The Age of Ice: A Novel (5 page)

“You.” She touched the lapels of my jacket. Then, “We are not going to marry, are we?”

“No,” I said.

“I’m sorry. I must be frail. The doctor says my constitution—”

“You are perfect. Kind. Brave. The cause lies with me.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. What . . . did you feel?”

She gazed into the fire. “
Cold,
” she said.

• • •

She was a gift of the heavens, and I did not deserve her.

That day Marie asked me henceforth to avoid her company, and I obliged. In a year she was seen with suitors; I could not blame her but suffered afresh nonetheless, not least because Andrei was getting married! Heartbroken was a medical diagnosis back then but it did not begin to describe the mix of envy and bile that flooded me when I stood at my brother’s wedding. Was my brother not cursed, after all? Was it just me? Or was Andrei’s bride, this Anna something or other, an unremarkable, demure girl I barely looked at before the ceremony, somehow more
accommodating
? Or did she, poor thing, not know what she was getting into?

The gossips of St. Petersburg found the famous “rejection of Prince Velitzyn by Countess Tolstoy” a fertile ground for speculation. Many held me at fault. In another year my
petite comtesse
married a rich civil servant twenty years her senior, while I remained chaste—and now the gossip turned to my deficiencies, one guess more piquant than another. Then Marie died in childbirth. Those narrow hips of hers.

After her death my critics fell silent. Now I was a black swan who had lost the mate of his life. The irony.

Of this I am as sure as I can be: she never shared my secret with anyone, she took it with her.

• • •

If not for Marie, I would have taken much longer to understand it, but now I knew: arousal made me cold. What was I to do?

I became a misanthrope. I was intemperate with my grenadiers and curt with everyone else. I was disconsolate and reveled in it; after a while I became disliked. I daydreamed of various exotic and demonstrative ways of self-destruction. When Empress Ekaterine imported the distinguished Dr. Dimsdale and his son from England in 1768 to inoculate herself and the young Grand Duke Paul against smallpox, I volunteered to be the
corpore vili
on which to
fiat experimentum.
(The empress refused to order anyone to submit to such a fate, while the doctor was reluctant to use his procedure on her without a test run.) I looked forward to a dignified illness and heroic death, but the self-sacrificial move turned out to entail a week of purgatives and boiled vegetables, followed by nicking on both arms with a scalpel dipped in pustules of a disease-stricken child from
the city’s outskirts. This was followed by another week of laxatives and special diet, during which I developed tenderness in my arms and then a mild fever. Then I got well. I erupted not one pustule, and Dr. Dimsdale doubted the inoculation had truly taken; he certainly could not use me as a source for more inoculations (which was my last hope: in those days we believed that the subject whose pustule matter is taken to inoculate others will consequently die). In two weeks, profoundly purified of “crudities in my stomach,” sick of turnips and cabbage but hardly altered otherwise, I returned to the regiment and to misanthropy.

One winter eve, Svetogorov stomped into our room in the Leib Company House straight from
la louveterie
—wolf-hunting—with Count Gregory Orlov. Smelling of fresh snow and blood he came, rosy-cheeked and ready to pour out a full report of his adventure. Then he observed me curled on my cot, wrinkled his nostrils at the stifling air, and judged, “It ought to stop someday, friend Alexis. Count Gregory inquired after you just now. He is where power is. Three”—he raised his eyes to the ceiling and counted on his fingers—“no, four ladies I personally know, comfortably married and nicely positioned dames, have been inquiring after you and are ready to allay your . . . your
douleur
 . . .” He made a pause and since I did not protest, he hounded me a bit more. “I mean . . . Poor Marie had been a fine maiden, no question. But to keep mortifying yourself over her is just unhealthy. She was not
your
wife.” Again, he checked the effect and baited me, “She was not bearing
your
child . . . I assume.”

I lunged at him like a cornered wolf. I struck him in the chest and called him an unscrupulous lecher and an insensate fool. As he swung his arms to avoid my grabbing him by the lapels, I demanded that he challenge me to a duel, and when he cried,
What for?
I answered,
For calling you a fool, you fool!
and by then other officers came upon our spectacle and held us back while I shouted,
Fine, then I will challenge you—for speaking lowly of the late countess Tolstoy!,
and when everyone heard that, they just shook their heads. Their hands shrank from me, and Svetogorov righted his dislodged jacket and muttered, “I won’t duel with you, Alexander Mikhailovich. Foremost you need to fix yourself.”

I strode out, chased by reproachful stares. I sprinted along the Winter Canal to the Neva, then tumbled down the bank onto the Neva’s frozen bed. On my hands and knees, I wanted to wash my face with snow—and that was how I learned that rage made me cold too. The snow would not melt against my skin.

I howled. I cursed the river, the night, the city. I cursed until nothing and no one else was left to curse at, but me.

• • •

From then on it became a matter of finding what else would provoke my body. I was no black swan. I was a mangy wolf. I picked fights in St. Petersburg’s seediest taverns. I dressed as a commoner for those adventures, but I fooled no one who mattered. The next day the whole regiment could see my black eye or squashed lip. I remember myself crouching in someone’s yard one night, whether thrown out of a drinking establishment or hiding from a ruffian’s chase, my heart thumping, my hand squeezing snow, my mind noting with malicious satisfaction that, once again, the snow did not melt. Fear made me cold too.

And I never, ever
felt
it.

It would have been funny if it wasn’t so sad. I may have misunderstood altogether, I realized, what others meant by saying they were
cold
. When
I
used the word, it could mean a pang of anxiety, or discomfort. Or unwelcome weather. Even so, I believed I hadn’t been
cold
as a child. Maturing into a man was what had brought it about, and provoking it now only made it stronger.

At last my commanders ordered me to take leave. Officially, they were rewarding me for my smallpox heroics. Unofficially—if I did not mend my shaken constitution, my leave could well become expulsion from the regiment. And yet, all I thought about was the multitude of things I could do back home—hail the labyrinthine, crooked-streeted, humpbacked Moscow with her high fences, deep cellars, and dark taverns! She’d turn her blighted eye on my histrionics. She would not fuss about me the way pretentious St. Pete’s did!

• • •

My childhood home, the estate of Velitzyno, lay just outside Moscow proper and encompassed fields, groves, a river, several lakes and villages. Two elders, my father and uncle, or rather, somnolent inertia, ran the estate; other Velitzyn males of service age were all dispersed, either throughout the empire in its numerous garrisons, holding the borders, or at court, in the Senate, in collegiums (i.e., ministries), holding the rudder, or as ambassadors in Europe, holding fingers on her political pulse. The old mansion meanwhile was filled with nieces of all ages and a few prepubescent nephews, tended by a company of seven ladies and an army of house folk. The days were spent having meals or talking about them,
except on Sundays, when there was also church in the morning, and the
banya,
a bathhouse with a steam lodge, at night. Into this bliss I descended, a mangy wolf with little else to do but roam and sniff for blood.

My father was not pleased to see me. But to the resident flock, I, an elite officer in the prime of his late twenties, was still a shiny gift from the capital. At once, I saw a world of opportunity for self-indulgence. I did not have to go to Moscow for my debaucheries, I could just as well start right here at home.

Consider an example of my activities:

At eleven o’clock one January Sunday, I insist on combining a little red sleigh (hardly used) and a certain two-year-old mare (who never pulled that sleigh before). Disregard advice of the stablemaster. (
Shaves too short for her,
he says.
Bah!
I say to that.) Charge off. Following a river, I encounter a hillock upon which stands a banya, where some peasant women dash out to gambol in the snow. I drive in and catch them unawares, most flee, one slips and falls. Her body is white and pink and veined, and freckled in places; it steams, and the snow that still clings to it is melting. I take my fur greatcoat off, lay it out at her feet, order her to step on it. Back up a pace, crouch, order her to stop stooping and covering her shame, order her to look me in the eye. When she does, her face is flushed, her stare defiant, though she is shivering already. She is older than I thought, a married woman, most certainly. She knows what I am about. I scoop snow into my hand and squeeze it. Open my hand. Ask, “What do you see?”

She shrugs—and her breasts stir in double negation.

I think I do not need to touch her, only to keep looking at her. I consider the biblical Onan. Consider snatching her and taking her someplace more convenient. Say, “Come here.” Stretch out my hand, snow in it, for her to see—as if it is an explanation for my imminent action. My mouth is dry. “Look at it! What do you see?” She cranes her neck, her eyes dart from my hand to my face and back. “Snow?” she says.

“Do you see it is not melting?!”

She returns a wary stare as the few vestiges of
her
snow slip most tantalizingly down her curves.

“Pick up my coat, wrap yourself.”

She obeys.

I grab her.

An earsplitting scream erupts from the sweat lodge. Startled, I release my prey and she runs away. My greatcoat falls into the snow. I see a crowd
has formed, watching me from the top of the hillock, men and women both. I flee to my sleigh, whip the mare, she bounces up and down on all fours wildly before she gets traction. As she widens her gallop under my whip, she hits the sleigh with her hind hooves—the shaves too short indeed—and so she scares herself into a frenzy. The sleigh overturns as the road curves away from a pond, I am dumped, the pull of the shaves and my clutching onto the reins bring the mare down, and both of us wind up sprawled below the road, in deep snow.

Lying there in that snow, not knowing whether to laugh or cry, I stare at the empty environs, at the sky splintered by an occasional crow. Then I roll over and, gritting my teeth, succumb to Onan’s ways.

I growl angrily at my own hand and stare down—in a curious feeling of animalistic parity—the mare who is trying and failing to get on her own feet. Once I’m done I get up, unharness the mare, and let her climb out of the hole she’d made. I trudge to the pond and sit. There are sullen willows and crows that strain themselves cawing, a fisherman’s crooked shack on the far side.
That’s how it is going to be,
I say to the pond.
God help me
.

The mare and I walk back to the mansion, where I learn the latest news: Andrei and his wife will arrive in days. He will stay just long enough to make sure she is settled, then leave for the war with the Ottoman Turks. How fortunate! Instantly, my existence receives new purpose: I will win the wife’s trust and she’ll tell me everything I wish to know about my brother but will never learn from him directly because I won’t ask and he won’t tell.

Is he cold? Like me?

• • •

God help us.

I watched, a part of the welcome committee, as they climbed out of a kibitka. My brother first, a solid man now, square-shouldered and unhurried, and then—the wife.

“What are
you
doing here?” was Andrei’s greeting for me. No one had told them, apparently.

“On leave,” I relished saying. “For the service I rendered to the empire. Haven’t you heard?” Oh how I enjoyed seeing his face turn dour while I gallantly mentioned my
inoculation,
looking not at him but mostly at his wife.
Anna,
wasn’t it? Her hair was very dark and so were her eyes, her skin was porcelain-white. But she was no beauty: her nose a trifle too
pointy, her mouth too small. Her smile was tentative. She wouldn’t be hard to win over.

“We’ve heard of your
service,
” Andrei said and all but carried Anna inside.

Andrei made it known that he did not like my staying in Velitzyno. I overheard it. I eavesdropped by the door to Father’s study; they
had
to be talking about me. The floorboards creaked and voices rose and fell. Andrei’s, agitated:
he
 . . .
irregular behavior
 . . .
ill-natured
 . . .
is said to be
 . . . Father’s, irate: . . .
me to do, kick him out?
 . . .
so he takes it to town?

An hour later, Father called me in. I walked into his study with a sardonic smile on my face: See if I care! He surprised me by saying,
What was that faux pas you had performed on that Matryona woman?
I said,
Matryona who?
—
The peasant woman you are rumored to have attacked,
he said.
Attacked?!
I flared.
There was no attack! Where’s the damage?

He erupted in a gurgling cough. He grumbled,
We don’t need disturbances here
.

I shrugged, ready to leave.
Is that all?

It was.

• • •

Oh, I knew: never had Andrei been so reluctant to leave this old house as he was now. I saw him talking to Anna. She was seated in an armchair and he was standing over her as if he were a teacher and she a pupil who needed correction. I knew he had indoctrinated her:
Stay away from Alexander! He is a troubled man!