The Age of Ice: A Novel

by Sidorova, J. M.

  This happened in the summer of 1762. I remember marching onto Peter the Third’s Palace—a show of force our commanders put together so that Ekaterine could intimidate Peter into abdication. She was at the head of us, on horseback, dressed in our uniform. Excitement was all around me, men feeling momentous. As for me, I marched with one thought foremost: What was so wrong about me that it was repelling women?

  • • •

  The one important consequence of 1762 was that we made peace with Prussia. Andrei could come home—and so he did, after a two-year stopover in Poland, where Russian troops were propping up a newly elected king.

  Andrei came back a man with a jaw set so hard that he barely smiled or spoke; a dull man who refused to entertain civilians and ladies with stories of his military feats. He came back merely a captain of infantry, and this modest advancement in rank prompted Paul Svetogorov to opine that Andrei was either inept or disliked. I wondered the same.

  Our reunion was formal.

  Yet my attention did not dwell on it too much because another subject preoccupied it—I had fallen madly in love. She was seventeen, a diminutive beauty with chestnut curls and stunningly dark brows and eyelashes that framed curious and demanding eyes. She turned those eyes upon me first, she chose me! She came to watch our drills, among other ladies and their male custodians (we were being made into a gentler, more European, showcase). Eventually, we were introduced. Prince Alexander, allow me to present to you Countess Marie Vassilievna Tolstoy . . . Countess—the Leib Guard subporuchik Prince Alexander Mikhailovich Velitzyn . . . She was so tiny! She looked up and I stooped down, bowing. She blushed. I was hers, right there and then.

  I went through all the stages a lovestruck young man was supposed to check off: poetry, sleeplessness, sartorial concerns, and epistolary excesses. Svetogorov eagerly stepped into the role of my confidant. At long last, he cheered. He tutored me in strategy, interpreted her letters for me, and mobilized the whole vast network of his buddies to create a beneficial climate for our romance.

  Social calls, hitherto avoided, now turned into conduits of courtship. I spent hours perched in the sitting room of the Maison Tolstoy on the Moika River, maintaining a polite conversation with a watchful Tolstoy matriarch and her elderly sisters, while all I wished for was but a single moment alone with Marie. Balls and fêtes became great windows of opportunity. Ah, the way she looked at me when we danced minuets! We must have roused smiles—a couple so mismatched in height. When a dance required that I lifted her off the floor, I had to restrain an urge to nestle her in the crook of my arm and spin all around the hall, carrying her like a precious gift of heavens. I could not believe I deserved her.

  One day I received a letter from Moscow. Father wrote:

  Son Alexander, we heard you are seeking affections of the youngest Tolstoy girl. Your stepmother, who is friends with their Muscovite relatives, warns that the girl’s frame is too narrow where it matters for childbearing but we say Tolstoys are a good stock and a respected house. Is this the only Tolstoy sister who answers your courtship? If so, lose no time and propose, you have our blessing. Your brother, if you don’t know it yet, is also considering matrimony, and may have settled his matters already.

  My heavenly love, reduced to utilitarian terms of hip width! And, not least, I wished Andrei and I hadn’t been pitched in a competition of who’d marry first. But I did not question the prospect of proposing to the Tolstoy girl. That was what one did after one fell in love.

  So I sprang into action. I paid a call to the head of the house, the formidable Count Vassily Tolstoy, made a mention of my honorable intentions with regard to his daughter, and received his permission to proceed.

  The evening of that fateful day, Svetogorov decided to throw a party for my successful completion of the first step out of bachelorhood. I voiced caution, but he said, “You know your petite comtesse will accept. She is crazy about you. What do you have to worry about?”

  Midway through our celebration we perceived an urgent need for ice. The kind of urge that has for centuries sent packs of young, excited males on a search for the missing ingredient for their revel, be it another sort of liquor, or treat, or the company of a particular person. It was July, the night was hot, our vin mousseux de Champagne may have been in dire need of chilling. It does not matter. What matters is we headed into the imperial larders.

  Imagine a cheerful crowd of Leib Guard officers invading the imperial kitchens, holding the staff almost at gunpoint. Led, as ever, by Svetogorov, we descended into the basement, unlocked a door to a room, and flipped the lid of a chest to reveal layers of straw that covered perfectly preserved, huge slabs of ice. We whipped out our swords and attempted to hack at it, but the highest-grade imperial ice resisted splendidly. Then Svetogorov found an ice pick, and the next moment, shards of ice flew in all directions as if they were alive and trying to escape. My fellows frolicked after them, but I—I froze. One shard had lodged itself at my feet and lay there waiting. It glittered in the candlelight and it seemed to radiate confidence—a groomed, smooth, mature ice. It could have been old. As old as I. It could have been the very same ice from which Empress Anna’s Ice Palace had been built. The ice my parents had lain on. Do they not say that ice has memory? Suddenly, it seemed as if my mind—no, my whole body impaled itself on a peculiar realization: if I picked it up, it would become one with me.

  Why?!

  “Hey!” Svetogorov pushed me in the shoulder. “Wake up!”

  I fled the basement.

  • • •

  Svetogorov said, “Marriage fears. Nothing out of the ordinary.” I begged to differ.

  But in those days we did not speak so openly. Euphemisms, innuendos, and—for the more daring—French colloquialisms, oft misinterpreted, were all we had. Svetogorov used to say that I had been either too anxious or too idealistic with the ladies; in private, he may have thought that I simply couldn’t achieve an erection. That, I could. What I could not do was explain to him how strange were the fears that struck me after the visit to the ice box. As grotesque as they were vague, they fled the torch of reason but returned tripled the moment reason looked the other way. What if some curse had been precipitated on me and my brother at conception? Was that why Andrei disliked me? What if Marie would be repelled by me just as others had been? No matter how fond of me she was now, what would she do on our connubial night?

  And could I—should I—talk to her about it?

  • • •

  The gentle humor of the rites of courtship is that after one’s intent had been declared, everybody conspires to create opportunities for imminent proposal. Watchdog aunts and nosy sisters now flutter out of the room whenever one pays one’s call. Everybody, including the bride-to-be, stares at one with bright anticipation. Yet, time after time, one fails to deliver.

  Same as ever, that day: we were walking down a path in the Italian Gardens, and Marie’s mother, uncharacteristically interested in every rose along the way, just kept falling farther and farther behind. I grew tenser by the minute, which finally caused Marie to take matters into her own hands. “Mon ami, forgive me, but I can’t help but see you are ill at ease with me. I should like to know the reason. I would hate to cause you an upset and not amend it.”

  I stopped. I could lie or evade. Or confess. Did we not love each other? Ought we not to speak of our woes? So at long last I said, “I hope it would not be a surprise to you if I say that I’d be honored and delighted to ask your hand in marriage, but before I even dare to do it, I need to tell you something important.”

  She was intrigued—pleasantly, so far. “But by all means! You should not have troubled yourself over it, I would gladly listen to you and help in any way.”

  The next step was much harder. I took her hand and stopped looking her in the eyes. I squeezed the words out with much labor and torment, meander and pause. The summary of it was: “I have a concern about myself,” and “when we’re man and wife you may be dissatisfied with me,” a
nd “if so I will never forgive myself for binding you in a union that was a burden,” and “I have to ask your permission to perform a trial of sorts before we are betrothed to each other.”

  My innocent petite comtesse! Only she could be so trusting, so kind and pure as to not take off running that very moment. She blushed, asking, “A trial? What kind?”

  And I blushed, answering, “A tryout. Of you and me. Whether we can touch each other.”

  “But we—”

  “As man and wife.”

  “My parents will not—”

  “It’ll have to be in secrecy.” The further I went down that hole, the more I thought that this was the best thing to do. The right thing.

  She was biting her lips in thought. “Is there no other way?” she begged. What was she imagining, as she stood in those pristine gardens, on this August afternoon, amid roses and butterflies? Horror tales of maidens’ honor lost, of sinister men and their predations? Greasy beds under scarlet canopies? Or was she just figuring how she could slip from the Maison Tolstoy unnoticed? My loving, devoted Marie, she did not want to bargain—too much—with me. “I just can’t imagine how this could be arranged,” she said.

  “It needn’t be elaborate,” I improvised feverishly. “Just come out at night. Through the kitchen door. At two in the morning. I’ll be waiting. Every night for a week starting tomorrow I’ll be waiting unless I hear from you otherwise. We needn’t much time, we needn’t even go anywhere from your door.”

  Oh, I was flying. Inflated and carried away, as if she’d already agreed.

  “We will . . . right there?” she puzzled, and I was nodding, oh yes! I needed but little, only a tip of the iceberg that was intercourse. I wished I could say so!

  “Shh,” she said, “my mother is here.”

  The matriarch Countess Tolstoy had run out of flowers to inspect. “Mother”—Marie was all blushing cheeks, wayward eyes, and shrill voice—“Prince Alexander asked me to marry him.”

  “Oh, did he?” The matron feigned surprise. “My dearest children—”

  “—and I told him I’ll give him my answer in a week.” Marie tried so hard to look willful and sophisticated but she lacked the practice; she awed me nonetheless, my dear beloved. She fumbled and fled into the arms of her mother, the latter now surprised in earnest. “Oh, did you?”

  Misplaced like a milepost in an open field, I stood as, safe at her mother’s bosom, Marie turned back to me. “I trust you will wait for my answer,” she said and gave me her—only slightly trembling—fingertips to squeeze in a good-bye.

  Of course! She had to be inviting me to be there, by her kitchen door, every night starting tomorrow! “I will be waiting,” I said.

  She led her mother away, and the moment they turned the corner, my confidence waned. I spent the next twenty-four hours in remorse, doubting Marie’s meaning and questioning the asinine plan that I had conjured on the spur of the moment.

  • • •

  St. Petersburg in the 1760s was much different than it is now. It was a city cut out generously, for growth, and it had not yet filled its own interstitial spaces. It lay like a fanciful appliqué on the burlap of my country’s reality. One could be disturbed by its contrasts if one wasn’t so used to them: gilded carriages that bounced over rutted dirt roads, baroque palaces that stood amidst empty fields, wolf-hunting that was best just a few miles away from the assiduously manicured Italian Gardens.

  There was a veritable prairie land behind the Admiralty, all the way to the Moika River, where the Tolstoy mansion stood on the east bank, and beyond it. There were timber warehouses facing the mansion over the Moika, and dogs howled there at night. If the wind blew from the west, it smelled of tar from the Admiralty’s shipyard; if from the east, of cowherds. The grass was so tall and coarse next to the Tolstoy stables, it pricked me in the eye, where I sat. Fleas jumped in that grass, mosquitoes buzzed, and vermin scurried about. Well before sunrise, beggars with branded foreheads and ripped-out nostrils gathered nearby, waiting for the snobbish household serf-man to come out and give away scraps from the Tolstoys’ generous kitchen.

  It was, in other words, a highly unsuitable place for a delicate young lady to come out to at night.

  For five nights I waited for her in vain. On the sixth night the door opened and she slipped out. I emerged from my hiding spot in the grass. She grabbed the door handle, ready to flee, then saw it was me. She tiptoed over. A nightcap, a house frock, and a sleeping gown. Slippers on bare feet. “Here I am,” she whispered.

  For a while we stood close, not a hand’s width between us, and stared at each other. Then she shut her eyes with the kind of sacrificial abandon that should have struck the longest, saddest chord out of my soul, had I not been so taken with thrill and passion.

  I lifted her and curled her in the crook of my arm the way I’d dreamed of, and knelt in the grass, she in my lap, and I kissed her cheeks, and lips, and shoulder—somehow bared—and then a bare knee, and neck, and chin, and lips again.

  I kissed her until I suddenly tasted salt and saw, in a breathtaking close-up, a long tear-track glistening on her cheek. The tear escaped her eye no matter how tightly she squeezed it shut. The next instant I noticed how stiff she felt in my arms. And then I pulled back and saw her as she was, so brave, so determined, fighting shivers, squeezing all of herself so tight—those little white fists held aloft . . . And still unwilling to open her eyes, still hoping, she whispered, “No, don’t stop! I’ll be all right, it’s just me, it’ll go away. Please don’t let go of me!”

  But let go I did. “What,” I said, deadening, “is it?”

  She scrambled off my lap. She tried to speak but sobbed instead; she shivered and tugged at her nightgown. The kitchen door behind us opened, a gaggle of lanterns spilled out. “Young mistress! Young mistress Maria Vassilievna, where are you?!”

  Marie was backing away from me. “It was . . . it was—”

  Led by the matron Tolstoy, the search party was closing in; Marie turned and faced them, wailing like a child. “I sleepwalked! Mama, I’m so scared! I’m cold, Mama!”

  They surrounded her, swept her indoors. No one ever saw me.

  • • •

  There is a Russian fairy tale about Old Man Frost, the ruler of winter. He roamed the wildest reaches of the land, he raged in snowstorms, and come morning, he stood amidst his snowy desolation. A sorceress once saw him standing like that, and pitied his loneliness. She made him a lovely daughter out of snow. When spring came, the snow maiden was meandering through the forest and became entranced by a delightful tune played on a flute. The flutist was a handsome lad and she fell in love with him. Yet soon she realized how many obstacles were in the way of her love: he lived in a village and she hid in the forest; she was pale and shy, while he was courted by many a rosy-cheeked lass. Only once did she dare to show herself to him, yet he took interest and invited her to a village festival. There was a big bonfire, and lads and lasses were jumping over it to show off; the flutist dared the snow maiden to jump with him. She knew she shouldn’t but she was determined to prove her love for him. She jumped, and in an instant she evaporated in a cloud of steam.

  With us, the parts were reversed, and so were the elements of nature. The trial was not by fire—it was quite the opposite. Not two days after our transgression, pneumonia struck Marie and brought her to the brink of death. Only in October had she convalesced enough to take my visit. She was swathed in blankets in a rocking chair by a fireplace when they ushered me in and left us alone. I knelt beside her. The fire pushed waves of heat onto me.

  “You.” She touched the lapels of my jacket. Then, “We are not going to marry, are we?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I’m sorry. I must be frail. The doctor says my constitution—”

  “You are perfect. Kind. Brave. The cause lies with me.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. What . . . did you feel?”

  She gazed into the f
ire. “Cold,” she said.

  • • •

  She was a gift of the heavens, and I did not deserve her.

  That day Marie asked me henceforth to avoid her company, and I obliged. In a year she was seen with suitors; I could not blame her but suffered afresh nonetheless, not least because Andrei was getting married! Heartbroken was a medical diagnosis back then but it did not begin to describe the mix of envy and bile that flooded me when I stood at my brother’s wedding. Was my brother not cursed, after all? Was it just me? Or was Andrei’s bride, this Anna something or other, an unremarkable, demure girl I barely looked at before the ceremony, somehow more accommodating? Or did she, poor thing, not know what she was getting into?

  The gossips of St. Petersburg found the famous “rejection of Prince Velitzyn by Countess Tolstoy” a fertile ground for speculation. Many held me at fault. In another year my petite comtesse married a rich civil servant twenty years her senior, while I remained chaste—and now the gossip turned to my deficiencies, one guess more piquant than another. Then Marie died in childbirth. Those narrow hips of hers.

  After her death my critics fell silent. Now I was a black swan who had lost the mate of his life. The irony.

  Of this I am as sure as I can be: she never shared my secret with anyone, she took it with her.

  • • •

  If not for Marie, I would have taken much longer to understand it, but now I knew: arousal made me cold. What was I to do?

  I became a misanthrope. I was intemperate with my grenadiers and curt with everyone else. I was disconsolate and reveled in it; after a while I became disliked. I daydreamed of various exotic and demonstrative ways of self-destruction. When Empress Ekaterine imported the distinguished Dr. Dimsdale and his son from England in 1768 to inoculate herself and the young Grand Duke Paul against smallpox, I volunteered to be the corpore vili on which to fiat experimentum. (The empress refused to order anyone to submit to such a fate, while the doctor was reluctant to use his procedure on her without a test run.) I looked forward to a dignified illness and heroic death, but the self-sacrificial move turned out to entail a week of purgatives and boiled vegetables, followed by nicking on both arms with a scalpel dipped in pustules of a disease-stricken child from the city’s outskirts. This was followed by another week of laxatives and special diet, during which I developed tenderness in my arms and then a mild fever. Then I got well. I erupted not one pustule, and Dr. Dimsdale doubted the inoculation had truly taken; he certainly could not use me as a source for more inoculations (which was my last hope: in those days we believed that the subject whose pustule matter is taken to inoculate others will consequently die). In two weeks, profoundly purified of “crudities in my stomach,” sick of turnips and cabbage but hardly altered otherwise, I returned to the regiment and to misanthropy.