The Age of Ice: A Novel (59 page)

in a finger of my hand.

Unknowingly, I’d squeezed a wasp—and dead

it looked. Its stinger

Was poised, though, poisonous, to stab

My ring finger.

Will I be weeping ’bout you, will I linger

To catch a smile you’ll fling?

Look—isn’t it pretty on my finger,

This wedding ring?

My dear Alexander, this was the last poem Akhmatova read that night. Please accept my sincerest gratitude for the things you have done for me, and a heartfelt apology for all the trouble I caused you.

Farewell,

Your E. G.

I refused to believe what it meant. I stood in the middle of my suite staring at the letter and repeatedly practicing my meeting with her father, then took a shot of Cognac and headed to the English Club.

I found Mr. Wallace sitting over a fresh kill of
The Stock Exchange News
and beef Stroganoff. I waved the letter in front of his nose while refusing to disclose its contents. I kept insisting that I had to arrange for a private meeting with the Vice Minister of Ways and Communications on the subject of his daughter, and I needed Mr. Wallace’s knowledge of local customs. Was it at all possible to call on someone quite uninvited and in fact against someone else’s wish, if expressed ambiguously? Could a young woman be suggesting a more arduous pursuit of herself by writing to you,
Farewell
?

Mr. Wallace became quite interested. What was I so burning to discuss about our troublemaker Lizzy? Is it news? Newsworthy, that is? Scandalous? Is it going to upset her wedding?
Oh dear
.

“Mr. Veltzen, did you not know? What did she do to you, this Diane the huntress? It is in every newspaper, it will be held at Christmastime . . . Oh yes, of course, in every Russian newspaper, I beg your pardon. The unforgettable Miss Goretsky is about to give a gift of her hand in marriage to a Pfaltzgraff von Welleren, of a very old and very aristocratic Teutonic pedigree from Danzig, whose circumstances—between you and me—have lately become a tad straitened, undoubtedly because the family has been too focused on its Crusader past than on anything the least bit practical—”

I ran.

• • •

She never intended to marry me. To her, I may have been just a clueless, gullible Englishman-capitalist. Or someone Akhmatova could have fancied, the Gray-Eyed King from a parallel world where people spoke a different language and lived according to poems. Or a way to settle scores with her father. Or—or the dreaded—

—the dreaded—that she knew who I was. Ever since that stupid reckless aborted act of elemental magic. That she suspected I was her many-times-great-uncle, the family’s mysterious patriarch, the dream companion of her childhood, the ghost who had been privy to the lonelinesses and longings of her adolescence.

 . . . I would never know and I am so tired of thinking about it decade after decade, but that is how these things go, and it does not help at all that I left St. Petersburg the next day, and come summer the war broke out, the First World War, the
War to End All Wars,
which instead expanded into the collapse of the four participant empires, which expanded into revolution, Bolshevik reign, terrorism, worldwide economic crisis, concentration camps, national socialism, communism, fascism, genocide, the Holocaust, more war and fallen kingdoms—

In all this mayhem, the tracks of one young songbird who was so busily weaving a nest of sublime unhappiness around herself, were forever lost; just as lost were the voices of those silver-tongued birds who sang off the stage of a pub named the Stray Dog, and other voices high and low, small and big, but all of them so unprepared for a wave after wave after wave of the brutal
translation
the twentieth century has made them endure.

L
et me just say it this way: in 1805 at Austerlitz we feared artillery canister the most. Canister was simply musket balls packed in a tin can that fell apart in air, raining its load on one’s head.

In 1914 the destruction produced by this archaic device was considered minute.
Unsatisfactory
. Behold the high-explosive shell. A British Army’s staple eighteen-pounder: it can be filled with shrapnel, or poison gas. It travels twenty times farther than the old canister. It pierces steel and earthwork. Now multiply its ravages by shell caliber, by pounds of trinitrotoluene, by pure numbers—hundreds, millions. The human mind is thought to have no grasp nor taste for zeroes, I am told. The death of a thousand is best told as the death of one, for it feels the same. I beg to differ.

What did I do in the wars, the one that was, quote, a
More Terrible Than Ever War
in the history of humankind, and the next one, the
Yet More Terrible War
? I donated fortunes to the Commonwealth’s defenses. I lost fortunes in the Russian revolution, the global depression of the thirties, the fall of the British Raj. And I made fortunes on military contracts. Not only hospitals and food depots needed refrigeration. Explosives needed it too.

In 1914 I spoke—though not loudly enough—against sending Indian regiments to the Western Front. The French winter was too cold for the poor sepoys, and the inevitable invasion of
bully-beef and biscuit
rations into their provisions—was beyond disagreeable. In 1942 I was in Singapore when it was occupied by the Japanese. I helped a couple of
Americans escape from a prison camp in Changi. Indian revolutionary guerrillas camped in my house then burned it.

What did I do? I survived, unlike so many who did not. Only, my cold spells have been getting more extreme since the thirties.
Nerves,
they now called it.

That’s all I will say. My story will pass speechless through the World Wars, bowing its head in humility.

• • •

Life goes on. Past bloodsheds become today’s favorite games children—and adults—play. Austerlitz is reenacted annually.

It is surely a matter of curiosity how a long-living man like me responds to the never-ending pressure of novelty—of a technological kind, of course—in his daily life. Shouldn’t I be leery of air travel and automatic soap dispensers? Should I not—if I drive at all—cap my speed at a neck-breaking thirty miles per hour? To answer: I am no different than anyone else, human or animal. One day we see new objects in our environment and we adapt. We go around them, break them, or use them. That I learned to poke at a keyboard of a personal computer is no more remarkable than a crow learning that only a paper bag with a certain logo contains tasty potato fries.

If a horse can speed down a freeway, blissful in his trailer, so can I.

• • •

In 1960, I received a letter.

Dear Sir/Madam,

My name is Anna-Marie Cazaux. At the behest of my passed away mother, Elizabeth von Welleren, née Goretsky, I am searching for relatives or anyone who knew Mr. Alexander Veltzen, the owner of Veltzen Enterprises, which dates to the beginning of the century. It was recommended that I write to your company because it may be a daughter company of Veltzen Enterprises. Please forgive me if my researches were wrong and this letter reaches you in mistake. However, if you or someone you know can help me, please reply to the following address . . .

It is obvious what I thought, isn’t it? I wrote an enthusiastic reply the same day. I was Alexander Junior, I wrote, in French. I was born in 1916 and lived most of my life outside Europe. My father had mentioned that
he had traveled to Russia before the First World War and there met a woman with whom he’d fallen in love, Ms. Elizabeth Goretsky. I’d be very interested in hearing more, et cetera, et cetera.

I waited impatiently for her reply. I eyed her address—a small town close to Paris—and weighed the benefits of going there unannounced.

A reply did come. The words in her letter (she gratefully switched to French) rushed with such force, they stepped onto each other’s toes. Details poured, images flashed by. Anna-Marie was born in 1914 in St. Petersburg. By 1918 the family was fleeing from Bolsheviks. Kiev, then Odessa, then Turkey. Anna-Marie was too little at the time to remember much. Only an ugly fight between mother and father in Kiev: etched in the child’s memory were strange, mismatched images of a shattered chandelier pendant and red blood in a white bathtub. Later she learned that he wanted to enlist with the Army of Don, the White Army, to fight against Bolsheviks, and Mother threatened that if he abandoned them, she’d kill herself. Then another fragment, in Constantinople: Anna-Marie saw a slice of a melon lying on the street, picked it up, and tried to eat it, and her mother got very angry, then shook strangely and wept, right there, in the middle of the street.

They lost everything along the way, you see. In Paris, Mother took jobs as an interpreter, or secretary, or telephone operator. Father was jobless for a long time. They fought often. Father would say he would have rather died a soldier in the White Army. He wanted to move to Germany. Mother said, over her dead body. She’d say no one wanted him there, a disenfranchised
Uradel,
she said, penniless nobles like him were a dime a dozen in the Weimar Republic, they taught tennis to rich Americans to make ends meet. Did Herr Pfaltzgraff want to be a tennis instructor? Anna-Marie remembered thinking Mother was too hard on him.

“But I am getting so distracted,” Anna-Marie wrote. “I must not wear you out with our history. It’s just like anyone else’s history—so many people have lost so much in the wars. Perhaps I am just searching for explanations, even now as I write. Shortly before her death in 1953, Mother told me my father was not my father. She told me about Mr. Alexander Veltzen, and she made me promise to find him. She seemed not to appreciate or care—which was so much like my mother—that Mr. Veltzen would have been very, very old by then, more than eighty years old by her own reckoning, and most likely dead.

“I am sorry to admit that I did not believe her at first. I even told my
father about her disclosure. What was I thinking, in retrospect? He dismissed it. He said Mother was just doing what she’d always been doing: trying to put a wedge between him and me. But last year Father passed away and I am free to seek the truth. The importance of it, for me, is immense. Pierre, my husband, says it will help me live on.”

I had to catch my breath before I could continue. My heart was tolling like a church bell. My forehead was getting wet with condensation. I had a child, absolutely, positively I did!

What if Anna-Marie had inherited some of my features? If my brother Andrei’s insensitivity to my ice had carried on through five generations undiluted, then surely the
ice
could be preserved in my own daughter! She was abnormal, like me, and
that
was what complicated her life and demanded explanations! I had to see her, because I could provide her with an explanation; the moment I saw her and touched her hand I would know—

Or would I?

Anna-Marie was not just my daughter. She was Elizabeth’s daughter too, and that meant she wouldn’t have felt my cold even if I wasn’t her father. Worse yet, I had no idea what a reunion of my and my brother’s features in one person would produce. What if they canceled each other out?

No, I simply had no way of knowing anything with certainty . . . I returned to reading.

In our family language was a battlefield. Mother preferred English and Father hated it. If she used English at home he invariably answered in German, which she barely knew. Before we immigrated to France, there was a battle of how much French should be in my life, and after it, how much Russian. France has had a growing refugee problem all through the twenties and thirties and there was a strong drive to assimilate, to become more French than the French. Father resisted it, but not out of love for Russia. It is complicated.

As a small child, I was delayed starting to talk because there were too many different languages circling around me. I of course did not even perceive them as discrete languages back then. They were just different ways to communicate when one was happy or angry, but most of these ways were dangerous, because if I chose wrong for my babbles, it would upset either Mother or Father. In the end, French
seemed the safest ground, and I stuck to it, and the rest of them just withered away. I can understand some Russian and German but I don’t speak either, and I no more than get by in English.

It seems I can’t help smuggling my whole life story into this letter. I hope it is not too much of a nuisance, and I certainly would love to hear as much about you. I also hope that somewhere in your memories or family archives, there are clues that would help us. My mother had said she had written letters to your father. But please do not think that I am jumping to conclusions and already appointing myself your half sister. All I want to say is that I believe, no, I know that your father had left an everlasting imprint on my mother’s life, and I feel I would find a measure of peace even just knowing this imprint was mutual. (But please don’t take it to mean that your family’s relationships were anything different than what you know them for. Ah, I am sorry, there is no way to talk about those things without an awkward appearance of selfishness!) All I can do is apologize one more time for my intrusion, swear I have no interest to profit in any way other than spiritually, and implore you to keep this conversation going.

I wrote to her saying I would come to see her.

• • •

Saturday, June 1961, Melun, about twenty miles east of Paris by train. She met me at the platform of her railroad station. She stood in a torrent of commuters, holding a handwritten sign,
Alexander Veltzen
. Her scanning stare was wary and guarded before it focused on me, approaching, and melted. “Are you Alexander?”