At H +20º/B +36º, pins and needles started in my body. I wanted to stretch my limbs, but forced myself to be still. I dived into memories instead. I smiled remembering Andrei Junior’s cavalier judgment: I can’t believe you haven’t found out how sturdy you are against cold!—I’m finding it out now, I whispered to him. Then I thought about Anna. No longer with indignation, just with clear-faced sadness. Would I ever dare approach her again, would I live to do it? With what I’d just done? Nothing would ever be the same, would it? I remembered Orenburg, the blind saint and the promise of his overwhelming blessing that would erase every sin. The kindness of snow. The cruelty of ice. Suddenly, fear gripped me. I thought I’d tricked Old Man Frost, but what if I hadn’t? What if I was being ice-sick again, if in a different way? Had it been me back at the forge killing Feodor, was it me now, here, on the verge of panic? Or something else? And if so, when had I stopped being myself, how far back? The H temperature began to creep down as I stared, and the more I willed it to stop, the faster it went.
My skin crawled, my limbs tingled, my breath got stuck in my breast. But the hand temperature slowed and stopped at ‒4º. Belatedly, I recognized the familiar pattern: I became anxious—my hands became cold, nothing more than that. The belly thermometer still held at +36º. This was a relief.
And yet—I was nothing like Feodor. My temperatures dropped where his held, and vice versa. Where Feodor shook, I didn’t. Only the tingling in my body increased and merged into one zinging, buzzing pressure. Then my internal thermometer lost a degree for the first time (H ‒5º/B +35º). The buzzing presence seemed to break through me and spread. It was so loud it gave me chills. The chills were followed by a heat wave, which carried such a great sense of urgency that I sprang to my feet. I started pacing, then remembered “Motion is heat,” a quote from Sawyer; That is not what we are doing here, I said through the buzz in my ears, so stand still, and fell to my knees. At H ‒10º/B +30º, I was overtaken with the greatest, most frigid fear, This is intolerable. At H ‒13º/B +29º, Stop resisting. But I wasn’t resisting anything, or if I was—there were so many urges hot-cold-tearing at me at once that I could not possibly have yielded to them all. Should I run down the ice bed of the river kicking my legs out and swinging my arms like a windmill? Or burrow face-first into snow as into Anna’s petticoats, and feel it rub my cheeks, pack into my eyes, nostrils, throat. Or tear my remaining clothes off. Or stretch so wide that I could hug the river—because the river was Anna—claw through her armor of ice and scoop her body up—her long, sleeping body where fish of secret desires floated in suspended animation. At H ‒20º/B +27º, I started convulsing, trying and failing to vomit out my shriek, to weep out my wail—I could not stand it anymore, could not explode over and over, and scatter apart, and yet remain so small and separate, so pressurized and dense, so burning with heat-cold of envy and love.
Then H ‒25º/B +25º struck as the twelfth hour. I looked at the thermometers because everything changed. The heat-cold buzz, the wail-scatter—they stopped. And in front of my eyes, the column of mercury in the “B” thermometer nudged back and forth, as if incredulous, then plummeted, multiplying into a forest of falling needles in my collapsing vision. And, as all these mercury needles sank into the white flesh of snow and were swallowed and disappeared without a trace, I realized with the last bit of my mind capable of human irony, that in the end no one but I had the temperature point of transfiguration. No one’s last words but mine were freezing into garlands straight out of his mouth. But the next moment none of it mattered, everything turned into contentment. The blind saint was here, raising his hand for a blessing, no, I was him, blind, but I did not need eyes, I saw through my ten million fingertips and my words of kindness were snowing gently on every tree and every home, and so I stretched all my arms and blanketed the river, its banks, forests, the fort, people and beasts, Ouchapin and Feodor, Sawyer and Billings, Robeck and Merck with one loving-cold, serene-white, peaceful-glacial blessing.
• • •
From here, Merck’s notes must carry the story. In March he finally received two Yakuti guides, a horse-drawn sled, and Billings’s blessing to go up the river and recover his coveted mammoth remains. He came upon something else instead. He wrote:
In a few German miles traveling up the Yasachnoi we encountered a majestic ice formation that blocked our way. Twenty feet tall, it had a coniferous shape, with many downturned limbs extending from the main body. These limbs reached the banks of the river and merged with the surrounding snow and ice. As we approached we could discern the remarkable multiplicity of forms that shaped the structure. Its broad base was formed of thick and smooth masses of ice, layered upon one another in a manner resembling wax depositions at the foot of a candle. These were covered with dense groupings of mushroomlike ice growth, and bigger, cauliflowerlike heads of ice. Further up the structure, the main body tapered and seemed to be predominantly built of elongated elements. The extending limbs were extremely complex in composition, and appeared to be a knotted and tangled profusion of different ice forms: cascades of water frozen in motion, foaming eruptions of rime, long veins like icicles, tufts of finest hairlike ice, fanning thin sheets of ice, dendritic formations remarkably similar to spruce branches, complete with needles. It was a remarkable display, as if purposefully put there by Providence in our path to demonstrate the inexhaustible richness of its wonders.
Merck’s notes say the Yakuti took it for a particularly ominous manifestation of Ulü-Toyon and balked. To them, it was a clear warning to go no farther. Naturally, Merck had to come close and inspect, if only to dismiss irrational fears. About halfway up the ice trunk, he discerned a thermometer. He hacked at the ice with an ax and came across my body. I was hard as a rock, eyes closed, the face—my face—bore a peaceful expression.
I only know this from Merck’s journal. At the time, I was still insensate. I am sure Merck downplayed the drama of the scene when he wrote, “When I asked the savages for help in recovery of Mr. Velitzyn, they took leave of me.” Hard to blame them—demolishing Ulü-Toyon and bringing home its core was more than they could stomach. The fact is, displaying great determination and bravery, the caw-handed, bookish Dr. Merck hacked me out of the ice all by himself and loaded me in the sled and managed to direct the horse back to the fort, which exertions took him the rest of the day and some part of the night. Not to mention that he sacrificed the one chance he had at laying his hands on a perfectly preserved mammoth!
I became his mammoth find. Of sorts.
• • •
My first sensation—how shall I best describe it?—love because your love has died, hang on to it because you lost it. Something impossible, something moving in two directions at once. The meaning of life under my fingers, like a long tail of a goddess’s dress—slipping, slipping past, as she walks—walks—away—and now she is gone. All that was left was me, raw and broken, and alive—only, being alive was so much smaller than what I had been just moments before.
Then I smelled burning wood and saw—through my eyelids, and, eventually, opened eyes, a light of fire pulsing through the cracks of a makeshift wall. From it issued ghostly tongues and currents of warmth that slinked in and touched me, pushed me, nuzzled me.
I went through stages of rediscovering reality. A symbol—Sailcloth, Edmondson & Gardner, Moor Lane, Lancaster, Lancashire—on a crate above my head was a complete enigma at first, then the words waxed with meaning, then they formed a sentence. The sentence entered into a relationship with a crate it was written on, and the crate became part of a stack of crates. Comprehension crept over reality like a hoarfrost pattern over a windowpane.
I was prostrate in our expedition’s storage shed, next to the smithy. But as soon as I understood this, I rushed to the peculiar—and dreadful—conclusion that I was Feodor. And the face that just showed over a workbench behind which I lay—had to be Mr. Velitzyn, the avenging angel thermometrist.
The face’s mouth opened in awe, then whispered,
“Good heavens!”
I rasped, “Please! I promise to do no evil.”
The face withdrew. Somebody started pacing and praying rapidly. Then the face cautiously reappeared. It said, “Mr. Velitzyn, is that you?” and instantly became the face of Dr. Merck.
I said, “I don’t know.”
Again, Merck retreated behind the workbench. I followed up on the thought, “I hope I am.”
Somebody—Merck, I presume—took off running, but stabbed his foot on something heavy and suffered considerable pain, by the sounds of it. After a plaintive grunt, there was a long silence. I used it to consider the good and bad repercussions of being Mr. Velitzyn, which train of thought led me to realize that I could barely move. Arms obliged but were shaky and fatigued as if after a great exertion; legs felt bound.
“Dr. Merck? If I am Alexander Velitzyn . . . then . . . I think I need your help. I am sorry.”
Minutes lapsed before Merck came back. His face was different now—grave, almost gaunt with determination. This made me wonder what he saw. Made me afraid of whatever had happened, and of whatever else would happen. All I had was a memory of my transfiguration and a memory of Feodor and myself, situated just across the wall from where I lay now. Merck said, “What would you have me do, Mr. Velitzyn?”
“Tell me what state I am in. What do you see? Tell me how you came across me.”
His tone was almost reprimanding when he said, “You look like Mr. Velitzyn. I found you on the Yasachnoi, entombed in ice. You have been missing for over two months. You still have ice on”—he cast an evaluative glance—“parts of you, and yet you are making conversation.”
• • •
To witness a miracle is ultimately a burden, a strain on one’s faculty of reason. “Did you tell anyone about me yet?” No, Merck said. A yet bigger burden is to witness a miracle and take a vow of silence. I begged Merck not to make the circumstances of my discovery public knowledge. “Please, Dr. Merck, promise me,” and he did, and his cooperation did not surprise me as much as it should have, not the least because my mind had not yet fully grasped my own state. Most of what I acted out was only reflex, a hatchling’s reaction to avoid open spaces.
Merck remained skeptical that I could eradicate the most offending signs of the “miraculous”—the rock-hard, frozen quality of my legs, for example—in the time that I had, until morning brought in the working folk. Thus he deferred to me to orchestrate a cleanup and a cover-up, and I did my desperate best to succeed. At my prompting, he broke off the remaining ice, then warmed up some water in the smithy’s hearth, lugged it in, and poured it on me. We even managed a moment of humor, however morbid, when I reprimanded him for not unloading me in the smithy in the first place, and he said, “That’s because I intended for you to remain well preserved, in cold storage!”
By the time I thought it was possible to claim Robeck’s and Sawyer’s help, I had a lie pieced together out of the mammoth and Ulü-Toyon: Mr. Velitzyn had fallen into an underground cavity, a den, a hibernaculum, and there must have gone into a state of torpor. Merck shrugged. “This is still unheard of. A man is not a squirrel.”
Didn’t I know that! “Yes, but it’s less of a stretch of imagination. When I stumbled out, barely self-aware, I came upon you. If not for you, I would have died. I shall not remember how to find the way back to the den.”
He gave me a long, grave stare.
“Bears sleep through winter,” I said.
“A man is not a bear,” said he.
“Please,” I repeated.
And after that, there was Act Two. Merck left to call our hut-mates and returned accompanied. Oaths, exclamations, and the appropriate commotion ensued. At the end of it I was installed in our good old earthen hut, on my own pallet, in my own bedding of trusty old Fearnought wool that smelled so sharply of my own old self. Merck was giving me furtive glances throughout but held up reasonably well as a co-conspirator, with only a slight tremor in his smile when Sawyer called the occasion “an extraordinarily lucky change of fate.”
What I did not know was that at the darkest, hungriest, and coldest hour of the winter, Merck had made a pledge to God. He had begged for a happy ending, and in return he had promised to sacrifice himself to the work of curing humanity of its ills. I did not know that when he saw me frozen in ice, he thought of Providence, and when he heard me speak, he thought the Divine had accepted his pledge. What did it make me in the eyes of this beholder? I should have known better.
• • •
God loves a drunk, it has always been said. Lately it is also said, One is not dead until he is warm and dead.
My reality was restored to its last detail on the second day of my convalescence, when I asked about Feodor. Robeck said, “He had an accident. Slowed him down a bit. Been getting perkier, though, lately.”
My hands clenched under the Fearnought blanket. Sawyer chimed in, “Oh yes, you wouldn’t have heard. It was the day Mr. Velitzyn disappeared, right, Mr. Robeck? The Christmas day. Feodor spent a whole night passed out in the shed—”
“You’d think one would be cold meat come morning,” Robeck said.
“—but not Feodor Feodorovich. Lord knows no tears would have been shed, should he have perished. But he only lost his nose to frostbite—” said Sawyer.
“—and some of his beef.”
“Temporarily. He has convalesced, though.”
Lord knows—not just my hands, my whole being clenched at the news. It hardly consoled me that my part in Feodor’s “accident” was yet unknown. Feodor had won. I had lost. He’d gotten frostbite—I’d gotten a tomb of ice; he had convalesced already—I was weak and prostrate. Sawyer seemed—happier? more distracted? diluted? distant?—than the last time I saw him. What if they just did not want to worry me?
“And Ouchapin?”
Said Sawyer, “It was better when Feodor was sick . . . Her child burden is coming along . . . Finish that soup, Mr. Velitzyn, or I’ll do it for you, I swear, and then you’ll never get your strength back. ”
I sat up, then got on my feet, swaying slightly. The reality was complete. I was in the same place as ever. Back where I started from.
• • •
Except that the season was changing, and this alone made one feel hopeful. The expedition had survived the winter, the ships were almost done. Snow still abounded, but there was plenty of sun, and at noon its warm radiance made one part with his winter garments. I was shedding skin—week after week it sloshed off as translucent peel. But my grip gained strength; my bodily functions restored themselves.
I remember one springtime moment—a dozen of the crew were sewing sails on a sunny day in the yard. The white canvas dazzled one’s eyes, laid across the men’s knees; those who stitched it bent over their task with a kind of tidy diligence that elicited thoughts of homeliness and kindness. Others spread and shook the sheets, and the unfurled canvas beat like angels’ wings.
I stood and looked upon the scene. Then I saw Feodor. His nose was bluish-black still, skin burned by frost; his hands were covered in much of the same. He saw me. I squared up and so did he. So we stood, stares locked, while between us the white, angelical canvas swelled and flapped and alighted on rope lines. I knew that he hadn’t yet, and never would, tell anyone who mattered what I’d done with him. He knew—I was sure—that he only had to play it safe for another month or two. As soon as the expedition departed on its virgin sails, together with its tempa-chura man, he could return to his ways.
• • •
In mid-April, Merck and I went up the Yasachnoi to where he had found me. I still did not know what my ice had looked like, and could not have realized that what we beheld was but a shell of its former splendor. It was easy to feel no attachment to this stooping, tumorous jumble posed to be washed away in the spring meltdown. It couldn’t have issued from me, I thought, no, it had to have been a trap laid by ice. The burst of omnipresence that was still vivid in my mind had to have been a delusion. Had Merck not r
escued me, I would’ve been flushed down the Kolyma come summer, spewed onto its banks, a mere drowned corpse, to sink into permafrost as time went by. Like Merck’s mammoth.
You didn’t get me, I whispered.
On the way back I thought how I’d leave, put distance between myself and this ice trap, this whole winter. All I’d done was created problems for those whom I would have liked to call my friends. A maladapted nobleman, a loose cannon, a walking miracle, a sick patient. I had wanted to take a man’s life. Worse yet, I had failed.
But retracing my steps back to Okhotsk was a horrific prospect, particularly in summer—endless marshlands, swarms of bloodsucking insects. I had to stay with the expedition until we hit the land on the other side of the Northeast Passage. Then, I would leave.
• • •
In mid-May, the whole fort was kept awake at nights by the humming and groaning of the river ice. The Yasachnoi was tumescent and rising, a thick slush of ice and water pushing over the old ice, more ice arriving every minute, piling up dams of last resort, trapping and smothering the water. The drowned old ice bellowed from the depths as water gnawed at it. The hum and roar was such that one could barely hear what anyone said—let alone hear Ouchapin scream in childbirth.
Then one fine day, all of the water and ice started moving and never stopped. It seemed that the entire history of the past winter was streaming by, everything that ice had ever captured in its collection of curiosities. Tree trunks, dead animals, lost baggage. Merck must have seen remains of his mammoth, and I could swear I saw pieces of my ice cocoon. A whole island floated past, complete with shrubs and perching birds, like a tableau vivant piece. The only artifact missing from the ice’s collection was me.
• • •
The freed river came in and flooded the fort. We pitched a tent on the roof of our earthen hut and watched the water enter through our door and make itself at home. The hut became an underwater cavern, all marks of our presence erased. Fish ventured out onto the flooded land, and the locals chased after them with cries of joy.
The Age of Ice: A Novel Page 17