“Mr. Sawyer,” I said, “you’re barely holding upright. I suggest you join Mr. Robeck. There is a trunk you can sleep on.”
Like a child, he disputed me on particulars, but the moment he stretched out in my bedroom, only my greatcoat between him and the floor, he was asleep.
And I stayed up.
• • •
In three days Sawyer and Robeck joined me on the road to St. Petersburg. They too wanted to detach, disengage, shake l’Empire de Glace off themselves.
However, it is not possible to look l’Empire de Glace in the eye, in her crazy, glacier-blue, lizard eye, and return unaltered. As we traveled west, a strange foreboding presence was aloft—perhaps because now there were more iron foundries, fewer forests along the way than ten years ago, or perhaps because the news of the infamous year 1793 of France, the Vendée, the industrial revolution of mass murder and test runs of its political apologia, the Jacobin reign of terror, La Terreur, were already permeating the air, spreading eastward like glaciation? Or was it the opposite: Siberian cruel ice was spreading west, to Europe?
The Great War was here—did I understand it then, or is it just hindsight? Or else why is it that since then everything got so mixed in my head—Ice and the French revolution, Ice and the human landscape of casual cruelty?
Zeittlenkeit
1794–1805
The Russian verb tlet’ means both to smolder and to decay, reflecting perhaps people’s intuitive conviction that decomposition is a form of combustion—which is of course true. Zeittlenkeit—a smoldering or perhaps decaying of time was one of the mixed-language words that Merck used in his late writings—he would write in his mother tongue but here and there break into Russian, Aleut, Chukchi—sometimes within the span of one word.
Zeittlenkeit was how he referred to his last years, the brief time he had before a stroke claimed his life in 1799. He was thirty-eight. I have picked the name up and carried it with me for another six years. Zeittlenkeit is the time between our return from the Arctic and the battle of Austerlitz.
Go on then, fearless Mr. Velitzyn, open that door and step over the threshold—meet Anna, meet your twenty-four-year-old godson.
• • •
My home Nikolskoe sent a kibitka with a pair of horses and a postillion to the main post station of St. Pete’s. I did not recognize the fellow who met me as one of my own serfs. I rolled in late in the afternoon, and the next day we performed the chores I had on my list (get a haircut and a shave, shop for boots, and make final adjustments at the tailor’s so I could wear the new garments I had ordered). We also lost time tarrying, since I feared meeting my family. I knew they would be horrified at how feral I’d become. How different from the balanced, untroubled man they had been envisioning based on my letters. Letters lie. They are just full of words.
I had no courage yet to show at the Nobles Club either, so the club’s barber had to be lured out to my old tailor’s workshop. While working on me, the barber and the tailor summarized ten years’ worth of new construction around St. Pete’s (whole blocks of wooden houses were now replaced by stone buildings, and the Imperial Library was being erected in place of the Imperial Orangery).
I then rode to the coast, to the place I had been with Ivan Kuznetzov, the western end of Vasilievsky Island, past the Galley Harbor, where now there were countless piers and docks, and sailing ships wintered, each bigger than any one of our expedition’s ships; and to the shore, still an untouched, raw beachline with some minor shacks. There I lingered amidst the smells of tar and rot, and gazed at the bumpy skin of sea ice with dark gray sores of open water where seagulls circled.
One thing led to another. After a stop at a tavern in Galley Harbor I had to sober up, and after that, go to Gostiny Court on the Nevsky Prospect and buy a handful of very expensive imported lemons and a box of less expensive French sipping chocolate to bring home as an excuse for my tardiness. When I finally reached Nikolskoe, it was past midnight.
The old house seemed to have shrunk. I entered tiptoeing, and was met in the vestibule by the old lackey Ignat and an unfamiliar houseboy, suppressed Ignat’s outbreak of greetings, and hit my foot on a chest that hadn’t been there before. The smell of the house was different—a touch of mold and—dried rose hips?
She was in the front room, by the fireplace, asleep in an armchair. A blanket covered her petticoats, an old quilt with a trim of crochet. She had slid down a bit and was slumped to the side. Her chin rested on her chest, and a fold of skin bunched under it. The line of her cheek was looser than I remembered. The corners of her mouth curved down, as her jaw relaxed in sleep. Her one hand rested on her abdomen, another hung off the armrest, heavy-veined under the weight of a loose bracelet of black pearls. Her tapering, smooth index finger pointed—languorously, forgetfully, as in a Titian or Caravaggio—to a glass that stood on an end table beside her. In this glass, I remember so vividly, a piece of ice, half-melted, sat in its puddle of water.
Symbolic, I would think in just a few years, and for the rest of my life.
She opened her eyes as I was kneeling—and instantly she became Anna, just as I remembered her. She exhaled softly, “Alexasha,” and before I could understand what I felt, we wrapped around each other, forearm to underarm, elbow to spine, cheek to ear, mouth to collarbone. Then she made a little sob of resignation, eased out of my embrace, pulled the old quilt up, insulated me up to my nose, and squeezed me in her arms again. And so we stayed, I swallowing tears, she weeping. The quilt engulfed me in smells of dry rose hips and mold, a chord of saliva and a theme of perfume—and if our poor old love had a scent—that was it.
So she knew. Since when? How exactly? I wanted to return the embrace, through this wonderfully unceremonious blanket. But my beloved had other plans. She blotted tears away and already she was ringing a little bell, calling for a whole brigade of housefolk, ordering to start the stove, and warm up this and that, and bring the folding table from the storage room, and that bottle of Cognac out of the corner cupboard in the big dining room, and pour it into those particular glasses of Moravian cut glass, and no, she would not take the late hour for an objection, and no, I was not going to go quietly into my rooms, but instead, how about taking off my boots, and easing into house slippers, Andrei had an extra pair, and Tata the maid could fetch them. With a giddy smile, she announced to the crowd of awestruck housefolk, “We have to keep him warm! Your master Alexander Mikhailovich came all the way from the North Pole!”
To the generation of servants who had not known me before, I was a myth, a legendary hero. “Lord Alexander Mikhailovich, is it true that people ride on dogs at the North Pole?” asked the houseboy, Stepashka. “Are them people so small?”
“Are they covered in fur?” someone else chimed in.
“Is night really half a year long there?”
“Can you really not use any iron there ’cause the frost shatters it?”
“Did you really see the fish with eight legs?”
“And the fish that roars?”
Popular imagination had done quite a metamorphosis with the information I’d been supplying in my letters.
Anna made it so that we weren’t left alone that night, and that someone—she, predominantly—was talking at all times. Even when the crowd was dismissed, and we settled around tea and pastry, currant jelly, butter, my sipping chocolate, and the Cognac, my good old Cyril, now a butler, and Tata the maid stayed behind. They nodded as Anna described how the whole household was waiting for me, how they argued on which day I’d arrive, exactly. “How did you find our kibitka at the station? Did you like it? Were the horses all right for you? The chestnut can stumble, does she not, Cyril?”
“. . . And I told her ladyship Anna Fadeevna why would she not go to bed, but she would hear none of it, she would wait in the parlor for Your Nobleship to arrive, and that was that.”
Cyril brought a chair for himself and accepted Anna’s offer to have some tea. Tata agreed to a cup of chocolate. It appeared
that these two were used to providing company for their lady—a lonely lady of the house, living here full-time, with only an occasional day or weekend trip to St. Pete’s. When I asked where Andrei was, she said he was here, but asleep with the mighty slumber of a twenty-four-year-old warrior. Rode in this evening, on leave from his regiment with the explicit purpose of seeing his uncle. I agreed we should not wake “the darling” up if he hadn’t done so on his own accord—let him rest from the hard labors of his service.
Finally, Cyril ushered me to my rooms. They had kept a fire going in my antechamber, and hot water was waiting in the lavatory. I said, “So, Cyril, how are we doing?”
He heaved a sigh and said, “You don’t know how much we waited for you. When we learned you were safe in Irkutsk, and coming back, we became so happy. Thank Jesus Lord and the saints, you’re here.” He paused. I waited. “The left wing needs repairs,” he added. “The roof. The floor in the kitchen. The tally books are all in good order.” He paused again. “I should go. Your Nobleship needs to rest.”
“All right, go.”
I spent some time washing up and changing. There was a mirror in my bedroom, a luxurious, full-view mirror. I studied my naked self—I hadn’t seen that much of me in years. The skin of my forearms, lower legs, and face was thicker, coarser, darker, and more wrinkled than the rest. My chest, abdomen, and groin were, on the other hand, anemically white and they looked—well, as if they had been swaddled in the same unclean clothes and not seen the light of day for months at a time. I poked myself in the abdomen, fearing resistance—a core of permafrost. The wall of my insignificant belly was taut, but not ice-hard. A tight scar just under my right ribs—the place where I had inserted my thermometer—was all that was left of my glaciation episode. Damn you, Velitzyn, I thought, all these decades, and you still have no clue what’s inside. Enough to eat, shit, breathe, and think, but where is the cold coming from? Which organ?
I hid my body under a nightgown and a banyan, and ventured out. I crept to Anna’s doors and hovered. I almost reached for the door’s handle. But I could not make myself go farther, much as I desired it. I headed back but before I could reach my door, the glow of a candle indicated that someone was coming up the staircase. I suppressed an impulse to hide in my rooms—was I not the lord of the house, free to roam wherever I pleased? It was Tata, in a nightcap and shawl, and thrown off balance now that she’d run into me alone in the dark hallway. She flubbed a curtsy and silently worked her way around me toward Anna’s quarters. I did not speak either, though I followed her with my eyes—all because I was too fixed on her hands. She carried the glass, that same, reused glass I’d seen by Anna’s side earlier, and this time it was filled with bite-size chunks of ice—fresh and hard, twinkling, winking at me in the light of a candle.
When I managed to go to sleep, my dreams were disturbed. My usual mash of Arctic ice at first, then rooms of something like the Irkutsk infirmary, but almost see-through, barely holding together, with ill-fitting doors and hoarfrost on doorjambs. I saw myself in one of these rooms, I was Merck’s patient. Then Anna came to visit me, and sat down on the erect me, and started moving so sweetly, but then complained I was so abrasively cold, just like a stick of frozen salmon.
• • •
The next morning was one of the best in my life. A slow easing out of sleep. A promise of a sunny day behind the drapes, and an assurance that my bad dreams were just that—dreams. Distant sounds of sensible, peaceful village life. A rooster called. A dog barked. My house had already woken up, and somewhere below me, in the kitchen, they were baking bread, I could smell it. Someone shuffled through my antechamber, a fire poke clanked, and china and silverware chimed lightly now and then, being set on a table. A clock in my antechamber struck ten. I heard muffled voices, a knock on the door. I could not help smiling.
“You are awake, aren’t you?”
She was fresh as a lily, in a sky-blue gown, with flaring sleeves trimmed in white, and a white kerchief innocently remedying the very low neckline of the bodice. She brought me coffee and poured it, demurely, out of a silver pot.
“Sugar?”
“Please.”
Her stays creaked slightly as she bent her waist and arched over my bed to hand me a cup on a saucer. What, I ask, could be a happier moment? She smiled at me. Could I even—would I try to shape the word—could I feel it when I’d say it—
She said, “Now I truly believe you are here.”
“Anna, I—”
“Your godson is dying to see you. Shall we let him in?”
“I love you.”
“He is by the door. About to barge in.”
—I felt it. I tasted it. Happiness. “He told you, didn’t he? You know how I can be cold, right? And that he is the only one who does not suffer it?”
She smiled again, slyly, and left the side of my bed for the window. She drew back the drapes and just as I squinted from the burst of light, she said, not even looking at me, “There must be something we should be able to do.” And as my mind raced to capture the full meaning of this something, she went over to the doors, cracked them open, and said loudly, “Andrei, come in! Your uncle is up!”
My God, he was a complete adult! A tall, strong male, whose young vitality charged like a shock wave ahead of him. How the girls his age must have swooned just upon seeing him approach! Was I ever like him, sending ripples through bodies? I hoped I had been. I barely had time to set my dainty coffee cup on the side table to save it from sure destruction, before he locked me in a bear hug.
“Andrei, you grown-up . . . beast!” I wrestled out and held him at arm’s length. “Look at you, a fearsome warrior! God, I envy you! How’s service, what’s going on, tell me everything!”
“He is our rising star,” Anna said, and he blushed, “Oh, Maman,” while I urged, “No, no, don’t be shy, let’s talk about you—”
They both were now sitting on my bed—and in one permutation or another, all three of us were touching, holding hands, glowing through each other. Here we were, a happy family, perfectly complete and continuous . . .
We took breakfast, scraping first layers off the last decade’s stories, the ones ready to be told. Then Andrei and I went for a walk around the estate; the trail led us to a hillock above the river, a perfect vista point. It was a beautiful sunny day in April, the kind when birds are already singing, when tree trunks are wet and dark, and the snow begins to look lightly bruised, like a ripe fruit, and heavy, like sorbet. So warm! I took my fur greatcoat off, spread it on the snow for us to sit on, and made a fire, which act delighted my nephew. “Uncle,” he said, “you are a magician at starting fires. And that you had a flint kit on you!”
I chuckled. “An Arctic habit, hard to break.”
For a while, we sat and watched slanted columns of stove-smoke over a faraway village.
“So . . . here we are,” said I, and now he chuckled. He was expectant, I could tell that much. I probed, “Cyril tells me the house needs some repairs—”
He promptly looked down.
“It wasn’t your responsibility. You are on active duty. When I was your age I had no interest in property management and I do not expect it from you either. I have been away for longer than may be considered prudent. I have no right to judge but I do need to know. Be honest with me.”
This had an effect. “Maman,” he said, “when things break she retreats from them. She makes do with less. And less. She seals off rooms, gives up on opening windows. She accommodates deterioration. When a door sticks, she’ll introduce palliatives: first lift, then push, then pull. But she won’t suffer to have any of it fixed or replaced! This house is shrinking around her.” The smoke of our fire snaked toward his face but he did not turn away. He endured it, his eyes tearing.
I too endured—the bitter implications of his words. “Why wouldn’t your mother move to St. Pete’s?”
“It’s the way she wants it.”
“How did you tell her about me?”
“I am sorry I was away for so long. I will make it up to—”
“No,” he interrupted, and looked down at me with apostolic serenity. “Those were Maman’s choices. And you did what you had to do. You needed it . . . Right?”
I bit my tongue. I was not ready to answer. Under his stare my head made an equivocal nod while my shoulders shrugged.
He was a strange young man. And an angry one. As we walked back I asked him about service, and he berated his regiment: officers lived a life of leisure, while the rank and file ground keys and carved spoons on and off duty. Is that military discipline, he lamented. Wives and mistresses showed in barracks and joined in revelries. He took no part in any of it. He was different.
And yet he did not know the half of it. When later that day Cyril and I went over the tally books, the truth was hard to miss. Anna could not have kept a household in St. Petersburg. Patching this old country house was all we could afford. No rebuilding, no improvements. “The city goods,” Cyril said, “your boots and pots and all these manufactured things are so dear, but your country goods—your grain, your dairy—now that sells for kopecks. How can anyone who still plows and sows for income make ends meet?”
We were damn near broke.
The Age of Ice: A Novel Page 22