The Age of Ice: A Novel (65 page)
Read The Age of Ice: A Novel Online
Authors: J. M. Sidorova
The Age of Ice is over, Ice has lost the battle. He lies, bleeding water out of his mortal wounds.
One woman from the climate program at the university was kind enough to treat my hypothetical question seriously: would it help if somehow the melting temperature of ice was raised a few degrees, even if only in the Arctic? Would it buy everyone a bit more time? The answer was, surprisingly, yes. Though even more surprising was the estimate her computer model spat out: to have a meaningful effect, the melting
temperature of the Arctic ice would have to be raised to +8‒10 degrees Celsius!
Am I sure I can do it? No. Making ice diamonds that don’t melt is one thing, but this is a bit bigger . . . and not as easy as
Ice-
9
. At least I don’t think so. I will surrender myself to it—this I know. I’ll be in pain. But nothing short of this will be accepted.
I shall push north as far as I can—fly, then walk. When I can’t walk anymore, I’ll stand and wait. Then I will spread my arms for an embrace. For a blessing. Serene-cold, peaceful-glacial.
Father, I am back,
I’ll say. Perhaps that’s all there is.
• • •
Life exists only in the present moment; when it becomes past, it becomes a story. A story is a form of death or a form of immortality of life, very much like ice itself. But without a story, life is chaos. Life is boiling water without it. Stories grow like glaciers in life’s wake and bring order into the world—as do glaciers. And even though a story is to real life as a finely chiseled ice palace is to previous whereabouts of all the molecules of water that became the ice that went into making the palace—still we make stories, we need to. It is the truth, as everything I’ve written here.
I have been a boiling water once upon a time. Now I am becoming a story.
I am Ice.
1550–1850 The so-called | |
1740 Ice Palace erected in St. Petersburg. Empress Anna Ioannovna dies. | Twins Andrei and Alexander are born to Prince Mikhail “The Clown” Velitzyn and Avdotia, née Buzheninova. |
1742–61 Reign of Empress Elizaveta. | 1747 |
| 1752 |
1757–62 The Seven Years’ War. | 1757 |
1762 Peter III, husband of Ekaterine, crowned, only to be deposed and murdered by the Orlov brothers. | |
1762–96 Reign of Empress Ekaterine II, or Catherine the Great. | |
1768 Empress Ekaterine invites Dr. Thomas Dimsdale to St. Petersburg to perform vaccinations against smallpox. After a demonstration of the vaccine’s safety, she, her young son the Grand Duke, and the court receive inoculations. | |
Alexander volunteers to be a guinea pig for the first smallpox inoculation, before the vaccine is offered to the royalty. | |
1769 | |
1769–74 War with the Ottoman empire. | |
1771–75 Circle of Sentimentalists active in Darmstadt: Goethe and Johann Heinrich Merck. | |
1772–74 Pugachev’s revolt in south-central Russia. 1773, October‒February: Orenburg, the city-fortress, is besieged. | 1773 |
1774 Goethe publishes | |
1775 James Watts perfects his steam engine with a condenser. | |
1779 Captain Cook is murdered on Kauai Island. | |
1781 Herschel discovers the planet Uranus. | Alexander duels with and kills Paul Svetogorov. |
1783 Britain recognizes U.S. independence. | |
1785–93 Captain Joseph Billings leads Russian-British expedition in search of the Northeast Passage. | Alexander joins the expedition. |
1789 French Revolution begins. Storm of the Bastille, National Assembly. | 1787 |
1793 King Louis XVI of France executed. First Coalition against France. Jacobin reign of Terror. | Alexander joins Billings’s ill-fated land trek through the Chukchi Peninsula. |
1797–1801 Reign of Czar Paul I. He is murdered in March 1801. | 1794 |
| 1796 |
| 1798 |
1799 Napoléon becomes Consul, then First Consul. | |
| 1801 |
1804 Napoléon proclaimed Emperor. | Anna dies. |
1805 December 2: Battle of Austerlitz between the allied Austria and Russia against Napoléon. | Andrei Velitzyn leads the |
1807 Russia enters a coalition with France against Britain—the Continental blockade, aka Blocus. | |
1808 First publication of Goethe’s | Martin Sawyer leaves Russia. |
1811 The Comet of 1812 is first sighted in Viviers, France. | |
1812 June: Napoléon invades Russia. September: burns Moscow. October‒December: retreats. The crossing of the Berezina River in December delivers a final blow to Napoléon’s army. | Alexander leaves home. He is adopted by the Chernigovsky Regiment as it chases the dwindling army of Napoléon across Russia. |
1813–17 Persian Crown Prince Abbas Mirza in Tabriz employs British officers to modernize and train his army. | |
1814 April: Allies (Britain, Prussia, Russia, Austria) enter Paris. Napoléon abdicates. | Alexander in Paris. |
1814 July: Mary Goodwin (Shelley, in marriage) and Percy Bysshe Shelley travel through France. | Mary meets Alexander at Ossip Vassilian’s. |
1815 March: Napoléon leaves Elba and lands in France, his “Hundred Days” end at Waterloo on June 18. | Alexander is taken to Persia and becomes a slave to Najar Alibek. |
1817 Russian diplomatic mission to Tehran, led by General Yermoloff. | Alexander performs spying and eavesdropping duties on the British and Russians for Najar and Mirza. |
1825 Persia is defeated by Russia. Britain refuses to help despite an Anglo-Persian treaty. | |
1829 A mob in Tehran dismembers the Russian envoy Griboedov. | |
| 1835 |
1837 Persians under the new shah mount an attack on Afghan city-fortress Herat. British lieutenant Eldred Pottinger tries to defend Herat. | |
1838 A Russian military contingent under Count Simonich joins Persian shah in his camp. Colonel Stoddard arrives from Tehran with a British ultimatum to Persia. Russians leave and Persian army lifts the siege. | Alexander asks Pottinger for asylum. |
1838–42 First Anglo-Afghan War. | 1839 |
1843 Pottinger dies in Hong Kong. | |
| 1854 |
1900 Average annual temperatures begin to rise. | |
1905 Peking‒Paris auto rally. | |
1906 World fair in Milan. | |
1907 Anglo-Russian | |
1912 Ballets Russes perform Stravinsky’s | |
1912–15 Russian Silver Age intellectuals meet at the Stray Dog pub. Poet Anna Akhmatova is a regular. | |
1913 A British business delegation visits Russia. | Alexander meets Princess Elizabeth Goretsky. December: Elizabeth marries Pfaltzgraff von Welleren. |
1914–18 World War I. | 1914 |
1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia. | |
1926 Soviet government proposes to found a Soviet-Jewish Republic in Russian Far East (Birobidzhan). | |
1927, approximate: Joseph Stalin consolidates power in Communist Russia. | |
1933 Adolf Hitler is granted dictatorial powers. First Nazi concentration camps. Boycott of the Jews. | |
1935 Twenty-one German-Jewish doctors, refugees in France, emigrate to Birobidzhan; fourteen are arrested by NKVD. | Marie von Welleren marries Mark Fromm and follows him to Birobidzhan. Both are arrested. |
1936–38 Show trials orchestrated by Stalin’s NKVD against “enemies of the state.” | |
1939–45 World War II. | |
1953–64 De-Stalinization of the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev. | |
| 1961 |
1968 Student uprisings in France. | Anna leaves Pierre, travels to New York with a young American. |
1969 Rolling Stones tour the U.S. | Alexander meets Anna in New York. |
| 1971 |
1973 Oil crisis. | Alexander travels to USSR in hopes of visiting Birobidzhan. |
2003 Deadly summer heat wave in Europe. | Anna dies. |
2007 Northwest Passage now free of ice in summer. Arctic ice sheet is melting. | Alexander leaves for the Arctic. |
A
s a multilingual narrative that touches on four centuries, this novel is as much about languages—how they can both unite and separate us—as anything else. Several real languages and their chimeras make appearances in the book, and pidgins of speech and thought go beyond the lingua franca that Prince Alex used to speak with his British friends.
For clarity, I’ve expressed distances in English miles throughout, except when they are referred to in dialogue. I sometimes used the now obsolete Russian unit versta, which is close to one kilometer. Prince Alex uses
versta
as a singular and Anglicizes it to
versts
as plural. The same is true for any Russian word he uses in plural: e.g., kibitka
s
. When using Russian last names, he applies masculine endings if he also mentions the family and emphasizes belonging to it: not Marie
Tolstaya
but
Tolstoy
; the same for Anna Velitz
yn
. Stand-alone female characters, typically minor ones, are given a last name with a feminine ending, e.g., Princess Dashko
va
. The Russian words spelled in Cyrillic letters are intentional, as are manners of address intended to convey a cultural flavor by being closer to the Russian original: Your
Nobleship
instead of Your Lordship.
The Yakuti, Aleut, and Chukchi words used in the novel are real, though their English spelling may not fully convey the way they should be pronounced.
Persian and Afghan names do not follow the Western first/last model. Words such as Khan can be either a name or an address (i.e., Mister), and the words Khwaja (Khoja), “master”; Mirza (Meerza), “man of letters, of learning”; or Sirdar (Sardar), “chief” are honorific titles. It is customary to use these and other titles (even without a name) when addressing people, strangers and friends alike. The English spelling of these words is an approximation, which has evolved over the last two hundred years (e.g., Saheb to Sahib).