The Age of Ice: A Novel (58 page)

I still worried that saying
I love you
was not the same for her as saying,
Я люблю вас
. That I and everything about me was still delegated to the realm of poetic, or conversational practice, or something an English double of Anna Akhmatova would do. I dreaded to see another verse in her mail. Once I wrote her a letter in Russian. I said that I had started taking Russian lessons, and had it translated by someone I trusted. That she could now introduce simple Russian phrases into her letters. In her reply,
she chastised me, in English, for involving strangers in our romance, and opined that Russian was too complicated to learn satisfactorily. She never wrote me a word of Russian.

By December we struck an accord: I would come to St. Petersburg. She instructed me to stop in the Hôtel Palais Royale. I meant to propose—officially and literally. No more synonyms or euphemisms.

I did as she bade, took a suite, and waited. Stood by the window. O the festive, snow-glazed, electrically lit, warm on the inside, crisply cold on the outside, St. Petersburg! The proverbial ship, her masts lit with yellow flames, the ship that flies through the night no matter how much snow and time have accumulated in her hulls!

I expected to meet Elizabeth the next morning, either downstairs in the restaurant or in one of those coffeehouses nearby. Instead, a note arrived, with an address. I flagged a cabbie and went. I found the apartment and rang at the door. She opened. She grabbed my hand and pulled me inside. She was thinner than I remembered her, and her cheeks were flushed. She looked me up and down then lunged forward and gave me her lips. “Do you love me?”

I said, “Yes. Do you . . . ?”

She dragged me into the living room. Her fur greatcoat was half lying on the floor, half hanging off the chair. Her gloves and hat were flung onto the ottoman. The room was small, all reddish-brown and plush with upholstery, drapes, and wallpaper; awash in heat from a tiled stove. A single window, a piece of a roof and a sky in it, was taped shut for the winter. There was a sweet gingerbread smell, as if from a bakery. The round table had a long tablecloth of red velvet over it. On it—a carafe and two tiny glasses, all made of old, yellowing, elaborately cut crystal. She wouldn’t let my hand go, she poured the liquor by sound, while holding me in her eyes. “To our meeting,” she whispered, passing me a shot of brandy.

“Elizabeth, why this place? Why are you so feverish?”

“Shh.” Her fingertip touched my lips. “I told you I love you. Stop asking questions.” She emptied her glass, licked her lips, and proceeded to kiss me again. Yet longer this time. Tighter. Getting drunk on it. Both of us. Then—an impossibility (it is still 1913, mind you). She pulled the pins out of her hair and it fell to her shoulders.

“Elizabeth, what are we doing? Why? It’s a disservice to you. I love you better than this!”

“Nonsense. I’ve made up my mind, so don’t you try to stop me!”

“But why?”

“Because I want to.”

Off with my greatcoat, with my jacket. My hand in her hand again, she pulled me into a bedroom, just as reddish-brown and hot. “Just hold me. Keep holding me while I undress. Don’t let go of me. Do your part, will you please? So many buttons and hooks, all these silly intermediate stages, what a nuisance, right? I know it is not what you may have imagined. But how can you feel alive if you come see me in a nightcap and gown and with a stiff upper lip, and extinguish the light? If all you embrace is a bunch of cloth? How can you feel in love if you haven’t struggled with ties and buttons, and garter belts and suspenders? Sorry, but I have to keep talking. Do you mind my talking?”

What is in your head, my crazy beloved? What mess, what did you think I was like, what book, what motion picture lies had you imbibed?
“You must think that Englishmen are made of ice!”

“Well, yes,” she said. “Aren’t you?”

Even this—no bouts of chill could stop me now!

Andrei, Nadya, is this how you did it? Was your bed this narrow?
A narrow, squeaky bed in a bachelor’s pad, daytime, a draped window. The best ever.

“Your ear.”

“Yes. A childhood accident.”

“Can I kiss it?”

“If you’d like . . . No biting please.”

“Sorry.”

Heat. O blessed heat. Do you know how deprived and deficient I had been all these years? Can you even imagine? You who bask in your habitual warmth, you who take your luxurious temperature for granted! Can you even begin to compare something that you don’t even notice, with the depth of my starvation, with the alienation of my absolute zero? If I were to be arrested for illicit sex an hour later and put before a firing squad on orders from the Government of Russia and personally from the enraged Vice Minister of Ways and Communications—I would not stop now. Can you understand how it feels to finally have a boiling point? To weep steam? To sweat gratitude? Do you know how wondrous it is to rub against her skin? To let her bend her legs and hook them behind my knees, to push my knees snugly into her buttocks, press against her curving hip with my stomach, cradle her head in my elbow, cup her breast
with my hand, print words on her skin with each kiss, “What—do you—want me—to do with you?”

She said,
everything
.

 . . . If I whispered into her shoulder, just under my breath, in Russian, she would not hear. May God keep you safe—
Х
ра
НИ
Т
еб
Я
Гос
ПОДЬ
. Then—
Л
ас
ТОЧК
а
МОЯ
,
П
у
ШИНК
а бе
Л
а
Я
, words that felt a hundred and sixty years old, words that would evaporate, effervesce, vanish the moment one tried to translate them.

• • •

For a while after, she lay very quietly, eyes closed. Then said, “What do I do now?”

“Nothing.” A kiss on her shoulder. “You are this man’s wife.”

“I am?”

“How are you feeling?”

She hugged my neck. “I feel great!”

She got up, pulled over her chemise, slipped out. In her absence I ran my hand over sheets—they seemed moist. Perspiration or condensation? I pressed my fingers onto the lacquered wood of the nightstand. Circles of haze began to grow ever wider around my fingertips. What was colder? I or a piece of furniture? Elizabeth came back. She brought treats. The art critic Arkady Bespechny—the flat was his—always kept a stash of gingerbread, she said. It was the best lunch I ever had—gingerbread and brandy in bed. With her next to me, my incipient fears dissolved. I was too busy hunting for gingerbread crumbs that fell between her breasts.

Suddenly she jumped to her feet: we had to go! We had to run or we’d be late for a train.
What?!
Ah, she just wanted to show me a very special place she grew up in—it was just thirty versts from St. Petersburg. “Elizabeth, can’t it wait, don’t we have to talk about something important?”

“Yes, but we can do it on a train, can’t we?”

A cabbie, then a railroad station. On the train she asked me how many loves I’d had before her. Two, I said. What were their names? Marie. And Anna.

She wanted more detail.

“Marie was my first love, unrequited. Anna became my wife. She’d passed away.”

“How long ago?”

“Over ten years.”

“What happened to her?”

“She became ill.”

“Do you still grieve over her?”

“Not anymore.”

“My mother died giving birth to me. Papa didn’t remarry, so my maternal grandmother reared me. The estate we are going to was hers. Now it is mine. When I was a girl I used to hate my grandmother. But now I realize she gave me a childhood that was so very special. I used to think of her as the Queen of Spades—you must know that story, it’s by Alexander Pushkin. The Queen of Spades, this old, evil woman who kept this young girl as her companion and captive and who drove to insanity a young man who sought her secret of winning in cards. In my fantasies I was that girl and my grandmother was the Queen. But by the time I turned fifteen, I understood that the Queen truly loved me and I began to feel so very privileged—I wasn’t the Queen’s captive, I was her apprentice, her accomplice. What other girl could say that she was the Queen of Spades’ beloved granddaughter?”

(I had read “The Queen of Spades,” and remembered it as first and foremost un- and more so, antiromantic. Rather, satirical and incidental. It was remarkable how it had transformed in Elizabeth’s imagination.) The train arrived at the Pavlovsk station. We found another cabbie.

“When I was a student of the Smolny Institute, I would tell the girls fairy tales about the Queen of Spades and myself. I made up stories of how we would conjure up the spirits of our ancestors. Grandmother’s house, you see, is very old. It still has volumes of bound magazines that date back as far as 1825. The
Northern Bee,
with Pushkin’s first print editions. It has chests with hundred-year-old clothes, all gray like ash, and see-through. Stories just lie around there, like dust, you can’t move things, or sweep, or open chests without stirring them up. Grandmother’s line is full of people who made good stories. When her father, my great-grandfather, was dying, in 1870, he was said to shake like an alder leaf and beg, ‘Please don’t leave me here, I am scared of them! I’ll never be bad anymore!’ Grandmother’s sister heard voices since she was fifteen and took strychnine at twenty-three. Her uncle became an engineer and exploded with one of his steam engines. Her cousin was secretly a nude model and ran off with an Italian opera bass. Her younger brother traveled to the Barbary Coast and became a Catholic missionary. They said he once exorcised a man-eating lion. There is still a lion hide in the house that is said to be a trophy he’d sent—it must be
that exorcism didn’t always work. My own mother, before she married, wrote terrifying stories like Mary Shelley, and treatises on how God was electricity.

“Any one of their spirits could tell you volumes, I am sure. But I always favored our main ancestor. I made so many tales about him! They say he was completely insane, tempestuous and fickle, and ruled with an iron fist. Everyone was afraid of his wrath. He had a laboratory where he spent days and nights and nobody knew what he was doing. When later they came into it, there was nothing left, only empty space. They demolished it anyway. I am confident he was doing black magic. That’s what he does in my stories. I told the girls at Smolny that I would summon him, and that I would never be afraid of him. We were friends and he’d teach me magic, and never do me any harm even though grandmother used to say he could freeze water just by looking at it. And that he could animate ice sculptures so they would march around and do his bidding. That he once made a whole army for Mad Czar Paul and they sent it to conquer India but it melted on the way. Grandmother said, that man, our patriarch, did not die a normal death. He just disappeared one day, and no one could ever find him or his body . . .”

We arrived. I don’t believe I need to say here that I recognized my house.

• • •

The story does not end here. It never does. I had enough composure to follow my great-great-great grandniece, who’d unknowingly just lost her virginity to me, through the shuttered, empty, abandoned house, through the enfilade of rooms so cold they could have been filled with snow. To visit her nursery, where a frosted window was framed by a graying curtain. Then—my study, where an armchair under a dustcover looked like a beheaded king. To stare at the desk drawers that could have still held my papers. To listen to more stories about myself—how I had acquired my black magic during a decade spent at the North Pole. To hug her when she wanted me to. To plant a kiss on her temple. To say, “We could bring life to this house, if you want.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” she said, chuckling. “It has a life of its own. Even like this, it does not make me sad. It’s part of me.”

Her great-grandfather was my grand-nephew Mikhail Andreevich, who must have learned my lesson, in the icery, quite well since he’d still remembered it on his deathbed. How many great-greats made it
less incestuous? The feeling was that of breakage, of falling out of grace. There had been no miracle of love, no melting of glaciers that made her immune to my cold. Just the same old trait preserved through generations, my late brother’s accursed and blessed gift to me. But if that’s what it took to allow me to be with this woman . . . I already knew that I would accept it. I’d accept it, but I would never be as happy as I had been just hours ago, when I’d thought I was keeping my beloved warm. I’d accept it, of course I would. I just needed a little time to mourn. Just a little tiny extra bit of time.

I thought I could hide it, but maybe she saw something in my face. She said, “Papa hates this house. That’s why he has done nothing to keep it up. In his view the house embodies everything that is disagreeable in life. Everything unpredictable, ambiguous, un-Germanic. Grandmother said they could not have been more opposite, my papa and mama.”

“Why did he marry her?”

She shrugged. “Same as why they always married us. Beauty. Pedigree. And they think they can tame us.”

Later I would endlessly go over each one of her words. Was she already telling me everything I needed to know? Could I have prevented everything that followed?

She checked her watch and said we had to go. It was getting dark. On the way back she held her arm curled snugly around my elbow. But she mostly looked through the window and did not talk anymore. In St. Petersburg she told me she would call me on the telephone next morning. She had to go, she said. “Elizabeth, I have to have a conversation with your father. You realize that, don’t you?”

Everything could wait till tomorrow, she said. Everything, even that.

• • •

She never called me. Instead, a note arrived at my hotel. Inside was a sheet of poetry.

My strangeling boy, I went insane

On Wednesday, three p.m.!

A ringing wasp—a stinging pain