We must have talked for hours that day, but all I remember was that she thought of moving to St. Petersburg. She said she would like to find a place to rent. Andrei needed the education only the capital could provide. Since the death of my father, I was the only close family left, and the boy needed family.
I kept nodding.
• • •
I let Anna and her maid sleep in my bedroom, and I shared the study with my godson. As the boy fell asleep, I found myself wondering what his mother felt, lying in my bed. Did she think the smell of my skin lingered there still, through the new linen? Did she look for traces of me? Then I kidnapped her from herself. I made an imaginary Anna who behaved as I pleased—and was sleepless now, swimming with lustful thoughts, confused, confusing me for her husband.
Only in the early morning did I let my imaginary Anna fall asleep, sweetly, facedown in my pillows, her dark hair splashed over the whiteness of the bedding, her hands tucked under the pillow, the dew of temptations long evaporated.
What can I say? It was late May. The nights were white. I merely fantasized, that’s all.
And yet it seemed to me that when she came out for breakfast, she had a rare glow about her—the glow of an absolute conviction that the day would bring something wonderful. What irony, in retrospect, that the day brought a call from Paulie Svetogorov!
We were lingering over breakfast, quizzing Andrei about what he wanted to see first in St. Pete’s. Cyril came into the dining room to announce the visitor even as the latter clomped right after him with, What are you, some kind of a majordomo now, Cyril Patronymikovich? Then he beheld Anna.
I enjoyed watching his transformation; it was comedic. “Madame—I beg your pardon,” and “I was in the neighborhood, at the cobbler’s, checking about new boots, why not pay a visit, see Alexis’s new lair,” and “I am Paul Svetogorov, Madame, premier major of her Imperial Majesty’s Leib Guard. We’ve met under circumstances of war, if I dare remind you. I can’t help noting that peacetime becomes you so much better, Madame!”
Anna was amused. “A civil war becomes no country, let alone a woman,” she said. “Pleased to meet you in peacetime, Guards Major.”
Oh, what a smile she gave him! Luscious and yet with a cold edge. The kind that can make men think they are just inches from a misstep. Paulie certainly thought so, it seemed. He hazarded some small talk (“So—are you visiting?”) without taking so much as an extra step into our dining room, and showed a great sensibility—humility even—in letting the conversation lapse and leaving when neither I nor Anna asked him to stay.
When he left, Anna asked, What is he? and I said, “Paulie and I go all the way to my first days in the regiment. We were buddies when we were younger.” And now, she prompted. “And now, as we get older, our differences begin to matter more.”
“He is so jovial,” she said.
To my amazement, I felt vindicated replying, “That, he is. As a plain man can be. He is no intellect. He is indispensable to have around if one wants to have fun, but at times of challenge his impulses can take the better of his good judgment.” And once this came out, the rest rolled forth as if my throat was lubricated now, “He and I started out together on the road to Orenburg. When we reached General Freiman, something peculiar happened. At best, Paul had no heart to go on but did not want to admit to it. At worst, he fooled me and set me up to leave alone.”
“But you are still friends,” she observed.
“Well yes. Friends, of sorts.”
• • •
In less than a year after their brief—no more than a week—visit, Anna and Andrei took permanent residence in St. Petersburg. She rented an apartment nearby, a twenty-minute walk from me.
It was a good thing, I suppose. A good thing.
And yet. I kept having dreams of ice. They forced me to keep working on my chain of abductive reasoning. To reduce reduce reduce myself to something explicable. Perhaps—if I could not muster courage to surrender myself to nature-philosophers in one fell swoop, couldn’t I at least begin by observing them in closer proximity?
The first time I ever went to a lecture in the academy, it was for a demonstration of remarkable properties of water by a visiting professor from Göttingen. The announcement read Open to the public. I was late, I was in my military uniform, and when I sat down in a chair in the back, my sword made an awfully loud clank in the echoey, wood-paneled auditorium. Far ahead of me, on a monumentally built bench, a sturdy retort was perched over a flame, the liquid in it was nearing a boiling point—and lo!—it boiled. The steam had only one escape route, through a brass pipe that divided in two and connected to both sides of a cylindrical attachment, also brass, with a piston inside it and a weight hung off the piston rod. The piston and its weight moved, as the steam was directed hither and thither by the professor’s assistant who nimbly opened and closed the pipe valves. Then the professor unveiled a third element, hidden under black fabric—a brass box connected via yet another pipe to the cylinder and immersed in a vessel of iced water. As the pipe route between the box and the cylinder was opened and the weight on the piston rod was yanked up again, the audience could not help but release a murmur of astonishment. “Meine Herren,” the professor announced, “as you can see, cold is just as capable of performing work as heat is.” (“Work”—eine Arbeit—came out forcefully like a double stab.) “Cold is not a mere absence of heat. They say a certain Scotsman by the name of James Watt is trying to make ice work for his steam engine!”
While the spectators applauded, I felt as if I just heard good tidings. Cold is not a mere absence of heat—my whole being sprang to life, relishing the mantra. It seemed to vindicate me, endorse my existence.
After the presentation, there was time for questions. As the professionals exercised their curiosity, I sat on the edge on my chair, my heart beating faster and faster, my mind, encouraged by the professor’s words, provoking me: Ask a question about ice. But what exactly? Something, anything! Just to get the exposure, to invite more good tidings. I rose. “Herr Professor? Is there any similarity between ice and diamond?”
Chairs creaked as the scientific gentlemen turned and stared at me. I repeated my question in German. The professor made a show of eyeing me head to toe and said, “Es gibt keine Ähnlichkeit” (There is no similarity). Then he added, casting glances at the nearest listeners, as if inviting them to tune in to a coming joke, “Even though . . . both glitter.”
The laughter was eager and unanimous. The professor turned away from me to call an end to the proceedings. Those in the front rose to shake hands and rub shoulders, and those in the back started to file out. I sat, then stood, then joined the exit. A feeling of embarrassment would come later. Then, as I went through the doors, a young voice called after me, “Guards Captain!” I was a second major by then, but I turned nonetheless—the voice belonged to someone who could not be expected to keep track of rank: Ivan Kuznetzov, the astronomer from the Orenburg steppes!
He still looked like a boy—a tall, slender, somewhat bumbling adolescent with wide eyes and upturned nose. Up close though, one perceived that he had dried up a tad, lost some of youth’s essential oil. Dusky half-rounds under his eyes spoke of an insomniac’s pursuits, either of study or of self-indulgence. But he beamed with joy at me, and acted as if the faux pas of my ice-diamond question had not happened. Unprompted, he told me everything he’d done since I’d sent him and Cyril to Freiman. He’d survived the winter and made his way to Kazan and then to Moscow only because he clung to the trove of his late professor’s astronomical observations and a sense of duty to deliver them to the academy. He laughed: the transit of Venus had secured his transit! He went on: he was taking mathematics and optics now, after Sir Isaac Newton, and considering going abroad to further his studies, he just needed to secure a stipend.
His chatter was both endearing and meddlesome: I was glad to see him alive and well but did not exactly welcome an incursion down the lane of Orenburg memories. Then Ivan as
ked what’d brought me to the academy and I confessed a curiosity about natural philosophy. He almost jumped. Why, he’d be more than happy to help me! He knows a few people, he could arrange for lessons, classes, mentorship! I perceived his offer to be more an expression of joy over the survivors’ reunion than a serious proposition; I had nothing against it either way. I thanked him, told him how to find me, and took my leave.
• • •
With Anna and young Andrei having settled in St. Pete’s, our life had developed new, familylike routines. Sundays, for example, meant a visit to church, dinner, an afternoon of lounging at Anna’s apartment, the three of us playing board games. Yes, we were quite settled, if not for the unsettling effect of some of the partings at night, when it seemed as if she was waiting for me to do something, and I never did; the silences that extended like icicles; the halfway smiles when our hands bumped over the dice.
Anna gained new lady-friends; with some I did not care to acquaint, with others, like the inimitable Baroness d’Anglairs, one could not help but have an acquaintance. The first time we met, informally at Anna’s, the baroness, a wasp-waisted, sharp-tongued, plaster-faced artificer of her own beauty and fortune, looked me up and down and said, “Darling, you absolutely must give me something to serve as gossip or else I shall have to invent it!” Under the baroness’s tutelage, Anna perfected her public face of fine charm—with a touch of chill—which I’d first glimpsed in Orenburg. The society loved it. The widow, chaste and graceful; the ice princess, they would now call her. No one but me saw it as ironic.
There was also Mme Knopf, another military widow with two sons; Anna and she put together a home school for the boys, with a battered Frenchman who taught them French, naturally, and a German, who taught everything else. When I finally retired, I began supplementing Anna’s schooling by educating Andrei in manly things such as riding, fencing, shooting, and athletics. I pulled what strings I could to enlist the boy with the Life Guards Horse Regiment—a cavalry equivalent of my Preobrazhensky. I was quite proud of this achievement of mine. Our eleven-year-old’s life did not change, he was working his way up through the lower ranks merely on paper. By the time he would actually report to service, he’d be a cornet already. More importantly, I was certain the Life Guards Horse Regiment would be as far from the battlefield as possible. If only I could foresee what history had in store for the Imperial Horse Guard!
• • •
Ivan Kuznetzov made good on his promise to connect me with natural scientists. I now attended more lectures, though Ivan’s men of science with whom I had become best acquainted were not much older than Ivan and just as much works-in-progress as he was, and, incidentally, they were as keen on study as on partying. In return, I convinced Anna to employ Ivan (a starving student, naturally) in her home school, giving classes in astronomy and geometry. Ivan was elated and I—proud of myself as a do-gooder. Everything was dandy.
Sitting in a lecture hall at the academy, I now watched in wonder how, when a measure of niter was poured into a flask filled with ice and water, the column of mercury in a marvelous thermometer inserted into the flask got shorter, exposing the fact that the temperature of the mixture now fell below zero degrees Réaumur.
Temperature! That was the universal measure of the property of coldness or warmness of all objects in the world. Some of these objects, a stone, for instance, could have a great range of temperatures. For other substances, such as water, the range was much narrower. Perhaps the essence of my aberration was that I was able to alter this range for ice! Since some salts lower the temperature at which water would freeze, then perhaps I contained a special kind of salt that raised that temperature, temporarily or permanently, and that is how I could make an icicle diamond. But what about my going cold? Could my temperature truly approach that of snow?
All I needed was a thermometer. If only Ivan’s student friends could get me one!
Because not everything was dandy: I kept having dreams of ice. The hanged Asotsky boy with ice in his mouth merged with the boy I had orphaned, Peter’s or Bulava’s son, and chased me with a burning broom. I would wake up with a pounding heart and frisk myself, afraid that I had turned into a mound of ice. After a night like this, who wouldn’t try to spend the next one awake over cards and wine, with fellow officers—
Only to find oneself the next morning, hungover, staring at this or that wintry landscape and traveling back in time, to the tranquillity of cold, to the wastes of Orenburg and the blessing of a blind saint that made my mind glide serenely over sparkling carpets of snow. Never mind that snowy fields had brought me nothing but ailment. Never mind that I had been Old Man Frost—I longed for a blind saint.
• • •
Perhaps, if I would not surrender to the professors, could I at least read up on the physics of cold and do my own explaining? Yet, the more I read, the more labyrinthine the science seemed. When I trudged through Bernoulli’s Hydrodynamica, I thought that if running water required colder temperatures to freeze, then perhaps my blood ran faster in my vessels. Or perhaps, my heartbeat was faster—but Ivan’s physician friends taught me how to measure my heart beat with supreme scientific accuracy—and it wasn’t.
Then I discovered theories of animal heat and Boerhaave’s hypothesis that heat was produced by friction of small particles of blood against walls of the vessels. So I thought that my blood was slower, made less friction, and froze easier, and that was why I felt colder than other people—didn’t this follow from Bernoulli and Boerhaave?
• • •
Where in all of this was Paulie Svetogorov? We remained friends of a sort. He stuck with the regiment, and he had gained a bit of weight and lost a bit of hairline, gained in ferocity toward the lower ranks, and lost his ability to hold back tears when they sang old regimental songs. He was, however, still indispensable if one sought fun. I remember a drunken bachelor party in someone’s mansion just outside St. Pete’s: the household’s serf theater gave a tolerable rendition of a smutty French vaudeville show, after which the actresses joined the table to sit in the revelers’ laps; followed by licentious frolics and inebriated racing around on horseback in the mansion’s park. I took part in the racing but not in the frolics, as did Paulie. Back indoors, on another round of drinks, someone pointed out, “Svetogorov, you’ve stopped whoring around. Are you about to marry or something?”
“Marrying is for geezers. And whoring is for losers. I have ideals, gentlemen,” Paulie proclaimed, but for some peculiar reason, his stare, suddenly sour, fell on me—and lingered, while his fingers pinched the strings of his guitar.
What ideals? But I was drunk so I let it all go in one ear and out the other. I drank rather too much during that time, as often as not in the company of Ivan Kuznetzov, in a tiny basement room he shared with one more aspirant, a room where a barrel stove ran so hot that the Latin quotes that hung all over the walls fluttered in the ascending streams of warm air. One night, Ivan’s roommate, quite intoxicated, babbled about Paracelsus, “the greatest magus and physician of all times,” and his four environs—fire, air, water, earth—and the creatures that live in each one.
It is simply a matter of symmetry, the student argued. For us humans, earth is our terra firma and air is our medium. We can’t move in earth, but we can walk on it, and we move in air, we breathe it. So, just as we humans walk on earth and breathe air, there should be gnomes who breathe earth and walk on water, salamanders who walk on air and breathe fire, and undines who walk on fire and breathe water! And here I suddenly imagined Anna as an undine, meandering the path between two elements, in a strange world of fiery grasses swaying in the water-breeze, and I thought then that perhaps—in a fire, in a heated steam, in a bathhouse, a sauna perhaps, we could do it, I could make love to her, in an undine world . . . And I pictured it so clearly and vividly that I almost suffocated in the swell of my own heart. But then I thought: She’d never, ever agree to it. So I said, What about ice? Can undines breathe ice?
N
o one could answer.
And then, as the night grew old, and the number of people in the room seemed to swell and shrink and then become uncountable, the gangly and bumbling Ivan Kuznetzov folded himself to kneel beside me and took my hand in both of his (I was half lying on a bed, sipping claret out of an earthen mug, focusing on the way the taste of wine reacted with the taste of the snuff packed between my gum and cheek). Ivan said, “I haven’t had a chance to thank you, sir. I do so now. You saved my life. If not for you, I would not be here.” Then he kissed my hand. The palm of my hand—he turned it over, reverently, as a Tarot card that foretold his fate. Then he sprang to his feet and rushed out.
Ivan’s kiss, planted right in the pit of my palm, where the heart line and the brain line swoop past each other, sent a sweet shiver down my body. Long after Ivan had gone, I kept staring at my hand while my heart and my brain argued, accusing each other of having enjoyed it.
• • •
Ivan’s friends finally found me a thermometer. For all I know it could have been spirited away from the academy’s laboratory of physics, and it was as big as Catherine’s scepter. I could barely hide it under my coat when I went to a brothel where I planned to perform an experiment on myself.
I did not visit just any brothel. I only trusted the Preobrazhensky-certified brothel, run by the respected businesswoman of humble beginnings, a former serf and now Madame Matryona Ilyinichna. Yes, my old Matryona.
I’d heard of her success, but hadn’t seen her since 1770. I certainly never visited her fine establishment, as a customer or otherwise. And there I was, nine years later, facing her just as if we were in the backyard of old. Both of us speechless, blank-faced. Then she said, “Please follow me,” and ushered me to her sitting room: straight-backed arm chairs and couch, brass-framed mirror over the mantel, a bureau. She reached to help me out of my greatcoat, and I hastened to say, “Not now.” She sat on a couch in front of me. A dress of burgundy velvet, a string of pearls. A crown of golden hair. Her hands—with those prominent, laundress’s knuckles—were folded primly in her lap.
The Age of Ice: A Novel Page 10