The Age of Ice: A Novel (60 page)

“Anna-Marie?”

She wore a plaid skirt and a sleeveless turtleneck. The chocolate brown of her hair looked dyed. Did she look like Elizabeth? Like me? I could not tell. She was an attractive woman, her beauty was of the kind that keeps with age; a downward, bitter curve in her full lips and shadows under her eyes made her look sophisticated, not worn out. She extended her hand for a handshake, then scrambled it into a hug. I hugged back. She noticed nothing out of the ordinary, as I had expected.

“Welcome to Melun,” she said.

She drove me past a small town square, along streets that ran up and down hill between endless stone fences of the same color as the cobblestones of Champs Elysées in 1814. There was a small stucco cottage, an
overgrown garden, and a skinny man who tended peonies in a little clearing cut out in the otherwise rampant jungle—the husband, Pierre. A ruffled type with a five-o’clock shadow. “Pleased to meet you.”

I entered a dark, cool living room with a tile floor, a small TV set on a mahogany piece that perhaps had started in the nineteenth century as a small bureau; a pale bluish curtain over a narrow doorway to the backyard. Then a busy kitchen with prolific houseplants, babbling radio, an asthmatic refrigerator, a stack of pans on a stove. A small breakfast table was crowded with a wicker basket full of bread, an opened book, several newspapers, reading glasses, an empty breakfast bowl, half a lemon, a scallion spear, a booklet of train schedules.

I already liked them both. But I was confused: I perceived Anna-Marie as a woman, not a daughter. I looked her age. Seeing her did not trigger any visceral reaction in me. What did it mean?

Pierre opened a bottle of red wine. The meal started—or rather, a conversation served in courses, a time spent by spoonfuls and mouthfuls. Fried sardines, then sausage were served with cucumbers, scallions, and radishes as sides, then came more wine, a plateful of cheeses, a heap of life stories. Foodstuffs were extricated from the refrigerator with a degree of difficulty—it was so crowded there. Anna-Marie almost started an avalanche of milk and eggs pulling a plate from the bottom of one stack or another. “Pierre, do you still want it?” she said about a small pot that seemed to have lost its place in the puzzle. “Yes, keep it,” he said.

Anna-Marie had a manner of pulling her turtleneck collar over her chin, especially when she did the talking. A lovely quirk—some kind of vestigial insecurity, perhaps? About getting cold? When she talked I stole glances at Pierre. The quickest way to assess someone’s marriage is to watch what one spouse does when the other talks. Pierre passed with flying colors. They said they tied the knot in 1948. “A month after we met,” Pierre said proudly.

They made tourist plans for me. They said I had to see the local attraction—the Château de Vaux le Vicomte. It was still in private hands, but Anna-Marie had access. As a history teacher. They were both schoolteachers; Anna-Marie in history and geography, and Pierre in biology and chemistry. The grounds at Vaux le Vicomte were said to be a rehearsal for Versailles. The same landscape architect. We could go there tomorrow because I was staying overnight, was I not?

They wouldn’t hear of me going back to Paris.

• • •

Getting drunk with them was good. They made me feel like an old friend. We laughed so hard—I hadn’t laughed like this in a century. But still . . . when the laughter subsided, there would be a small pause, as if laughter made them lose their bearings. Their kitchen smelled lived in, eaten in; it smelled of a hearty life with both feet on the ground . . . but there was also a hint of rot. These two people were sad, I realized, and the saddest part of it was—they didn’t even know it. To them, this was joy. The more Anna-Marie tugged at her collar, the more it seemed a compulsion. And they hoarded food. Last time
I
knew starvation was in Herat. Today I came to Melun after a stop at the famed Parisian Tour d’Argent restaurant, where I’d made a point of tasting a Clos de Griffier Cognac of 1788. Then, it felt nostalgic. Now—embarrassing and excessive. The bottle I’d bought was still in my suitcase.

I began to feel responsible for their sadness. Somehow, it was my fault. I was beginning to react like a father.

They told me their stories. Anna-Marie stayed in Paris throughout the occupation. Pierre was a POW in Germany since almost the start of the war. “Didn’t take much back then to end up a prisoner.” He chuckled. “We were running like rabbits.” He dug ditches and foundations, then assembled Volkswagens. He knew the workers who sabotaged. He didn’t partake. Civilians drove those too.

We’d moved our conversation-feast to the living room and now Anna-Marie pulled out shoe boxes full of photographs. The very first photo she passed to me was Mr. and Mrs. von Welleren, in 1920. A studio shot, with her seated, him standing by the back of her chair. “The Teuton” looked a fairly straitlaced blond specimen of his kind. Those days photographers used to make anyone look tense, at any rate. Even my Elizabeth . . . Her hair was cropped. Her unsmiling lips looked almost black, like in those early motion pictures . . . and her eyes looked more colorless, transparent. Last I looked, they were drunken cherries, her eyes, that’s the Russian expression, a
drunken cherry,
a dark, sweet cherry steeped in liquor—

Anna-Marie waited, holding several more photographs, while I lingered with the Urchin Princess’s image. I pretended to scratch my forehead—hiding my face, really.
I’d better be able to stomach it
. What followed was more of Elizabeth or the Teuton, all years. Then the last one in the hospital. Before her second heart attack. The Urchin Princess had a sneaky look on her wrinkled face, as if she was plotting a prank on the doctors.

So this was it then. This was truly it.

Photos of Anna-Marie started from the late thirties. The childhood pictures were absent. I didn’t ask why. Pierre accepted photos from me and briefly examined them, as if he ran a tally. Soon he began to fidget and finally broke in with a seemingly irrelevant statement, “Welleren was a collaborationist, Anna-Marie, you know that.” And addressing me, he added, “She has trouble reconciling a few things about her . . . about Welleren. Anna-Marie, you better start talking.”

She sighed, the turtleneck collar all the way to her nose. “My mother was a troubled woman,” she said. “She was never happy and as she kept thrashing in her unhappiness, she kept hurting those next to her. She’d had affairs. Not even that, no—flings. When she worked and Father stayed at home, she’d sometimes come home very late or the next morning. Father took care of me. He was useless as a breadwinner for the first decade in France, but he took good care of me. He loved me, I was more certain of that than of my mother’s love. Mother could be so tempestuous. Well, they both could. But she was toxic and mean, while he was just plain angry. I don’t know, it’s just complicated, Pierre.

“She had this romantic, no, not the word, some kind of otherworldly streak in her, and since the world never lived up to it, she was incurably bitter. But she was also tenacious, as if this bitterness fueled her, as if it was her purpose to prove that the more you struggled, the more disappointment you incurred. And so she struggled, she did whatever it took. She fed and clothed us through the twenties even as she complained that we were her shackles and she forfeited a career of a literary translator because of us.

“But Father—he had instead this rigidity. In some sense he was just as ill-adapted to this world as Mother, but his was different: he simply was a purebred Germanic nobleman. He loved her as a Germanic nobleman, with this stiff, unmovable love. And he could not find a job as a Germanic nobleman. When he finally got something going, it was not because he’d changed, but because France had changed.”

“You idealize him,” said Pierre.

“You weren’t there to see how proud he was when he started to bring food to the table. How he gave Mother gifts! He just glowed. He supported us through the war, we owe him that!”

“He was a collaborationist.”

“Pierre, you said it yourself. When you were at a VW factory you’d
sometimes forget where you were, and what it was, and would be just plain satisfied with a day’s job done well.”

“That’s not the same!”

She gave him a haunted stare. He softened.

“Anna-Marie, this is the kind of argument we can have by ourselves, and we’ve had it a dozen times already. The point is, we have Mr. Veltzen here, and he can help you have a different argument.” He turned to me. “Anna-Marie’s official father was a Nazi collaborationist. She knows what he’d done, but she’s been trying very hard to justify it. All her life she sided with him. She took care of him when he was dying. And she’s been bending over backward to make it all fit together. If she keeps bending like this, she’ll break. What she needs is a fresh start.”

Both of them now looked at me. A pause lengthened. I was nervous. What should I say to them? To buy time, I returned to shuffling photographs—I still held a stack in my hands. That’s when I saw it. A blurry, grainy one. A man and a woman, illuminated feverishly, as if by a lightning bolt, kissing on a terrace before a mansion. Hardly recognizable—their bodies and faces so turned on each other that nothing identifiable escaped for a chance observer to capture. Other than their passion itself.

Elizabeth and me.
She’d kept it, she’d kept it
 . . .

I felt another sinkhole forming inside me, where my permafrost had collapsed, just the same way as fifty years ago, when I’d dropped on my knees before Elizabeth . . . Anna-Marie leaned over to see what I was so absorbed with. “Oh, this one,” she said. “I don’t know where it comes from. I’ve always thought it is a stage shot from some old, grand movie. It’s not signed or dated,” she said just as I glanced at its back. My mouth opened as part of my sinkhole; I spoke to avert tears. “Here is what I know. Your mother married on Christmas. Three weeks before that she slept with my father. He thought she was his fiancée; she then told him she was marrying another and bade farewell. He ran. Then the war started. And—the rest.”

I made a pause—emptied, relieved, sad. Angry.
Why can’t you see it? It’s me!
I’ve just condemned myself to half-brotherhood when I so longed to be a father. The main character of the story remained a dead man to these two, no matter how many excited questions they threw at me the very next moment.

“How do I know? He told me firsthand. He was very heartbroken. All his life. He never understood why your mother had done this to him. He
had no clue about you. If he did, he’d have tried to find you. He may have been happier, if he knew. But tell me, Anna-Marie, when is your birthday? August 19, 1914? Don’t you think you came a little early for a January honeymoon? I dare say von Welleren had known it from the start. Your mother may have seen to it.”

It got easier as I went. A liberation, of sorts. “That same day, in early December—when, as it appears, they made you, your mother asked my father how many loves he’d had before her. He said, two, and she asked for their names. They were Anna and Marie. Now you know where your name comes from.”

Anna-Marie whispered something, then squeezed her mouth shut against the onslaught of tears, sprang up, and left the room.

“I am sorry,” I said to Pierre. “What just happened? What did she say?”

He ruffled his hair. “
C’est la bérézina
.”

“
C’est la Beresina?
The river?!” My memory flashed a vision of ice mash dragged past two failing makeshift bridges, people on bridges, people in the water, women, children, a squeezing mass, the other bank was the outside of Russia, safety, it was 1812, the finale of the French retreat, and the Russian gunfire was closing in, and I—a madman, an idiot, an Old Man Frost, was dancing on a hillock nearby, windmilling my arms, laughing. Laughing vengefully, I
hope
(for Andrei, for Austerlitz, for Sachan!), but just as likely laughing because I found the sight funny.

Pierre said, “You could have been less—abrupt. But hell, no matter how you’d say it . . . I can see how in your family you may not have liked Mme von Welleren. I only knew her during her last years. Such a bonfire she was. Anna-Marie probably loves her mother more than she would ever admit. I’ll go see what she is up to . . .” And on the way out he added, “. . .
la bérézina
—it’s an expression. It’s like—American soldiers say FUBAR. You know? It’s similar. Something gone horribly wrong.”

Horribly wrong
. I pondered it while he was gone.

Pierre returned. “She says sorry and please never mind her. Emotions, right? She promises she’ll spend all day with you tomorrow. I told her to go to bed. We should probably retire too. It’s late.” But he sat back into the armchair and offered me more wine. “Maybe she’ll open up to you. There is something else there, I know there is. If von Welleren knew, why did he pretend otherwise all his life? Just keep asking her. You have a right, you are her brother, after all.”

• • •

The next day, on a morning as fresh and as cheerful as they come, Anna-Marie drove me to Vaux le Vicomte. In the car, I said I didn’t mean to criticize her mother. “I mentioned my father’s broken heart,” I said, “but I failed to mention that your mother gave him the happiest, most cherished moments of his life.”

This admission did not fully cheer my daughter. “You know your father so well,” said Anna-Marie, “I envy you. I wish mother had told me more about Mr. Veltzen. How they met. How she felt about him. What he was like. But she didn’t. She took it away with her.”

“I can tell you how they met.”

“Thank you, but it’s not the same as hearing it in her words.”

“Are you angry at me? For forcing you to deal with all these sensitive memories?”

“I don’t know.”

We parked before a guardhouse. The palace loomed at the end of a long, wide, perfectly empty driveway behind a wrought-iron fence, its pillars topped with classical visages. Not a soul around.

Anna-Marie rang at the guardhouse door and the groundskeeper came out and let us in. I reviewed my positions. I had decided: I would try to find out whether Anna-Marie was abnormal, like me. I had almost convinced myself that she was. Everything pointed to it, didn’t it? Another turtleneck today, and this—
c’est la bérézina
. Keep asking, Pierre had said. Damn well I was going to.