The Age of Ice: A Novel (7 page)

I
was
interested.

Herr Goldstein’s money bought me Matryona and Savva. I settled them away from myself, in Preobrazhenskaya Sloboda, the main campus of my regiment in St. Petersburg, and set Matryona up as a laundress. In
truth, I did not want to ever see her. It caused me grief. It could be said that I manumitted her and Savva because I did not want to be legally responsible for them. Except that I felt responsible still.

In June Anna gave birth to a healthy boy, Andrei Junior, and insisted that I become his godfather. I returned to Velitzyno for the baptism and beheld the happy family. “You two—make peace,” Anna ordered, a superior authority of motherhood upon her, and we obliged. An eerie feeling it was, when my brother and I stalked toward each other: it was like walking toward one’s own long-lost reflection, now feral and unrecognizable. We embraced—and, remarkably, no annihilation commenced. Then I got to hold the little one, Andrei Junior. It was joy. Thus came about my last, most important, lesson: Joy made me cold too.

I wasn’t alerted to it by the infant’s complaint—I gave him up before the wave of cold crested because I felt it coming, and I swallowed the bitter discovery without so much as a chuckle. I was a student of reserve now. I was training myself to accept that my life would be spent giving up, pulling back, stepping aside—always on the watch for a seizure of cold and ready to withdraw well before anyone complained.

As for the icicles—I found a few more of them by the old barn. Just lying there in the dirt as new grass was pushing out all around them.

L
et me explain if it isn’t yet clear. If it is winter, go outside and scoop a handful of snow; if summer, find a mountain stream, find a cold ocean, take your shoes off, and walk in. If it’s a dewy late-October morning, stand barefoot in the grass, pick up the last apple left behind in an orchard or the first pebble you see on a road; find, if you must, a wrought-iron fence and press your forehead into it, squeeze its bars with your bare hands. You’ll feel it. Almost immediately, your feet, your hands, your forehead—I’m told—will start to ache. That is how it feels to touch me when I’m cold.

• • •

Two years after we’d made our truce, Andrei moved his family to Orenburg, almost tripling the distance between us.

Anna and I kept exchanging letters, but that was not the cause—those were perfectly innocuous reports of family life and St. Petersburg’s scene. Was it because whenever I visited Moscow, I brought toys to little Andrei? A miniature landaulet just big enough to sit him, should he wish to be propelled around the house; a wooden grenadier, finely carved and painted in Preobrazhensky colors, with a free-rotating grenade-throwing arm . . . I was just trying to be a good godfather! No, it had nothing to do with me. In 1771, Moscow saw a breakout of plague and rioting. My brother was fleeing these calamities, that’s all. Only . . . he could have fled toward, not away from me. Besides,Velitzyno remained a safe place, the plague did not strike the privileged class.

Enough, I said, stop second guessing.

Orenburg was a walled city in the foothills of the Urals at the empire’s southeastern border, in the land of nomad hordes, Cossack tribes, and a troublesome Turkoman Kyrgyz-Kaisak Khanate that lay farther southeast. Anna was against the relocation but conceded when Andrei presented
it this way: either this, a safe garrison option, or they would keep sending him to the front line.

I thought the dilemma was false but kept my opinion to myself.

• • •

In March 1772 my brother and his family reached Orenburg. The rumors about
troubles on the Yayeek
were already circulating by then. Yayeek is a river, or rather, the river used to be called Yayeek, before Empress Ekaterine punished it by renaming it Ural—just a few years after the turmoil we were about to live through. Yayeek harbored a population of very disgruntled Cossacks.

A Cossack, it may be said, is what one gets when the institution of knighthood is transplanted onto Russian soil. By tradition, they are professional cavalrymen, they live on their land lots, and have rights and privileges. They are not serfs, yet they are more peasants than knights. Always have been. And when they grumble, it is not because they have no liberties. They know their own weight in gold, and know when and how to bargain for more. In 1771 it took the form of an uprising.

Orenburg was about a hundred fifty miles up the Yayeek from the epicenter of the unrest.

I would have liked to point a finger at my brother—
You brought it upon yourself
—but that would have been the old me. The new me wrote to Anna with gentle concern.

She replied, yes, there had been rumbles downriver, but life in Orenburg went about its way unchanged. Nothing to worry about.

So I didn’t. Almost a year slipped by. Anna miscarried their second child. I won back the good graces of Paul Svetogorov. The command promoted us to captain rank and we moved to the top floor of the Leib Company House next to the Winter Palace. And then came the summer and fall of 1773.

• • •

At first it was a hazy apparition. Anna wrote,

In Yayeek-town, they say Cossacks received a new leader who claims to be [the next two words were crossed out—self-censorship—after all, she wanted this letter to reach St. Petersburg] what he is certainly not, and they say he stirs up serfs and Tatars wherever he drifts. The day before yesterday, Collegiate Secretary Ivanov returned from a business trip to the city of Kazan and he tells me he ran into a disorderly
crowd on the New Moscow road. They refused to let his coach through, and when he became intemperate with them, they threatened him with the “true Father-Ruler who will come and straighten him out, and those like him, on the gallows tree.” Andrei is confident this upset will pass the way the previous one did. I agree with him in my head, but my heart is troubled. The doctor attributes my low spirits to my miscarriage, and I find his opinion rather believable. So please do not worry about us; one melancholy woman’s premonitions cannot possibly be more right than the wisdom of a military officer and his commanders.

I made inquiries the same day. Since 1770 we had had a kinsman as a governor of St. Petersburg—my once- or twice-removed uncle and namesake, field marshal Alexander M. Velitzyn—and I was able to extract some information from him. He told me there was nothing to worry about: no one had heard of any popular new leader in the Yayeek region. Only a few minor criminals were active in the area, but that was nothing new.

In September I wrote to Anna with everything I’d learned, and suggested that she should consider visiting home, for a rehabilitation of her delicate state.

In early October she wrote, and I received the letter at the end of October.

Dear Alexander,

I should like so very much to receive a letter from you. These days I am in need of your support more than ever.

After dinner in our home, officers were whispering among themselves and I overheard. Some were saying that all forts between here and the Cossack capital on the Yayeek are taken, and others said it was not true, only Tatisheva and Lower Lake. Premier-Major Naumov said they are no more than a crowd of peasants with sticks, and Mr. Obukhov, the customs director, insisted they have cannons. I confronted Andrei afterward but he refused to discuss such matters with me. My maid Alena had relatives in Tatisheva, and yesterday she received her ten-year-old nephew, who came all by himself, and told Alena such things (I can only guess) that the poor girl only crosses herself, prays, and starts pulling too hard at my hair with the comb when
I ask what is happening. Alexander, everything is so strange. Why is Commandant Wallenstern inspecting city walls if there is nothing to worry about?

Just now I tracked the ten-year-old to the kitchen. He sits at the table, somber like a little old man, slurping soup, a hunk of bread in his hand. His hair is wheat-blond, and his eyes are very pale blue, like those of a husky, and he has a sore under his nose, a wet, old sore. Seeing me, he stops eating. I ask him what had happened at Tatisheva, he snuffles. He looks at me with his pale eyes, but his stare drifts, he seems unable to fix it in one place. “Hacked up,” he says. “All the lords and two ladies. Master had his one eye hanging out like this”—he shows me with a soup spoon, dangling it by the handle in front of his face, how the eye was hanging. He is so very calm, Alexander, so very dispassionate, only his leg is kicking under the table.

Perhaps you could write to my husband. He would listen to you. But please do not worry about us too much, we are in good hands. We are in God’s hands, and the governor has a plan.

And the garrison here is three thousand strong. My husband is a very experienced soldier. Dear Alexander, they are hanging and quartering all nobles, all officers, all civil servants, wives, children and elderly. Please, please stay in touch.

Yours truly, Anna Velitzyn

What was happening was far bigger than a Cossack mutiny. It was an explosion of pent-up hatred against the existing order of things and those who were part of that order, including my brother, his wife, and his four-year-old son. Could I grasp the scale of it? No. I was still losing time to inertia and guesswork. Could I find anything—anything at all—justifiable in the rebel cause? Not at the time.

I lost sleep.

At an impolitely early hour, I called on the residence of my relative Alexander M., the governor, and my agitated looks and the declaration that my brother and his family were endangered, bought me the following confessions from the sympathetic madame governor: A certain fugitive Cossack with a criminal record, Emelyan Pugachev, had started a disturbance. He and his gang had taken a few fortresses. “But you must understand, darling Alexander, these fortresses are rarely more than villages surrounded by a wooden fence or, at best, by an earth rampart.
They are only fortresses against nomads and their arrows, but against cannons and firearms my dear, they are nothing.”

“Oh, so the ‘gang’ does have cannons?”

“Shh, lower your voice, darling, you may upset my husband. I am just saying we should not overestimate the insurgents’ successes. Regular troops with artillery and cavalry under General Carr are already headed there. Carr has a lot of experience suppressing these kinds of outbreaks. They say he’s done just that kind of thing in Poland. In fact he must be already on-site. May I offer you some tea?”

• • •

Carr was not on-site. Only in late October was his army anywhere near the theater of military action (but not near enough to Orenburg), and even then he was defeated disastrously. In November he was back in Moscow, having abandoned his troops under a pretext of a bout of rheumatism.

I swear, I was writing to Anna. I was offering my help to get her and Andrei Junior out of Orenburg. Useless words! By then the sedition was no longer a secret. In Moscow, the arrival of the deserter Carr and the influx of refugees made it impossible to deny the trouble. What was still conveyed in whispers was that the insurgency’s leader, Pugachev, claimed to be Peter the Third, complete nonsense, because the latter had been most definitively killed in 1762, with my regiment’s direct involvement!

In early December three letters came from Anna all at once—variably dated, repetitive.

Dear Alexander,

I completely understand why you would not find words to put down on paper in reply to my outpourings. I have been quite irrational and I have made your task rather difficult. I thereby hurry to assure you, that I am still the Anna you used to know, and not the babbling maenad I may have appeared. My husband has been quite open with me now, and I find strength and consolation in awareness. Still, we cannot leave—it is unsafe to travel now because, you see, Orenburg is surrounded and there are uprisings all the way between here and the Volga River. It is so strange, Alexander, to have one’s husband wake up every morning, have his tea and bread, and go to war. He has been outside the city walls, fighting, three or four times now. Each time they are out, they lose people to Pugachev’s side. I just sit and wait. This one time he came back, sat down in the front room, his
coat and gloves still on, and he wept inconsolably. He kept repeating, The ground gives under my feet . . .

They raid almost every day. Every time our cannons shoot, they withdraw to their camp. What is rumored to go on there, I shudder to relay to you. I shall not commit it to paper . . .

They raid, and chase our foraging parties. They burned all the haystacks around the city and now the horses are near starvation, and our foraging is all in vain because a rare party can slip out unnoticed, and then half of it will run off to the enemy. Winter started early, in mid-October, and never relented. My son does not eat well anymore; the doctor says he may have trouble swallowing, because he nearly choked once when they started shooting and one cannon blew up. It seemed so close, right over our heads. A cannoneer lost his legs there, we heard. My son was just having his oatmeal. We are so alone. Food will be short soon. The governor keeps writing to everyone for whatever bread they can spare and none has come. One detachment that was coming to help us out, under Colonel Chernishev, was misled right to Pugachev’s camp; all officers killed, all soldiers forcibly recruited to the enemy. They are ten thousand strong now. All officers beheaded, walked right onto the knife, and it was almost in sight of the city walls, and no one from us could help. I’ve never seen my husband weep before . . .