The Age of Ice: A Novel (40 page)

“What?”

“Who only have eight degrees of freedom! between life and death, yet they smash ice! and build ships—
don’t cling, lads!
—and make warmth out of deep freeze with their breath alone!”

“
Shivering humans
?”

“Yes, Son, not monsters, not me—just the fearless shivering humans like you do the greatest magic of all, that’s what I learned in the Arctic, that’s what it was!”

We reached our shore and doubled back, in what now became a throughway of open water. I tried to stay close to Andrei, and if I didn’t look at him directly I heard his voice next to me. I lost track of him maybe for just one moment, just a short little second.

And suddenly, he was no longer there.

I remember halting, stupefied. Men pushed and pressed past me, but I was helpful no longer. I kept looking left and right, wading back and forth, but I could not find him. A disappearance, sheer, plain, and shrill; no holding him in my arms, no dragging him ashore, no hearing his last words. He was above water and the next moment he wasn’t.

I swear it wasn’t hypothermia. It wasn’t ice. It couldn’t have done
this
to us. A French cannonball had to have killed him, a shell. Contused him, drowned him, pushed him under ice. I kept looking. I ended up looking for him even back in the vineyards, for that’s where I remember myself standing, hours later. Maybe I thought he had left and gone to rejoin his troops. I don’t know what I thought.

I remember a deepening dusk and freezing rain. From the far end of the field, wind blew fragments of the antiroyalist “Marseillaise” interwoven with chants of
Vive l’Empereur!
Wandering lights in the fields—the French were out and about poking at the dead and wounded. An air of something perversely festive—a weird Christmas, as if those people with lanterns were out caroling. An occasional burst of speech or laughter. A gunshot from time to time. I shouted, “No more killing! Shame on you!” And someone shouted back in a busy, annoyed, and very French voice, “He begged me to! What am I supposed to do, walk away? Eh?”

I remember, even when silence would fall, the battlefield felt strangely alive. Here and there a soul still held the fort, flesh against ground:
I am. I am. I still am.
I could feel the hum of this obstinate
I am
all over the body-strewn field. I could see it: a horse sat patiently on his haunches observing his hind legs, broken off. A man picked dirt off his spilled guts and folded them back into his stomach. But there was also another, terrifying kind of life. The leftover life of the flesh. The whole field was warmer than me. I could feel it pulsing, dripping, churning, cooling but slowly, effluvia lingering. A twitch, a rustle. The empires had worked so hard to forge a single body of war out of their soldiers, and they had succeeded, in a manner.

In my dreams, the scene gains terror. The darkness is deeper, the falling sleet thicker. I am alone, outnumbered. I hear crawl and creep around me, bodies furtively joining into a sheet, a different kind of a glacier. “Andrei?” I keep calling, but less and less loudly. I am so afraid. I know I need to say something to this ever-growing audience. So I begin, careful not to start crying, “In the Zeittlenkeit that surrounds me—”

Sometimes when I have this dream I get to see what happens next. I see lights and hear someone banging on a canteen. “Wake up! Anyone alive, show yourself!” I see surgeon Kessler with his leather-bound sketchbook. Between me and his wagons, the field lifts hands, groans,
help
.

• • •

A curious case of Prince Velitzyn, Alexander Mikhailovich, an older man. Found wandering in the field of battle in wet clothes and showing extreme coldness.
I am sure that’s what Kessler wrote in his sketchbook after he had come across me. I left his care the next morning—as soon as I could string two thoughts together. A day later, they found Andrei. He had
floated up,
Subcolonel Nastyrtzev told me.

S
truldbrugs
are a peculiar race Gulliver encountered in his travels. A struldbrug’s life begins as any normal person’s would, and reaches a ripe old age, and then an overripe age, and then—he just would not die. But instead of appeasing him, this condition makes a struldbrug ill-tempered, burdensome, and annoying. He may tell you, as I just did, that his friend died, then his wife died, then his adopted son died. He may even blame himself for these deaths, just as I do. Ironically, it is this feeling of guilt that makes him into an ill-tempered old man who vexes the remaining few still around him—something he, in turn, feels guilty about. It is the fact that all his loved ones have passed on that makes him feel like a struldbrug.

I am so sorry.

• • •

On December 4, 1805, Subcolonel Nastyrtzev and other kindly souls from my old Preobrazhensky put me in a carriage and told me I had to accompany Andrei’s remains home. Our hero, they said, should rest in peace and comfort in his home soil, not in a mass grave in a foreign land. So that his children,
your grandchildren, Prince Alexander Mikhailovich,
they told me, would visit him and be proud of their father, reading on his tombstone,
a cavalier of the Order of St. George
. Apparently, the brass had already made an application to the emperor, and His Majesty had nodded. The high award to Andrei was virtually guaranteed.

God bless Nastyrtzev, he was so helpful, he explained it all to me so patiently. And so, for days and days, I rattled on in my carriage, Andrei’s coffin strapped to its rear, and my back felt every bump and rut he had to endure. The most horrific journey.

Back in Nikolskoe, it was all a charade. While one woman pretended that she grieved more than she actually did, another had to pretend that she grieved less. I was watching poor Nadya at the wake. The mourners
all flocked to Varvara, held her hands, whispered condolences, showcased their empathy with their offerings of water and aromatic salts—which it was Nadya’s responsibility to run and fetch pronto.

I saw the glances Varvara shot at Nadya. Revenge comes in so many guises!

I remember thinking that I should speak to Nadya. Tell her that I did not condemn her, that I was on her side. But I feared breaking down in her presence. I barely held together as it was. I sought refuge in my icery, the cold and drafty former barn with naked windows without panes and frost on doorjambs, with snowflakes nesting, like swallows, in the shadows between the roof beams. I would walk between the rows of my creations. Their fragrance—a tone of mineral, marmoreal purity and a touch of wet-cold rot, was like a drug to me, like Anna’s morphine. For hours I wandered, stood still, or lay flat on the dirt floor, inhaling it. For as long as I did this, the pain in my soul seemed to lessen.

Why didn’t Nadya leave? Why did she stay where it hurt the most? Why would she go to Anna’s and Andrei’s graves and stand over them like a votive candle, quietly burning away? She had means. There was a trust fund set up by the academy for Druka’s education, and Carl’s pension had been accumulating for a decade now. Besides, my Andrei had left her a small endowment in his will. I hadn’t told her about it yet, because bringing it up would imply that I knew they’d been lovers. A most awkward admission. But if she were ready to leave, if these were my last words to her—then perhaps it wouldn’t matter so much, would it?

Once, Nadya came into the icery. I don’t know how long she was observing me—my back was to the door. I was trotting down an aisle between my ice flower beds, calling softly,
Andrewsha-a-a-a
! I only noticed her when I turned around to make another pass. We both were startled. Then I approached. Her eyes, her nose were red—she must have been crying. Only the very tip of her nose was white, the tip that had been frostbitten a lifetime ago in Irkutsk, with her Carl. Part of me wanted to touch that little white tip and say, “I’ve been crying too, kid.” But another part of me, embarrassed at her finding me in such a sorry state, was already saying, “Do not ever come here uninvited.”

She apologized and hurried out.

• • •

How was it, Nadya?
Was Andrei a good lover? Did he make you forget everything, your children, your shame? Did you realize that what you
had with Carl was but an academic, scholastic version of passion? Did you trust my son? Was he a friend to you? Did you worship him? Was he funny? Did you pray together? Laugh? Cry? Did he lace your corset, your booties? Did he buy you presents? Intimate ones? Did you have nicknames for each other? Did you have embarrassments, near-disasters, lucky escapes, awkward run-ins, secret messages, favorite jokes, resolutions, quarrels, vows, great revelations? Was it thrilling? Was it bitter? Was it worth it?

“Yes,” she would say, walking up from behind, putting her gentle hands onto the back of my armchair. “Yes, Alexander Mikhailovich, it was worth it. I shall never ever regret it. I know you blame me for his death too. We share the blame. Here we are, the two of us, we are all that’s left. We are convinced we’d loved him best, known him best, worshipped his true self. But at the same time we are the bearers of his undoing. How sad it is. And how strange.”

She says all that and strokes my hair. She is no longer Nadya, she is Anna. Dreams, goddamn dreams.

• • •

In 1807 we went to war again and fought the French some more, bloodily and inconclusively, at Eylau and Friedland, now alongside Prussians. After we signed the first Treaty of Tilsit with Napoléon, we were obliged to join his continental blockade of Britain, or the
Blocus,
as we used to call it back then. Our ports closed to British ships. Trade was supposed to cease, again. In February 1808, Sawyer visited me in my home and brought along his new wife, a former Mrs. Alistair Woodrow, now in charge of the late Mr. Woodrow’s sizable timber operation. She and Sawyer had known each other ever since she, then a married woman, adopted him as a charitable cause after his return from the Arctic, and they had become quite embroiled over all kinds of things; connubial interest—whenever that had ignited—but one of the ingredients in a mix. I remember how, back in 1804, Sawyer confided in me that Mr. Woodrow, who, along with Messrs. Thornton and Boyle, was one of the wealthiest English merchants in St. Petersburg, was instructed to forward a considerable sum of money directly to Czar Alexander I and a few of his key courtiers to keep alive our interest in the war against Napoléon. That’s in addition to already existing,
official
subsidies, Sawyer explained with a wink. (With his typical boyish excitement, he could not help hinting that he was personally involved in some of those transactions.)

Now, in 1808, our Mr. Sawyer looked somewhat stiff under the added weight of wealth and responsibility. A far cry from the young man who fell head over heels for the sixteen-year-old wife of a sadistic Siberian Cossack. Though perhaps it was precisely the memory of Ouchapin that made him seek a relationship where he would never be able to govern the woman he married. The widow Woodrow, ten years his senior, was like a mother to him. If she thought that she had rescued him like a puppy and nursed him to full manhood, she wasn’t that far from the truth. “Martin dear, will you be needing your cane?” she asked him when they were getting out of the kibitka by my front entrance.

“No, I’ll manage,” he said; then, offering his elbow to support her, “Watch your step, Mrs. Sawyer, it’s a bit icy right here.”

He must have liked the sound of it: Mrs. Sawyer.

“Prince Velitzyn—how do you do,” she said, and extended a hand—a big, gloved lump of energy which I squeezed briefly and released. She was solid-framed, slightly stooping. A trifle taller than Sawyer. Her hair was golden-red, eager to escape the oppression of a fox fur bonnet that almost rivaled a Napoleonic guard’s bearskin in size.

I entertained them in my study. Under different circumstances, I might have enjoyed their company. Alas, Sawyer informed me that I now had to find a third party to ship my ice goods. Besides, if I wanted to reach the British Isles, that third party would have to sail out of Archangel, not Kronstadt, and go over the Scandinavian peninsula rather than through the politically stormy Baltic.

As if this was not bad enough, a burgeoning ice-harvesting enterprise was now active on the immense Lake Ontario in the New World, an operation for which I was no match, and which could ship to Britain unmolested, any time of the year. Most damning of all, Sawyer said he and his wife were returning to Britain. “Right, Evy?” He glanced at her for support. “It’s high time to go home. Staying here gets harder and harder all the time because of—you know, the situation. I am sorry.”

I thought if he hadn’t married, his
home
would’ve been here, in the smoky St. Pete’s apartment with a view of the admiralty’s spire, in the stuffy club, on the noisy floor of the stock exchange. It was for
Evy’s
convenience that he now abandoned the idiosyncratic mixture of English and Russian we usually communicated in, and spoke
proper
English—which made me realize that my own English had become stale. The lost cause of the Tower of Babel came to my mind, as if the responsibility
for it lay on my shoulders too. As if we were just now smitten with the proverbial curse and were segregating into our respective languages, our ability to understand each other slowly fading—

I found myself wishing this visit was over and the Sawyers were on their merry way.

Instead, Sawyer begged me to give them a tour of my icery. Evy wished to see it. Having reinstalled Mrs. Sawyer’s fox fur coat on her broad shoulders, we headed out. I said to Sawyer in Russian, “You and I—we could have managed. We’ve been through embargoes before, haven’t we? We could trade with continental Europe, as we did in 1799.”

He didn’t answer immediately. Mrs. Sawyer walked next to him, attached to his elbow, looking eager. Then, out of the corner of his mouth and now in our dear mixed
lingua franca,
pronouncing my patronymic in his special, Anglicized manner,
Maikl-
ovich, he whispered, “Things
izmenyautsya,
Alexander Michaelovich.
Ranshe
it was one thing,
a
now it is a very different
situatsiya
. Think of it, we are
praktichesky
in the opposite war camps.
Britannia
on one side and everybody else under Napoléon on the other.”