The Age of Ice: A Novel (43 page)

Still, in August there were fires. The word spread that folk in Smolensk were running away from the French and burning everything before them—and our local pyromaniacs must have developed an itch to do the same, just out of solidarity. My neighbor Kudelin’s barn burned. Then a part of another’s forest.

Some said the perpetrators were those who wanted
emancipation,
imported on the French sword. No fear greater to my neighbors than that the
mouzhik,
the peasant-man, would get it into his head that the French were
liberators
! Nobility meetings buzzed with agitation: what counterpropaganda to adopt? Why, French atrocities of course:
When they come they will rape your mothers and children and gut your wives
.

Smoke was in the air. Varvara was quieter, combed her hair with more zeal, listened carefully to my updates, kept her boys close. I kept “informing” my peasants:
No burning. Business as usual. Napoléon wouldn’t ever get here, so where would it leave you with your silly conflagrations? You’d be the ones rebuilding, that’s all.

But what would happen if they conquered us, they’d say.

They don’t want to conquer us, they just want to give us a scare, I’d reply.

Would they hang our beloved father the czar?

Would they take us away from you?

Would they cut our heads off and throw us into a vat of boiling oil?

No, no, God, no!

• • •

Then came September. When Napoléon entered Moscow after the Battle of Borodino, everything fell apart.
The sacred heart, our mother of the forty times forty churches, our lady of the seven hills, Czarina Moscow was abandoned to defilement!
Church bells tolled. Women wept. Men meandered around, aimless. Some hooligan boys, some drunken vagrants agitated to form guerrilla bands and go beat the French. Some serfs went missing. My neighbor Kudelin, now an elected community safety officer, made daily patrols with a rifle. “You were wrong, Alexander Mikhailovich,” he told me triumphantly. “The enemy does not want a negotiating table. The enemy wants the Russian nation dead!”

I squirmed.

Varvara grew dramatic. I’d lecture her that Kudelin and his like were just as afraid of their own peasants as they were afraid for the motherland, if not more, and that it was simply laughable to see how they’d now become so possessed with their own patriotic rhetoric, as if they hadn’t, a month or so ago, adopted it in a calculated move to keep a lid on their serfs. She’d accuse me of cynicism, defeatism, denial,
Francophilia
. She’d wander around clenching her hands and saying she was worried about her brothers in Moscow. I’d say they must have been just fine, evacuated with everyone else east, to the city of Ryazan. She’d say, how could I be so certain, did I open and read a letter addressed to her and then destroy it?

Then she’d go listen to what they said in the village church. She’d return wide-eyed, seething with fears, and at the same time proud of herself for joining with the common folk in times of trouble. She’d tell me that I’d been lying to her about the French. She’d watch, from a window, the brave safety officer Kudelin making a stop at our mansion while on his rounds. “Now what on earth is the man patrolling for,” I would grumble. She’d say, defensively, “Runaway serfs, troublemakers, French spies.”

“French spies?”

“Yes, there is nothing funny about it, Alexander Mikhailovich. The other day they caught one, he swore on his mother’s grave that he was not a spy but a tutor to some local family. That he’d denounced his France back in 1793 and had nothing to do with it since. Shed crocodile tears,
babbled about
deportation
and
internment
. Couldn’t explain satisfactorily the matter of his being in those particular woods.”

Now she even talked like Kudelin. She
must
have been meeting with the man somehow!

“What did they do with him?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Gave him to militiamen?”

Alas, poor Yorick.
I had my own dangers. I was certain she’d use every patriotic excuse and loophole to turn the tables on me. How about spreading a word that I was a French sympathizer! That I was preparing a welcoming party for Napoléon! Storing ammunitions in that icery of mine—why else would I keep it locked!

Me, a French sympathizer! If I could lay my hands on Napoléon, I’d strangle him. But I beg your pardon, I still remembered the French cook Diadya Vasya, and the way he had stood by his splendid table, in Irkutsk, at Merck’s wedding—searching for signs of approval on diners’ faces and blooming with smiles when he found them. Don’t ask me to demonize Diadya Vasya!

One day I told Kudelin not to patrol on my lands. I told him that I knew what he was after (Varvara, of course!), that he violated my privacy, and that I didn’t need his services. He looked at me as if I was insane. Said, “You know, common people are talking about you, Alexander Mikhailovich. That you have made a deal with Napoléon so he won’t come here and won’t harass the local folks. Believe it or not. Your own peasants have been saying that. I’d say, very curious, isn’t it, where they ever got this idea?”

I could have laughed. Varvara didn’t have to bad-mouth me, a simple echo of my own words, distorted in transmission, polarized by fear, was enough to do me in!

• • •

It was like this for a month. Napoléon sat in Moscow watching it burn, watching things go undone on him. I too couldn’t help participating in my own undoing. Varvara was growing stronger every day on her diet of patriotism. I was certain she was conspiring with Kudelin, her new ally. And I knew I was going down, one way or the other. An escape plan—if you could call it that—was shaping in my mind.

Rains had started in the first days of October and kept coming, off and on, almost every day. I unlocked the icery and went in, after three months of neglect. What a godforsaken place! A stench of mold and rotting hay,
stale water, mouse droppings. Shuttered windows, mud, and—molten, ulcerated, stooping shapes—what was left of my ice. How ugly and how fitting!
It does not just resemble you, it is you.
Never again should you, Alexander Velitzyn, come here to practice your so-called art—because this is how godawful it is, in all its pockmarked decrepitude, look at it! Tear the boards off the windows, disperse the hay, knock down and shatter the rotting ice carcasses. Never again! How foolish, how insane you were. Now, kick open the door, let the stench out. Look at the fields, take a breath of air, you know exactly what to wish for, you know when—as soon as the first snowflake comes circling down from the skies and settles on your hand.

When we heard the news on October 21 that the Grande Armée was on the move again, at first there was a great wail of fear: now they were coming for St. Petersburg! Even Varvara for one brief moment forgot she hated me and fluttered into my study seeking consolation—semi-dressed, eyes wide. The mood passed quickly, though it remained possible, if increasingly unlikely as days went on, that the Grande Armée would take a turn north.

I’ve told you that year was an odd one. Morning frosts in early October, skim ice in water puddles. Freezing fogs. And rain, rain, rain, in between. When seasons break like this, rapidly, even I can’t help but feel shortchanged, as if I’d never known the splendors of winter. But not this time, no. This time I was grateful, because I had to hurry. And all I needed was a little frost to help me along.

On the night of October 26, drizzle turned into snow. I stood by my window and watched as snow kept falling and falling. I pulled out boxes of my snowflake collection, emptied them into a sachet, stuffed it into my breast pocket. I went downstairs and donned Cyril’s sheepskin greatcoat—then took it off. I did not need it.

I tiptoed out.

I walked, breathing snow, feeling weightless—the way only a youth can feel when he is falling in love for the first time, and snow is falling for the first time in his love. If snow kept on falling like this and covered all the fields ahead of me, I’d find that road to Orenburg and walk on it day and night, and meet Anna and little Andrei, and save them from Feodor Napoleonovich Pugachev, and we all would live happily—ever—after.

Forever.

T
here is a long and a short version of what had happened to me. I like the short version better, it makes me look less culpable. It goes like this:

One day I woke up in a foreign land, under a makeshift canvas canopy. I woke to clamor—steel on steel, ax on wood, spoon on bowl, hoof on cobble; to speech, song, laughter, wafts of smoke, smells of cookery—all around me were troops. Russian troops. But the land was France. That’s what I had been told. My canopy was on the Champs Elysées near Paris. It was spring.

I knew some of it upon waking—recovered it just as anyone fresh out of slumber regains his bearings within seconds. But this time something was different. It was in the wonderment that arose in my head: with all the noise around me, how could I have slept? Sun danced on a sagging canvas above my head. A fly sat there, rubbing its front legs together. There was moisture on my brow—dew or sweat. My tongue rolled in saliva like a pig in mud. I swallowed and almost choked. This was different too. But how?

I looked over my prostrate length, knowing the body as mine but at the same time observing its details as if after years of estrangement. I wore officer’s leather boots and ill-fitting blue uniform pants with golden galloons, but above them was a peasant’s red robe girdled with a rope. My back was sore—I had slept on an ax that was tucked under the girdle. I had a thick beard and my hand that scratched it was coarse, veinous, and tinted gray from pallor and dirt. On my head—as my hand discovered—was a bonnet lined with greasy fur. My other hand rested on a rifle.

I felt buoyant. Happy? I got on my knees, picked up my knapsack and
rifle. The rifle suddenly felt heavy and burdensome. I put it down, let it lie as it was. Straightening my back, I stepped from under the canopy. A big road of powdery yellow dirt and huge cobblestones ran in a straight line through our encampments, past rows of houses that grew ever denser, to the clustering of grand stone buildings a half mile beyond. I’d always wanted to follow that road and see what the buildings were, I realized.

Men by the nearest campfire greeted me with banter. I mimed an urgent need to urinate and staggered away. The miming, the exaggerated manner came naturally; they would have expected it, just as they expected me to shield my eyes from the campfire, to look the other way. But this time, I
knew
I acted it, an observer of my ways, not a partaker. It was not me. I
pretended
.

Because I wanted to go away—down the road of dirt and cobblestones, away from the men who had taken me in and kept me around. This was different too.

• • •

And there she was, the grandest of European cities.

I walked smiling. I weaved between soldiers, tents, horses. I approached a freestanding arch and halted, craning my neck: atop of the arch stood a sculpture of a Roman quadriga driven by some classic deity or hero, with two more gilded personages standing at the horses’ sides. An inscription on the frontispiece opened with: L’ARMEE FRANCAISE EMBARQUEE A BOULOGNE . . . MENACAIT L’ANGLETERRE . . . and concluded with NAPOLÉON ENTRE DANS VIENNE, IL TRIOMPHE A AUSTERLITZ EN MOINS DE SEN JOURS LA COALITION ES DISSOLUTE. I read it all and I understood it, but the words were mute. They were not sounds, just combinations of letters that stood to describe the campaign of 1805: Napoléon threatened England, took Vienna, was victorious at Austerlitz, et cetera. I hadn’t spoken French in two years—in fact I hadn’t spoken much at all—but now I wanted to say things, to taste them on my tongue.

Ahead of me was the most splendid palace. I loitered in its court, then attempted to go around. A river embankment was on my right, and I paused there to watch some Russian soldiers fishing off the quay with makeshift rods. A corpse or two floated past. There had been a battle. But then the war was over, I remembered that.

I left the riverbank, circled the palace and dived into the narrow streets. People were everywhere. Soldiers, officers, burghers, workmen, merchants, beggars. Women, girls. Languages rolled over me from all
sides, like smells. Whiffs of French, German, English, Italian. Whiffs of fish, baking bread, apples, cadavers, perfume, cold ashes, tallow, wet stone, caramel, charcoal, urine, pot roast. To my left a Prussian Rittmeister was in over his head trying to negotiate a price for a head of cheese at a street stall. Further along—three Russians dressed in brand-new civilian attire huddled over a guidebook, while their escort, a shabby Frenchman, stood waiting, smiling patiently. I passed coffee shops, porcelain shops, palm readers, vegetable vendors.
La boulangerie
.
La fromagerie
.
La pâtisserie
. My tongue and jaws moved now, rediscovering the shape of these beautiful words that felt like hot fresh pastry or a slice of soft crumbling cheese in my mouth. But my voice? I did not even know what it would sound like . . .

A placard in a bookstore’s window said that Napoléon had abdicated in a palace called Fontainebleau. And that the allies had chosen to show royal magnanimity and to spare Paris. Perhaps that was why I was different? The placard was dated April 6, 1814. I pondered it: the grand parade and pomp of the past few days, the cheer and merriment on Champs Elysées now made perfect sense to me, as if they too were arranged on a placard.

“Kazak, kazak, galava boli?”
Two girls in a window above the bookstore. Giggling. They spoke a makeshift Russian; moreover, it was me they addressed. I gave them the broadest ever smile, I wanted to say
oui, mesdemoiselles,
just to be nice to them.

Then a gaunt invalid in a doorway looked at my pants and snarled, in French, that I was a robber and a murderer. “Who did you rip them off, you jackal?” I suppose I wasn’t meant to understand it, but I did. I smiled at the veteran too, and walked on.