The Age of Ice: A Novel (63 page)

And I considered it. All of it, the tucking in for the night too. I could, couldn’t I? Just like this, sweetly: to take care of her as she was growing older . . . I said, “Let me think about it.” I certainly hoped her question meant that Ricky
was
wearing off. But a while later, she challenged me, “Why won’t you ask me if I am in love with Ricky?” I fumbled, “I don’t want to.”

“Or what he does, who he is?”

I did not reply. She said, “He is an aspiring photographer. He has some potential.”

I said, “I don’t care. Where do you want to go for dinner? American cuisine? Or have you grown an appetite for the home country’s offerings?”

She narrowed her eyes. “You sound as if you’re jealous.”

“Why would you say something like this?” I truly did not understand why she pushed that button.

Until this: a few hours later—in the middle of the night—I opened my eyes and saw her standing next to my bed. In a camisole and little else. She slipped under the blanket and—it felt like—adhered to, fused with my body along the whole warm length of hers. Her arm stretched across my abdomen, her leg—over my thighs.

Ma vie
claims we had sex. Not just then; it claims we went on to have
a liberating windstorm of an affair for the next month. It’s a lie. I swear it is. She was my daughter. The truth: I scrambled out of bed. I whirled around the bedroom like windblown trash, all but pulling at my hair. She just watched me, lying in my bed. At last I composed myself enough to say, “Do not. Ever—” She sprang up and slinked past me, out the door.

In the morning, her note said, “I’ve gone back to Fulton. I’m fine, and please, PLEASE don’t try to interfere again, or I’ll call the police on you.”

Ma vie
says that she embarked on a solo road trip across the United States, falling in and out with hippies, anarchists, and Oregonian kibbutzniks. Not entirely true. She went with Ricky. Every one of the postcards she sent to the St. Regis said only,
I’m fine.
By November they were in California in some kind of a beach commune. They heard a word about the Rolling Stones tour.

I trust this chapter of
Ma Vie
because it is increasingly unhappy. They drove to Oakland for a concert, then to San Diego, then to Phoenix. Then Ricky announced he had to attend every one of the Stones concerts and shoot photographs. So they made it from Phoenix to Dallas in two days, and from there to Alabama, then to Illinois, spending sixteen-hour days in the car. They fought, then got high to stop fighting. In Detroit Anna fell sick and stayed behind. She writes that she lay in a dark motel room littered with dozens of black-and-white photographs. She rolled in them in her fever and they stuck to her sweat-drenched body.
Like feathers to tar,
she writes.

I was in Canada when she called the St. Regis. The message she left with the clerk had an instruction to tell me, “We are
half
siblings, and maybe not even. I just thought. Mistakenly.” It convinced me she was no longer fine. I returned to New York and looked up the Stones concert schedule.

She caught up with Ricky in Boston. Because of her, they were late to Florida and missed the concert. That’s what he told her. It was
her
fault that they now had four days to drive back to California for the last, the grandest, concert, he said, the one that was to be better than Palm Beach, better even than Woodstock.

The infamous Altamont concert.

• • •

She writes in
Ma vie
that seeing thousands of twentysomething-year-olds in one place oppressed her. She felt as if their collective stare urged her to self-destruct to free up space for the next generation. Halfway through
the concert she needed to pee, and after a long search for a place to accomplish it, she could no longer find her way back to Ricky. She wandered around. Somebody told her,
Move over, Grandma, you’re not transparent yet.
Somebody else offered her a drag off his joint and hot chocolate out of his thermos.

I have since convinced myself that I can see her in the concert footage. There she is, a waifish apparition in capris, high heels, droopy white sweater, and the ubiquitous sunglasses. She is craning her neck from behind a cordon of Hell’s Angels—not to see what’s onstage but to make out the photographers behind the flashes. Jostled by the rough crowd, she is looking for Ricky. Sir Jagger is singing,
Pleased to meet you—Hope you guessed my name—

When a man was stabbed in front of the stage and the air ambulance came, she pleaded in vain that the medics take her with them. She was intoxicated by then. Then she walked down the highway in search of her parked car. She was not certain how far back she had left it and whether she had passed it already, everything was so different in the dark. Eventually she climbed into someone else’s car. Hours later, its owners found her curled up in the driver’s seat and gave her a ride to her motel. Ricky never showed up there.

I flew in on the second day after the concert. The motel’s owner summoned me. Let’s say—I opened the door of Anna’s room to smells of vomit and photo developer. I’d like to leave the rest out, if I might. I cleaned her up, paid the bill, added extra to cover room damage.

She slept most of the way on a plane back to France. I remember looking at her face, her drawn, paper-thin profile. She’d pulled her knees up. Like a girl, I remember thinking, like an exhausted runaway teenage girl. She’d always be my girl. No matter how old she got she’d always be my beautiful girl. I was the only man on earth who saw her that way and it was so sad that she would not accept it from me. Wouldn’t listen when I’d say that she was ageless to me—just as she longed to be—because I was her dad.

In
Ma vie,
she makes her way home all by herself.

• • •

Two years later she published it,
Ma vie sans une jumelle
. There are lies in that book, yet they are so ingrown into the truth that memory bleeds teasing them apart. There is our “affair.” And there is the central, pivotal premise that Marie, the twin sister, never existed. That my other daughter, the ice heiress, had always been a figment of Anna’s imagination. This
too could be a lie. But it is one of those lies that, once out of the box, begin to contaminate the truth.

After
Ma vie,
I largely kept away from Anna.

• • •

You see, I had been looking for Marie. But there was no record of her existence in prewar France, as if someone had purged it. In the early sixties, there was hope that one could peek behind the iron curtain, inside the USSR. Cracks formed in the NKVD archives. I sent inquiries, but in 1964, Nikita Khrushchev was ousted, and the NKVD cracks snapped closed again.

After
Ma vie,
however, I had to get to the bottom of it.

By then I was no longer manufacturing or distributing cold. I had investments here and there, I made money by brokering and consulting. When one’s business is to link those who supply and those who demand, making a needed connection becomes a matter of sending out a word and waiting till it echoes back. I had a deal in mind, and sooner or later a buying agent from the USSR was seeking to meet with me. The Soviets wanted something from the black list—a list of things the West was not supposed to let them get their hands on. No, it wasn’t a weapon, merely industrial-scale refrigeration, more, a climate-control system.

The official line was: for a seed vault, deep in Siberia. To preserve biodiversity and agricultural heritage in the event of nuclear war. An expansion of a smaller project already in place in Leningrad. All right, I’ll arrange it. Mind you, I’d ceased being a Russian patriot about two centuries ago, in the Arctic. Nostalgia is not patriotism. But on the scale of things—Americans had seed vaults already, why not Russians? More to the point, I had a quid pro quo: a visit to Birobidzhan, to the city hall or wherever they kept birth and death records, a search for living survivors. And a dig in the NKVD archives.

In the summer of 1973, I flew in to Irkutsk.

A crazy feeling, to view the land from my effortless vantage point in the sky, all these hills and plains upon which our ill-fated expedition had trudged with so much exertion for weeks and months and years—to see them summarized in minutes from the tiny window of an airplane. Then landing, stepping out onto the tarmac. As ever: the gusty wind, the whine of turbines and smell of exhaust—but now it was here, in
this
place! That I would, after almost two hundred years, be standing in the capital of Siberia!

In Irkutsk, we were supposed to do the talking: prices and logistics; after that—my hosts were providing me with a flight to Khabarovsk and a ride to Birobidzhan. The international part of my flight itinerary had been ridiculously cloak-and-dagger: to cover my tracks from the Interpol, CIA, et cetera, Russians had flown me in by way of zigs and zags with stopovers in places like Baghdad and Prague; a chaperone on the last leg of the journey had seen to it that I boarded without a passport check. My return had to employ the same sequence—or risk consequences.

Nonetheless, all had gone smoothly on the way in and would have continued to do so if Russians didn’t decide to dazzle me with a daylong fishing extravaganza on Lake Baikal. A substantial pleasure boat was at our disposal, courtesy of the Communist Party boss of Irkutsk. It took us up into the remotest corner of the lake (beautiful, as a matter of fact). Then, at the end of the day, the inherent Russian domestic sloppiness struck with a vengeance. The boat lost power.

The distant shores were mountainous and uninhabited. There was a radio connection, but idiotic notions of secrecy and the ruling caste’s pride made a call for help from this barge full of party bosses, KGB agents, officers of the Ministry of Foreign Trade, and an “overseas guest” quite unlikely. The machinist had twenty-four hours maximum to come up with a fix. After that the delay would start eating into my cloak-and-dagger flight schedule. The trip to Birobidzhan was the obvious first victim.

I was assigned what I call a mehmandar from the Ministry of Foreign Trade. His name was Mikhail Sudarev, and he insisted on being called Mike. He was in his early thirties, tall, handsome, and amicable, he spoke the best English of all on the boat, and had a certain, no doubt consciously cultivated, luster of a man who had been out and about in the world. He knew single malts and metallurgy, and could speak volumes about both. Yes, he could have been a full-time KGB, or he could be only talking to them—who wasn’t? At the very least he acted like a good chap. At most, he was one.

Fortunately or not, the boat was well stocked with spirits and “delicacies,” and everyone turned to Stolichnaya and Cutty Sark, sturgeon and crab legs in a semi-instinctive strategy to ease the tension. There was not much else to do. We ate and drank while the condemned machinist was working around the clock.

By midnight, hard liquor, moonlight, and a pretty wench named Lenochka had created an atmosphere of suspension from reality. The
locals partied like there was no tomorrow; this indeed could have been a feast before the coming plague of retribution. The detail from Moscow exercised some reserve but was not altogether immune to the charms of Lake Baikal. At three o’clock, I went out onto the deck. Mike followed me, the good mehmandar that he was. He said he was quite certain that by morning the boat would be fixed. He offered to find me a place to get some sleep. I said I was okay. Then I asked him if there were any monsters lurking in the Baikal. He did not understand at first. Monsters, like the one in the Loch Ness.
You know, Nessie
. A gigantic water dinosaur.

Oh, that. “No,” he said, “there are no monsters in Russia.”

“Why, do you think?”

He chuckled. “I don’t know . . . But I like the nickname. Nessie. Makes it smaller, yes? Like Jimmy Carter. Or Teddy Roosevelt. I like how English language brings things down to earth.
Know-how. V.I.P. Bull market
. It does not bow to anything. It’s the language of practical people who do not—
idoleaze
?”

“Idealize, you mean?”

He looked embarrassed.

I said, “Oh,
idolize
. Right?”

“Yes, that’s it. Do you see what I mean?”

I did. I also saw that he was fond of the U.S.A. “Have you been to the States?”

“Last year. Pittsburgh, Detroit, New York.”

“Did you enjoy your visit?”

“Very much indeed.”

By four thirty the partying subsided and Mike brought out a bottle of whiskey to keep us warm. By five, all one could hear was snoring and Lenochka’s coital meows, not quite muffled by the walls of the galley. Mike, slightly more drunk, told me that he used to be a
stilyaga
in the fifties: he had followed echoes of Western fashions by gluing extra layers of rubber to the soles of his shoes, seaming his pants so narrow he could barely get in and out, and listening to jazz bootlegs recorded on X-ray film. And then he said that he loved his wife and daughter—
very much indeed
. His daughter was eight. She liked books by Ernest Thompson Seton and Sir Walter Scott and drew graphic novels with the thirty-piece set of Flo-Master marker pens he had brought her from the States. He looked at me. “Do you see what I mean?”

• • •

When the first of the revelers staggered out onto the deck and the machinist resumed tinkering with the engine, I agreed to get some rest behind a curtain in Lenochka’s private corner. I fell asleep and woke up to an engine beat; we were, lo and behold, moving! But it was late afternoon, and we were a day behind. I was not going to Birobidzhan. The remnant piece of time between then and my departure was as useless as one might imagine. A heavy lunch with toasts was the last obstacle in my way to the airport, but eventually even that was overcome. In the car, a black government Chaika, Mike gave me a sealed envelope.

“The archive documents you requested from us,” he said. I moved to tear it open, he jerked his eyes toward the chauffeur. “There is a lot to read. May be better to do it later.” I instantly imagined graphic details, interrogation protocols. He was right. I put the envelope away. At the airport he gave me a firm handshake but he looked unwell. He looked as if all he wanted was to get as far away from me as possible.