The Age of Ice: A Novel (8 page)

My dear Alexander, not so long ago it was nothing, and now it is too late. I am sorry I keep troubling you. I hope this letter will find you well. Your godson says hello, and your brother I am sure would have sent his regards, were he not willfully ignorant of this correspondence.

I wrote two more letters: one to the empress, and one to the command. There was a knock on my door when I was finishing, and Svetogorov poked his head in even before I answered, “Come in!”

“Alexis! Whatcha up to?”

I sighed.

He twitched his brow. “You got another letter from Orenburg, didn’t you?”

I nodded. He prompted, “Go on—”

“Not good,” I said. He acknowledged, “I figure. You look like crap. A dinner at Gypsy Joe’s, perhaps, to dilute the melancholy in
alcoholy
?”

“Not feeling it today.”

“Billiards, then?”

I looked at him. He was, after all, the closest I had to an old friend. “I will be leaving first thing tomorrow, Paulie. Going to Orenburg. Don’t make a big deal out of it, will you?” I said the latter expecting him to burst out in objections—or to marvel. His eyes indeed widened, but he let out only a whistle to indicate his surprise and said, “That bad . . . And they let you?”

“Not yet. But I can’t wait for them. I wrote a letter of resignation and an apology. That’ll have to do. Right?”

“Right,” said he. “That’s great! Show me how you wrote it, I’ll copy. I’m going with you.”

It was I who ended up bursting out with commonplace objections: the dangers, the penalties. But Svetogorov stilled me with words that at first seemed mysterious; it took me an extra moment to realize he spoke about his idol, Count Gregory Orlov: “Two years ago Grishka Orlov volunteered to go to Moscow to stamp out the riots and the plague. Personally inspected the hospitals, a goddamn hero. Do you know that I asked to go with him but he refused me? Don’t be a selfish bastard, Alexis, take me with you. I’m perishing here.”

What can I say? The next day I, my orderly Cyril, and my friend Svetogorov headed east.

• • •

All the way to the city of Kazan, on the Volga, we traveled in a country that was hospitable and familiar, save for the remnants of quarantine checkpoints against plague that still marred the road. We drove with speed and swapped out horses at every transit station—there
were
fresh horses and catered dinners, and traveling gentlemen of appropriate social rank still gathered for after-dinner pastimes. In transit lodges last thing before sleep, or in the confines of a kibitka, Svetogorov was a galloping monologue.

“So tell me, Alexis, does it not infuriate you? Watching all these doe-eyed juveniles made general and bathed in riches when you’re just hoping to slog to colonel before your teeth fall out? . . . No, I guess not. You don’t care. Then again—and I’m saying it as a friend—you’ve got the looks and the title, and relatives everywhere it matters, so you can do nothing but sit around and whistle your own tune. But I—I can’t do that. And I see all these Vassilchikovs and Potemkins shooting past me—and it vexes me, Alexis. I know that I can do just as well as they can. You know
how I know it? Because the late Elizaveta herself, peace to her in Heaven, told me so on numerous occasions when she groaned in the most animated fashion due to my performance on her. I know I can be Empress Ekaterine’s favorite just as well as any Vassilchikov, and yet fortune won’t pick me out.”

He talked, I listened. In this nonchalant manner, we reached Kazan. There, everything changed.

The city was clamoring with rural gentry who had fled their estates across the Volga. The whole provincial administration was in various stages of fright or flight. South of Kazan, down the Volga, the city of Samara had already been deflowered by Pugachev’s hordes, and many foretold the same fate for Kazan.

Our plan, if one could call it that, had been to join an army heading toward Orenburg. But in Kazan we learned that no detachments were moving out in the foreseeable future. Kazan was expecting a new imperial envoy, a man called Bibikov, to arrive with reinforcements and take the reins. Perhaps then we could resume our peregrination, they told us. The delay was indeterminate and, to us, unacceptable.

What options did we have then? The only road that was not yet definitively under rebellion was a 450-mile diagonal across an approximate square formed by Kazan, Ufa, Samara, and Orenburg. A little over halfway in on that road, in the township of Bugulma, were stationed General Freiman’s troops, stagnant since Carr’s departure. If we reached Bugulma in time, we could join these troops before they would be redeployed toward Orenburg.

We procured three sturdy Bashkir horses and two sleighs, which we loaded with food and forage—again Herr Goldstein’s money came in handy—and we went.

• • •

It should be said that in peacetime our voyage would not have been anything out of the ordinary. The tyranny of winter in my country was much like the tyranny of its czars: harsh, but not altogether incompatible with pursuits of life. In peacetime, the transit stations,
yama
s, spaced every twenty miles or so, would have been well stocked with food, forage, and fresh horses. The road itself would have been well trodden and busy. There would have been foot travelers marching along the shoulder, official couriers and unofficial youths on horseback skirting kibitkas and sleighs; there would have been traffic jams and hot pierogi wrapped in
towels, and pickles from ice-crusted barrels would’ve been sold off the curbside on Sundays.

This was not peacetime, however, and the land grew quieter and quieter around us. Only Svetogorov kept talking ad libitum, his musings about his failed career as Ekaterine’s favorite running the gamut from victimhood to moral superiority and back. Still, our first eight days and one hundred eighty miles were spent almost normally. In due course, we crossed the Kama River and turned southeast.

Then, on the ninth day, when requesting shelter for the night in the village of Sheshma, we were eyed grimly and redirected to the Asotsky estate, just half a mile down the road from the commons. We passed a snowed-in orchard (our lantern seized upon an occasional frostbitten apple still hanging off a glistening black branch), and went on foot down a long roadway toward an arc of a gate in a picket fence. Three corpses hung off the top of the gate: a man, a woman, and a little boy; the snowcaps on their heads were just like the ones on those shriveled apples we just passed. They must have been the Asotskys, they must have lived in the house behind them, now dark and silent. Those who sent us here had to know what we would find.

I heard Svetogorov mutter about the plague, and myself reply, “For heaven’s sake, what plague, Paulie?” Cyril crossed himself and spat.

I should have been horrified and enraged, but all I could see was the snowcaps on the heads of the hanged and the ice in their opened mouths. All I could smell was fresh snow. It had blanketed everything with a perfect tabula rasa: tracks of the killers and blood of the victims; private, dear contents of their lives dragged out and burned in the bonfire. The snow was like a blessing of a blind saint: extending too far, onto the unholy and undeserving, and yet more replete with grace because of it.

A blind saint. I felt no emotion. But I was getting colder—colder . . .

A leaflet was pinned to the hanged man’s chest. Svetogorov jumped up and seized it. It was a subversive tirade from Pugachev, and it challenged those who could read it—the literate upper class—either to die quartered or to join the army of the new czar. Across it someone scratched with a piece of coal: “Asotsky somwabich.” Cyril said, “But the nipper. And the ladyship. Wolves,” and laid a cross upon himself again. Svetogorov snapped, “What, the demise of the paterfamilias himself is justifiable, huh, Cyril Patronymikovich?” Cyril did not understand him. “Say what, Your Nobleship?”

I said, “What do we do? It’s night. Stay here? Leave?”

We stayed.

We cut the poor family down so the horses would go through the gate. The bodies were hung so high up, so hard to reach. They knocked against one another like stones. Even the little boy’s corpse was heavy—infested by twice its weight in ice. Ice seemed to be attracted to flesh—or was it the blind saint’s gentle, sublimating hand? The thought itself was strange. Why was I not enraged?

• • •

Later, we made camp in the house as best we could. We kept close to the kitchen and pantry, pillaged empty save for a dusting of flour. We did not venture upstairs. Cyril grumbled as he made us millet mash, but nevertheless he would have managed to go to sleep had it not been for Svetogorov’s provocations. “So, Cyril Daddyich, aren’t you worried now that you are stuck in this land with two gentry? No, in earnest, how much would it take for
you
to string
me
up on a crossbar? If they told you to, would you do it?”

Cyril fidgeted and responded monosyllabically until at long last he begged me to intervene.

“See,” Svetogorov pointed out, “he is talking back already!”

“Let the man have his sleep,” I said.

In the morning Cyril dragged in some tattered winter coats—likely left behind by the bandits who had helped themselves to the Asotskys’ wardrobes. “For your nobleships to cover yourselves up. It’s a common man’s land from here on,” he remarked taciturnly. Svetogorov refused, indignant. I thanked Cyril and tucked the coats into our sleigh. Cyril had a point. Svetogorov had a point too, sadly. How much—or how little—propaganda, prejudice, and peer pressure would be enough to turn Cyril against us? Truly, I did not know.

The ground gives way under my feet,
my brother had said.

• • •

We rode by Cossack settlements, where men looked at us askance but still remained on this side of violence—if only because it was dinnertime, or because the horse was unsaddled, or the rifle was unloaded. Once, having passed a village already, we heard a gunshot, and one of our horses kicked and lurched, but later, upon inspection, was unharmed.

We came across other travelers—somber peasant families on the move, refugees, paupers—and other corpses at the roadside, each tucked
in kindly by a snow blanket and each, under its cover, being violated furtively by ice. Thoughts of this kind made me queasy and I chased them away but they kept coming, like windblown snow.

We passed through a burned village where only lumpy boxes of brick stoves remained standing in fire pits that used to be huts, and gaped at us mournfully. We camped by one of those stoves, under charred sticks that used to be trusses of a roof. We burned our fire in that stove, and took turns sleeping on its warm top. In the middle of the night I awoke saying,
Ice maggots.
Svetogorov, torn out of sleep, sucked in saliva and replied,
What?

“Maggots of ice.”

“Go to sleep.”

In the morning, we drove on.

I would daydream. I would keep missing prompts in conversation. At length, Svetogorov left me alone and engaged Cyril. They would talk. And talk.

Svetogorov: “The rebels’ leader can’t be Peter the Third because Peter the Third was killed in ’62, that’s why.”

Cyril: “How does your nobleship know?”

Svetogorov: “Because Count Grishka Orlov told me, that’s how. He did it, and told me afterward.”

Cyril: “What if his nobleship didn’t and only said so?”

Svetogorov (making a spitting sound): “Now why would he do that? What an illogical man you are, Cyril!”

Whenever I stopped listening, my gaze would start to flow like liquid and drift away from the road and into the white distance where earth and sky became one. There was a promise of kindness there, a blanketing blessing of a blind saint—

Svetogorov: “Then who was it, lying in state, in 1762, deader than death?”

Cyril: “A pretender?”

I: “Will you two be quiet for just one second, for heaven’s sake?!”

They looked at me with identical expressions on their faces, class conflict taking a backseat to surprise. I too was startled by the acute irritation my words pushed out with. Their exchange had been grating on me, I realized. It disrupted the charm. It prevented my gaze—why, my whole spirit—from gliding away into snowy fields. I said, “Sorry, Paul.”

After a while, Cyril said, “I get goosey, without talking.”

“Truly, Alexis,” said Svetogorov, “I don’t like your silence. Gives me the creeps.”

“The kindness of snow,” I said, looking at the horizon. “The cruelty of ice.”

“. . . but I like your poetics even less so . . . Say, Cyril—”

And so it went.

• • •

We did reach Bugulma, and Freiman’s troops were still here—a stroke of luck, we thought.

It was a great relief to join the officers at the major’s table, to sit in warmth and safety, to be served a stew of buckwheat and hare, plenty of tea, and a thimbleful of brandy to go with it. A short moment of ignorance and bliss, and then it was gone. Svetogorov blurted out how elated we were to have caught up with them in time, and our hosts responded with ambivalent grins, and as it always goes, the youngest, hottest-headed aide-de-camp, muttered,
It’s not like we’re going anywhere
 . . . I looked at Freiman: he sat twisted in his chair, perhaps just to keep his taut paunch from bending. “So, what brings you two gentlemen here?” he asked.

Freiman was not going to Orenburg. We were not on an official mission. Both sides turned out to be a disappointment to each other, failing to deliver the news each longed for. Kazan was still waiting for reinforcements, we said, and no one there had cared to send any dispatch to Freiman. Those admissions caused murmurs and grumbles, our emergence having upset a delicate balance of muted discontent:
They’ve abandoned us! We’re sitting ducks! We must retreat,
some said, and others
, We must wait for our orders!

Their view of courage was to stand their ground here, not to go on to Orenburg.

Our beds that night were made up in the same room we had dined in; Cyril was sent to camp in the bathhouse together with other servants (lodging was in short supply). Svetogorov took the table and I opted for the floor, not caring for its icy drafts. But sleep would not come to me. Once released from social routines of daytime, my mind succumbed to anxiety. The surreal sent its tendrils into the real; ice-maggot-infested flesh—this bothered me more than the terrors of the road, I realized, because it wasn’t just me being cold—that was old news—no, it was something different,
new
. I said, “Paulie, what do we do?” “I don’t know!” came testily from the table.