The Age of Ice: A Novel (6 page)

I could just tell. And so I waited for Andrei to abide the call of duty and leave. I waited through all those little silences, and forks dropped at dinner, and the glances Anna cast about as if—but for an instant—she was deeply and profoundly disoriented.

Oh, I watched her, yes, I looked for ways of entry into her soul. She was twenty-two but her calm demeanor made her appear older. Her dark eyes were sad. I knew just what to ask her come the right time:
Why are you unhappy?

• • •

Andrei left.

I hunted her. Day to day, from fireplace to fireplace, parlor to parlor, among ladies playing cards or taking cordials or altering clothes or tasting currant preserves or knitting or finding each other’s soft spots and there inserting their dainty needles (Anna would respond with a polite—or
clueless—smile). I chased her among children at play, where she would take part dreamily, while younger nephews blushed at older nieces, and nieces twittered into each other’s ears in their little-girls’ French.

She avoided being alone with me—she was a good pupil—but no matter. I could converse with her—or about her—in others’ company.
How is my sister-in-law doing today?
My lady cousins, I knew, would supply the context:
Annichka, dear, your brother-in-law seems so taken by you
 . . .
runs in the family, no doubt
 . . .
although no two brothers could be as different as these
 . . .
and this one is a bad, bad boy, they say
 . . .

I piqued her interest. Soon she would at least sit with other ladies and listen to me telling stories about Andrei’s childhood:
Do you know he wanted to be Iliya of Murom when he was a kid?
 . . .
Do you know he wanted to be a Leib Guard so badly that he stretched himself taller?
 . . .
He wasn’t always as serious as now
 . . .
Does he ever smile at you? Is he ever tender?

Splotches of blush would show on her cheeks. “Well, yes. Andrei Mikhailovich is a caring man.
Of course
he is tender with me.”

And I’d add another little fly to the ointment. “You can call
me
Alexander. No need for those stuffy patronymics.”

I was engaging in talk of this kind one day when a lackey approached. “Your Nobleship, a
situation
is downstairs. Kindly attend to it.” I registered Anna’s curious glance upon me before I left to “attend.”

The situation
was standing in the backyard, between a chicken coop and a workshop. She had a boy of four, maybe five years of age, clinging to her arm. “For the third day straight she comes,” the lackey commented. “Says you asked for her, stubborn thing.”

Flushed already, I told the lackey to be on his way, then approached her. “Matryona, is it?”

She bowed her head.

“Your child?”

She nodded. “Savva.” And then, holding my stare captive, she headed toward the chicken coop.

Inside, Savva climbed the plank to the roost. “Mama, look—a hen with a cowlick,” and his mother said, “Look for a red one, baby,” and then she opened her greatcoat for me and let out her breasts. The areolae wilted in the cold air. I watched though did not touch myself in front of her—still too shy. But the next time, and the time after that, and later—I was shy no longer.

Before she left on that first day, Matryona pointed to some freshly hatched eggs. “I’ll take these? No?”

“Yes,” I said hoarsely.

Then I returned to the mansion, checking my clothes for chicken scratch, and rejoined the parlor company. “I’ve digressed. Where were we?” Anna looked up from her needlework, then dipped her head down like a pupil who did not know the answer to the teacher’s question and was afraid to be called upon.

• • •

In the chicken coop. Then in an old barn, where Matryona deadbolted a rickety door. Then in a woodshed, where she lifted her skirts, and the decrepit linen, the hemp rope–fastened wrappings she wore on her legs, were the color of dead skin. Afterward: to putter back to the mansion, dump my fur coat on the floor, leave footprints of snow all over. A feeling of shame, as I checked myself in the mirrors:
God help me
.

Was it to this look that Anna had started responding? Suddenly it had become so easy to find her alone: by the fireplace, in the renovated nursery, at a table covered with cups and saucers and raspberry pastries. She watched me break a pastry and abandon it. I asked, “Why are you so unhappy?” and saw confusion on her face, as if she were giving her soul an emergency inspection.

“I am not . . . I’m happy. Do I not look it?”

“Do you believe that people can explain their true selves to each other through words?”

“Yes, certainly, I do.”

“And yet you can’t manage to ask me the questions that have been on your mind since you first saw me. Isn’t it so?”

It was so easy to discombobulate her!

Meanwhile: In a cold bathhouse, where it was too dark to see. In a fisherman’s shack. In the workshop, where Matryona fingered a newly finished crib that smelled strongly of flaxseed oil. In the creamery, next to trays of milk, where Savva lost a milk tooth eating cream off a skimmer. I never touched her. We rarely spoke.
She is neither a wife nor a widow,
our lackey told me when I asked. Her husband had been drafted into soldiery, which those days meant—for life.
God knows what she lives on
.
Tough working her land lot by herself, and her boy’s too small yet.

I pocketed tea cakes for Savva when no one was looking.

• • •

Anna said, “Very well, I’ll ask.” This time,
she
had sought
me
out. I sat at a table, playing solitaire, she insisted on standing. She said, “What do you and my husband hold against one another?”

I made her wait for my answer. “Our differences. Or similarities. Maybe we each dislike our own reflection in the other.”

“You are not being earnest.”

“You are not asking the right question.”

“Are you seeking my company because you want to annoy your brother?”

What splendid riposte! There
were
a few embers smoldering behind that demure facade. Yet I rewarded her only by another deck-shuffling pause and then by a very loaded, “
No
.”

“As in—”

“I am not seeking your company.”

“I’m sorry I was mistaken . . . It must be one of your eccentricities.” She turned to leave—too abruptly. She was discomposed, and it was the perfect moment for me to spring from the chair and plead, “Anna! I’m sorry. Yes. Yes I was. I’m not eccentric. I’m
lonely
. Very lonely, that’s all.” An utter truth, backed up by that genuine
God help me
look in my eyes.

She saw it of course. “Well, I’m lonely too. In a house full of in-laws—”

“I know I have a
reputation
. But it is not that of a seducer.” (She almost, but not quite, winced.) “Your husband has nothing to fear from me . . . Friends?”

This time Anna made me wait. At long last she conceded, “Friends. On a condition that you stop talking to me as if I am your brother’s possession.”

“Why, I never intended—” and so forth.

• • •

In the barn again, where I was becoming more demanding. Then I saw how our own domestics chased Matryona from the yard, saying,
Be gone with you! Scavenging here! Whoring around!

When I asked what happened, the lackey said that Matryona was not even ours.
Not our serf
. There went my semiserious plan of easing her lot by making a house servant out of her.

Matryona never touched me either. Except once: I was performing my routine while watching her—and was not succeeding, it just would not happen; so she said,
Let me,
and then pulled the kerchief off her head—a newer, whiter thing she wore, with a stitchwork of little red roosters along
the edge—and she took me into her hand through this kerchief, explaining,
My hands’re rough and young master’s skin’s tender.
I leaned back on my elbows and wanted to close my eyes but those little red roosters—this misused Sunday-best kerchief—I could not tear my mind from it, it anguished me, it jumbled me—

“You pity me, don’t you?” I said.

She stopped for a moment. Her braid rolled over her shoulder and fell on my chest. She tossed it back. Then resumed.

“I am not a ‘young master.’ I may well be older than you.” I could not bear these pangs of sadness and shame and injustice, perverted together, and so I cried, “Stop!” because I did not want her to stop, and then drew her in and held her by the waist, and straightened her skirt, and then buried my face in it and begged, “Don’t come here again. Please. Don’t come for me anymore.”

Later, Father categorically refused to buy Matryona and Savva from whoever owned them. “When you come into money, you can blow it whichever way you want!” I had no income other than the allowance he gave me. The empire rarely paid my nominal Leib Guard salary. As a landed nobleman, I was expected to have no need for it, and if I had the need, to be too proud to ask.

I came across Anna right after that conversation. “What happened?” she asked. My face must have been a portrait of ire.

On impulse, I said, “Take a sleigh ride with me. Please?”

And here we were, propelled by that same spirited mare (a choice of mine), over an end-of-February landscape, under the crisp sun. Once or twice at sharp turns Anna shrieked and grabbed my arm, then laughed—excitedly, I thought—and it cheered me up, and I thought that this was when I’d ask her about my brother. I needed, I had to know, now more than ever.

On the outskirts of a village, some kids were building a snow fortress and I turned toward it. “A cavalry charge!” I roared, and Anna protested,
God, no!,
and I reigned in the mare to a halt and jumped out of the sleigh. “An infantry charge! Preobrazhensky grenadiers—attack!” I stormed on, and the kids responded with a volley of snowballs. I retaliated with snow grenades and rammed the snow wall, tumbling to the ground on the other side and being bombarded by the fortress’s defenders till snow bursts covered me head to toe; yet I lay sprawled and laughed like a madman until Anna’s face appeared above me. “Look at you—a snowman,”
she said, smiling so brightly. And I said, “Then tell me something. Be honest with a snowman. Is your husband cold when he performs the procreative act?”

At first she just raised her brow, prompting me to repeat it, but by the time I did, her face changed, a grave concern upon it, and her gaze turned inward. I sat up. “What’s wrong?”—“I am unwell,” she said. “Take me back.”

I was terrified. She saw it and, once back in the sleigh, she offered an explanation, “It’s my pregnancy.”

“You are—
pregnant
?!”

“You didn’t know?”

“You didn’t tell me!”

“I—guess I thought you knew. Everyone else does.”

“Oh my God, I shouldn’t have—if I’d known—”

“It’s all right. It’s just—something is a little wrong right now.”

“Something what?!”

“It’s not a man’s business, Alexander. Will you just get me home, please?”

• • •

The bumpy sleigh ride I had made her endure . . . of course it was all my fault! I would kill myself if she lost her baby. They confined her to bed. They were saying the worst hadn’t happened, and she was hopeful. Days passed. I stayed at her side as often as she’d let me. I kept track of her face. If she was calm, I breathed. If she looked concerned, I held my breath. At the same time I kept thinking:
A baby. A baby! My brother must be normal. He is not like me. I am alone. Curse them. Curse the world!
I no longer needed her answer, when one day she said, “That question you had asked . . . Your brother is not at all a cold man. He cares deeply about me. He is a devoted husband.” Then she asked, “Tell me, what had happened between Marie Tolstoy and you?”

As I opened my mouth to respond, Andrei walked in the door. You see—the problem with the Turkish war was that it just would not start in earnest. So Andrei had sought permission to leave the idle troops to be with his pregnant wife, and showed up at Velitzyno quite unexpectedly.

“What did you do to my wife?!” were Andrei’s first words. Then, as Anna—instantly oblivious of me—lifted her arms to greet her
normal
husband, he took control of his emotions and asked me out for a word. Anna objected, “Alexander had done me no wrong!” but Andrei was
already closing the door behind us. When we were out of Anna’s earshot, he berated me. I rebuked not a single fantastic accusation of his because I felt guilt and—at the same time—because I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. But I promised to remove myself from the scene, and to begin with, I absconded to the old barn I’d frequented with Matryona.

As I yanked at the barn’s door, a whole rack of icicles, sharp and long, broke off the eaves, plunged down in front of my face, and stabbed the snow, narrowly missing my foot. I picked up the icicles one by one and broke them into smaller and smaller pieces until my palms bled and only the icicles’ wrist-thick roots resisted my best attempts at destruction. Those I hurled against the barn wall, again and again. Shards ricocheted into me. After a while there was no piece left larger than a pea.

And then, at long last, my supply of rage ran out. It occurred to me that it was time to stop asking God for help, because if he was paying attention, he ought to be helping Matryona and Savva and Anna, not me; that I was one year away from turning thirty and had nothing to show for it . . . If I was serious about loathing myself, it was time to graduate to doing it quietly—and responsibly, without the bonfire and attendant harm to others.

It would be, at any rate, more honest.

• • •

Curiously, when I undressed for bed that night, I found a shard of an icicle stuck between my vest and shirt. I placed it on my dresser and found it still solid come morning. I had no idea what I’d done to it, but it never melted: not when I washed my dried blood off it, nor after a week in my pocket when I brought it to a certain Herr Goldstein in St. Petersburg, a jeweler. I said that it came to me by chance, what was it? Herr Goldstein inspected it with ardor, then told me circumspectly that he did not know what it was but could buy it off me. Had I any more of these stones? Maybe, I said. I told him to name the price, and he did. I doubled the number, stooped over him across the table, and watched what he’d do. As soon as he conceded, I leaned further forward and told him to explain himself. “It is not a diamond,” he said with trepidation, “But it could pass as one. If Your Nobleship were interested in considering the
possibilities
.”