The Age of Ice: A Novel

by Sidorova, J. M.

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  Contents

  Epigraph

  List of Characters

  Birth (1740)

  In Corpore Vili, or The Early Phenomena (1740–69)

  The Blind Saint (1770–74)

  The Science of Cold (1775–85)

  L’Empire de Glace (1785–93)

  Zeittlenkeit (1794–1805)

  A Struldbrug (1805–12)

  Intervita: A Pause Between Lives (1812–14)

  Nor All Your Tears (1814 to 1850s)

  Lost in Translation, or Vesna Svyashennaya, Le Sacre du Printemps, The Rite of Spring (1906–14)

  Anamorphosis Abscondita: Things Seem Closer Than They Are (1914–2003)

  I Am Ice (2007)

  Time Line of Events

  A Few Notes on Language

  Acknowledgments

  About J. M. Sidorova

  To Mom and Geoff

  In memory of Dad

  List of Characters

  Prince Alexander M. Velitzyn

  The book’s narrator and hero. Son of Mikhail “The Clown” Velitzyn and Avdotia, née Buzheninova, who conceive Alexander when imprisoned together in Empress Anna Ioannovna’s Ice Palace in 1740. Serves his military duty with the Preobrazhensky Leib Guard’s grenadiers.

  Prince Andrei M. Velitzyn

  Alexander’s twin brother. A war veteran by thirty, he trades frontline for garrison after the birth of his son, and moves his family to Orenburg in south-central Russia.

  Princess Anna F. Velitzyn, née Khitrovo

  Andrei’s wife, mother of Andrei Junior.

  Prince Andrei Velitzyn Jr.

  Son of Anna and Andrei Velitzyn. He follows in his uncle’s steps and joins the Leib Guard. Famed for his courage in the Battle of Austerlitz.

  Varvara Redrikov, Princess Velitzyn

  Wife of Andrei Junior, from an aristocratic background, though less wealthy than the Velitzyn clan.

  Prince Mikhail Velitzyn

  Son of Andrei Junior by Varvara Redrikov.

  Paul Svetogorov, “Paulie”

  Closest friend of Alexander in the Preobrazhensky regiment of the Leib Guard.

  Countess Marie Tolstoy, “la petite comtesse”

  Onetime fiancée of Alexander Velitzyn.

  Matryona

  Serfwoman who lives near the Velitzyn estate. She later opens a brothel in St. Petersburg.

  Savva

  Son of Matryona. As an adult, he becomes a famous couturier.

  Cyril

  Indomitable valet of Alexander, then his butler.

  Ivan Kuznetzov

  Student of astronomy, whom Alexander first encounters on the road to Orenburg. Later, in St. Petersburg, he studies at the academy and tutors Andrei Junior.

  Baroness Mimi d’Anglairs

  St. Petersburg socialite, friend of Anna’s.

  Commodore Loginov

  Official of the Russian Admiralty. He organizes the expedition to the Arctic.

  Joseph Billings

  Englishman by birth, a captain of the British navy, who served under Captain Cook. He leads the Russian-British Arctic expedition to find the passage from the Bering Strait west over the Eurasian continent.

  Gavril Sarychev

  Captain of the Russian navy, Billings’s second-in-command.

  Martin Sawyer

  Expedition’s English‒Russian interpreter, secretary, and ethnographer. Born to a British merchant family in the Russian city of Archangel, he is bilingual.

  Michael Robeck

  Expedition’s surgeon. Prior to the expedition he served in the British navy and then in India.

  Carl Merck

  Naturalist and physician. Born to the Merck family of Darmstadt, he travels to Russia to see the world, then becomes a member of the expedition.

  Richard Hall, Christian Bering

  Officers of the expedition.

  Allegretti, Lehman

  Surgeon and surgeon’s assistant on the expedition.

  Batahov, Bronnikov, Bakov, Voronin

  Members of the expedition.

  Feodor

  Cossack commander at the Upper Kolyma Fort in Siberia, he runs it as his personal fiefdom.

  Ouchapin

  Feodor’s sixteen-year-old Yakuti wife.

  Nikolai Darkin

  Chukchi by birth, raised as a Cossack. Recruited as an interpreter for the expedition.

  Nadezhda (Nadya)

  Wife of Carl Merck. Born in Irkutsk in Siberia, she is half Yakuti, half Russian.

  Evelyn Woodrow

  Wife and business partner, then widow of one of the wealthiest British merchants in St. Petersburg. Befriends, then marries Sawyer.

  Ossip Vassilian

  Persian resident in Paris and Oriental rug store owner.

  Najar Alibek

  Nephew of the Persian ambassador to France, he travels in Europe as a young man; later he is influential at the shah’s court in Tehran.

  Victor Goutte

  Russian agent in Persia and Afghanistan.

  Iqbal Ali

  Medicine man in Herat, a city near Afghanistan’s border with Persia.

  Eldred Pottinger

  Lieutenant of the Bombay artillery regiment, British resident in Herat who leads effort to secure its defenses during the Persian-led siege.

  Khalil (Khalo) Khan

  Pottinger’s errand runner, later assassin.

  Count Simonich

  Head of the Russian mission to Herat.

  Dr. Josias Euler

  Physician in service of the shah of Herat.

  Princess Elizabeth Goretsky; Pfaltzgravine von Welleren in marriage

  Free-spirited daughter of a powerful Russian bureaucrat, she encounters Alexander on his 1913 trip to Russia.

  Robert G. Wallace

  Russian correspondent of The Times of London.

  Anna Cazaux, née von Welleren

  Daughter of Elizabeth and Alexander, teacher, then feminist author.

  Pierre Cazaux

  Anna’s husband. Prisoner of WWII, then teacher in postwar France.

  Mikhail Sudarev

  Official of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Trade and Alexander’s chaperone in Irkutsk.

  It is, I believe, a very just observation that men’s ambition is, generally, proportioned to their capacity. Providence seldom sends any into the world with an inclination to attempt great things, who have not abilities, likewise, to perform them.

  —Samuel Johnson, “Herman Boerhaave”

  Birth

  I was born of cold copulation, white-fleshed and waxy like a crust of fat on beef broth left outside in winter. I was born of seed that would have seized with frost if spilled on the newlyweds’ bed. I was born on the twenty-seventh of September because in the month of January my parents had been sealed in a wedding chamber made of ice.

  The year was 1740. The place—St. Petersburg, Russia. My country, corseted, wigged, and powdered on top but still darkly savage at heart, was panting and retching after the marathon Peter the Great had forced her to run. My would-be father, Prince Mikhail Velitzyn, scion of a family ancient and stately, had been transformed into a court jester. He had been forced to wear red-and-white-striped stockings and pretend to be a hen—to brood an imaginary clutch in Empress Anna Ioannovna’s menagerie of dwarfs, cripples, freaks, and victims. This was his punishment for an alleged affair with a Catholic noblewoman.

/>   I’ve never met that woman. She may have never existed. The one whose existence is certain was Avdotia Buzheninova, a jester by birthright and a humpback, whose act was to writhe in a mockery of yearning, to clutch her breast and wail that she was lusting for a husband. The empress loved the gag, they say—so much so that it inflamed her head with an idea of a jester wedding.

  That winter was brutal, and generous with precipitation, thus permissive of all manner of arctic entertainment: making snowmen and leaving men out in the snow, sharpening blades of axes and ice skates, freezing little birds and little maids in flight. By January, upon the empress’s whimsical orders, a palace was erected out of ice blocks—the purest crystal blue, ripped out of the Neva River’s winter hide and chiseled to diamond perfection by the empress’s slave architects. Inside the palace was a wedding chamber, a canopy bed on a dais, with heavy drapes half drawn, cascading to the floor—all made of ice.

  The wedding opened with festivals and masquerades. Dwarfs trumpeted and freaks paraded. A procession followed, and at its head strode the empress herself, dressed as the Queen of Sheba. She danced, quaking her regal fat, perspiring in her sleeveless gown. She led my parents to the wedding chamber, gave them the blessing, and locked them up for the night.

  Idle tongues used to say it was for fear of being left forever inside the frosty chamber that my parents fulfilled their connubial duty. But what do they know of ice, those idle tongues? No one but an abused prince and his slave bride know how fingers, skin taut with cold, nail beds bruise-blue, climb into warm recesses of the flesh, hiding from frostbite. How sweat and tears freeze and join with ice, becoming part of the curtain, part of the bed. How flesh shivers, giving its seed up as the last drop of oil for the dying fire in a night that is as long as winter. How dawn glows through the walls of ice, and lights up the cavern, and finds them fused together, clinging to the residual warmth of each other’s blood.

  Only in the morning did the guards go in, to find them half dead on the ice slab of their wedding bed. Nine months later, two boys were born. My brother Andrei came first, a perfect infant. I found my way out a day later. I was smaller and paler than Andrei, and once I cleared the womb, our poor mother expired. Everyone was certain that a colorless runt like me would not see his first summer. But they were wrong. They knew nothing of ice.

  In Corpore Vili, or The Early Phenomena

  1740‒69

  Empress Anna Ioannovna died a month after we were born, and my father retired from his clown duty and fled the capital for the family estate near Moscow. Peter the Great’s daughter, cheerful Elizaveta, eventually ascended to the throne, while Father married a proper, if unremarkable, noblewoman. Soon Andrei and I had a half sister and another sibling on the way.

  The extended Velitzyn clan never let Father forget his ignominy, and the episode was a frequent punch line. Back then, no one was coddled. The age of delicate senses had not yet dawned, nerves had not been discovered. Father helped himself by letting his temper loose. The only concession he ever won was a ban on house jesters and fools, much lamented by the family members. We had to depend on our household pet for entertainment—a brown bear who sat on a chain by day and roamed the grounds as a watch by night, and who would dance for a treat when in the mood. Father was like that bear, I would think years later. Both fearsome, both wearing an indelible weak spot: one a chain-link in his nose; the other, a foolscap, once and forever.

  My brother and I were treated to the story of our less than noble origins as soon as we were able to listen. I remember Andrei telling me (we were five or so), “If Anna Ioannovna didn’t die, you’d be a jester!” To which I replied, “We both would’ve been jesters. But if she hadn’t died we would’ve killed her!”

  I uttered the murderous verb with the gusto only a child can get away with. Andrei returned a sharp glance. “To avenge our father? So that he would love us?”

  It stunned me that this particular reason had been absent from my mind until Andrei brought it up. My reasoning, if you could call it that, went toward a takeover of the throne to found an empire of jesters, freaks, and cripples. I looked at my brother, at his serious face. Was there something important I did not yet understand? “Yes,” I said. “Why else?”

  • • •

  When we were eight, Andrei found a book somewhere in the house, titled La fantesca and written in Italian, which neither of us could read. On the cover was a drawing of a woman unloading a loaf of bread as round as her bosom in front of a man seated at a table. It was but a piece of smutty romance, as I later realized, but Andrei had connected it to the mysterious Catholic lady on whose account our father had been punished. His guess could have been correct—how else could an Italian tickler have wound up in the household of a Russian prince? Andrei, however, took to believing that the woman in the picture was our father’s love. And one day he confessed to me that this Italian woman was his true mother, not the jester Avdotia Buzheninova.

  What enraged me wasn’t the fact that Andrei thought only of himself, not both of us, when he redefined his maternal origins. It was that he did not want to have sprung from the terrifying and wondrous Ice Wedding. That he could denounce it for the mundane womb of some foreigner wench with a loaf ! Dimwit, I shouted at him. Humpback’s son, he shouted back. I hate you!—I hate you better! When nannies and wet nurses came upon us, we were balled up in a fight.

  Clearly, though, I hated him less than he hated me. Not a week passed, and I was offering my humblest penitence to my brother. He pardoned me like a gracious king. He needed me to play the game of Czar-Sultan of the Golden Horde and the Great Warrior Ilya of Murom, or fence with oaken swords, or sneak upon the napping household bear, tickle his snout with a sallow-tree branch full of catkins, and run like we stole something when the beast awakened, sneezing.

  • • •

  When we were ten, we built an ice palace. It started as a snow fortress, then we added a wall slit for a window and a roof made of pilfered firewood and fir-tree paws overlaid with snow. The idea was mine. At first the interior of our palace was barely large enough to sit two, but we kept at it, carving and digging snow on the inside, hauling in and packing new snow onto the walls from the outside. When tired of our labors, we huddled inside. Andrei would make a tiny fire and gaze at it, his knees drawn up to his chin. I would wrap my arm around his shoulders. Even in those tender moments I couldn’t help but feel that I had failed to understand something important, that Andrei’s mind inhabited a different space, and, to squelch the feeling, I urged us back to work.

  One sunny winter afternoon we were at work inside our palace when Andrei rose from his knees and walked out. I looked for him through the window: he stood just outside. He looked at our stepmother—pregnant again and bundled comfortably in furs, she promenaded down a path some fifty yards away. Our three-year-old half brother waddled next to her, his arm raised above his head, his little mitten of a hand held fast in hers. They stopped to look at our handiwork; she bent to talk to the three-year-old and pointed at us. Their shadows lay long and blue on the salt-white snow. I joined Andrei outside. Our stepmother started down the path again, away from us and our ice palace, slowly, so her child could keep up. Andrei stared after them. I tugged at his sleeve. “Let’s go!” He ignored me. I pulled again but he yanked his arm free.

  Looking at our stepmother’s back and then at my brother’s sharp profile, a revelation washed over me. The something important that existed had given itself freely to Andrei and spared none for me. That’s why I wanted, needed to be with him: as if he were my interpreter, my guide. Without him, I could stray off into a strange and sad land, misunderstanding and misunderstood, unable to grasp why a motherless boy freezes, ceases play, when faced with a tableau of maternal love.

  Then the moment of acuity passed. I nudged Andrei’s sleeve again. Without a word, he went back in.

  When twilight set in he was making his fire. He blew on coals till he was dizzy, then fed in some dry pine needles, then wo
od chips, then twigs, then logs. And more logs. I begged him to stop but he would not. My cheeks burned, my forehead ached. Heat and smoke and shrapnel of glowing cinders beat us all the way to the snow walls, and still Andrei tossed more fuel into the fire, and the flames were about to outgrow our chamber.

  We fled. Through the window slit the blaze shone like a giant magic lantern, orange through dusky blue; it was beautiful in its doom. Andrei whooped when the roof collapsed, and laughed in shrill, compulsive volleys when the flames hissed, dying under the weight of snow. He still laughed when a manservant ran to us from the mansion with a dispatch for us to go indoors at once, and he went eagerly, circling around the man, poking him in the arm, asking Did you see? and heaping upon the man a story of how he’d burned down the ice palace.

  I dragged behind them. I wasn’t angry at Andrei. I was sad.

  • • •

  When we turned twelve, Andrei begged to be sent to the Cadet Corps in St. Petersburg and our father gave his blessing. Twenty-five years of service were mandatory to sons of nobility back then, and those who eschewed it were forced to append a humiliating appellation to their signature—Juvenile—for life. Still, we did not have to start so young. All I knew was that Andrei longed to leave home. The reason? It had to have come from the same place as his impulse to burn down the ice palace. Still, If he goes, I go, I told Father. He did not object.

  By the time we were sixteen, I had learned to drift dispassionately along in the regimented life of the Corps, while Andrei was brimming with ambitions. He longed to join the elite Leib Guard, praetorians of the “Third Rome” (as the Russian Empire liked to call herself). He wearied himself with training: throwing cast-iron balls as far as he could or hanging from a crossbar with a weight fastened to his legs in order to stretch himself taller. In this manner he strove and I drifted, each of us coming into manhood and taking the shapes that belied our kinship: my hair darkened, his paled. I bolted, tall and long-armed; he settled on an average height, broad in the shoulders. My features arranged themselves handsomely; his came together in a pleasant but ordinary visage.