The Age of Ice: A Novel

by Sidorova, J. M.

  • • •

  In the barn again, where I was becoming more demanding. Then I saw how our own domestics chased Matryona from the yard, saying, Be gone with you! Scavenging here! Whoring around!

  When I asked what happened, the lackey said that Matryona was not even ours. Not our serf. There went my semiserious plan of easing her lot by making a house servant out of her.

  Matryona never touched me either. Except once: I was performing my routine while watching her—and was not succeeding, it just would not happen; so she said, Let me, and then pulled the kerchief off her head—a newer, whiter thing she wore, with a stitchwork of little red roosters along the edge—and she took me into her hand through this kerchief, explaining, My hands’re rough and young master’s skin’s tender. I leaned back on my elbows and wanted to close my eyes but those little red roosters—this misused Sunday-best kerchief—I could not tear my mind from it, it anguished me, it jumbled me—

  “You pity me, don’t you?” I said.

  She stopped for a moment. Her braid rolled over her shoulder and fell on my chest. She tossed it back. Then resumed.

  “I am not a ‘young master.’ I may well be older than you.” I could not bear these pangs of sadness and shame and injustice, perverted together, and so I cried, “Stop!” because I did not want her to stop, and then drew her in and held her by the waist, and straightened her skirt, and then buried my face in it and begged, “Don’t come here again. Please. Don’t come for me anymore.”

  Later, Father categorically refused to buy Matryona and Savva from whoever owned them. “When you come into money, you can blow it whichever way you want!” I had no income other than the allowance he gave me. The empire rarely paid my nominal Leib Guard salary. As a landed nobleman, I was expected to have no need for it, and if I had the need, to be too proud to ask.

  I came across Anna right after that conversation. “What happened?” she asked. My face must have been a portrait of ire.

  On impulse, I said, “Take a sleigh ride with me. Please?”

  And here we were, propelled by that same spirited mare (a choice of mine), over an end-of-February landscape, under the crisp sun. Once or twice at sharp turns Anna shrieked and grabbed my arm, then laughed—excitedly, I thought—and it cheered me up, and I thought that this was when I’d ask her about my brother. I needed, I had to know, now more than ever.

  On the outskirts of a village, some kids were building a snow fortress and I turned toward it. “A cavalry charge!” I roared, and Anna protested, God, no!, and I reigned in the mare to a halt and jumped out of the sleigh. “An infantry charge! Preobrazhensky grenadiers—attack!” I stormed on, and the kids responded with a volley of snowballs. I retaliated with snow grenades and rammed the snow wall, tumbling to the ground on the other side and being bombarded by the fortress’s defenders till snow bursts covered me head to toe; yet I lay sprawled and laughed like a madman until Anna’s face appeared above me. “Look at you—a snowman,” she said, smiling so brightly. And I said, “Then tell me something. Be honest with a snowman. Is your husband cold when he performs the procreative act?”

  At first she just raised her brow, prompting me to repeat it, but by the time I did, her face changed, a grave concern upon it, and her gaze turned inward. I sat up. “What’s wrong?”—“I am unwell,” she said. “Take me back.”

  I was terrified. She saw it and, once back in the sleigh, she offered an explanation, “It’s my pregnancy.”

  “You are—pregnant?!”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “You didn’t tell me!”

  “I—guess I thought you knew. Everyone else does.”

  “Oh my God, I shouldn’t have—if I’d known—”

  “It’s all right. It’s just—something is a little wrong right now.”

  “Something what?!”

  “It’s not a man’s business, Alexander. Will you just get me home, please?”

  • • •

  The bumpy sleigh ride I had made her endure . . . of course it was all my fault! I would kill myself if she lost her baby. They confined her to bed. They were saying the worst hadn’t happened, and she was hopeful. Days passed. I stayed at her side as often as she’d let me. I kept track of her face. If she was calm, I breathed. If she looked concerned, I held my breath. At the same time I kept thinking: A baby. A baby! My brother must be normal. He is not like me. I am alone. Curse them. Curse the world! I no longer needed her answer, when one day she said, “That question you had asked . . . Your brother is not at all a cold man. He cares deeply about me. He is a devoted husband.” Then she asked, “Tell me, what had happened between Marie Tolstoy and you?”

  As I opened my mouth to respond, Andrei walked in the door. You see—the problem with the Turkish war was that it just would not start in earnest. So Andrei had sought permission to leave the idle troops to be with his pregnant wife, and showed up at Velitzyno quite unexpectedly.

  “What did you do to my wife?!” were Andrei’s first words. Then, as Anna—instantly oblivious of me—lifted her arms to greet her normal husband, he took control of his emotions and asked me out for a word. Anna objected, “Alexander had done me no wrong!” but Andrei was already closing the door behind us. When we were out of Anna’s earshot, he berated me. I rebuked not a single fantastic accusation of his because I felt guilt and—at the same time—because I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. But I promised to remove myself from the scene, and to begin with, I absconded to the old barn I’d frequented with Matryona.

  As I yanked at the barn’s door, a whole rack of icicles, sharp and long, broke off the eaves, plunged down in front of my face, and stabbed the snow, narrowly missing my foot. I picked up the icicles one by one and broke them into smaller and smaller pieces until my palms bled and only the icicles’ wrist-thick roots resisted my best attempts at destruction. Those I hurled against the barn wall, again and again. Shards ricocheted into me. After a while there was no piece left larger than a pea.

  And then, at long last, my supply of rage ran out. It occurred to me that it was time to stop asking God for help, because if he was paying attention, he ought to be helping Matryona and Savva and Anna, not me; that I was one year away from turning thirty and had nothing to show for it . . . If I was serious about loathing myself, it was time to graduate to doing it quietly—and responsibly, without the bonfire and attendant harm to others.

  It would be, at any rate, more honest.

  • • •

  Curiously, when I undressed for bed that night, I found a shard of an icicle stuck between my vest and shirt. I placed it on my dresser and found it still solid come morning. I had no idea what I’d done to it, but it never melted: not when I washed my dried blood off it, nor after a week in my pocket when I brought it to a certain Herr Goldstein in St. Petersburg, a jeweler. I said that it came to me by chance, what was it? Herr Goldstein inspected it with ardor, then told me circumspectly that he did not know what it was but could buy it off me. Had I any more of these stones? Maybe, I said. I told him to name the price, and he did. I doubled the number, stooped over him across the table, and watched what he’d do. As soon as he conceded, I leaned further forward and told him to explain himself. “It is not a diamond,” he said with trepidation, “But it could pass as one. If Your Nobleship were interested in considering the possibilities.”

  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 o
f 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.

  The Blind Saint

  1770‒74

  Let 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 of
ficers, 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!