On graduation day a pole was installed in the exercise court. High up on the pole, a notch was chipped, the proverbial cut. Chickens came scratching around the pole as we queued up opposite it. When it was his turn, Andrei all but took his heels off the ground to make the cut, but alas. “Too short. Next!” the corporal droned. When stepping away, Andrei kicked at a chicken, drawing snickers from everyone present. He blushed and fled. My turn came next and I stepped in and out fast: I was in a rush to find Andrei. Of course I was tall enough.
I found him at the edge of the grounds; he sat in the grass, wrestling a burr off his stocking. I hovered over him and offered what I thought was the only, the best consolation. “I’d rather go with you than be a Leib Guard.” Picking viciously at the crumbling burr, my brother replied, “You’re stupid. You don’t know what it means to be a Guard.” He struck a chord: indeed the Leib Guard’s appeal did not penetrate me, which could be considered dimness rather than indifference. I felt slighted, yet still I tried: “I mean, because of you and me—not the Guard.”
Andrei sprang from the ground. “Leave me alone!”
He pushed me out of his way and was ambling off when I released my frustration. “You picked the wrong mother,” I said. “Should’ve stuck with Avdotia—would’ve grown tall.”
He spun around, furious.
I said to his face, “Your Italian did you no good.”
He measured me. “Get out of my life.”
I could not help noticing that the remnants of the burr still clung to his left stocking as he stomped off. I stood; wasn’t I like that burr, I thought. I called his name but he kept going.
• • •
I hoped that this upset would pass as others had, but Andrei repelled my overtures as days at the Cadets dwindled. They assigned him to the Novgorod Musketeers. I wrote to our father begging him to intercede—to help get Andrei into the Guard. I had no idea whether Father had enough weight to accomplish it. By November, Andrei was back at the home estate in Moscow, while I moved just across the Neva, to the Preobrazhensky Leib Guard barracks, and waited to be sworn in. In December a letter from Father said Andrei was leaving, and not even for Novgorod but much farther away—for Smolensk. “That is the way your brother wants it,” Father wrote.
Meanwhile, the day of my swearing-in ceremony drew near. My mind told me to enjoy myself, but my heart ticked with anxiety: the moment of irreversibility would be fast upon me unless I did something.
So I ran. One night in December I hit the St. Petersburg‒Moscow road as befit a distraught youth: no kibitka, no coachman, no blankets, only my mount, borrowed from my second uncle in St. Petersburg. The loaner horse bolted an hour into the journey, and I was thrown out of the saddle; when I rose to my feet I became aware of the formidable silence of the winter fields. Just a few lights of human habitation twinkled miles ahead of me, the light of the world divided between stars, the moon, and the snow. There was a stillness in the night, a majestic calm of cold that seemed to know that it could overpower any disturbance—rushing hearts and thoughts, scurrying of warm creatures and fluttering of warm molecules.
My horse stopped a few yards away from me, steaming and jerking her hide under the saddle. It was a coat that had startled her—discarded or lost by a traveler. Balled up in snow, it resembled a crouching beast. The horse neighed, fearful—she seemed to understand the peril of the snowy world. I, too, felt a pang of fear—or awe, rather, the kind that freezes one in place. In order to dispel the feeling I took my glove off and picked up a handful of snow. I squeezed my hand into a fist, then opened it, and let the snow fall out of my palm.
The snow I had squeezed didn’t melt. Dry, solid flakes went into my bare palm and dry flakes sifted out, sparkling and twirling as they fell to the ground.
My first thought—after a flash of sheer primal wonderment—was how I’d tell my brother about it. I did not believe my eyes, I’d say, and I did not, or rather believed just enough to make a story out of it, the excitement, the urgency of which would help me close the gap between us. Hokum, he’d challenge me, prove it. We would run out to the yard, and then—
I crouched and scooped another handful of snow. This is how I’d prove it. I opened my palm—and beheld the snow melting. It was as if my brother and I had just grown even farther apart.
I felt a wet nudge to the back of my head. My impatient horse. “Teasing me, right? Fooling me,” I said to the snowy fields. I looked forward, then back. Then mounted and rode on toward Moscow. I stopped at the next transit lodge to wait out the night. Come morning I was on the road again.
Andrei, when I reached home, looked as if he was older than me by a year, not a day. At dinner the footman served him second after Father, while my turn came after our stepmother. Even as I dug into my meat pie, Andrei let his languish on a plate, while he—like an adult—discussed with Father our military prospects against Prussia in what would later be called the Seven Years’ War. This was the first time I heard—or remember hearing of it. Before this moment, my world was too small to hold a war in Europe. Aren’t you supposed to be sworn in soon? they kept asking me. It is not for another three weeks, I lied.
That day, meanwhile, was right upon me. I spent it restlessly, filling with a mix of self-righteousness and fear. By evening I was overflowing and ready to take my cause to Andrei. “What have I done to you? What offense have I ever given? Why are you mad at me?”
He was packing his chest. “Am not,” he said.
“That time at the Cadets was just a joke, like we’ve always done. You know it!”
He held an embroidered vest at arm’s length and scrutinized it. “You want this one?” He tossed it in my lap.
“It’s new,” I stated, wondering whether it was a gesture of reconciliation.
“Auntie’s gift. I don’t want it. Too showy for me.”
No, it wasn’t a reconciliation. I said, “If it’s about the Guard—”
“I don’t want to be a Guard. They’re nothing but peacocks.” He resumed packing.
I said, “It’s today. The swearing-in. I am missing it.”
He looked up. “Now, that’s stupid.”
And I had hoped to impress him! “You just called them peacocks!”
“Better than nothing. You want to remain a juvenile?”
“No.” I did not know what I wanted, apart from staying in his good graces. “You being so distant does not help.”
“I am not distant,” Andrei said. “Just different.”
“Different how?”
“Go back, maybe they’ll still take you.”
I had a miracle happen to me on the road . . . I almost said it. I wanted to, it was my last trump card. But I bit my tongue. It would win me no appreciation of his, would it?
I refrained, I think, or else a servant boy prevented my confession, a lad who came in with some brown and crumbling chunks of homemade soap for Andrei. The conversation was over. I picked myself up and left the room, blindsided by a thought that came for the first time, never to leave: what if my brother had not been running from home—but from me? Thus ended my childhood, some seven years after Andrei had ended his in the blaze of our ice palace.
Looking back, I know I loved him, and I know there had been sweet, unself-conscious moments in our brotherhood that no ice palace could overshadow: Being five years old and running full speed down the enfilade of sunlit rooms, shouting his name, a special, diminutive version of it that we used between the two of us: Andrewsha-a-a! And seeing him charge from the other, distant end, with a similar battle cry: Alexasha-a-a-a! And then colliding in the middle, laughing so hard that the backs of our heads would start hurting.
Now we were only running away from each other.
• • •
I slunk back to the Preobrazhensky. On a bright December day they tied me to a sawhorse, a hand at each end; I could either stand bent over, or kneel. “Barebacked or leave the undershirt on?” the officers asked. I opted to leave the shirt out of it. I
stood first, then knelt, waiting for my ten lashes.
My punisher, a subaltern not two years older than me, stroked the knout as if it were a mane of hair and told me, “You’ll be all right. No brass, see? Just leather. And I won’t flick my wrist.”
On the first lash I nearly dislocated my shoulders. The pain was exquisite, despite his not flicking. After the fifth he stopped and dumped a bucket of snow on my back, “Cool it, rookie,” adding into my ear, “Our Lady-Colonel is here. Aren’t you lucky.” The “Lady-Colonel” of course was the empress herself, Elizaveta. My eyes downcast, I saw that her crinoline trembled like a dome of jelly as she approached. I saw the pointy tips of her pumps on a Persian rug laid out in the snow. A gloved, perfumed hand touched my cheek. “He learned his lesson, haven’t you, darling? Get off your knees, let me pardon you . . . Such a strong one!”
Imagine a youth, bare-trunked, loose-tressed, bound by his wrists, and piquantly raw with pain. Imagine the zestful mix of defiance and gratitude he puts into kneeling before his middle-aged empress. She got her arousal, I got my pardon.
The only peculiar detail . . . I distinctly remember: when my punisher’s mercy landed me with a bucketful of snow on my lacerated back, it brought me no relief whatsoever. No anesthesia, not even a sensation of cold.
• • •
For the next four years, each fighting season—that is, spring, summer, and fall—Andrei would go to war with the Prussians. It is a miracle he did not get himself killed during his first one, in 1757, a bloody muddle, the so-called triumph of the Russian guns at Gross-Jagersdorf, and then in 1758 at the Russian defeat at Zorndorf. By 1759 the Russian army had learned its lesson and did quite well at Frankfurt an der Oder, Kunersdorf, then Berlin. I, meanwhile, was busy growing my braid to just the right length, doing drills, or escorting the court in its seasonal migrations from one countryside palace to another. Yes, all we did was guard. The last time the Preobrazhensky went to war was under Peter the Great. Now, only an occasional detachment, a handful of volunteering hotheads went out on campaign, and usually returned without a single battle.
Winter or summer court residence, there was always a good-size banquet hall where we officers would spend time drinking wine and playing cards. My former punisher-hazer, whom I now knew as Paul Svetogorov, or Paulie, had taken me under his wing and from him I learned the ins and outs of a Guardsman’s life.
A proud owner of Viking looks, soulful tenor, and a mobile brow whose flutter conveyed a range of affects from scrutiny to flirtation, Svetogorov was impossible to ignore. The Guard is the navel of the earth, he would reiterate, the cream of the crop. Andrei, on the other hand, when he would leave the troops billeted in Poland or Livonia and come home for Christmas, would greet me with, How go the peacock’s labors?
How go the footslogger’s travails? I would answer. Each winter homecoming Andrei’s jaw would be set harder, his speech flow slower, his look appear duller. It is hardly surprising that as time went by I was more and more inclined to feel like the navel of the earth rather than a peacock.
• • •
Empress Elizaveta was very fond of the military in general and of the manliness of her bodyguard in particular. In St. Petersburg, she lodged the whole first grenadier battalion (to which I belonged) on Millionnaya Street, in a large three-story building just across a canal from her Winter Palace. Officers on the top floor, subalterns and soldiers below. Life was a frolic in that house, a jolly good time.
We weren’t just Her Majesty’s security, we accentuated her, we were the choirboys to the performance that was her life. On Christmas morning we were encouraged to barge into the imperial boudoir with celebratory shouts. At Easter Eve we lined up in a pious backdrop to the church service and the procession outdoors that followed (having secretly wagered on which one of us would get to trade kisses with the empress—a customary accompaniment to the “Christ is risen”—“Truly risen” exchange). Svetogorov would twitch his brow and say, “Know, pal Alexis, when to go and when to come, and you’ll go far.”
What he referred to, I assumed, was the fact that our all-night vigils of wine and card games at the court would sometimes invite a different kind of performance. It took place in a roomy tent, which the empress had ordered to be pitched right inside the grand hall of the Winter Palace. The night I entered that tent—my first and last time—the darkness was impenetrable, and when several hands put a blindfold around my eyes, I gathered that I was supposed to play a game of catch. Once my eyes were covered, candles were lit. Laughing, the ladies told me no peeking, and that I would only be let go if I caught the empress herself. I was inebriated, and the dancing lights did marvels for my weakened sense of balance. I tripped and fell, hot wax splattered onto my blindfold, and when I tried to sit up, it felt as though a great multitude of lively bundles of fabric resisted me. At length I captured one bundle and tore my blindfold off. “Prince Velitzyn,” they chirped, “you are breaking the rules!” and blew out their candles.
As a child I had always imagined that ladies’ dresses were cavernous on the inside, not unlike a church cupola, and in the center of it, their mysterious legs hung lonely and cold. But once I applied myself—in that tent—to finding the said cupola, the task was more like unraveling an onion. Only with difficulty did I find flesh among cloth, and as I exploratively sent my hand up to the apex, my catch shrieked, “Stop it!”
I withdrew, apologizing. My blindfold was reinstated. I fumbled on, somewhat less able to enjoy myself amid their nimbleness and laughter. I did not so much bump into the empress as was goaded to do so, and I held on to her for balance; even so, we both fell onto some cushions. Her laughter was conveyed to my ears over the shaking terrain of her bosom. She finished with a sigh and leaned on me. I captured her plump hand on my face and planted a respectful kiss; her rings smelled of metal and shed skin trapped in gemstone mountings, and they abraded my lips when she pulled the hand away. A palm, presumably hers, alighted on top of my blindfold, and a hand authoritatively unbuttoned my breeches, located my loins, and proceeded to inspect their state. I quivered, then yielded as she plied, cooing out mysterious clipped phrases such as Apraksiya, silly thing, has thought up three trunks of nonsense. Then, suddenly, she pulled her busy hand out and now used it to remove the blindfold and palpate my forehead. “Daddy dearest,” she remarked, “this can’t be right.” She studied my face. “My prince, are you well?”
I pulled my knees up and said yes, but her motherly face remained concerned, even frightened. “Look at you—white as canvas, cold as ice. Go, daddy dear, go and get a good sleep. No more drinking for you. Go!”
I got on my feet, buttoned up, and went. She said, “Oh, and send praporshik Svetogorov to me, will you?”
• • •
When I approached the table, Svetogorov slammed a joker onto a fan of cards. I said, “Paul? Your turn.” He smirked while half a dozen others scrutinized me. A few of them chaffed me, and I could hardly contain my double embarrassment: I had been groped by the august lady and then—for whatever reason—failed to satisfy her.
“Gentlemen—not a word!” Svetogorov intervened. “Let him be.” He poured me a shot, which I refused, then, once on his feet, he put his hand over my shoulders, encouraging me to walk with him. “No big deal, no big deal,” he consoled, looking into my face. “The first pancake always comes out botched, that’s all.”
“What pancake?” I protested.
“The pancake,” he affirmed with significance and gave my shoulder a squeeze. “Sleep it off.” With that he cocked his chest—“Watch me”—and dived into the tent. I was seventeen then, he was almost twenty. The empress was nearing fifty. In the autumn of that same year she fainted in the middle of the road, walking from her church to her apartments. She fell into her own crinoline, I remember, and it caved in around her like a sinkhole. A bad sign.
• • •
There are stories of the empress’s favorites and their vertiginous ascents to power, but my story is no
t one of them. Neither is Svetogorov’s; whereas I proved incompatible with Elizaveta’s amorous exercises, he lacked the smarts to turn his superb goings and comings into a strategic gain. But he remained my defender and always repelled regimental fun-pokers when they took aim at my unhappily enduring chastity. It was a myth of Svetogorov’s making—that I was highly principled, a man of the purest discretion. I was grateful that he had my back.
In retrospect, the memory of those years is embarrassing in its entirety. It is hard now even to conceive that goodhearted, cheerful savagery that passed for our code of honor; that strange mixture of the lurid and the naïve that fed our famous loyalty. Our tight poise on duty and drunken debauchery off-duty was a logical impossibility of the same kind as Svetogorov’s, when—in my company—he would discharge himself into a prostitute, pushing into her from behind with compulsive urgency, and afterward take up his guitar and sing, moist-eyed, about romantic devotions. Nowadays our hyperventilation before our Lady-Colonel would fool no one; the truth that lay at the bottom of it, heavy as a drunk’s stare, was that we were a power, we were feared—and it was intoxicating. When poor Elizaveta passed away (less than two years after my failure in her “tent”), her praetorian teddy bears dethroned her nephew and successor, Peter the Third, after he reigned for only six months because we just did not like him, and it did not matter what the Great Chancellor Prince Cherkassky, or the French ambassador, Marquis de la Chétardie, or the English ambassador, Sir Hanbury Williams, imagined about their own cleverness and the reach of their bribes. Peter the Third’s wife, Ekaterine, better known as Catherine the Great, was installed, backed by our bayonets; we obtained ourselves another Lady-Colonel.
The Age of Ice: A Novel Page 2