The Age of Ice: A Novel (45 page)

I didn’t know at the time that every foreigner who had lived in Moscow—and whose nationality had the misfortune of being represented in Bonaparte’s troops, which meant just about everyone—had left with the French, because—yes, because they feared repressions from the returning Russians. So many civilians were on that road, mixed with the troops. They did not have to be there. They shouldn’t have been.

Old Man Frost remembers one family—a mother with two small children. She was . . .
No, say it. Say how it was
. My keepers made her dance with me. For bread. They said,
Dance with our bear
. I was the “bear.” Her children watched us. Around us, men clapped and cheered, and someone blew into a fipple flute. But she only stared up into my face. With this complete, terrorized concentration that could be mistaken for—hope? She smiled too. It was a dead smile. Her freckled face was starved. She tried to match my stomps and jumps. She tried. But she was falling behind. Too weak. When she fatigued—quickly—she just sat down. Just folded up and remained so. Just sat there. Didn’t cry. Her collapsed skirts made this puffy—bulwark—around her. Why were there just skirts? Had she no greatcoat? Her poor legs were stretched in front of her. Her footwear was mismatched: one
valenok,
a felt boot, and one miserable shoe with a wooden overshoe, quite fallen apart and showing a sickeningly swollen ankle. She just sat. My keepers turned to go, it was no longer cheery. Someone yanked me away, someone dropped bread in her lap.
The piece sank into the puff of her skirts. Someone, not I, threw it. I only stared. That’s all. That’s what I keep seeing. Those puffy skirts. And those outstretched legs, in a
valenok
and a shoe. One foot still alive, one frozen dead.

• • •

 . . . I remember Vilna, when our troops entered. Festive joy in the air, sparkling snowflakes. The command held a victory ball and all the local nobility attended. I remember hearing the cotillion, smelling wine and roast. The Chernigovsky got to march to the other end of town for billets. There was a hospital there, turned prison. They were throwing typhoid corpses and near-corpses out of second-floor windows. It was easier that way than dragging them down the stairs. I could still hear the music.

These are the things I remembered. There must be worse things I had forgotten. How can any of it be?

I had come out of my home, in October 1812, to join Anna and little Andrei. To die. Instead, I lived to commit violence.

I suppose it is the question that I am not the first to ask, so much so that by now it could be considered rhetorical: Why is it that the only two places on the European continent where Napoléon stumbled were the religiously zealous, grit-of-the-earth, backward, peasant countries, like Spain and Russia? The countries that could paint the French as Antichrist’s minions and treat them accordingly? Does total victory require total violence?

Don’t answer.

Answer instead this one: I looked to be many things in those mirrors of the Palais Royale. But I did not look
seventy-four years of age
. Was my renewal fueled by the lives that Ice had fed on? Was I an ice flower, a tumid bloom that jutted out and opened on an overfertilized, gorged ice-field?

Or had I come out of my mother’s womb this way?

Am I culpable or not?

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

—Omar Khayyám,
Rubáiyát

A
fter the night in Tivoli, after I wept, smeared dirt on my face, gnawed on the head of my ax, and wept again—I kept on living. Somehow, days kept filing in: sunrise, then sunset. I exited the garden. I went to a barber. I ate bread and held it down. I looked for jobs. I knocked on every storefront, bookstores to vermin exterminators, and offered myself for hire. My other options were to panhandle or skirmish for the scraps of farmers’ markets and grocers, to fight over sodden bread or fish-soiled cheese with the shell-shocked and the crippled, the very men who had been made this way because of ice—and me. And days just kept on coming.

Eventually, an Oriental rug store owner took me. His name was Ossip Vassilian and he had been born to an Armenian father and a Russian mother. From my very first day of employment, he told me wondrous stories about himself: how he had been spying for Russia in the Persian Armenia, how he’d switched allegiance to Persia when the neighboring Georgia was annexed by Russia in 1801. How he had performed critical duties for both the French mission to Tehran and the Persian mission to Paris between 1805 and 1810, being friends with the recently departed Persian ambassador in Paris, Asker Khan. Whatever the truth, Ossip did appear as a perfect
political,
as they used to call politicians back then: a cordial, smooth-talking, generous, and peculiarly untrustworthy man.
While he did sell a rug now and then, his store doubled as a club: a motley assemblage of persons, distinguished and not, visited Ossip’s back rooms for no other reason, seemingly, than to sample sweetmeats and smoke
kallion
(similar to Indian
hookah
): a liberated artist, Mme Vavin; Mr. Jaubert, a former diplomat in Tehran and now a professor; a young poet, Boucher, who worked on something about plague and love in an Oriental paradise, to name just a few.

On occasion, I wondered why Ossip had taken me in. Not for work—there wasn’t much of it. Not out of sympathy, I had wits enough to realize. Maybe for my French, or because I’d look good around the shop, what with my height and mournful, Old Testament mien. Or—because he perceived me a simpleton. And a broken man.

He was right, of course. I stood over my own ruin, so to speak, suspecting myself of foul play, and uncertain whether I could rebuild on the same spot. Besides, who is to say that I hadn’t been made slow in the head during my term as Old Man Frost?

• • •

One memorable night, a traveling British couple wandered in. The young man was friends with the Boucher fellow. The woman, Miss Mary, struck me with her resemblance to my Anna. The same clear, high forehead, the same serene sadness in her eyes. She looked unwell, or self-conscious. She appeared less entertained than her companion by this late-night visit to an exotic Oriental hideout. She noticed my staring. As I served them
halvah
and
kallions,
and the males went into a heated political discussion, Miss Mary asked me, “Who
are
you?” There was marvel in her voice. “A wanderer. I come from far, far away,” I said. “From the North.”—“What’s
North
?” she said. I went on to tell her—because she looked so much like Anna and listened so beautifully—about the nightless days and the stately palaces of ice that floated past a sailing ship over sunset-colored waters, about
polynyas
and ice drifts, about the deep freeze that lures you into his cradle, and then squeezes his hand over you, ever so slowly, gently . . . I’d like to think I’d made an impression on her: why else then did the piece she jotted down just two years thereafter, the famous
Frankenstein,
open with a scene on an Arctic-bound ship?

• • •

Ossip had not hired me for my looks, or my French. He was grooming me for something special. The occasion soon presented itself.

In March of 1815, Bonaparte returned to the Continent. On the twentieth
he entered Paris, to the cheers of the crowds. That day I came from the streets anguished. I saw miserable veterans—with their missing limbs, skin ulcers, oozing eyes—the victims of ice. I saw them crawling out of the woodwork everywhere, screaming
Vive l’Empereur,
shaking their crutches. I could not understand why. Their
Empereur
had abandoned them in the clutches of ice! Nor could I comprehend why the very same civilians who only a year ago had cheered the Coalition liberators, now so devotedly turned to the man who had nearly bled their country to death. I felt an acute, desperate need to run away, to a place where Boney’s name would have never been heard of, where his wars would not ever reach.

Ossip found me sitting in my corner, shivering. He had a chore for me, he said. A business associate of his was traveling to Persia, and he fancied to send me along with some correspondence, since I had served him so well over the past year and he had developed a complete trust in me; but now that he saw me, he worried on account of my feverish state—would I be able to stomach the journey or was I falling sick?

Persia? Why, by all means, I could leave today! Ossip could see it already: even as the prospect of leaving Europe and seeing all these fabled, warm, tropical worlds was opening to my eyes, my shivers and sweats seemed to resolve quite miraculously!

The irony of it is, my “escape” from Europe did not take me completely away from Bonaparte, whose portrait I saw in the Persian crown prince Abbas Mirza’s palace long after Mr. Nap was expelled from France for the second, and last, time. Nor did it relieve me of war—on the contrary, I was thrust into something that was later called, vaingloriously, the Great Game—the contest of diplomacy, war, and espionage in which Russia and Britain competed for influence and conquest in Asia. The game that, in some form or other, is arguably played to this day.

• • •

As I traveled from Paris to Marseille, then by sea to Messina and on to Izmir in Turkey, I always had chaperones. A friend of Ossip’s, then a friend of a friend; one hard-baked man succeeded another in a chain of custody, each subsequent one more divorced from the trappings of Europeanism and less fluent in French. Even someone as benumbed as me could wonder: Why couldn’t all these guides be Ossip’s postmen? Why me? Ossip’d never sealed his letters, only wrapped them in cloth, but I knew them to be written in Turkish. Even if I was tempted, I could not glean their content.

In Izmir, a most civilized and likable young man met us at the port. Speaking lively French and smiling pearly whites, he introduced himself as Najar Alibek, Asker Khan’s nephew, and said he’d lived in Paris for more than five years and loved every day of it. “Alexander?” He beamed at my introduction. “Like the Russian czar? Like Alexander the Macedon?” When I gave him the letters, he unwrapped them, skimmed a few sheets, and cast a quick evaluating glance at me. Then he said that he and I would travel east to Tehran.

• • •

I remember rocks and dust, ancient ruins that looked like mud cakes that some playful giant had shaped out of the land and then abandoned. The whole country seemed to be sinking—softly, languorously—into disrepair, roads and bridges and mosques; like an old man who’s lost track of time, unwilling to look ahead and patiently enduring his too many, long years. The only two things that stayed in perfect and timeless order were the mountains, and the ubiquitous and ingenious devices of irrigation.

I had a hard time riding a camel—it gave me sciatica; having to ride in slippers instead of boots discomfited me, as did wearing native dress, it being so loose. Najar, who forced this costume on me, never talked about a return journey, and I did not pry. I too was unwilling to know what was ahead.

Oh, but the heat—it made me feel safe. It meant nothing bad could happen. Even when I asked Najar to teach me Turkish and Farsi, and he smiled amicably and told me that I was impolite, for a
slave
. Even then.

Tehran, clay-colored, seemed flattened by the heat, prostrate on a plain under the rugged, snow-covered peaks. Up close it was a maze of walls, fences, and water troughs; the streets were narrow, the traffic was by foot and hoof, never by wheels. To a European eye, the city would seem subdued, oppressed, and underpopulated, until one got to the bazaar—and was struck by its splendors: endless, crisscrossing passages two and three stories high, their vaulted ceilings fit for a cathedral; passages that were thick with people, exuberant with wares of copper, gold, and porcelain; red, azure, and yellow fabrics; leathers, tapestries, and glazed tile mosaics; passages that shattered one’s ear with the din of whole rows of smiths a-hammering or spectators cheering wrestlers at a
zur-khana
; that made one’s mouth water with smells of pilaf, mutton soup, and
kishmish
raisins.

In Tehran I had a first glimpse of my purpose. There was a contingent of Russian Cossacks at the shah’s court, all deserters (a result of
a decade of Russian military encroachment south over the Caucasus, through Armenia and into Persia). Najar Alibek had me eavesdrop on them through a secret vent in the ceiling. Inconsequential chatter was all I heard. I am sure he had ways to corroborate me. Soon after, Najar had me shave my head after the native custom and grow out my beard. He made me a fixture in his retinue, and started to call me Eskandar—an Asiatic version of my name. Whenever he transacted with the
feringhee—
foreigners—he would have me listen in. My transformation came easily.

By that time I discovered that there was ice in Persia. Not infrequently it froze and snowed in winter, and not only that, they had ingenious icehouses,
yakshal,
which both made and stored ice. They were two- or three-story-high cones with thick mud-and-stone walls. Water ran along the gutters on their outside and collected in troughs at their base, where it froze at night and in winter. Ice was carried inside the cones, into the underground chambers. Ice was precious—and a medicine too. I once saw a sufferer of malignant fever who was forced to swallow at least a pound of ice.