small talk in the meantime.

How sad, how brave—

Sitting by that bed, I confessed to him. I said, “Dr. Merck, I did what you did. I too performed an experiment on a man. Back at the Upper Kolyma. On Feodor. I watched him freeze. I was measuring his body temperature. I wanted him to die. But he didn’t. And then Darkin—remember?—you’re right, I shouldn’t have killed him. Darkin died because Feodor hadn’t.”

He munched his lips and lisped, “Fidikh. Kal. Woofgan.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“Fidikh Kal Woofgan. How daughter says her baby brother’s name. Fidikh—Kal—” He smiled. “I speak
this like
too now.”

 . . . How lonely the mind and how fragile. And yet, one of the last
things he ever said was, “You told me: Chukchi had one word for life, hope, and faith—
yejtel
. So true.”

Thus ends the story of Carl Heinrich Merck, a man who found the insight of mind to forgive the savages who wronged him, and savagely killed a man in an experiment; a Dr. Faust who believed that he had been contracted by God, and then believed he had been contracted by the devil, and in truth wasn’t contracted by either.

A month after his death, I was reading his archive—what was left of it. He had burned everything but this, the field report he had bequeathed to me: “In a few German miles traveling up the Yasachnoi we encountered a majestic ice formation that blocked our way . . .”

And thus I learned how glorious my ice had been and how
right
. And I mourned for both of us.

Merck is the reason I have never again let a scientist or a physician come near me. Merck is also the reason why, when Andrei Junior reached out for me, on a March night in 1801, I all but pushed him away.

• • •

At the funeral, Nadya Merck nearly fell to the ground and had to be held up by Sawyer and me when the priest said Dr. Merck was taken from us “in the flower of life.” There was something so grossly, hideously unjust in this phrase! The faculty wives whispered that Nadya needed to be watched, or she’d forget to breast-feed infant Friedrich. I suppose it was only natural that Anna took upon herself the responsibility of watching her, transferring the remainder of the Merck family, minus Frau Fretzl, to Nikolskoe. I am grateful to my wife.

When, in six months or so, Nadya started showing signs of recovery, Anna dissuaded her from taking flight back to Irkutsk. Then she repelled Nadya’s impulse to flee in the opposite direction—toward Darmstadt, to surrender into the Merck family fold. A year turned into two, then three. And then Anna no longer took care of Nadya—the roles became reversed.

What year was it? The nineteenth century had opened, the countdown had begun.

• • •

At midnight on March 11, 1801, Czar Paul died in his just-finished St. Michael’s Castle, a faux medieval fortress he had inserted in the middle of St. Petersburg. His body lay in state, a peculiarly severe head wound and multiple scrapes on its face speaking to the fact that he hadn’t “died of an
apoplexy.” He had been murdered. This truth, however, was moot, and those who’d learned it met it with disregard, or at most, aversion, instead of indignation. The conspiracy of looking the other way was more widespread than the conspiracy of assassination.

I was, shall I say, not upset by His Majesty’s passing. Yet I always picture his murder exactly the way I had committed it on Darkin.

We in Nikolskoe learned the news on the twelfth. Being an ex‒Leib Guard and knowing
how we do things,
I had no difficulty imagining that the czar’s death might have been
encouraged,
and not without the Guard’s involvement. The question was, which regiments and how heavily? Was my alma mater, Preobrazhensky, the eager tool of imperial transfiguration, as its Russian name ever suggested? Or Semyonovsky? Or Izmailovsky? And what about the much-abused Horse Guard? What about Andrei, Guards Lieutenant Velitzyn?

I expected Andrei to use the day of interregnum for a break, to fall back on home, to share the news in person or at the very least via a missive. He didn’t. On March 13, I went to St. Pete’s myself.

Fields, a cemetery, a cattle market, stables, ammunition stores, churches, all lidded by an overcast sky. In town, the Preobrazhensky village, the main nest of my regiment, was very quiet. Next, I went by St. Michael’s Castle, where a small flock of cadets contested to throw snowballs over the wall. I rolled past, onto Kirochnaya Street and to Tavrichesky Palace. So many streets and boroughs in this town were inhabited, were animated in fact by the army! Regiment upon regiment, Leib Guard and regulars—and today all of this musculature lay suspiciously still, not a twitch from it.

I made stops. I visited officers who knew me, who had served under me. I asked some questions.

I found Andrei at the Tavrichesky, napping in his room. The room was small, a mere side thought, a pause on a straight dive from the door to the window where St. Petersburg’s gray sky reigned supreme. One of the window’s sections was held half open by a leather strap tied to the windowframe and a neckerchief tied to a nail in the wall. Thus, when I opened the door and entered, the window did not slam, only twitched, like a hobbled horse. Andrei snored away in full uniform minus boots and saber, which lay in front of me on the floor.

It was, I could imagine, very cold in the room. Cold and fresh, though an undertone of Andrei’s sweat, a centaurian mix of man and horse,
was unmistakable. The smell jabbed me with envy: here I was, pushing sixty, while this young man was entering his best years . . . To intellectualize this animus was to tell myself, one more time, that my godson just
had
to be my ideological opponent, the czar’s backer. But what if I was wrong?

“Uncle?” His voice was ragged. He sat up.

“Night shift?”

He nodded suggestively, not definitively. I sat into a high-backed chair by his writing desk and he leaned against the wall—with resignation, I thought.
But why was his room so ascetic? Czar Paul’s austerity creed?
I pointed at his window. “You keep it fresh in here, don’t you?”

He affirmed it by way of coughing, nodding not just with his head, but with his whole trunk.

“I thought you’d come home. After
the night before yesterday
 . . . Are you ill?”

“No. I was, that is, but now just a cough lingers. I’m all right.”

I said, “Ill and sleeping with your window ajar as if it’s the middle of summer. Why wouldn’t you come home?” I could well be channeling Anna.