The Age of Ice: A Novel

by Sidorova, J. M.

  It was late afternoon; we were perched on our roof, and, with a degree of good humor, we were surveying the surrounding floodwaters and the limitations they imposed on everyone’s perambulations, when a baidar, a kind of canoe, pushed past us, propelled hastily by a woman. She rowed in strokes that may have wanted force though not determination, and her red kerchief had fallen back to release a shock of black hair, while her eyes were fixed on the forest line ahead. The baidar was loaded up with something like offal, heaped, slithery, and glistening. We observed it in silence.

  Then—a movement at my side, a splash, and Sawyer was in the water. Off he waded, stumbling, splashing, elbow-flapping, falling, rising, swimming. “Ouchapin! Ouchapin!” he called after her. Some distance away from us he caught up with the baidar; she guarded against him with the paddle, almost struck him on the head—he could overturn her boat, after all, clinging to it so clumsily, trying to climb in—and he could drop in the water whatever that was, that offal. He negotiated with her, she went back to rowing, he stuck on to the side of her boat, he helped her get where she wanted to go. They were getting farther and farther away from us.

  “Wasn’t she confined just days ago?” said Robeck.

  “And now she’s rowing a boat,” I said.

  “Besides the—” Robeck let the rest hang.

  Sawyer returned some hours later. He changed into dry clothes and supped on hot tea. His affect was flat. We waited. Finally, Merck gave in to scientific curiosity. “Mr. Sawyer, what was it, in the boat?”

  “Her afterbirth,” he said, and slurped his tea.

  “Begad,” Robeck said.

  Sawyer explained, “Yakuti women believe that if they don’t want to bear any more children, they need to leave the last afterbirth out in the woods for birds and beasts to eat it.”

  “And you—”

  “Helped her.”

  Merck said, “But her newborn is—”

  “A baby girl and doing well so far. She has her reasons.”

  For a while we contemplated those reasons, in silence. Sawyer said, “She doesn’t want to go with us.”

  Robeck whistled. “You proposed that? A mother with a newborn, on a ship, to the Icy Sea? Bad luck if I’ve ever seen one. The captain would never agree to it, you know that, right?”

  “Doesn’t matter. She didn’t want it. Not to the Middle Kolyma fort, not to the next one down, the Lower Kolyma. To get away from here, never mind following us to sea. She didn’t want it.” He bottomed-up his mug and picked a shred of tea leaf from his teeth, then went to his bedding and curled up under the covers.

  Robeck said, “How’d she feed herself and the babe on the Middle or on the Lower Kolyma? If no man’s taken her come fall, she’ll die. She knows that.”

  Sawyer turned his back to us. “Only four days left.”

  Four days to the 25th of May, 1787, when we would set sail.

  • • •

  We consecrated the ships in a ceremony at the Middle Kolyma fort a couple of weeks later, and named them Pallas and Yasachnoi. Middle Kolyma was also where we picked up Nikolai Darkin, a Chukchi translator for our impending transactions on the peninsula.

  When we sailed the final miles through Kolyma’s discharge into the sea, the banks were tall and crowned with wind-carved rocks. They stood like giant sentinels—their topmost parts sat on their tapering pillars like heads on shoulders, all turned north. The sea dressed itself in mists and clouds—it seemed there never was a true boundary between ice, water, air—it was a single medium, in many guises. Air sweated moisture. Ice breathed fog. Water smoked swirls of cold vapor—pillars of white steam stood here and there across the horizon like umbilical cords between heaven and earth. In the mornings the ships’ rigging would be encrusted in ice, and the rest of the time every unbound droplet of moisture in this world found us and settled on us. It seemed as if we all—man, ship, sail—were an alien object inside a gigantic, slow beehive, and the invisible bees worked day and night, encasing us in their secretions—layers of ice, water, and ice again.

  In the Icy Sea at last! Everyone’s spirits were up. But the airs were contrary more often than not. We kept plying, and as we insisted on our easterly course, ice floes, big and small, kept going in the opposite direction. It began to seem to me these ice floes were people—blind, pale people wading past our vessel, touching it, running their fingernails along its fragile hull, scraping, like chalk on blackboard. And as I stood, sleepless, on the deck, the night sun low and yellow, I felt that ice people were here for me, that if they were allowed to take me, they would go away and open our path. That they were here because I had escaped the ice trap on the Yasachnoi.

  What do you want from me? I would whisper.

  • • •

  Once, we stood away from the coast, due north, in hopes of steering out of the ice mash. But as far as we went, we did not find clear water, only more ice—sheets, floes, slush, and broken pieces, some up to eight feet tall. The wind became fresh and then increased to squalls; we had to reef and then furl sails. We returned back to the coast and tried to trace it east for a few more days. All the while, endless ice arrived from the northeast to meet us, pushing against us, beaching, jamming the shore.

  Barannoi Kamen, a precipitous cape in the shoreline, was as far as we got. I volunteered to climb to the top and scout what lay beyond Barannoi. As far east as I could see, the sea was teeming with ice, and our little ships—made by the first-timer work crew, as best they could with their frostbitten hands—were no match for it.

  What do you want from me?

  The day before Captain Billings ordered a retreat, the wind changed and the ice began to move offshore. Years later, Sawyer would still get bitter when recounting the circumstances: we could have sailed east right there and then! The locals had been saying the waterways in those parts were the best from early August on. Only two weeks to wait! But our captain was apprehensive of staying on water too late into fall, and he was always thinking of the way back, not the way forward.

  There are times when I think we failed because our captain chose a safe course, not because I refused to make a sacrifice of myself to floating ice.

  • • •

  We left the Pallas and the Yasachnoi at the Lower Kolyma fort in early August. We left the translator Nikolai Darkin there too, with orders to travel east to the Chukchi tribes, join them, and await our arrival by sea from the other, eastern side of the continent. In doing so, we created the very trouble we had to face four years later, in 1791. But first things first.

  We had to go back the way we came from.

  The Upper Kolyma fort was inescapable. We started a climb back upriver in every caliber of boat and baidar, some rowed, some towed by dogs. The wind, rain, and sleet were punishing. Then we began to hear the rumor. The farther up we traveled, the stronger it got. Any local who floated down the Kolyma past us was full of the rumor. Upper Kolyma? No, don’t go there. An icy-eyed, dog-faced white man had disturbed something there he shouldn’t have disturbed, and a great morbidity ensued.

  I could think of only one way to interpret the tale, and it smothered me with dread. Merck too had not failed to see the connection and looked more and more like an unwilling member of a conspiracy to commit murder. Sawyer—for reasons of his own—spent his days with a vertical crease of sorrow on his forehead.

  At Middle Kolyma, the rumor took shape. There had been smallpox on the Upper Kolyma since the early summer, the resident Cossacks said. Said the Yakuti: there had been another instance of a restless shaman ghost. He had erected himself over the Yasachnoi and issued an icy hand from his breast, and pointed, and off she rode, Old Hag Smallpox in her bloodred furs, with her fiery club.

  Any survivors?

  No one knows, they said.

  Now, at least, the rationalists among us knew what to expect and—if they had been inoculated against smallpox, as was the case with all the Britons—could enjoy a feeling of safety. It was the Russian crew that was at risk, bo
th from disease and from mysticism. Our chief rationalist, Captain Billings, held a meeting of the command plus the men of science. Could we, or could we not, travel past Upper Kolyma fort with any safety? September was upon us, time was running short, spending another winter of scarcity here was a no less dreadful prospect. Billings wanted Merck’s medical opinion, and Merck, as he was called to speak, kept sending dark and questioning glances my way. I could tell: a mystic and a rationalist were fighting in our doctor’s head as he was mustering his words; the mystic crying, We can’t go there! Why won’t Velitzyn admit it?!

  But I kept silent. What, in the Lord’s name, could I say? It was not the smallpox that we both feared, or not just the smallpox. I had been inoculated, after all—by the distinguished Dr. Dimsdale himself, remember? No, my (and Merck’s, I assumed) worst fear was that of ice. That it had been altered somehow, after it had trapped me. What if smallpox had been conveyed through my ice cocoon precisely because I had been inoculated?

  Finally, Merck the rationalist said, “When the frost sets, there is a fair degree of safety. If we do not disturb anything there. If it is smallpox.”

  The captain ruled to proceed. We changed boats to sledges, oars to horses, and followed the Kolyma to its confluence with the Yasachnoi.

  • • •

  The dread. We saw the familiar dock, the huts, Feodor’s izba, our shed. Falling snow was giving the fort a gentle and patiently slow burial—for all was silent and dead, and no smoke was coming from the roofs. Quite willing to obey the order Do not disturb, we peered in from the distance, each searching for portentous signs: graveyard crosses or untended corpses, doors ajar or boats amiss, foot- or pawprints. Sawyer looked for Ouchapin. I looked for strange and infectious ice.

  Not a soul stirred. Only a small flock of horses, their breaths steaming out of their nostrils, wandered in and stood serene in their doom, observing us as we observed them.

  I pictured the corpses—if there were corpses, they were inside our dwellings. Our earthen hut must have turned a tomb, permafrost forestalling decay, ice being careful to keep the treasure safe for a weary traveler of fifty, a hundred years from now, whom need or curiosity would compel to enter a hole in the ground and discover a mummy in a red kerchief who lay clenching another, smaller one in her arms. Their flesh would be dark and glossy, ice growing quietly in its deepest recesses, between bone and sinew, marrow and vein, tooth and gum. Seeds of smallpox inside them—perfectly preserved.

  That’s what the strange and infectious ice was, wasn’t it? O heart, you are heavy with sorrow.

  No camping, no tarrying, we had to go on. Sawyer was one of the last to leave. I said, “Mr. Sawyer, note that the yurts were not there. Perhaps some inhabitants have escaped the contagion.”

  He turned to me and spoke with fervor in his voice and a tear in his eye, “It’s nothing we’ve done, right, Mr. Velitzyn? It’s just a superstition, how could we have done anything of that sort? The smallpox was already in the neighborhood. The Yukagiri had it the summer before this . . . How could it be something we have done?!”

  Ah, my good old Mr. Sawyer. The moment you reminded me of the Yukagiri was when I had a selfish revelation. I realized that it had not been Merck and I, the icy-eyed man and the ice-shaman, who had brought smallpox upon this place. It was you, Mr. Sawyer. You, who traveled to the Yukagiri and back on a sled propelled by dogs, you brought Old Hag Smallpox to the Upper Kolyma. You had wished it struck Feodor dead with its fiery club, and strike it did, just as you bade, though being a weapon so blind and undiscerning, it struck many more along with the one man who may have deserved it. As weapons always do.

  You did it.

  I did not say it to him then—how could I? “No,” I said, jolted by the bitter taste of my relief, moved at once by pity, affection, and condescension, “no, it’s nothing we have done, Mr. Sawyer.”

  Nothing I have done. And yet . . . Turning to go, I glimpsed . . . thought I glimpsed . . . a beautiful, long, and luscious band of ribbon ice weaving from a larch tree, all wrapped in icy ruffs and frills, and onto the eaves of Feodor’s izba.

  • • •

  Of the twelve-hundred-mile overland march back to Yakutsk that followed, it suffices only to say that some legs of it were perfectly miserable, others less so. I heard much lamenting, but not a word about giving up. It was a matter of fact that the expedition would go on to seek the Northeast Passage from its other end, the Bering Sea.

  • • •

  Yakutsk.

  I gave myself two weeks to rest before I would depart for Irkutsk (and from there to St. Petersburg). I lodged like a king, having a whole room to myself in a warm cabin of a well-to-do merchant, a cabin built around a giant brick stove that never went dormant. The front room even had windows, with panes made of ice.

  A confidential report that I had to write to Commodore Loginov could wait till a face-to-face meeting.

  I enjoyed my privacy. The time away from my friends prepared me—and them, I thought—for my imminent departure from the expedition. Sawyer would call upon me—“Mr. Velitzyn, how about an evening at cards? A decent company is due to gather at the ispravnik’s tonight.” (An ispravnik being Yakutsk’s top military official, a commander.) But I would never run out of excuses not to go: I was putting my notes in order, or being indisposed. “Guaranteed good laughs,” Sawyer would say enticingly. “A certain Ledyard, a traveling Englishman, is staying with the ispravnik. The man is full of anecdotes. Imagine: he had served on Captain Cook’s Resolution as a corporal of the marines and there observed Mr. Billings as a teenage boy. Then he somehow became a colonel in George Washington’s army in the American war. And now he is on his way back to the United States, believe it or not. All by himself—what a character!”

  Still, I was unavailable.

  • • •

  A parcel arrived for me from home. In it were silk shirts, wool stockings, a pair of incredibly warm shearling mittens, packs of St. Petersburg’s finest snuff, a flat bottle of my favorite Cognac, and a letter from my nephew, Andrei. I kept looking for a note from Anna, but nothing shook out of the shirts, stockings, or mittens. She still had nothing to say to me, she hid behind goods—if that was her idea at all, and not Andrei’s. I felt a pang: I do not want to go back home—to this. I rushed through Andrei’s letter: I went to my first ball without Maman and when it was ladies’ round, Mademoiselle Lili P. chose me . . . what is my next move? . . . We went shopping for my service horses . . . I finally got to see my new sword . . . The hand guard is wrought in the shape of our two-headed eagle and there is a fine engraving on the blade . . . I shall join the regiment in less than a month . . . Maman is such a fearer, it is embarrassing . . . Uncle, what do you do when you both do and do not want something? . . .

  A seventeen-year-old, innocently self-absorbed, pouring out the all-important, all-urgent matters of his fledgling adulthood. I sat and looked at the date again. The letter and parcel were eight months old. Andrei was no longer seventeen. He’d long joined the Life Guard Horse Regiment and made—or hadn’t—his next move with Mlle Lili P., without my input. It was hopeless. It was like looking through the wrong end of a spyglass.

  And Anna had nothing to say to me.

  • • •

  One night Merck paid a visit. “I heard from Mr. Sawyer that you have been indisposed. Can I offer my assistance?”

  I didn’t have the heart to turn him away, though I knew he wasn’t here to give medical advice. Remaining at the front door, he already had his hat off, and his frostbitten face looked pitiable. I led him into my room, offered him the chair, and seated myself on the bed opposite him. Without a preamble, he said, “On our way here . . . in one village an old Yakuti woman beat me upon my chest and cursed at me. Captain Sarychev had to peel her off. Apparently, even three hundred versts past the Upper Kolyma, they think I have done something wrong.”

  That was why I had to leave, I reminded myself, even if Anna did not want me back. I said, choosing the w
ords carefully, “Dr. Merck—you are a physician and a naturalist. Think: how could you have induced smallpox by saving me? The disease is endemic to the area.” I made a pause, figuring out how to mention Sawyer.

  Picking at his cuff buttons with his frost-burned fingers, Merck said, “There was no natural science and no rational explanation to your survival.”

  This sounded like a challenge—and part of me knew he had a right to it, while another part wanted all the more desperately to evade and run. It was a vaguely unpleasant memory: Merck dashing about and praying, Merck terrified that night in the shed, the night of my thaw. I went on weaseling. “An unexpected admission from an explorer such as you, Dr. Merck. Some explanations are just awaiting discovery, hidden but by no means nonexistent. How could a mammoth live this far north? Can you explain it yet?”

  “It must have been warmer in Siberia in the days of the mammoth.” He took a breath. “Mr. Velitzyn, why did you say that night in the shed, the first thing when you thawed, ‘I promise to do no evil’?”

  I wished he hadn’t reminded me. Because I thought I had become Feodor and wanted to repent for his sins. I could not help springing to my feet, then remembered to step back so as not to tower menacingly over Merck. I said, “I don’t know. I was very confused.” I made myself sit down. “Dr. Merck, listen. I will always be indebted to you for saving my life, but I—I must beg you not to interrogate me further in this manner. I hope you understand.”

  “I do.” His face claimed otherwise. He let go of the cuff button, then, under my stare he picked at it again. He repeated, resignedly, “I understand.”

  He got up and I rose too, ready to see him out. And though it almost looked like a bribe, I said I had something for him and gave him the shearling mittens I had received from home. He seemed uncertain whether to be chagrined or flattered by the gift. He wanted to say something else before he went out the door, but I did not leave him the slightest opening.

  I realize now that I’d always given more attention to Sawyer’s feelings than to Merck’s. In my mind, Sawyer had always been the fragile one, the one ready to boil over, while poor old Merck was supposed to be impervious, as was proper to a man who cared more about mammoth bones than about human beings. Even when he showed signs to the contrary, I disregarded them.