The Age of Ice: A Novel (36 page)

He sucked in a sigh. “I’m on duty. Why’d you come?”

“Daytime naps are what I see of your duty so far. I came so you can tell me firsthand what is
going on
. Were you posted in the castle
the night before yesterday
?”

“No.” His voice had a rougher edge.

“No? Some old friends of mine say you were out around midnight. Where were you?”

He broke into suppressed, clenched-teeth coughs. His eyes welled with liquid. It was just the coughs, I thought, but then, when he looked up, I doubted myself.

“Friends of yours,” he said, and grinned at me, over his wet eyes. “So, would you have liked me to be happy now . . . today, after the twelfth—or saddened?”

I chilled so much that his room air must have approached the dew point if it wasn’t there already. It wasn’t just
what
he asked but
how
. He was probing whether I had been for or against Czar Paul. He understood as little about me as I did about him, and was as awkward in figuring it out. I leaned forward.
Say happy. No. Say sad
. “Which is it, Guards Lieutenant?”

The tears in his eyes were not from coughing. “Neither,” he whispered. “Not happy, not sad. It doesn’t matter to me one bit. I paid no attention. I’m sorry to disappoint you.”

Impossible! Liar!
I felt fooled. “
I
would have liked you to be happy. Right now. As I am. Not to be in tears—”

“That’s not—”

“Then where the devil were you that night?!”

He clenched his fists. But he spoke in an even voice, “
Outdoors
. I can show you. Walk with me to the park. Please.”

I followed Andrei out. He went straight from bed, only shoved his feet into boots. He took no coat.

Tavrichesky Park is big, easily five times the size of the palace. It is a melancholy place. Rooks roost in its leafless trees. A large, misshapen pond behind the palace’s rotunda extends deep into the park. Andrei strode and spoke without looking at me: “When you came from the Arctic I thought one day soon you would call me up and tell me about it. Not the pretty tales, not the anecdotes. The real tale, what you went there for. In the name of the
brotherhood of ice
. But you never did. You shut me out. You went to
Maman,
to your English friends. You went to your ice.” Astride, he scooped up a handful of snow and packed it into a ball. “But you never went to me.”

He turned to face me and bounced the snowball in his hand. Then he stepped backward and crossed from the ground onto the ice of the pond. “You were my hero. I never meant to keep secrets from you. You made it so.” He was backing farther onto ice, watching me as if to make sure I’d follow. I did. “This is cold”—he hefted the snowball, then pointed at me with it—“but your hand, if I touch it—will be warm.” He tossed the snowball into my hands. “Are you cold yet, Uncle? Will the snow melt in your hands now or not? Even if it doesn’t, I’d still perceive your hands as warm. Why? No one knows. It just is.” He paused to cough.

“Andrei, you are on ice,” I warned.

“I know!” He stomped his foot. “And so are you!” He turned, arms swinging, and continued forth, in wider, angrier strides.

A frozen pond all around us. Did I hear it crunching, cracking the March ice? All bumps and slush, snow mounds, puddles and drifts. Its boundaries imperceptible, the pond could be vast or small—one could not tell. It was . . . it was just like in one of my Arctic dreams. With Darkin. I stumbled and stopped, limp in the legs, reliving the sensation of
being trapped—in ice—being bound and held down by a pack of Chukchi boys—so vividly, so starkly—

“Andrei!”

“Yet I am not like you,” he almost shouted now, pausing yards ahead of me, kicking at snowdrifts. “I am not cold! I can’t make ice! I am just someone who can arm-wrestle you without getting frostbitten. So, what now—that’s it? That’s what I’m here for—to hold your hand? A mere shivering human, so inferior to you that you don’t even care to confide in me?”

“Andrei, wait! You don’t understand—”

I forced my legs to move; he jolted and set off again, slipping, sliding, stomping all the while, challenging the ice he walked on.

“No! That couldn’t be all that I am. So I’ve been working on it for ten years now. Each winter, almost every day. I am as impervious to cold as a shivering human can ever be.” He stopped and turned. “And I will go beyond human, I will thrive in ice!” He watched me trudge in. “Thirty-two minutes—that is my longest record!” He opened his arms wide, lifted them level with his shoulders.

Then he fell backward.

The splatter of water and ice shards hit me in the face as he screamed, a terror-howl morphing into a shriek of joy, “This is where I was that night—here!”

Anna in me cried out for her son,
You’ll drown, you’ll die!
But she was only one of my parts. Another cringed: such vigor, such juvenile ambition—such outrage! Some boastful young buck—not my son—who wants to best me, a silverback male—thus—more power to him. Let him risk his life—let him die and leave my turf to me!

Another was the permafrost in my abdomen. It heaved and hurt. I saw the blanched skies.
Nothing thrives in ice!
I saw Merck, methodical and insensate, ice-glazing a bound man, and myself, the
monster,
watching.

“You fool! Get out at once!”

He laughed. “Join me!” He worked hard, head and shoulders bobbing up and down in the ice mash. Chunks of ice brushed his face. He was short of breath, coughing. He put his elbows on the ice ledge, leaned. “Is it reluctance I see? What, on earth, are you afraid of, Uncle?” His legs were kicking. The edge broke off, he grunted and dipped in. I lunged, dropped to my knees, grabbed his hands just as he latched onto me and pulled. Our tumble was undignified and violent like a Darkin dream. He
was stronger. Or more desperate, or favored by gravity. I fell in his hole and went under.

I struggled with the water, not with the cold. I am not a good swimmer. I pushed away ice chunks that pecked at me from all sides. I struggled until I anchored myself to the ice ledge with my forearm, then I could float comfortably. I blew on the water because it tickled my lower lip. “You shouldn’t have done it.”

He had pulled back to the other end of the hole and was observing me. His breaths came out ragged and hasty. Fear, awe, and curiosity mixed on his face; he drew a grin and started coughing again; he forced a breath through his nose, he spat. Floating ice crowded him. He rode low in the water, he kept his arms below the surface—water being warmer than air, I understand.

He said, “Warm enough for you?”

You’ll never thrive in ice—you’ll catch a deadly cold—you’ll drown—more power to you.

I said, “I’ll tell you what I’m afraid of. It’s not a game. Ice is treacherous. It puts thoughts into your head. Makes you feel as if you are drunk. As if you could cradle the world in your arms. Then you freeze to death.”

He panted. He spat, his lips trembling. “Try me.”

I remembered a fifteen-year-old boy who once upon a time had dunked his lower half into a barrel of ice-cold water. Although his mother had thought the boy had been punishing himself for something he had seen his uncle and another man do, he had done it then to prove himself special. He was doing it now for much the same reason. He was already very, very special. He was what they later would call a
sea lion
in Russian, a
polar bear
in English, an
ice-swimmer
in Finnish.

But right now, he treaded water in front of me, jaws clenched. He struggled to breathe. I floated. My mind began to wander away.

I envisioned him sneaking out of the barracks at night—he, his orderly, and a lantern. He would jump into the many rivers and rivulets, ponds and canals of the winter St. Pete’s, while his awestruck orderly would hold the lantern in one outstretched hand and his master’s ticking Breguet in the other. The involuntary gasp for air, the rushing heart—he’d learned to control them, he’d learned not to be afraid of them. He’d learned to crave this jolt that made him feel ten times more alive, to master the bone-sawing pain that, I am told, sets in at once and grows until one’s skin goes numb.

I floated, he treaded water. He fixed me with his stare. But twilight was blurring his face now—or was it my mind getting distracted, gliding away to the cruelty of ice, the kindness of snow? “Andrei, get out of the water.”

“No.”

He was that boy in the barrel, who had become this young man, and for this very reason he had never, ever told his mother about his ice-swimming, even though it was never because of what he had seen his uncle do to that man, no,
it was the cold, you see, the cold that he doesn’t feel, you know that cold, Anna, you’ve felt it, haven’t you, you’ve felt it inside you—it burned you, even though you believe you like it—see, it is so hard to explain all these things, isn’t it? Aren’t they better left unsaid?

I heard myself saying, “Ice is the cruelty of the world.” And “What did I learn in the Arctic, you ask? This. That people—peoples—will never understand one another. That they will always be at war. That I am a monster. I have been taking advantage of your mother’s weakness. Is that what you wanted to know? Now you know it.” My own voice sounded strange. I hope he barely understood me by then. His breaths were spastic. Held back or pushed out, they flared his nostrils and cheeks as he tried to keep his mouth shut; his lips were white and drawn into a line, water lapped at them. His hair was crusted in ice.

He let out a growl—rage, pain, frustration. But he did not quit. He just grabbed the ice ledge, pressed his forehead into his knuckles, and squeezed his eyes shut. That’s how he’d stay, I thought. That’s how he’d stay until he froze. Maybe he wanted to freeze now. I followed the perimeter of the hole to him. “Andrei.”

“No.”

“You beat me.”

“No!”

He fought me, I think. Maybe he did not believe I was helping him.

I pushed then pulled him with my arms and legs. Once halfway out on a ledge, he lay on his side, unable to move. He slurred his curses like a drunk and his face was a mask of snow.

Just a shivering human,
he kept saying, as I all but carried him back to the palace.
Just a
 . . .
shivering
 . . .
human,
lying face to the wall in his bed under a blanket and two greatcoats, coughing and shaking so violently his forehead would hit the wall. The first couple of times I put my hand
on his shoulder he knocked it off. Then he gave in. I kept my hand on him and felt every shudder and spasm of his tortured muscles.

Just a shivering human.

• • •

Andrei relapsed into a chest cold but in due course his fit constitution prevailed and his coughs resolved come summer. Our relationship resumed on cordial terms, at least in public or whenever Anna was with us. But he avoided being alone with me, and whenever I held my stare on him for more than five seconds, he tensed up. He never again mentioned his ice-swimming.

• • •

On with the story, Mr. Velitzyn, do not flinch, press forward! Say it, say when first you began to believe there was something wrong with your wife.

When?—When I was no longer the only, the exclusive, deliverer of her ice. When I spied Nadya sneaking in plain frozen water, low-life chunks from some undignified and impure source—and this instead of the precious offerings of my icery, of the gifts of my love—oh, how offended I was, how hurt was my pride! Circumvented, dethroned, and for what?

I confronted my wife, I demanded an explanation of this degradation of taste.

She said she did not want to bother me. And I objected that it was never a bother but a joy to me and why on earth would she deprive me of it and mix Nadya up in it? So she said, “You’ve made such a ritual out of it . . . given it so much importance, that I sometimes feel as though—”

“What?”

“As though I want it to become unimportant. I want it to be as if it does not exist.”

Why, my sweet? Why do you want it not to exist? What have I done?

“I feel so old,” she whispered. “So tired of being . . . me. Of waking up each morning, in my body. And then to spend the day negotiating one or the other of its little rules. It’s like a collegium, my body, a perfectly inept Department of my Interior. And I am a petitioner, and every morning I start a petition anew. Do you understand?”

I wasn’t sure I did. “What do you petition for?”

“For my day. What if you had to apply to have a good day? And it absolutely had to be on a good half-folio paper, and if you do not observe the
margins, then you have to wait till noon, when they accept nonstandard correspondence, except in those cases when they do not accept anything at all.”

• • •

Words are so ephemeral, they are not the fabric of reality, they could be merely an opinion, a fleeting mood. Anna had compared her body with a surreal bureaucracy—perhaps this meant nothing at all. Or was it something I should act upon, should I bring in a doctor from St. Petersburg, and thus admit to the reality of it? I asked her and she recoiled. “I don’t know, Alexander!” She too was fearful to act—she too perhaps would have liked to keep it in the realm of words alone.

For days I debated the matter with myself, then called for a doctor. I had him brought in, a dignified old German, a reliable caterer to all of St. Petersburg’s aristocracy. He spent time with Anna behind closed doors. I was in the parlor opposite the entrance to her apartments, restless. I wondered what he asked her about, what she told him. What he did to her. Did he tap on her chest? Did he measure her pulse, sink his knotty finger into her soft belly? My thoughts went to the ways in which the two of us had been making love for the past five years. I began to fear that Anna’s mysterious ailment was caused by it, even as I didn’t want the doctor to learn it. I prayed she wouldn’t tell the doctor about it, even as I realized that if she didn’t, he’d never be able to help her. But no, no, I assured myself, nothing we’d done could have weakened her health! How could it?