The Age of Ice: A Novel (52 page)

• • •

There is just one more thing left to mention. Two months after Pottinger’s death and a month after we in Calcutta learned about it, I received a letter from him.

My dear Mr. Velitzyn,

I am, believe it or not, on leave now and in Hong-Kong, visiting one of my uncles. From there I planned to head home to the Isles, but as of two days ago I feel very unwell and, given that some kind of malignant fever is afoot in this Colony, I fear I may not get another chance to set things right between us.

Your testimony at the hearings caught me by surprise. Remembering your own words spoken during our argument in Herat, I am doubtful your pathos represented the entirety of your opinions about my activities, just as your description of your time in Persia had to be a simplification made for the benefit of the authorities. Notwithstanding, I have settled on a belief that you had endeavored to lend me a
helping hand. For this I am grateful. That I am still perplexed by you must be a reflection on my character, not yours, and I regret I had not taken steps to clear our misunderstandings.

Concerning your praise, perhaps you of all people will understand me best when I confess how saddened and doubtful I remain. When I volunteered to become Akbar Khan’s hostage, I thought my surrender would help us get through. I was wrong. But I hope you understand why I’d done it, and that I had thought it would help. True, my leg wound had me crippled, but I wasn’t choosing life over death, I hope you understand.

By taking others and me hostage, Akbar Khan had saved our lives. Perhaps that’s what he intended to do, knowing we’d be killed otherwise, and took pity upon us. For this, he suffered. Seeing the humanity of one’s enemy brings sorrow and doubt. Not seeing it brings injustice and atrocity. But there is also a third way, the way of a soldier. He kills when it is work hours and befriends in his hours off. Can one’s soul endure that? You had called me an agent of history once. No, I was not that. I was a speck that had wedged itself between two millstones in the hope of slowing their grinding against one another. A speck never knows if it is a rock of granite or a mere grain of wheat until it is being ground, but either way, it is just a matter of time.

Men of action see that they effect events, men of observation see only a cruel play of chance and irreversibility. I do not know anything anymore. Yet every day and every night I keep asking myself what I could have done differently. Will I ever stop? Neither my father nor grandfather had served, Waterloo happened without them. I’ve always worshipped my military uncles and dreamed battles. Now, I’d be happy just to get home.

Yours sincerely,

Eldred Pottinger, C.B.

My dear Mr. Pottinger,

I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your letter—a century later. It is true that each time our paths crossed, it was under unfavorable circumstances. But perhaps it won’t surprise you if I said that we were friends—we did the best we could, for a man of steel and a man dead on the inside. Wouldn’t you agree? Let me simply point out that back in
1840
, when you voted me down for the mission to
Bokhara, you quite possibly saved my life. Perhaps that’s what you intended to do and took pity upon me.

You of all people would understand me best if I told you that year after year I have been dreaming about the Kabul-Jalalabad massacre. I still dream of it sometimes, and still appear as a
Yeti,
the elusive Himalayan snow ape, in those dreams—a hashish-spawned, mythical creature. White with a coat of snow, I run wildly through gulches and along clifftops, so fast that no jezailchee can catch me in his sights. I am invincible, strong, deadly. I am as cold as ice. And most remarkably, I also retain a faculty of speech and reason, and remember where I’m going and what I have to do once I’m there: rally help! Each and every time—in the dream—I interrogate my memory and rejoice, convinced that I am just reliving the experience that had indeed occurred. That I
had
been there, I
had
bent my
Old Man Frost
to my will and
had
run to the watch fires of Jalalabad in the snow-blind distance; that I
had
reached them in time to change history. Each and every time I return to reality realizing, no, I hadn’t. I hadn’t even tried, unlike you.

• • •

There is a memorial for the Angleesh in St. Thomas’s Cathedral in—now—Mumbai. It was built with public funds raised through subscription. I read the announcement in a newspaper.

I made a contribution.

I
t’s always the same story. A trader ventures to a new land in search of fortune. Then he brings in a soldier—to protect his profits. On the soldier’s heels comes in a politician—and a priest—to legitimize and sanctify soldiers’ and traders’ activities. None of them can desist. It’s their nature.

Ports become cities become states become colonies of the British crown. Singapore was one.

The tale of my ascent as a businessman belongs in some grand old scholarly tome called
From Rags to Riches: European Colonists in Malaysia and the Industrial Revolution
. But of the events that might not make it into the book, a few salient ones are:

There is a man who lives in a threadbare shack on Changi Beach, some ten miles northeast of town. He comes up with an ingenious recipe for making ice: five parts water, one part himself. Mix ingredients and let them rest in a deep cellar under the shack. Remove the body of man from the body of water when the latter begins to freeze, and insert vessels in which some of icy water is mixed with common salt, three parts to one. Such mixing cools the solution down another 21 degrees Celsius, enabling the rest of the water to turn to solid ice. And from there—ice makes more ice. In this respect, ice is just like money.

The man is wise. He’s heard of Lord Kelvin. He’s learned it by heart:
The second law of thermodynamics states that heat will not pass from a
cooler to a warmer body unless some adequate compensating event occurs in connection with the transference
. The man does no magic. His “adequate compensating event” is raw emotion, and in its deficit—a tad of hashish or later, of opium—and the reverie that follows.

There are more and more buyers for his ice, and he is ragged. He feels trapped. He is afraid of Chinese gangs that control opium trade and of tigresses that are said to swim across the strait to give birth to their cubs on the island. A monkey who steals his food seems a spy to him, and rustling bamboo becomes sand that spills from the Maranjab Desert into the Gobi and back, all night long. Once, he forgets to get out of his tub in time and is stuck in ice. He has to wait till it melts to wriggle out, it takes hours, and then his legs barely support him. He collapses and weeps for the ruined ice batch.

Then one day at the port he sees a
steamship
. She is the
Tuscany,
here from Maryland, of the United States of America. Four masts are still attached to her but they are lone and bare because she does not need these relics, the sails: a beefy stack in her middle unfurls cloud after cloud of coal smoke, and a giant propeller churns under her stern. The man thinks about tradition and inertia, and imagines how she will shed her masts if given half a chance.

Her sole cargo is ice.

As he stands over his measly ice cart, the man has a vision. He too has been a relic, a lone and bare mast that sticks to its old ways—and why should he go on like this? He sees the whole world in one breathtaking frame—and the world is hungry for ice. He hears the ice dragged in from the Himalayas and Tibet, chiseled out of the Great Lakes and scraped from the Karakoram Desert, he sees icebergs harpooned and hauled in, like whales, off the coasts of Australia. He watches men in spectacles and tweed jackets fastening pipes to pumps to steam engines, burning coal, pressurizing and releasing noxious liquids and gases, ammonia and ether and sulfur dioxide—all to make more ice. So that Australian beef gets to Britain and British Ale—to India, unspoiled; so that peaches keep through winter, and in the sunny French Riviera, vacationing ladies and gentlemen can take their liqueurs frozen on a stick.

Why should the man not partake in this gold rush? How ludicrous and pathetic he is—cowering in his hole, birthing his ice by the cold sweat of his brow! There
are
other ways.

The man spends all his savings on a warehouse at the port and makes ice storage out of it. Then he goes to the heads of merchant houses, the
Scots, the Chinese, the Arabs. He says,
I am the man. I am the best return on your investment in ice.

That’s his story.

• • •

By the time Singapore was fully absorbed into the Pax Britannica, I was well made,
hear that, Mr. Sawyer?
No longer was I a
specialty shop,
my dear old boy. At the turn of the twentieth century we—my Australian meat-packing partner, Harrison and Co., and I—introduced to Singapore the first of our icehouses cooled with man-made cold. We called our enterprise what it was—
Cold Storage
. Now it is a supermarket chain. And that was just the beginning.

Meet Alexander Veltzen, a nearly perfect Englishman with the official status and passport of a
British subject,
globe-trotting industrialist with stakes in refrigeration and refrigerated shipping far beyond the Malaysian archipelago. He has mansions in Singapore and Bombay, and a favorite hotel in London where he makes extended visits. A regular traveler on
P&O
and
BI
steamships, he knows by heart the sea route Bombay—Suez Canal—Alexandria—Venice. When his associates wonder about his origins, the Brits guess he was born in one of the colonies, and the Indians suppose it was in Great Britain. No one dares to ask—Mr. Veltzen is known as a stern and private man.

What of the rest? I was not dying. My fears and sorrows had fallen by the wayside somewhere between a hundred twenty and a hundred sixty years of age. How long could one worry? My appearance had settled on that of a forty-five-year-old, plus or minus, and there crystallized. And whenever the old Prince Velitzyn stirred in me and gave off a foreboding that all this
pumping heat to make cold,
all this violation of Ice’s birthrights, was sure to bring some existential blowout to humanity, the new Mr. Veltzen just shrugged and did something philanthropic.

No worry. No guilt. Nothing.

• • •

In 1906 at the World Expo in Milan, Lord Revelstoke, my banker, introduced me to a certain Mr. Rutkovsky, an associate of the new Russian foreign minister, Mr. Izvolsky. “All you need to know,” Revelstoke said, “is that this gentleman was quite instrumental in securing Russia’s recent loan with us. Now he is out shopping for investment capital. He may make things sound easier than they are, but he has a point. How would you like to have Russians build a new railroad from the Black Sea on to
Europe proper, where your refrigerated cars will be moving goods to and fro?”

In my jaded opinion, Mr. Rutkovsky was one of these newcomers who become so excited after arrival abroad and a couple of dates with big business that they are eager to short-sell their homeland in concessions for pennies on the dollar—not out of greed or lack of patriotism—they are simply dying to be counted in, to make their country a player in the world of modernity.

In thinking thus, I revealed my inherently paradoxical conviction that Russia was backward and inferior, and yet at the same time dangerous. When my businessmen colleagues feared and distrusted Russia—after fifty years of chessboard moves and sacrifices of the Great Game—I sneered. When other colleagues called for condescension to Russia (however smug), saying that she was now a toothless shadow of her former self—which her recent humiliation at the hands of tiny Japan proved beyond doubt—I likewise sneered.

All the more profoundly did Lord Revelstoke’s suggestion stir my brew. “There will be talks in St. Petersburg,” the banker confided. “We cannot but follow France’s example and enter into an agreement with Russia. It is just a matter of time before we will sign the
entente cordiale
with our beloved nephew Czar Nicky.” (He was referring to the kinship and closeness between the czar and our own monarch.) “When it happens, British capital will flood Russia. I would not mind seeing us—you, Mr. Veltzen—far ahead of the race.”

He said that King Edward VII himself was brokering a visit of British dignitaries and industrialists to St. Petersburg. How would I like to be one of the delegation? I said I’d think about it.

Last I’d seen Russia was in 1812. I’d had no need nor want to go back, and now I was divided. The old Prince Velitzyn, a calcified mummy, was stirring. If I did visit Russia, would it be because I wanted to make more money? Or because I secretly longed to see her, if only to gloat at her misery? If I didn’t go, was it because I was afraid to see Russia miserable or afraid to see her living happily without me?

Two days later I telegraphed Lord Revelstoke from Brussels. I was game. But in the end, the visit did not happen. Czar Nicky begged for a postponement (in a personal letter to the king), citing the lingering unquiet in the country. (Rural areas were still under military curfew after the 1905 uprisings, and he had just sent home the first Russian parliament.)
The joke was that the monarch was embarrassed to entertain foreign guests in a house that was not yet made tidy—even after the signing, in August of 1907, with much wrangling, of the Anglo-Russian Entente.

• • •

My disappointment at the cancellation made me realize how much I wanted to go. By the end of the decade I was restless. In 1910 in Vienna, at the International Congress of Refrigeration, I was busy sending my own feelers. By then even those colleagues of mine who had perceived Russia as a toothless shadow were changing their minds. Russia was really a benevolent giant, ready to leap into the future, not unlike some kind of big Feodor Shalyapin, the bass who had made Paris swoon in 1907. Ah, haven’t you heard? The Peking‒Paris rally, haven’t you seen that daring Italian, Prince Borgia, he drove all through Russia in an
automobile—
and came out to tell the tale! “Russia is navigable,” he asserts with a smile, what a charming understatement! And haven’t you seen Monsieur Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes perform in Paris? Some kind of highly sophisticated classical barbarism, ah, so esoterically Russian! Europe, as reflected in the green eyes of a
Russe
mermaid, wild, lustful, and sage with the wisdom of the ancients, the wisdom that we, ladies and gentlemen, have lost here in our much too pragmatic world!