The Age of Ice: A Novel

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The Age of Ice: A Novel Page 12

by Sidorova, J. M.


  “Kill and bury?”

  “My upset emotions, I mean.”

  She blotted her eyes dry. “I’ll go to him and tell him to reconsider. He will listen to me.”

  This he will listen seared me with jealousy again. My fists trapped the hem of her dress. I wanted to twist and crumple the fabric. “No, absolutely not, never. Promise me you won’t do it.”

  “I can’t.”

  “WHY?”

  “What if you die?”

  “I don’t care! I’d rather die than have you go begging a madman for my life!”

  “Do you want me to become a widow twice over? How do you think I’ll live?”

  “Don’t you understand? Svetogorov won’t listen to you, no, he’ll bargain with you. So what exactly are you prepared to offer him in exchange for one chance to take a shot at me, for a chance—not a sure thing—that I’ll be hit?”

  “He is not like that, he is a decent man!”

  “Are you defending him again?”

  Fresh tears filled her eyes. “You are being cruel. Let go of my dress. Let go!” She pulled the hem out of my hands and went to the window; she looked outside, repositioned the drapes. I got to my feet. I said, “This is how it is going to be. You shall not go to him, write, or speak to him about this matter. Understood?”

  She did not reply. She was facing away from me. She pulled her shoulders up, stiff, as if she felt chilled. I stood for a while, then I left the room.

  • • •

  What if I told her that I myself was considering seeing Svetogorov?

  He was in his sitting room, playing with his blade when I entered, tossing up candles and chopping them midair. He also had a jolly officer company gathered around, and at least half of them sprang up on seeing me, formed a cordon between us, and went on to remind me about the code of honor. “Hey hey hey—Alexander Mikhailovich—Prince Velitzyn—you can’t be here on your own behalf ! Where is your second, sir?”

  Paulie made a show of sheathing his sword. “Look who’s here.” He strutted back and forth. I said, “I need to have a word with him and I will.” The men closed in around me. “Come now,” I said, “stand back. What are we going to do—fight? That part is already penciled in for later.” One of the men, a veteran with an eye patch, told me, sotto voce, “Alexander Mikhailovich, but you know how this works, don’t you, my friend? We won’t leave you two alone, so whatever you say may be rendered ineffectual by the very fact of our presence.”

  I said, “I’ll give it a try.” As they eased off, I pleaded to Svetogorov, “Paul—look at me. Let your guests bear witness: I don’t care if my visit is considered cowardly, I am here to remind you of something. I challenged you years ago, remember that day? You said you wouldn’t fight me. It was the right thing to do, the best thing a friend could do. I was not myself then and you were right to point it out. I owe you that. So here I am now and I’m urging you—reconsider. We can sort this out. We don’t have to go to extremes to resolve this, it is not a Gordian knot. Reconsider, Paul.”

  I thought I’d got through to him. I thought I had. He seemed to be introspecting, but it turned out he was merely searching for the sharpest riposte. “Hmm, let me see if I’ve got this right. Prince Velitzyn is telling me I am deranged and he is sensibility incarnate. Why, thank you.” He furrowed his brow in mock pensiveness. “The way I remember it, I had said then that you need to fix yourself first. Well, I see you’ve fixed yourself quite well, a purveyor of good sense. So we can fight then, I surmise!”

  And that was it. The eye-patch bearer turned to me. “You did what you came here for. Now you’d better go.”

  I took a breath, studying Paulie—not a crack in his visage of amusement. Why would I not turn around and leave? Because, whatever else I may have thought about it, I had not come here to seek peace alone. I’d come to get him to talk about Anna—peace or war—to glean what he had been to her. So I said, “All right. Then let’s make it clear: what will we fight about? About me calling you a fool twenty years ago? Or about you appointing yourself to protect the honor of the lady who in fact has not requested any of your protection?”

  Now I’d got through. He bristled. “Has not requested? Then how do I know about your escapades in the first place? About the way you use her, denying her the decency of marriage?”

  Those words were like a surprise cannon going off. Had she . . . indeed told him everything about us? I drew forward, “You lying son of a bitch!”

  “Freak!”

  Paulie’s pals grabbed me like brambles, pushing me back and bouncing Paulie in the other direction as I shouted, You have no honor! You’re just out to hurt her for rejecting you! while Paulie raged, I should have whipped your ass with the full ten lashes instead of five that day, I should’ve flicked my wrist to teach you a damned good lesson from the get-go—

  They goaded me out. I was back at the front door now and it had been closed; only the eye-patch veteran remained with me, restraining—or steadying—me by the forearm. “Flicked his wrist?” he repeated and shook his head. “See now, Alexander Mikhailovich, what comes out of this kind of talk?”

  I rubbed my face. My hands were shaky, as if not my own. “I suppose . . . Who is his second?”

  “I am,” he said, and introduced himself—Major Kaledin. He let go of my forearm and watched me, as if testing whether I’d stand or fall.

  “I suppose you’ll hear from my second before tomorrow,” I replied.

  “Will do.”

  I turned and took the stairs down.

  • • •

  He is lying.

  She had not told him anything about me. No. Yes. No. My mind, like a rabid dog, kept chasing itself around the triangle—Anna, I, Svetogorov—picking and dropping blame, pity, hate.

  I enlisted Commodore Loginov as my second. He and Kaledin organized everything splendidly: the time, the place, pistols inspection. The rules. One shot at twenty paces was all we would get. Misfires, failures to spark, et cetera, counted as shots. Loginov said, “If either of the parties would like to make a final statement, to be disclosed in the event of death, please write it and leave it in your pocket for us to discover.”

  The night before the duel was terrible. I needed sleep or my aim would suffer, but could not get any. I had a glass of Cognac brandy and forced myself to part with the bottle. Or else—hangover, shaky hands. I wrote down my bequests (everything I owned went to Andrei Junior), then I wrote him a letter. Then I began to write one to Anna and tore it up, wrote another, and it followed the same fate.

  It’s my fault. It’s your fault. I love you. I cannot love you anymore.

  I imagined how at this same time, across town, a balding, forty-something-year-old boy with a belly-bulge, a formerly dashing not young anymore lonely Guards Major Svetogorov was scratching his last words on his sheet of paper. An ink-fingered, endangered man—just as I was—convinced that whatever words he’d choose, they would forever soothe—or hurt—the woman he wrote to. I grabbed my remaining flintlock and ran to my sitting room, where I positioned myself in front of a mirror in my best duel stance (right side forward, stomach drawn in, right arm in line with chest), aiming into the face of my dim reflection. I asked, “Why did these people do this to you? Answer me! I don’t want to shoot at Paulie or fall out of love with Anna. I don’t want it!”

  The obstinate mirror twin only glared back. “Fire!” I said. And—click. The pistol was unloaded, of course. I lowered my arm: my mirror twin still stood his ground. I took a candelabra and approached. The man in the mirror was the same me that I’d known for years. But what was it, frozen into his features? The kindness of snow? The cruelty of ice? Was it ice in his mouth? So, whose blood are you reddened with, freak?

  A pang of terror. I backed away, fled to my study. There, I wrote: Anna, I loved you the only way I could. I was born with a mental and physical defect that would have hurt you if not for the water. I am sorry if I made you unhappy. I was too much in love with you to let you
go.

  • • •

  The next morning: the March sun, fresh air. The arrival. The site was in a birch grove. A perfunctory call for reconciliation, refused. A pat-down for coins, badges, anything that could deflect a ball. Selecting a proper orientation of both parties to the wind. Then to the background and to the sun. Measuring of the distance. Loading of the pistols. Getting into position. Set . . . Fire!

  We fired.

  I kept standing. So did he. A ticklish stream of liquid reached my armpit and started flowing down the side of my trunk. Then he collapsed.

  I remembered to lower my arm. I walked to the parked carriages, shaking blood off my fingers, but it kept trickling from inside the sleeve. I stuffed my hand in my pocket, burying it in the letters I brought with me. I waited for the surgeon to return from Svetogorov. “Well, nothing I can do there,” he said, “Let’s take a look at you, sir.” The surgeon pulled the ball out of my upper arm right on the spot, while I stared away, at Svetogorov’s body.

  “Bed rest and hot water bottles,” the surgeon said. “Highly recommend. You show signs of shock, my dear sir.”

  I nodded. Svetogorov’s voice in my head kept taunting, So, whose blood are you reddened with, Alexis?

  Yours, Paulie, I whispered.

  When he returned from the body, Loginov shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” I repeated stupidly.

  “Nothing.”

  “Where did I hit him?”

  “In the face.”

  • • •

  I will never know. Silence was the only message Paulie had prepared in the event of his death. Perhaps he truly had nothing to say. Perhaps he had already told Anna everything he wanted to say. All I know is, our fates had come full circle. Years ago, I had approached Anna to get closer to my brother. Now she may have approached Svetogorov to get closer to me. The rest followed.

  After the duel, I asked Commodore Loginov to deliver the news of my survival to my sister-in-law. Then I headed straight for my country estate, twelve miles away. In just a couple of hours I climbed into my clawfoot tub, curled up, and closed my eyes. Sometime later came a knock on the door to the sauna. I so wished it would be Anna. It was Cyril, wondering if I needed anything.

  • • •

  Cut it off, bury it, leave it behind. In the weeks that followed, Anna and I made a truce, though it was as delicate as new ice crust. One had to tiptoe and follow very narrow, predefined paths. I continued to appear alongside her in those public places where such appearances mattered, and performed the parental responsibilities due to my godson—

  No. We didn’t make a “truce.” I simply came back, much like my brother came back from the grave in my dreams in Orenburg and took his seat at the dinner table as if nothing had happened. It was Andrei Junior’s fencing lesson, so I’d come to pick him up as I always did. Afterward, Anna asked, Would you like to stay for dinner, and I did.

  . . . But to invite her to my heat chamber ever again, or even to broach the subject of not inviting her—a sheer, unthinkable impossibility.

  • • •

  If I had not been obsessed with hot water before, I now became a compulsive soaker. Feeling melancholy?—Soak it. Feeling angry, powerless, mistreated?—Soak it. Besides, water was my only conduit to her, the only medium of many precious memories. I would sit in my tub and reimagine, rerun, review. Once, I fell asleep in the tub and made love to her in my dream; the dream turned so real that my body was fooled. My paroxysm startled me out of sleep and, disoriented, I could not understand why the water around me was so strange, covered with film—a fragile, breaking kind, a slough of my passion. Then I suddenly understood, and scrambled out of the tub in terror. It was ice. Ice formed over me when I dreamed of Anna. Had I slept there any longer I could have ended up embedded in it!

  Later, sitting on the edge of the tub and watching the incipient ice floes melt and vanish, I thought of seeding crystals. In his Prodromus Crystallographiae, Capeller said that symmetry of crystals was underpinned by the sameness of their tiny building blocks—moleculi. And Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the famous microscopist, saw tiny building blocks of man’s seed, the moving, swimming animalculi. Were my animalculi more like moleculi? Did they form crystals instead of being alive, wiggling about? Was I less alive? I seeded crystals. I made icicles endure like diamonds—

  Had I . . . those times when I’d made love to Anna, in this very hot tub, if I hadn’t withdrawn from her at the last moment, would I . . . have infested her with crystals of ice? Would I have harmed her?

  I slumped to the floor, made sick by self-hate. I wanted to break my teeth gnashing at the tub’s edge. No. No! I hadn’t harmed anybody!

  He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

  • • •

  All that notwithstanding, I did not miss a single meeting of the Arctic Exploration Committee, which had by then become quite wrapped in politics. I thought it was our intent to keep the Britons out of the equation, what with the way we signaled to them with our League of Armed Neutrality, with wrangling over import tariffs, and with the rumors that our trade agreement that was set to expire in 1786 would not be renewed, at least not on “most favored country” terms. But one day we were introduced to a certain Sir James Harris, an envoy to the empress’s court, and from then on we suddenly found ourselves cooperating with the very country we sought to outperform in the matter of exploration of the higher latitudes.

  At the time, Russian exploration was on a long break. If it proceeded at all, it was as a slow encroachment of Cossacks on native Siberian tribes. That’s what our Arctic committee, and Loginov foremost, had been droning into the empress’s ear for years: the Russian Empire needed to show organized effort, claim her own Northeast and put it on her maps. Loginov droned and droned, only to merit a mere nod of amusement from the empress. And yet—one pitch made by two foreigners, a certain Mr. Coxe, who had published a book on Cook’s travels, and Dr. Pallas, a visiting scientist—and suddenly the expedition to the Arctic was an imminent reality.

  Like other committee members, I felt a pinch to my national pride, until Loginov explained it all to me one evening in the privacy of his study over a well-chilled bottle of Swedish aquavit and a tray of black caviar canapés: Let the Britons need us, because, Lord witness, they do. Their best bet to find the Northwest Passage, the inimitable Captain Cook, had failed. So let us accept British help in money and fine scientific instruments, and swallow it, biting off the attached strings. Or some of the strings, at any rate. I argued, our trade treaty terms would soften toward the Britons now, wouldn’t they? That, they would, he opined. We toasted the future with our tiny shots of fine, imported aquavit.

  Soon we heard that the British navy lieutenant Joseph Billings was the only qualified candidate to lead the expedition, according to Count Semyon R. Vorontsov, our ambassador in London. Granted, Billings had sailed with Cook, but merely as an astronomer’s assistant—the position Ivan Kuznetzov was in when I had met him on my road to Orenburg.

  Speaking of which, the expedition needed astronomers and I thought of Ivan. By then, the poor student was nursing his life’s disappointments with melancholy poetry rather than doing anything practical. I felt culpable: it wasn’t just the crash of his tutoring career, the crash that Anna (and I—by inaction) had instigated. Let’s also say, I did not offer to put Ivan on the expedition’s roster in order to send him away from me—and prove to Anna that I was not attached to him. I named Ivan to Dr. Pallas, but he requested a written proposal for astronomical studies, a document Ivan could not draft in time.

  The next time I called on Ivan, he was alone in his den—the basement apartment where I had partied more than once with him and his libertine friends. The room, damp and dark, oppressed me now. Or perhaps it was the way Ivan sat, crouching on a ridiculously low chair, a baby chair almost. He was sitting within a narrow rectangle of lit space, daylight squeezing through the window, three-quarters of which were below the street level
. His knees were locked, his feet turned inward, a folio and some papers were in his lap, and an inkwell was on the floor to his one side, a bottle of vodka to the other. The sight pained me.

  “Let’s take a ride,” I said. It was the end of April, a wet, breezy day. We drove all the way to the seaside of Vasilievsky Island, a raw windswept beach, straight as a blade. We stood and watched a schooner struggle against headwinds to make way into the Gulf of Finland, past the guardian island of Kronstadt. Then I caught him staring at me. The cold light of the April sun was not kind to him. He’d never filled in, he’d remained boylike, only dried up a bit more, and he looked taut and brittle now, his skin approaching the texture and color of eggshell.

  “They discovered a new planet,” he said. “Uranus.”

  “Who?”

  He waved his hand toward the West. His eyes were teary, abraded by the wind. That’s when I thought, What would have happened if I had let him love me? No, more: if he, not Anna had been my lover? Could I have lived that life? Could it have sustained me better than what I had—or had not?

  Would any one of us be happier today?

  He said, “It could have been me,” and I was fairly sure he spoke about discovering planets, but another meaning seeped through. It could have been me, not Anna.

  I hurried to change the subject. “Regarding your proposal. Timing is becoming yet more important. Mr. Billings apparently claims he would make the astronomical observations all by himself—he considers himself an expert. So, if you really want to get in, you have to act now.”

  “Sir, I—”

  “You are not going to do it.”

  “It’s no use.”

  “I’ll talk to the commodore. We’ll induce Pallas to make it less onerous.”

  “Thank you, my Prince. You are too kind. But there is no point. Dr. Pallas I’m sure has his favorites. Besides, I am not built well enough to endure the Arctic.”

  I started to walk back uphill to my ride.

 

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