We walked into a village; dogs discovered us and started barking. A boy popped out of a hovel and began screaming, pointing at us. “That’s him, that’s him, that’s Old Man Frost!” A woman joined the boy, and he yanked at her sleeve. “Mam, he’s the one who killed Dad!” But the woman only crossed herself and towed the boy back inside.
There must have been something strange about me that made her invoke the holy sign. I looked down at my jacket and brushed off a layer of snow. Or was it perhaps a snowcap that I wore on my head? My mind felt like a huge snowball; the name Old Man Frost, though familiar, was buried much too deep to make sense. I started walking again.
When I was twenty or so paces away, the boy appeared again and ran after me, his mother not too far behind. He carried a broom, its business end burning, and hurled it at me like a javelin just before his mother captured him. My horse yanked at his reins, terrified, and pulled me out of harm’s way; the blazing broom missed me and landed at my feet. I looked at it, at the boy, at other inhabitants of the village who started to congregate at the scene. The boy stared back, panting. Perhaps he was waiting for Old Man Frost to melt? The little fire at my feet was still burning—so yellow, so different . . . and so important. It made me remember two boys sitting in front of a campfire, surrounded by walls of ice and snow. My brother and I. I had my arm wrapped around his shoulders, and then glimpsed, in an epiphany, that he had something I lacked. And that I needed him. Andrei, who had set our palace of ice on fire. I opened my mouth. “Which way is Orenburg?”
Several hands pointed, so I headed that way.
• • •
I recall very little from the rest of my journey. At some point I lost my horse—I do not remember how, I only know I came out of the wild without him, without my winter coat, and without the foodstuffs that he carried in the saddlebags. Maybe the horse simply had been too slow to keep up, because I do remember running on more than one occasion. Running and chanting to the beat of my footfalls, The kindness of snow! The cruelty of ice!
Orenburg revealed itself by gunfire. I walked for several days using those rumbles as my only guide. By that time I more or less knew who I was and that I was going there to meet my family. I had been teasing out these morsels of memory by staring at the flames, whenever I managed to kindle a fire and sustain it for minutes at a time with some brush: Fire. Palace of ice. My brother and I. I need him. The rest of the time, as my gaze glided over hills and dales, the snowball in my mind swelled—as if I were pushing it in front of me like some winterland Sisyphus.
I approached Orenburg from the north. I crossed the Sakmara River and could have sneaked along its wooded bank southwest to the Yayeek gate of the fortress. Instead, drawn to noise, I headed southeast into open fields in front of the Sakmara gate. There, a sortie of rebels—and here I employ the testimony of others rather than my own memory—had assumed possession of a cannon abandoned by the Orenburg troops. Attracting some fire from the walls, rebels were limbering the piece up, while others of their number were galloping by the walls in a display of taunts and jeers.
I crossed this scene at a run. Shortly after I took off I had a tail—a rebel on horseback pursued me, shouting. He gained on me; I turned around and ran at him, scooping snow as I ran, slapping it into snowballs, and hurling them at the rider. I wanted to catch him, bring him down, and stuff snow into his gullet until it ruptured. I pictured the man stuffed like a scarecrow, only with snow instead of straw. All of this made great sense to me at the time.
He halted his horse. I ran on. I was closing in. We made eye contact. There were shouts and gunshots; none crossed our line of sight, though. I had already stretched my arms to grab him when he yanked his horse to the right and whipped it into a gallop. I pursued for a bit, but was no match for his horse, so I turned and ran back toward the gate.
The gate opened for me. Some people were on the inside. I said, “Colonel Velitzyn. Colonel Andrei Velitzyn, please.”
• • •
So this thing, this Old Man Frost was what stood in the anteroom of the Velitzyn residence, when Andrei Junior, shouting, “Godfather Alexander!” charged me and wrapped his skinny arms around my waist as only a child can. Only a child, for whom a crust of snow on the jacket of his godfather was nothing out of the ordinary. If he hadn’t been the one who saw me first . . .
I recognized him but vaguely. He kept clinging to me, bobbing up and down and reciting, “Godfather is here, Godfather is here!” With the boy on my arm I let myself into the parlor and there, the burning fireplace instantly commanded my attention. The salvation, the memory trigger! I leaped to it, dropped down, and stared at the flames with the greatest focus ever, ignoring little Andrei’s questions and fidgets.
The snowball inside my head exploded: corpses, telescopes, snow, a boy with a burning broom, ice maggots, Paulie, Cyril . . .
I listed to one side, suddenly weak. I felt—I didn’t know whether metaphorically or literally—as if I were turning from ice to liquid, and I wetted—embarrassed to say it—my pants, if only as a consequence of becoming liquid. That was the state Anna found me in.
She shrieked. Maybe she was startled, afraid for her son, then she recognized me—perhaps—as I was sloping farther and farther to the side like a snowman in springtime. My godson squirmed out of my arms, Mama, Mama, look who’s here!—Oh my God, she kept repeating, and I was so sick, so terribly sick but also—happy. I clung to the mantel for support, muttering, “Give me a moment . . . don’t come near me . . . send somebody in . . . some warm water . . . please . . . just a bit of warm water . . . should do it.”
• • •
Three hours later, after having locked myself in a lean-to banya (Anna would call through the door from time to time, Alexander, are you all right? And I’d say, Yes, just need a little more time), after having peeled off my clothes one item at a time and seen—no, not the frostbitten arms or legs, patches of icy infestation, toes that one feared to find porcelain-hard, skin that peeled off as one crust with the fabric—no, none of that. What I saw was just my pale, filthy body, roughened and all too sensitive to warm water, but undamaged. And so, three hours later, I recovered enough self-presence to rejoin my family.
It was my mind. It felt ill. In me, Anna had acquired a patient; a second one, unfortunately, because, when at long last I emerged from the bathhouse in my brother’s snug-fitting crisp-clean shirt and breeches, my dirty clothes bundled discreetly in one hand and all the coins and banknotes that I had found stashed in my clothes in the other; when I met Anna in the parlor again and surrendered the money to her, and saw—this time—that she was thinner and sadder than I remembered (for my memory grew clearer), and asked, therefore, “Where’s my brother?” she said, “He’s sick.”
• • •
I remember seeing him for the first time since my arrival: gaunt and unshaven, stretched out in bed. The last time he had been outside the city, he’d taken a bullet in the shoulder. Now he had a lingering wound and pneumonia. Approaching him, I felt like a teenager to his grown man. “Andrei?” I said.
He considered me. “Did we break the siege?”
I shook my head.
“No troops are coming?”
“They are staging. They will be en route shortly.”
“Staging, my ass.” He reviewed me more thoroughly. “You don’t look too good. You came alone?”
I nodded.
“What for?”
And the teenager that I felt all but apologized: “Just so . . . whatever happens, happens to us together. It felt better that way.”
• • •
The first meal I took with Anna and Andrei Junior was a thin soup of sour cabbage with hints of beef kidney. The soup’s meniscus reached beyond the bowl-shaped part of the plate only in my serving. There was gray bread—two slices for the boy, two for me, one for Anna. A shaving or two of butter on Junior’s and my slices. All this was defiantly served in snow-white, melodiously clinking china, on an immaculate tablec
loth.
Anna cut up her son’s bread into tiny pieces. He ate with hungry abandon, but his eyes went an anxious blank just before he shut them, each time, while swallowing. Anna lingered, watching me. Exploring the soup with my spoon, I wondered, just what had I been eating on my march? Nothing, it seemed. It had been two weeks—the calendar claimed—since I’d faced the bandits. The thought was unsettling in and of itself, and worse, how was I to begin eating now? Then, a realization: this was scarcity, and I was an extra, an unsolicited mouth to feed. Anna had taken from herself to give to me. I shrank, my elbows glued to my sides. “Just one piece of bread is good. I am not too hungry. I am sorry. And thank you.”
Anna said, “This is not municipal bread. We bake our own.” She sounded apologetic. I could not understand why and felt bad. I truly wasn’t hungry, my body seemed not to have realized its warm needs yet.
My mind alone was suffering through the disabling stages of thaw. Reperfusion of mind with thought. Return of painful emotions. Necrotizing areas of missing memories. It was hard for me to listen to Anna when she explained that merchant granaries had been municipalized, bread rationed; that the municipal bread dough had been augmented with downer cattle hides, fried and minced, and some people had taken ill. On the black market (there was one still, thank God!), a pound of flour went for sixteen rubles. Andrei had not approved of this and insisted on living as miserably as his soldiers, she said.
I nodded but barely made sense of her words. Anna appeared—on my disabled scale—too new and unfamiliar, a stranger, I could not be at ease with her. I needed, had to fall back to things that were ingrained in my deepest, least frostbitten memories.
• • •
Word of my arrival spread to every Orenburg officer within hours. Visitors began to call the very next day: Wallenstern the commandant, Reinsdorp the governor; Major Naumov, who served under Andrei; Major Varnsted, who’d come from Bugulma in November; Brigadier Korf, who’d retreated his corps to Orenburg from Ural fortresses that had fallen into enemy hands. Anna served the men tea in dainty porcelain cups, while their wives slipped her jars of rhubarb jam and sachets of dried echinacea for Andrei. My brother dragged himself out of the bedroom and, propped on an ottoman and ignoring entreaties to spare himself, took part in an impromptu war council where I was made to testify about Kazan, the road, and Freiman’s plans. Andrei drilled me until he hit the gaps in my recall. How many troops in Bugulma? What kind? Which regiments? Have they received our letters?
I did not know.
Reinsdorp, it seemed, took me for a harbinger of victory, and Wallenstern for a fraud. Reinsdorp said that we all ought to march out of two gates and strike Pugachev on three sides at once. Andrei’s voice rose above the others, “The cavalry! You can’t nail him without it. Have our cavalry cross the Sakmara, go up the right bank, and strike Pugachev from the north!” This suggestion was met with bewilderment. Wallenstern warned, “Andrei Mikhailovich, have mercy. One must think in cannon and infantrymen at this time.” Andrei protested, mentioning hundreds of dragoons and Cossacks. These must have been phantoms of his fever, because he was roundly ignored. Reinsdorp bent toward me and confided, sotto voce, “We haven’t got horses. He knows. He just forgets.” Then he signaled the end of the meeting. “We’d better let our colonel rest. Take care of yourself, Andrei Mikhailovich, listen to the doctor. Do not forget that rhubarb.” Andrei, red in the face, glanced sheepishly after the departing men as if they had exposed a foolishness in him. I felt bitter pity for my brother. Before he left, Reinsdorp gave me a pat on the back. “I do expect your visit, Guards Captain. We need to talk more about our strategy.”
I had no strategy to talk about, and Andrei was beyond help of rhubarb and echinacea.
• • •
Anna and I helped Andrei back to bed, and after that I did not quite make it out of his bedroom, an act as selfish as it was helpful: I was not feeling right, I was hiding from Reinsdorp and company. He needed a nurse. A perfect match.
Nay, more than that. Together, we embarked on a journey, each of us at once a Virgil and a Dante to the other.
Through fever and sickness, around the clock, from present to past. He cursed, he taunted me, he spoke in riddles: “The word is out. Killing a noble is just as inconsequential as killing a chicken. Pugachev? He’s a drunken puppet!” He spoke of atrocities: “Cowled over face with skin of own scalp and chased into fields hands tied behind can’t unblindfold himself !” and I felt sick imagining how I would be smothered by a mat of my own hair turned inside out and pulled over my nose and mouth, the hood of skin tightening, shrinking in the sun as I stumbled on . . . To whom had it been done? And by whom?
But I had to keep up with my brother, who rushed forth, revisiting every battle, releasing every memory he had kept locked up in the cellar of his mind. He descended—and I followed—from the Turkish conflict to the Seven Years’ War; he hallucinated parched flats of the Sea of Azov; salty wind; two toothless old men, a master and his slave; one fished for another and then they ate out of one bowl; taking of Taganrog, dust devils, not a shot fired; then forests of Moldova, minarets of the Izmail fortress and the dome’s up-horned crescent above the wafts of gunsmoke, a Wallachian youth who jumped off the wall onto Russian bayonets; then wading the Danube’s estuaries in a fog where tresses of willows touched one’s face like women’s hands and pelicans disturbed by cannon fire flew overhead; then bell towers and cobblestones of Berlin, chains of Prussian footmen in dirty-white uniforms marching in inhuman unison to be butchered between the Oder River and the Russian artillery batteries at Kunersdorf—
“Bone is yellow blood is dark meat is dirt,” he cried, “and they’re bringing their teacups and wig powder! Do you understand me?” Yes, yes, I do, I said, though I didn’t. My brother was wiser—or sicker than me, I thought. And he kept racing, all the way to his very first battle: sunrise in August in a forest at Gross-Jagersdorf, springy carpet of needles underfoot, the softness of the realization that the vanguard column had lost its way and scattered; the unlikely feeling of peace, like home; discovering a bright clutch of chanterelles, and then cannonballs and shells started crashing all around and one did not know where to run and stood hugging a fir tree and picked with shaky fingers at its scales and sap leaks, and was so afraid, so afraid, so afraid.
And I was whispering, It’s all right. You’re safe. It’s all over now. And it was. We were past all the wars, down to our own battle, brother and brother.
Once, Anna came in with a plate of broth and stared as if afraid of us both. He whispered, Tell her to leave, I’m not decent. I covered him and I said to Anna, Let me feed him. He would not eat more than two spoonfuls at a time by then. I would help him onto a chamber pot. I’ve got you, I’ve got you. He would laugh, all coughs and wheezes, his breath sour. Look at me, can’t hold myself up on a shitter. What, I’m so light you can lift me up now, little brother? His fever kept climbing. His wound had opened like a slit in a leavened loaf, and the doctor only shook his head at it.
I waxed, Andrei waned. He sweated, hallucinated, vomited his memories out, while I gained mine back. I picked out my memories among his expelled ones. His wound smelled of decay. We were up to our necks in our childhoods now, far away, and I felt I had recalled everything. I said, Remember how we used to charge into each other? Said he, I do.
I said, “I never wanted to be at war with you. Why were we?”
“That is the harshest kind of war,” he said and drifted, momentarily, out of touch.
“Andrei?”
“Mmm? . . . I’ve been jealous of you.”
“You shouldn’t be. I am a freak—”
“You bet you are. Not of this world. Nothing sticks to you. Father hated us but you don’t care. I was ashamed of our birth, you were proud. You somehow made it into this—”
“—and I’ve been jealous of you, because I am abnormal. A virgin, for one. You know why?”
“—into this wonder. Don’t know how you do it. Ju
st saunter through life and it keeps parting before you . . . no ass-kissing . . . nor kicking . . . and I go and there is a wall . . . My head’s burning up.”
“Andrewsha?” But he’d drifted again. “What I mean is my body is freakish, not just . . . my mind,” I insisted. “Let me show you,” and I put my hand on his forehead—
He returned, “Good to have you. My damned lucky little brother. Spare us some. Save my wife and son for me. Promise.”
I pressed my hand to his forehead and imagined snow, fields of it, all the chill of broken hopes, all the gelid drafts of ravaged homes, all the anger, all the lust—I needed to cool his head, now, I so wanted to relieve him.
He jerked his head. “Let go already! You’re heating me up!”
What?! I recoiled. I stared at my palm. “Is my hand not cold?”
“Alexasha. Serious now. Get your sweaty hands off me. My wife and son. They are your responsibility now. Do you understand?”
Had I been cured of my cold?
Dumbstruck, I muttered, “Yes, yes. But you’ll pull through. We’ll do it together.”
He drifted off. I called his name once, twice, to no avail, then pitched my voice high, like a child, and howled, “Andrewsha-a-a-a . . .” as if we were running toward each other down an enfilade of sunlit rooms . . . His mouth opened but not his eyes. “Go to war,” he whispered hotly, as if in a bad dream.
• • •
Andrei died at three in the morning of the next day, December 31. When the priest confirmed that he was no longer breathing, I finally left the room and went into the open air. I hadn’t been out in days. I didn’t even remember these houses, this street now before me. I said, “Brother, you wouldn’t mind now if I double-checked, would you?” and picked up some snow.
I had not been cured. The cold was back, or it had never left, only tricked me, denied me a single, the first and the last, favor I begged of it—to cool my dying brother’s brow.
The Age of Ice: A Novel Page 8