The Age of Ice: A Novel (53 page)

Thus extolled the newspaper
Le Matin,
in pieces placed nicely adjacent to the ads for the Russian treasury bonds. Evoke your wisdom of the ancients by financing the Russian budget deficit, invest wisely, and you’ll haul in a green-eyed, silver-tailed Russian mermaid. Russia is like an ocean, mighty, but navigable—come forth, entrepreneurial Columbuses!

In 1912 the Ballets Russes was giving Stravinsky’s
Petrushka
in Covent Garden in London during my visit, and Lady Revelstoke committed me to going. My sense of the aesthetic had been confused, as she correctly pointed out, by all manner of Asiatic strings, winds, chimes, and tambours, by performers masked in layers of chalk, rouge, and charcoal or wearing visages of dragons and monkeys, and mincing around, swaying, and freezing in various contorted attitudes, or wailing in impossibly high-pitched voices. Art as ritualized restriction. The more constricting, the purer the art form.

In Singapore, they perform something called Kavadi, when men mount many-tiered ornate decorations over their bodies, held up by long spokes, with the ends anchored in the flesh of the bearers’ torsos. Then, like live pincushions, they stomp and twirl for hours until they collapse.
I don’t know what I expected that night in the theater from the Russians. Some kind of imperial serf ballet? Tutus, definitely. What I saw . . . what I saw in Nijinsky’s title part was all and none of the above. He wore thick, crude mittens on his hands and danced as if they were his skin, as if he was never able to take them off and hold anything—anyone. A serf, a kavadi dancer, a hand amputee, a human soul trapped in a thick carapace of chalk, rouge, and charcoal, immured in a brickwork of reality, and yet—managing to break through, to flare through cracks, to give off a rainbow flash of its irreproducible wonder—all momentary, all doomed, all bound still—because that is the way life is. Like a pocket of air in ice.

Petrushka the doll—or should I say Pierrot?—falls in love. Rebels against his puppetmaster. Then dies, outmatched.

• • •

I had to go to Russia. I could not sleep that night in my hotel suite after the performance. Between two and three in the morning, it grew so quiet that I could hear the electric buzz of streetlights, and clicks and crackles from the gilded embossed wallpaper on the walls. The suite smelled of my cigarettes, Armagnac, and leftover hors d’oeuvres: cucumber, cold cuts, pineapple. The curtain fluttered like Petrushka/Pierrot’s white sleeve in the last, anemic farewell. Goddamn that Nijinsky!

I tossed and turned and at long last—I was sailing into Russia in an automobile, and the snowy fields around me were heaving like an ocean. Some peasants gathered to watch my progress, dressed like Nijinsky’s Petrushka, only cruder, dirtier, with huge stiff hands. They stood in their little boats, two-three to a boat, and stared at me. Then I was suddenly in St. Pete’s, on the Nevsky Prospect. The Nevsky was strange, though, irregular and potholed, snow mounds abounded on it and grass grew between its cobblestones. Nijinsky/Petrushka peasants were crowding the sidelines, milling impatiently, as if waiting for me to pass so they could return to the mainstream. All the while my advance was getting harder, the snowdrifts growing bigger, the grass—taller, and then—a chair would appear in the way, then a cast-iron stove, lying on its side, then a dead and bloated horse. And yet I had to hurry on, because I was late and because this place did not seem friendly at all, and so I ran faster and faster, and then, because I was rushing so much—I tripped. I fell, and once I did, the Petrushkas swarmed onto me and drowned me in the Nevsky, which had become a shallow stream, because they were waiting for me to trip, and because I was Captain Cook.

A dream.

• • •

In the spring of 1913, British business emissaries were finally to visit Russia and I was along for the ride.

We chugged, in a steamer, through the restless Baltic Sea. In the thickest fog, one of my companions jokingly hoped that we would not be taken for Japanese and bombarded, as the jittery Russian Baltic fleet had done to British trawlers back in 1905 at Dogger Bank—the first thing they did after they poked their nose out of the home waters of the Gulf of Finland, gearing up to go to Japan . . . The joke precipitated a grim comment that these days one should rather avoid being taken for a German, not a Japanese, which was followed by a no less grim pronouncement that if we were perceived as Germans, Russians would in fact give us a warm welcome, not shoot at us.

St. Petersburg met us with a proud display of its modernity: newspaper stands where headlines shouted away in all European languages, the Singer Sewing Machine Building crowned with a remarkable revolving, illuminated globe, glittering vitrines of chocolatier Kraft on the Nevsky, Druce’s fragrant perfumery, colorful bookstores, cream soda shops, coffee shops, fashion shops, theaters, cinemas, jewelers, advertisement posters everywhere, banks, trams ringing like bell towers, crowds of finely clad people. A passable European capital in other words. What did I expect, crinolines, breeches, and tricornes? Military austerity? But surely, if I were to ride just outside of this glowing metropolis, I’d find that the time did stand still, that the peasant country still hauled the same old yoke, in the same garb, and with much the same contraptions. Didn’t it?

We lodged in the Hôtel d’Europe, a grand enterprise outfitted with all the latest conveniences of modern life—they even had a
telephone
in each suite, even if it connected only within the hotel. Next was a reception in our honor. The Russian officialdom came in force. Names with long, zigzagging patronymics weaved around us; I pitied my genuine British colleagues. In due time, a grand old man approached me, he resembled Kaiser Wilhelm I, but attached to his elbow was a young woman—eyes slightly narrowed, scarlet-red lips pouty, cheeks a tad indrawn, as if she pinched them between her teeth. Short fluffy bangs—rare at the time—under a heap of light brown hair held up by several crescent-shaped silver combs. She would have been no more than twenty years old. “Prince Dmitry Petrovich Goretsky,” the host was announcing when I thought,
What a dirty old man, Prince Goretsky—to have such a young thing for a
wife
 . . . “Vice Minister of Ways and Communications,” the introducer continued.
I’ll be having talks with this Goretsky soon,
I noted, and finally moved my stare from the young thing’s silvery evening gown to the vice minister, just when the introduction finally reached its climax, “and the Princess Elizaveta Dmitrievna Goretsky.”

I bowed my head to the dirty old Kaiser Wilhelm I and said some pleasantry in French when I heard, in a loud English, “How do you do, Mr. Veltzen!”

Her voice was husky—like that of a little boy whose fledgling vocal cords can’t keep up with his delirium of growth, play, happiness. She extended her right hand—a perfect, narrow leaf of a hand, loose in the wrist as if hanging off a stem of her arm; no wedding ring. I took that leaf by the fingertips and kissed it.
How do you do
. “Elizabeth Goretsky,” she said.

A
daughter
.

At the banquet she sat far away, but her voice seemed to reach out to me over the din. A splash of throaty laughter, a thrilled question mark, “Is that so?” I would turn to it, cast a glance: she would be engaged in conversation. She would not be looking at me. I dubbed her the Urchin Princess and told myself she was too loud.

The entertainment was a chamber orchestra with a Tchaikovsky concerto. It wasn’t the orchestra’s or Tchaikovsky’s fault that by the end of it, brokering and scouting were in full swing, and only titular officials, loafer guests who had come to have a good time, and the ladies were still seated in front rows; everybody who meant business was in the back. No time was to be lost. Mr. Rutkovsky, my acquaintance from London, came in handy as social glue. My suspicion was confirmed: if I wanted a piece of Russian railroad, I had to go through the Urchin Princess’s father.

• • •

The next day we visited Thornton’s textile factory at the outskirts of St. Pete’s. Our cavalcade of Packards passed a horse-driven tram stuffed full of people—a glimpse of the life of the proletariat. Indifferent gray faces jerked in unison behind the wagon’s railing as the Clydesdales yanked it into motion.

A tedious tour of the machine floor was followed by a dinner at the English Club, where there were more Russians than Englishmen and Salisbury steak was served with slivers of pickled cucumber. A visit to
the docks and a steel factory loomed ahead, then a tour of the new electric power plant and a meeting at the Russian-British bank. We’d seen a lot of bureaucrats and done a lot of talking. But where were the Russian capitalists?

Rutkovsky produced some for me the next day: bearded and rotund patriarchs, two brothers who looked like village priests—of the proverbial Russian
pop
kind—but who happened to own all the slaughterhouses in St. Petersburg county. They were respectful but not interested. I understood their point—they sat amidst the ice country. They did not need a foreigner to sell them ice to keep their beef cool. Fake ice, at that.

What I needed was a piece of the South. Routes from the Black Sea ports to Ukraine and then Poland. I needed attention of the father Goretsky.

That night we ate dinner at the British embassy, with a view of the solemn Mars Field and the charming Summer Garden. The ambassador’s message: never mind the official agenda, make your own. We were introduced to Mr. Robert Greenell Wallace, of
The Times
of London. He was a man with leonine looks and an overlay of ink and tobacco stains on his thumb and index finger. Having lived for five years in Russia, Mr. Wallace knew its labyrinths like the back of his hand. I made a breakfast appointment with him for the day after next.

• • •

The following day I was in Goretsky’s waiting room. Rutkovsky had assured me that I’d be received promptly, but something had happened, a snag. The secretary, a young man with a pencil-line mustache, looked embarrassed. I sat on a couch under a gigantic maritime painting by the artist Aivazovsky: a storm and a sinking ship, dramatically illuminated by an accidental ray of light from a crack in the clouds. I avoided looking at the secretary because it made him fidget, but I managed to examine his desk. Across it was strewn a pair of lady’s gloves.

Well, there was an explanation: the doors burst open and
she
strode out, scooping up her gloves from under the secretary’s respectfully still nose, and then—she saw me. “Oh, hello!”

“Princess Elizabeth Goretsky,” I said, and stood up, “if I remember correctly.”

“Mr. Alexander Veltzen. The ice king.”

This gave me chills. She did not expect to run into me, she probably felt exposed, unprepared—I saw it in the way her hand flew up to her
curls and then slid down the plain front of her blouse. And yet, of all the things she could have said—it was this,
the ice king
.

She composed herself and made a playful smile. “I hope you don’t mind. It helped me remember the guests, the other day at the reception. Well, I suppose you’d like to go see Papa now. I am sorry I have delayed your audience. It was nice seeing you again, Mr. Veltzen.”

Then she left and I went to see her papa.

• • •

That evening around ten, I was in my suite going through a stack of Russian newspapers, since no one, not even my Indian servant Vinay, could see me (I was not supposed to be able to read Russian). The one I held the highest hopes for was
The Stock Exchange News
but, strangely, the newspaper devoted more room to theater reviews than to economy.

The telephone rang. A clerk from the front desk said he had a note for me, would I kindly allow him to deliver it? I didn’t want to fold and hide my newspapers. Could it wait till morning?

“Beg your pardon sir, it can’t.”

All right.

The note (handed over in the doorway), said: “Mr. Veltzen, would you like to see the real St. Petersburg? It’s white nights, and it does not sleep. I am waiting in the car. Elizabeth G.”

Another bout of chills.

“Would you care to send a reply, sir?”

I forgot the clerk was still by the door. Elizabeth’s proposition was quite forward, even for 1913. Even for white nights . . . I was down in the lobby in ten minutes, just as my reply promised. The clerk directed me outside, to a shiny, café au lait‒colored Austin. The night wasn’t even here yet: it was late May—did I notice this before?—and the sun was just now preparing to set.

I climbed inside. I was curious what she would say and she exceeded my every expectation when she nonchalantly asked, in bypass of all courtesies, “Do people stay up late in London?” And before I answered, she commanded to the chauffeur, switching to Russian, “To Mamontov’s Gardens!”

“I don’t spend too much time in London,” I answered. “What is that place we are going to?”

“A secret. You will see.” She was dressed in something white, with a few stark black—or dark red?—accents. “Where
do
you spend your time?”

“All over. I used to live in the Malay Peninsula. Now I spend winters there.”

“I’ve only been to Italy, as a girl. I’d like to travel more.”

“I’m sure you will.”

She turned to look out the window, glanced back. “Are you surprised by my invitation?”

“No. I am intrigued.”

“A fine distinction.”

“Your English is very good.”

“You are being polite.”

“Not at all. Only as someone who is being kidnapped and driven to an unknown destination.”

She laughed. The Austin turned off the crowded, lit Nevsky.

She said, “I want to become a translator. To make new, better translations of the best books. Not of these Pinkertons and their like. Of the serious literature. I want to make them sound closer to the Russian soil. Not to sound alien. I want to translate Thackeray. Galsworthy. Jane Austen. Even Shakespeare . . . You don’t believe me, do you?”

Hamlet, the Prince of Muscovy,
I thought. “Why, of course I do. You are a very modern lady.”