The Age of Ice: A Novel (64 page)

“Good luck to you and your family,” I said.

“Thank you very much indeed,” said he.

• • •

I opened the envelope even later than Mike had advised. Only when I’d stepped off my last scheduled connection and then jumped on a plane of my choosing. No, not even then. Only when I’d landed in Johannesburg, checked into a hotel, and poured myself a Cognac was I able to get to that envelope. I was afraid of what I’d read.

There were quite a few sheets inside. Inquiries and affidavits obtained in response. Copies of birth and death records from Birobidzhan. Lists of names. They seemed to demonstrate that due diligence had been applied in search for a record of arrest of Maria and Marc Fromm, Frohman, or Welleren, traveling to the Amur in 1935; but they contained the absence of evidence, not evidence of absence. The last piece in the stack was an oddity. It was a cheap quadrille notebook, and the only text there was handwritten in block letters on the first page:

THE VAULT IS NOT FOR SEED BUT FOR WEAPONIZED SMALLPOX

That’s it. Nothing more. Or less.
Two hundred years, and Old Hag Smallpox still rides her bloodred dogs.
I finished my Cognac and left for the seaport, where I bought my way on to the next cargo ship bound for Australia.

• • •

What if Marie
had never existed
? Was I beginning to believe it? No Marc Fromm, no travel to Amur. No betrayal. Anna
had
invented the
whole thing—
could my troubled daughter hatch a lie as insidious as this?

I pulled out of the deal. I gave the Soviets no reason why I did it—had no legal obligation to, at that stage. And I kept the contents of that quadrille notebook to myself. Doing otherwise wouldn’t have created any more obstacles for the vault but would have ended up exposing Mike. I suppose the Soviets may have punished him anyway—for the very fact of my withdrawal. But this was a risk he must have been prepared to take.

I hope he has survived inside the Soviet empire as a man Western at heart, and got to enjoy a single malt now and then, watching his daughter grow up. I hope he outlived the USSR. But there is—always will be—a doubt. I see at least one reason why Mike could have withheld evidence of Marie’s existence from me.

• • •

Since my encounter with the Russians, I’d been brokering no trades. By the nineties I fell back on my original preoccupation. I started a company that built seasonal ice hotels in Norway and Canada. We crafted ice suites with ice beds, ice halls with ice chandeliers. We built an ice bar in Dubai—a miracle of modern industrial refrigeration in the middle of a hot climate, ice tables and chairs, even cocktail glasses carved out of ice. These were none but a mockery of the Ice Palace of my conception. The joke was no longer on me.

Then I sold that company too.

• • •

A month, a year, a decade. Time would flicker in and out of existence. Yesterday a hundred years ago.

Marie may have never existed—but I kept dreaming of her. She was in an ice cocoon, a crystalline chrysalis, morphing as ages went by, my Sleeping Beauty, my immortal butterfly. I dreamed of joining her one day. We’d crystallize into each other, become one and then become a nothingness; and it was a good dream. I saved it in my mind for the bad nights, when I saw Marie as that starved Frenchwoman I had made dance with me in 1812. Marie forced to dance with the Russian bear, Marie exhausted, collapsing into snow. Marie’s outstretched legs in a
valenok
and a shoe.

A decade, a year, a month. I would sit in front of a TV all night, tuned
to the BBC world news or CNN or Weather Channel and imagine I was in the Herat jail watching events just go by—and by—each new day. When something would attract my attention, I’d summon my friends. The trader, the scientist, the soldier. “Could you have fancied, Mr. Sawyer, what kind of an industrialization snowball your nation had set in motion? But no economy can grow at ten percent a year indefinitely, Mr. Sawyer, only cancers do it.” Or: “Imagine, Dr. Merck, they are freezing human embryos now! So your idea wasn’t crazy, it was just way before its time.” Or: “Mr. Pottinger, I wish you’d seen how Russians were mired in Afghanistan. And now Americans went back in and we came along. Makes you realize it wasn’t anything
you’d
done wrong back then, don’t you think?”

I think they like visiting me.

To Andrei, my brother, and Andrei Junior, my godson, I said, when they came,
You are and always will be my heroes
. To Anna, my wife—
I love you, please forgive me.
Even though your craving for ice that I had believed to be caused by me, is now called
pagophagia
and is a recognized symptom of anemia. Even if there was nothing I’d done to have caused it, and it must have been brought about by an underlying disease, cancer, most likely—still.

To Elizabeth I said . . . no, I asked,
Did you know who I was? When you—

I ask her the same question every time she comes. When in the morning I wake up in my armchair, there are icicles under my nose and hoarfrost around my eye sockets.
Coldness,
as we understand it now, is nothing but stillness in something that is not supposed to be still.

• • •

Ice had sired me that night in the Ice Palace, in 1740. I am half-ice, half-human, which makes me neither a prince, nor a Velitzyn. That is what I believe. But I still do not understand my purpose, if I have one at all.

Perhaps, through me, Ice had tried to understand human nature. Perhaps I am a demonstration that ice and human fates are linked. Perhaps I am an accident. Perhaps my father does not even recognize me for what I am.

What had happened to me on the Yasachnoi many years ago was
a phase transition
. From human to ice. Two hundred and more years later, the memory of the pain and distress I’d felt still reels me. But there was also a flash of grace at the end, a brief burst of benevolent omnipresence
before I lost a sense of self. The feeling as real as the fact that the incredible ice formation Dr. Merck had described was not trapping me, it
was
me. Is the
Blind Saint
my true nature? And yet I’d never truly attained it, on most occasions I had been winding up as loathsome
Old Man Frost.

The road to hell is always paved with our dreams and aspirations. And yet, if I
were
to become the Blind Saint, what would I be called to do? Envelop the world in my embrace? Stop it from losing its ice? Bring about another Ice Age?

• • •

It had been years since I stopped communicating with Anna, but in 2002 or so, it came to my attention that disbursements from her trust fund were still occurring. This sent a ripple through my torpor, as I realized that she would have been eighty-nine by then. So either she was still alive or the accountant was cheating. Then in the summer of 2003, the first of the heat waves hit Europe. News reports of solitary elderly dying in their homes worried me. The last address of Anna’s that I had was a flat in the middle of Paris where she lived alone. I flew to Paris.

The heat was such, it felt as if I ran into a wall once I exited Charles de Gaulle Airport. I like heat, but this was hard even on me. I chose the subway because taxicabs promised to be roasting pots, but cowering underground brought no relief. When I resurfaced at the Le Châtelet station—oh
mon Dieu
! Shouldn’t I be melting, just like the Snow Maiden suspended over fire?

The right street, the right house. I went up the stairs, rang at the door. Then down, to the manager’s door, then up again, now with a sweaty, shiny-nosed fellow who answered to the title
gestionnaire de l’appartement
. We unlocked Anna’s door and I worked my way through a plug of hot and stale air: a hallway, then a small
séjour
; a glance into the dining room—months of dust on the table; the hallway again, then into a draped bedroom—and there she was, my eighty-nine-year-old, lying in bed, little more than another wrinkle in gray sheets. The smell of perfume locked in mortal combat with the smell of urine. Dignity, fighting her last battle.

What can I say? Should I state the self-evident sentiment that no parent should ever live to see his child reduced to this? Should I try to reproduce the sounds I made when I realized she was alive, if utterly incoherent? I made a babushka-like cry when her breathing became very strange, and scampered to the kitchen to fetch some ice from the refrigerator
because my hands alone were useless on her—only to discover that the refrigerator was dead. And the water that came out of the faucet was so horribly warm!

I ran into the apartment manager, still in the hallway, and ripped the ambulance number out of him, dialed it, but got mired in French babble, holds, and redirects; gave up, ran back to be with her in the bedroom. I scooped her up and held her in my arms. Air drafts crept in my hair and droplets of condensation tickled my nape and forehead as I rocked her—and rocked her—and whispered in Russian,
I know an old fairy tale
.
It’s about Old Man Frost, the ruler of winter. A sorceress felt pity for his loneliness
—here I got chin-shakes but steadied myself—
and she made him two lovely daughters out of his snow
.
One snow maiden
—it started snowing, all around us but I went on—
went to the coldest place on Earth and there slipped into a dream, but another one—another one chose to live among people, in a grand, hot city, with her mother the sorceress.

A blizzard came over us, everything was getting wet, a sleet, a slush, and Anna kept staring through me and wincing at snowflakes that fell on her face and breathing shallowly in scary, random bouts; I snuffled and pressed on,
But people kept burning their bonfires, and made the snow maiden jump over them—again, and again, bigger, hotter bonfires, and then one day the grand hot city became so hot—so hot that—

Anna’s hand made a jerk as if trying to move away a curtain, then found my ear stub and clung to it. Her eyes focused on my face and she lisped in Russian, “Daddy . . . You’ve come.” And then, louder, as if announcing me to the whole world, “My dad is here!”

And that was all.

• • •

Later, the manager grumbled, “The old lady never once mentioned she had a son. Nor have I ever seen you visiting—not in two decades she lived here. Families these days!” The ambulance crew just shook their heads as they kept slipping on the wet floor. “What happened here?” They pronounced Anna dead and told me to call up funeral homes, though waiting for a hearse could take forever—with this heat wave.

I had forever to spare. I sat over Anna’s body in the room that now felt like a jungle after a tropical rain. Anna’s bed steamed, evaporating moisture back into the warming air. I sat for a while, then went roaming. I pulled out one drawer of her desk, then another.

When it comes to the end of life, some hoard and some purge. Anna
was a purger. Her last thirty years had virtually no evidence of existence. Only the old stuff was left. Black-and-white photographs. There was a whole series of Anna’s portraits shot by the same, inspired camera (Ricky’s, I presumed) and regressing from dreamy nudity to stark nakedness—a story which first pages spoke of the photographer’s affection as clearly as its last—of loss thereof . . . Then older photographs. I’d seen some of them before: Elizabeth, the Teuton. Haphazard mid-century snapshots gave way to increasingly choreographed turn-of-the-century portraits. That was it, I thought, I’d run out of the documentable lifetime. But at the very bottom were these—that I had not ever seen—

Photographs of two twin girls. Laughing, sulking, reading a book, posing in front of the Eiffel Tower. Marie and Anna. Anna and Marie—

Two girls in an old photograph. Two, not one. I sank down. I pored. And pored into the fading black-and-white, realizing something else: I couldn’t even
tell them apart
.

For forty years I’d thought them so different. I’d built a whole history of the twentieth century based on this belief. They were so different that one of them almost did not exist. But they are identical twins. They are indistinguishable.

The rest of the contents of that drawer belonged to me. My notes from the Arctic. Merck’s notes about my ice cocoon. Letters to me. Letters from me to Anna and Andrei. Elizabeth and then our daughter had preserved them all through two wars and a revolution . . . and here I was . . . standing over them. With a lump in my throat.

I want to write it again and again, like a boy made to scribble a thousand times on the blackboard of his irreversible past, a string of words that hurts so much each time he writes it:

I had two daughters. They were twins. I can’t tell them apart. And they are gone.

I
am no longer angry at Ice nor afraid of him. I’ve seen Ice kill people and I’ve seen people kill Ice—and I am old enough to understand that there is never a one, absolute answer to anything. In the end, Angleesh Pottinger may have been right: the only way to keep a balance is to have two opposite forces ramming against each other. Sadly, this way comes at a high cost in human lives.

If I ever had a purpose, this must be it: I’ll be upholding a balance, that’s all. Like every truly altruistic endeavor, it is also selfish.

I’ve simplified my investments, sold holdings, drawn a final will. My life is tidy and narrow once again. I’ve been staying in Anchorage, Alaska, for the past two years, training to be a bush pilot and talking with scientists from the local university. They showed me images of receding glaciers, records of melting Alaskan permafrost. They showed me a space satellite’s view down onto the Arctic, where the North Pole was marked by a black, perfectly round navel. Two raging-hot continents and the complicit island of Greenland were closing in around the beleaguered Arctic ice sheet; it suffered loss after loss and was barely firing back. In 2006 the Arctic ice was running cracks as it had never done before. In 2007 its mighty bastion, the Northwest Passage, fell on one knee—no more ice on it in summer.