“You—and Savva—are doing well?”
“We are. How can I serve you?”
Why was it so hard to say, “I’d like to buy time with one of your girls”? When I did say it, she showed just the very faintest smile, replying, “Certainly. Shall I ring for one?”
Which embarrassed me nonetheless, and I blurted out, “I’d need her to be in a blindfold,” though I had not meant it to come out that way.
“Certainly.”
“Good.”
“May I stow your coat for you?”
“No.”
“Would you rather use me instead of—”
“No.”
She rose and glided to a tasseled cord hung next to the doorway. But when she reached for the cord, her hand was hesitant. “Alexander Mikhailovich, what are you hiding under your coat?”
“It’s of no concern to you.”
She tarried, the cord’s tassel in her hand. Her chin was tight when she looked back at me—and, holding her unblinking eyes fixed on mine, she slowly pulled the cord—
It dawned on me, finally. “Oh God, Matryona! Have I ever hurt you? What do you think I am about to do? And why are you letting me do it, if you think I am up to no good?”
Her countenance began to melt; her lips quivered—“I . . . no . . .”
The old despair reared its head; I grew angry at her and at myself, and I should have just left, but part of me whispered obnoxiously that now would be an excellent time to measure my temperature—precisely because I was so upset.
So I persisted. Leaning back in an arm chair in a tiny room, squeezing a thermometer in my hand, asking the girl in front of me to undress and flaunt herself. Saying That will be all sooner perhaps than she expected, rushing out past her, stuffing a banknote into her hands as she stood hunched, her blindfolded head flitting like a bird’s, trying to hear what she could not see.
It was just as well. The next step of my experiment was to go to a barber—a bloodletter—on a track that followed Bernoulli’s and Boerhaave’s reasoning. This track of pure scientific inquiry into running liquids—blood in particular—and its relationship to bodily heat did not have to involve a detour to a tavern; but let us excuse the distraught experimenter. When I finally arrived at my destination, the butcher of my choice bled me (at my insistence) to the point of almost passing out. I then dragged myself out of his shop into the back alley, drunk and nauseated; I toppled into a mound of sooty snow punctuated with urine of dogs and beggars, and grabbed a handful of it—to compare the result with the thermometer reading. I hoped that the snow would melt in my hand, now that my blood, a quarter of it left (or so it seemed), was running faster along its circle, and thus rubbed (undoubtedly) against my blood vessels so much harder.
The snow didn’t melt. The thermometer stood at the freezing point of water, just where it had been heading in the brothel. I passed out and came to hours later, sans my winter coat and my thermometer. Did somebody steal them? Did any of it really happen? I don’t remember.
• • •
I do remember that shortly thereafter, pale and penitent, I was sitting in the salon of the grandmotherly Mme Ex-Governor, my relative and patroness since the times before Orenburg. “But some of your associations,” she was saying, “those libertines, darling, those vivisectionists, it hardly becomes a man in your position.”
I said, “Ma’am, my position is that of a career officer, now retired. I can’t help but feel—well, uprooted, ma’am.”
“But of course, my dear, of course you should feel uprooted. And I just happen to know the salve. Marriage, my dear, is the prescription. I can find you a perfect match. And don’t you smirk at me, young man, don’t you imagine that you are wiser than this old lady. My husband has just the same to tell you, just the other day he said as we supped: our darling Prince Alexander is floundering, he said, he needs a wife or a desk job in a collegium. Would you rather take the desk job?”
• • •
I kept having dreams of ice. A boy with a burning broom. I can’t scream—there is ice in my mouth. I’m Old Man Frost. Then one night I was standing by the window in Anna’s apartment, a window that looked upon a busy street, with carriages and people, and lanterns rocking in their hands, feet and hooves kneading the same old snow—and my longing came upon me again, taking shape as it rose from the pit of my stomach to the top of my throat. “I wish I had snowy fields in my window,” I said.
There was movement beside me, it was Anna. She said, “Your brother is at peace. I wish you could understand.”
I said, “I’d like to go to the country, visit my estate.”
“I’d like to go with you,” she said. “You wouldn’t mind, would you?”
I said, “No.” Meaning no, don’t go and no, I wouldn’t mind if you did.
• • •
I made arrangements. The house in the countryside, in my inherited estate Nikolskoe, stood half shut down for the winter. I ordered the staff to liven it up for our visit. The butler did a decent job. The wallpaper and the plaster of the ceiling in the dining room had water marks, but the room was clean, the upholstery was refreshed, and there were plenty of candles. The supper (duck broth, puff pastry, and pickled plums) showcased the cook’s enlightenment.
Anna dressed up for the meal. Her cheeks were paler than usual, her lips redder. Her conversation was charming. Then, over tea she smiled coyly and said, “It is funny, Alexander, society; the younger generation is convinced that we are having an affair. The ladies smile at me knowingly, and nothing I say will dissuade them. And the older generation, the grandmothers pull me aside and say what a shame it is that such a prime bachelor as you goes to waste, and instruct me to bend your mind toward matrimony. I—I hate to keep disappointing both generations.”
If it is possible to be frozen in one’s chair while melting on the inside—that was my condition.
She lowered her gaze. “When you walked into my home in Orenburg . . . You were so unlike the man I knew you to be. Helpless . . . as if you were lost. And I was terrified of how I felt because it was a sin—what kind of woman would feel like this when her own husband lay there on his deathbed? But now I think, it was even earlier, I am afraid. It was that winter in Velitzyno, when I was pregnant, and you kept seeking my company just to quench your boredom. When you were so arrogant and careless . . . and desperate—ever since then I was in love with you. A very small love at first—I kept fighting it, I did, but it just wouldn’t go away, and now—by now it is so big that I’m approaching the end of my—of my—ability to cope with it.” Tears came to her eyes.
Oh, the terror! But before I could speak, she composed herself and continued, “A lady friend of mine, Baroness Mimi d’Anglairs, tells me there are men who do not favor women . . . and I can see how Ivan, Mr. Kuznetzov, adores you. Is Mimi . . . is it true about you?”
Now—could it get more tragicomic than this? I hid my face behind my steepled fingers. “No, it is not. Can’t you tell? The only reason I hold back and do not court you is that I cannot marry you.”
I expected she’d ask why. Is this because you proposed to the poor Marie Tolstoy and she promptly fell ill?—No and yes.—Is this because I am your brother’s widow?—Yes and no. I expected a long and painful trading of words, but she just said very evenly and firmly, “Then don’t. You do not have to marry me to be with me.”
She threw a defiant glance at me, and then, letting out a small sound of exasperation, fled the room.
By God, Alexander, do not do it! But I did, I went after her.
Her bedroom was dark, but she was there; she had thrown herself on the bed. I knelt beside her. A creak in the floor, a sob, a sigh. She shifted and her dress made a feathery, dry sound. “I am not just your brother’s widow. I am a living, breathing woman who has dreams, and passions, and—”
“Shh.”
She sat up. “For years I’ve cared, and worried, and tried to fix whatever had been wrong between you and your brother, and I’ve
respected whatever had been right. I’ve done my best to be your brother’s wife, then widow. But I can’t do it anymore!”
I found and squeezed her hand, then let go. “Is my hand cold?”
“Yes.”
“Very cold?”
“Very,” she said. “Are you all right?”
I hugged her knees, stuffing my arms full of her petticoats, and hid my face in the folds of the fabric. “I am going to ask something of you. I am going to ask you to come with me. And most of all, I beg you to trust me—if only just this one time—please, just follow me.”
• • •
Shall we, my dear memory, shall we hold hands now and go back to that place and time, and revel in its waters once more? I had made arrangements in the bathhouse. Enough hot water to bathe the whole Preobrazhensky regiment. Enough steam to see little more than the reddish glow of a stove and pale yellow halos of candle flames, and hazy outlines of wooden walls, benches heaping with the softest sheets I could find, and my best effort—a tub, a clawfoot tub, filled to the brim.
She was hot. I could see tiny beads of moisture on the back of her neck, and I tried to touch her clothes as lightly as I could while undressing her—her bodice, then her stays, then her skirts—and several times I thought I’d pass out, from an overflow of emotion. I could not laugh or talk, and I was short of breath. Now in her shift, she glanced at me and walked over to the bench; before she sat down and pulled off her stockings, I rid myself of my outer clothes.
Perhaps she expected me to sit down by her side, instead of stepping into the tub and submerging myself. Perhaps there was a tinge of surprise in her eyes, yes, as I went under and surfaced a little while later. A surprise and a smile—a smile that was prepared to flee. Please, don’t flee. Please, my love, let me now take your hand into my wet palms, and draw it in, and hold it right at the boundary of air and water, and kiss it, fingertip by fingertip, and then pull gently, pull you in by your hand that I, a sea monster in a whirlpool, now own; let me sink you into my depths—your beautiful caravel, your wrist, arm, leg—and learn how your dark hair clings to your forehead when wet, and how the white sail of your shift floats up to your breasts; and discover the shape of your thighs, and the size of your navel, and the last thing I’ll ever say will be, Let me know if you get cold.
• • •
At the crowning moment my undine, my precious water nymph passed out. The human comedy! She did not look cold—her face was rosy, but still, I feared the worst. I rushed her out of my heat chamber and sank onto the floor by the door, she in my lap, wrapped in sheets. Anna. Anna, wake up! Once a cold draft of air in the hallway had worked its way into her covers and my breath had cooled her brow, she opened her eyes and mumbled in a voice that was so sweetly intoxicated, “Alexander? I must have passed out.”
“Were you cold?” I whispered.
“Cold? Silly. I was too hot.”
“Don’t tell Baroness d’Anglairs,” I said. “She won’t understand.”
• • •
Did this happen before or after my lifelong friend Paulie Svetogorov proposed to my Anna? It had to have been after. He proposed, and she rejected him, and then made a decision to go with me to my country home.
And if so, when did Svetogorov learn that we had consummated our passion? The moment he saw her again, I am sure. Or the moment he saw me. A certain glow in her face, a certain bounce in my step. One cannot conceal such things from a hungry eye.
And yet, if she ever imagined that our routines of coexistence would change, that I would visit her bedroom as a lover, as a secret husband would, she was wrong. I longed to be with her, but the formidable logistics limited me to but a few carefully orchestrated occasions. Thereby she was to learn that whenever I presented myself to her as her lover, I was—how to put it?—in a hot tub. In other words, the dark swan, the prince of her dreams turned out to be a man of bizarre and restrictive sexual tastes, a water fetishist.
She was willing to put up with me, at least at first. And not just put up. I’ve seen how her passion exploded in my hands—an undertow heavy and inescapable that would burst through—a muted shriek, the craned neck. So what salt then eroded her trust? Not the mordant wit of the Baroness d’Anglairs, I hope. Not the dogged persistence of Svetogorov, a poor knight at her service, ready to turn his ear to her grievances!
What demon kept whispering to her that the kind of treatment she was getting from me was suggestive of disrespect? What confusion of faith indoctrinated her that doing it in the water world was more sinful and perverse than to be plastered on the sheets of dry land?
One time she asked me, probing the hot water with her hand, “Is this necessary, Alexander?” And I answered as best I could, which was not enough, “Yes. I am sorry I cannot explain it very well. But it is not a fancy. It is a necessity. Please, forgive me.” She gifted me with a strange, melancholy passion that night, and her eyes were as still as water that is about to freeze.
• • •
By then Ivan Kuznetzov no longer tutored in Anna’s school—she dismissed him. “He is a bad influence on the boys,” she said. Any gossip in St. Petersburg would have told her that I had never looked at another woman; by God, she could see it herself, but I suppose the possibility of Ivan as her competitor could still entrap her mind. This was perhaps the true reason why I backed out of making him my personal secretary—an appointment that he would have loved to accept now that his stipend had fallen through, as had Ivan’s other dream—a private laboratory with me as some sort of Lord Cavendish, a nobleman-scientist, and him as my trusted assistant and inspired colleague. Let’s just say, my brothel-exsanguination fiasco made me averse to experimentation. I fled to the safety of pure theory.
Cold is not simply an absence of heat. I read that some considered heat an element caloric, which, when united with other elements, raised their temperature. By the same token, cold was thought of the same way—an element called frigorific, whose mode of action was fundamentally similar: Caloric plus water made steam. Frigorific plus water made ice. Clearly, I carried too much of the frigorific, that’s all. A comforting thought.
• • •
It was at about that time, 1780, I believe, that I met a certain Commodore Loginov from the admiralty, in the salon of Baroness D’Anglairs. The conversation with Loginov, superfluous at first, soon touched on a subject that ignited my interest. “The empress is beginning to realize,” the commodore mused, “that we have to apply ourselves to geographical exploration. We could either leave the turf open for the British or we could claim it for ourselves. Is it really a choice? Because it is only a matter of time that what they call the Northwest Passage—it will be a Northeast Passage to us—will be found.”
He was talking about the search for a shortcut between Europe and the western coast of the Americas. The coveted passage through the Arctic Ocean, which was supposed to be free of ice, according to experts. The passage that James Cook was sent to find, only to suffer a horrendous death at the hands of aborigines in 1779.
An exploration of the Arctic! A tremor passed over me—to go there and beyond, to the places where stately palaces of ice glide serenely over the pale blue abyss of the ocean!
Before long I was a member of the Arctic Exploration Committee at the admiralty. It is not that I believed that I would actually sail anywhere, I just felt I was in the right company rubbing shoulders with people who discussed topics such as When does winter glaciation occur in the Bering Strait? and How do Inuit people battle snow blindness?
• • •
And then, one day in March 1781, right at the plateau of my limited, guarded, cautious happiness, an officer knocked on my door and handed me a letter. It was a challenge to a duel, issued by none other than Guards Major Svetogorov. The grounds? The honor of a lady.
The lady in question was, of course, Anna.
This I regret: I told her about the duel. I called on her, still holding Svetogorov’s challenge in my hand. Her apartment was a s
cene of domestic peace: the boys were reciting something in German behind the doors of the study, and Mme Knopf, by the sound of it, was in the kitchen, tasting the cook’s béchamel sauce. None of it stopped me. I all but pushed Anna into her bedroom. I think—I think, for a brief second, she nonetheless expected to hear something good, something emotional and urgent, but wonderful. And then I said, shaking the letter in the air, “What is Svetogorov to you that he has appointed himself as a defender of your honor against me?”
She was dumbfounded. She could not even understand at first. By the time the word duel came out, it was a fight already, shouts breaking through whispers, because she kept begging me—through tears—to lower my voice—for the boys’ sake—but I would not, I hounded the one truth I was after, dislodging many more than I was ready for—chains, trains, coils of stowed-away and festering upsets, one linked to another. So, when I cried, “You’ve had him as a suitor for years and you didn’t tell me,” she rebuked me, “You hardly tell me anything about yourself, so why should I? After all these years you are no more approachable, you keep me at arm’s length. Your friend Paulie whom you think stupid but who is just a normal man with a good heart who courts and proposes a marriage to a lady—your friend told me more about you than you did in a decade!”
“And you believe him,” I went on. “A good heart! Don’t you know what fantasy he’s capable of, don’t you understand anything at all?!”
And at last she shouted, “Do you think that I told him to do it? Is that what you think?!”
My anger turned inward. “God, Anna, I’m sorry. Forgive me. I shouldn’t have come.” I slumped to my knees, then lower yet, sat on my haunches. I reached to hold her by the hem of her skirt.
She curled her lips. “Yes you should have. How else would we have talked?”
I laid the hem over my knee, stretched and smoothed it. “I’ve upset you. I hate to upset you because I can’t handle it. I can handle my upsets, I can just kill them and bury them, but your upsets are so much worse—”
The Age of Ice: A Novel Page 11