I knew then what I would do. Everything, everything I accomplished in the next several years, was brought about by a singular purpose: to offer her the best ice I could make. Anna gave me the power to be the Great Master of Ice.
• • •
Also in the year 1794, Dr. and Mrs. Merck arrived in St. Petersburg and then went on to Germany. Merck was dispatched by Dr. Pallas and another German in Russian service, Baron Asch, to escort a load of ethnographic artifacts, including a complete Yakuti shaman’s outfit, to Professor Blumenbach at Göttingen University, and the spouses used this occasion to visit the ancestral grounds of the Darmstadt family on a belated honeymoon. At Professor Blumenbach’s, Merck met Goethe again, and attended a reading of the first part of Faust, where Mephistopheles convinces the eponymous doctor to sign over his immortal soul in exchange for infinite power and knowledge. Precisely on the famous line where Mephistopheles introduces himself to Dr. Faust as “a part of that power which is ever willing evil and ever producing good,” Merck had a fainting spell.
I learned it much later. At the time, when the couple returned to St. Petersburg and I beheld the clutzy old Merck, the blue-eyed and earnest-faced good doctor who still walked in a buttoned-up manner and lacked social graces, only now he held on his arm a lovely redhead wife whose smile turned heads and warmed hearts—at that time I was just happy that his life had taken a turn for the better. I wanted to help him make it better still. God knows, he deserved it. And so, by the spring of 1795, Dr. Merck landed a junior professorship at the academy—my efforts yielded fruit.
At the time, the virago Princess Dashkova, nicknamed Ekaterine the Minor, was effectively at the helm of the academy. Ingratiating myself with her was relatively easy. “I hear, my Prince,” she said when I kissed her hand, “you are a newlywed. You married your sister . . . in-law, have I heard it right?”
She did not use the Russian word snokha, which does not share a root with sister. She flaunted her English at me, and made a long enough pause between sister and in-law for even the most unsophisticated of men to notice.
“You’ve heard it right, Madame,” I replied in English. “Aren’t those Britons the greatest economizers when it comes to language? They’ll use the same word for everything if they can. Nuances can get overlooked, though. Yes, I am a proud husband to Princess Anna, née Khitrovo, the mother of my”—I paused to smile—“godson.”
“Please pass my congratulations to Lady Anna. Why, it is quite a change for you, I reckon. After years and years of bachelorhood . . . Weren’t you the talk of the town in the late sixties? You were engaged to the youngest Countess Tolstoy, weren’t you, that lovely girl, what a tragic death. Didn’t she perish of influenza weeks after you proposed? You must have been so shaken.”
Not influenza, you old harpy, but pneumonia. And she didn’t perish after my “proposal” but three years later, a married woman, by childbirth . . .
“That,” I said steadfastly, “was such a long time ago, that you and I, Madame, have every right not to remember it very well. Altogether too many things have happened since.”
Fortunately, that was all for the admission test. “Indeed.” She smiled. “So tell me about your marvelous adventures.”
Which in due course brought me a chance to make a favorable mention of the Arctic hero Dr. Merck, and his lovely wife, who needed the patronage of the most enlightened, most caring and considerate of the academic helmswomen. And if perchance this was where it started, the charming little rumor that Andrei Junior could have been my biological son—I saw no harm in it.
• • •
That winter I threw myself at the task I envisioned as my new purpose. Anna deserved ice as pure as an angel’s tear. She deserved extraordinary ice. I ordered one of the sheds on the property cleaned and made an ice nursery out of it. I wanted to make cubes of ice, balls of ice, bullets of ice, stars of ice. I expropriated kitchen pans, I stole carafes and stemware from Anna’s cupboards and vials from her boudoir; I bought wines and brandies just for their bottles. I filled them all with water. Some glass broke when the water froze, its ice-fruit ripe for harvest. Some I broke myself, cracked like a shell that got in my way. No matter, I’d get new ones.
Later, I would rally woodcarvers, potters, and a blacksmith of my estate to make me wooden, earthen, and tin molds, and I made my own mold designs, ever more complicated. Later yet—I would no longer need molds. But for now—icicles, the long, gorgeous icicles, they were a dime a dozen in March, but think of having them in December! I loaded ice and snow on slanted wooden trays, percolated water through them, then harvested icicles after the night’s freeze, and stored them whole or sawed into perfect bite-size pucks. It wasn’t easy to get the right trickle rate, I had to troubleshoot, perfect the ways of manufacturing. And there was more, there was always more. If ice was going to touch her lips, why not sweeten it? Sorbet ice, shaved ice, creamed ice. Chocolate ice. Milk ice. Tea ice. Wine ice. If ice was to lie on her velvet belly, why not scent it? Rosewater ice. Lavender ice.
I had many failures. I had to learn, to experiment. I unpacked my remaining thermometers, pulled out and leafed through my yellowing notes. I obtained quantities of niter and employed it to make the cold colder. Still, all that was not good enough. It lacked sophistication. It borrowed from the existing tricks. But Anna deserved impossible. Magical ice. The kind of ice you glimpsed in the heart of the Empire de Glace, at the end of your line, when you thought you were done with and then you saw it—a filigree of beauty and hope. The lace ice, needle ice, and above all, the ribbon ice, ruffle ice, the ice good enough to be a precious necklace on her bare shoulders, to be a glittering flower in her dark hair.
Now, that was a challenge worthy of a grandmaster. How many days and nights did I spend under my open canopies, watching my ice germinate! How many tree twigs—birch, larch, alder, dead or alive, I immersed into bowls of water set out for the night! How I prayed for an insight—for that promise of kinship and understanding that would let me into the secret! What makes you want to be born? What fancy, what desire, what seduction whispers in your atoms and wakes you up to develop into a once-in-a-century blossom and not into an everyday slab, sheet, powder, mash, hail? Could I make snowflakes? Could I make ice of that heavenly tint of blue that I had seen in the Icy Sea? Could I draw hoarfrost patterns never before seen on earth—just by tracing them with my finger over a glass pane, in the night, out alone in my shack, an alchemist of ice? An alchemist, yet also a victim of the Empire de Glace, battling Darkin’s ghosts with half-submerged twigs, battling visions of self as a frozen fish—with incantations, thermometers, and controlled evaporation out of a pan of cold water onto a cloth of fine cotton gauze suspended just inches over it and then slowly raised as ice needles grew; and knowing, even as my first ice flower bloomed on a dead reed stalk sticking out of an ice-cold, wet bed of wood pulp, that the more I practiced my witchcraft, the more Darkin would be peering over my shoulder, that my grandmastery of ice came loaded with this curse, just as every deal with Mephistopheles goes rotten . . .
On a practical note, all this activity was not improving my financial situation. It was consuming resources instead. The salvation, when it came, arrived from the sidelines. One day in early February Anna decided to throw a dinner party. When she told me what tasks she’d assigned me, I was surprised: to make ice for the cold courses: colored ice beads for cheeses and hams, ice butters for meat pies, ice glasses for vodkas and aromatic bitters. But above all, to reveal my very special dessert—little floats of ice in a bowl of punch, each bearing a dollop of blueberry sorbet with creamy topping. My Icy Sea Floes! Until then, I had served them only in bed, to a naked Anna. It’s too private, I fussed, the guests would be scandalized if they gleaned any hint of what it meant to the two of us; and your friend Baroness d’Anglairs, well, she would read us like a book the moment it’s served!
Anna gave me a stare. Her lips bunched as if she was sucking on a candy, and her brow quivered with whimsy. “So?�
�� she said. “Will you do it?”
That’s all that was needed to win me to her side—a little zest in her smile, and I was her eager co-conspirator. I went to work on her dinner plan the very next day.
Our “ice dinner” made news all over St. Pete’s. The most marvelous thing about it was that it was not the peculiar fetishes of the Prince and Princess Velitzyn under discussion, but the novelty of their menu. Soon requests came pouring in, and in due time you could say that if Count Rostopchin had an orangery, which supplied the whole town with oranges, Prince Velitzyn had an equally popular icery, which supplied—ice.
Still, this was more publicity than commerce. It did not befit a noble to put a price tag on the produce of his icery when servicing fellow aristocrats. My second lucky break came from Sawyer. After months of withering, rheumatic pains, petitioning the admiralty to pick up the tab for their treatment, and composing an English‒Aleut dictionary with the help of Robeck and the good old draught beer, Sawyer had bravely reinvented himself as a broker at the St. Petersburg stock exchange. (This came through his acquaintance with Mr. and Mrs. Alistair Woodrow—Mr. Woodrow being a timber merchant of some significance, and Mrs. a fan of cockfighting and a matron saint to young men in distress.) Now with his broker connections, Sawyer came up with a business plan and made it a reality. Not that I was first in the ice trade—it had been a vigorous industry well before I came into it: every northern country from Norway to Russia stockpiled ice in winter and then sold it, come spring, to the southern countries to help them keep their foodstuffs unspoiled and their ice creameries churning through summer. But Sawyer made me stand out. “All of St. Petersburg’s aristocracy, even—between you and me—her Imperial Majesty Catherine the Great, eats Prince Velitzyn’s ice,” Sawyer advertised me to his fellow businessmen. “Is this not a mark of quality? If Prince Velitzyn’s ice is not worthy of residing in an English larder next to your good wife’s butter, then whose is?”
Sawyer knew how to be convincing.
By the end of winter in 1796, when the old sea route opened for navigation and the first merchant ships left Kronstadt for the British Isles, one of them was loaded with slabs and slabs of my ice—each wrapped in burlap and nestled in wood chips and straw, each stamped Nikolsky Icery, St. Petersburg, Russia, each tinted heavenly blue, so unique, so coveted by competitors in the years since, so unattainable for them. My trade secret, my mark of purity. And in separate crates, triple-insulated, swaddled like precious porcelain, was a shipment of ice flowers—fragrant lilies and roses, the most marvelous creations, the first ever on the market, destined straight for the remaining courts of Europe, to float in their champagne fountains, to adorn their trays of sturgeon and caviar—the blooms whose evanescence graced the last days of the old eighteenth century as French armies kept on marching: over Italy, over Spain, through the Low Countries.
• • •
Late in 1796, Catherine the Great passed away, surrendering the throne to her son Paul. Everybody inhaled and held it: what now?
Well, three years into his reign, our czar became charmed by Bonaparte and approved every surgery the French strongman had performed on Europe’s body. The czar even sent a contingent of Cossacks to India as part of the Russian-French plan to harass the British. Seated in the club of the English colony, Sawyer fumed and boomed about Bonaparte: Boney this, Mr. Nap that, which nicknames made me a bigger Anglophile each time I heard them. Sadly, Britain was getting lonelier and lonelier in her stand against the aforementioned Boney. Besides, Russia’s break with Britain hurt our business, Sawyer’s and mine. But it did not kill us—the new French elite also liked its ice cream cold.
If anything, the break with Britain killed the czar.
• • •
Commenting on Paul’s short reign and ugly end has since become a cottage industry and I shall not contribute another account. All that’s important for my story is that I—tracking right with my class—felt queasy about the new czar, and that there was a time—a year or two or more—when I feared that my adopted son was the new czar’s devotee and disciple.
This was, more than anything else, an unfavorable diagnosis for Andrei’s character.
Why? Czar Paul was a harpsichord-playing, romantic, perfectionistic, fitful—madman. Exactly the mix that makes tyrants and revolutionaries, utopian princes whose overarching theorems of common good are always and inevitably procrustean. He’d made a model of perfection, a gingerbread town out of Gatchina, where he’d dwelt before ascending to the throne. Now he aspired to make a whole gingerbread empire with us nobles as gingerbread men marching around his drill grounds to the tunes of his military bands, played on exactly five—and not more, as he personally ordered into law—instruments.
Hence, as visions of this caliber often require tools of expediency, Czar Paul’s “Secret Expedition” spied day and night for dissidents. “In my reign,” the czar once said, “only that one is an aristocrat at whom I look, and for only as long as I’m looking.” Pity those who squirmed in the glare of the royal eye yet endured, for this gaze alone fastened them to reality. A blink—and they’d dissolve in shadows of nonexistence.
This is important to me: when the czar personally harassed Andrei’s Horse Guard Regiment, drilled them, reorganized, and mixed with outsiders, and redesigned their uniforms at least nine times, each time making them equip themselves at their own expense, Andrei said not a word of complaint. He was a lieutenant of a troop for five years—the czar froze promotions or else advanced his minions at the expense of the regiment’s natives, but it was always “All’s well, Uncle Alexander. The discipline’s never been better.”
When the czar sent the regiment to lodge in the Tavrichesky Palace, Andrei only shrugged. Horseman and horse, wood chips and manure entered the palace’s grand hall turned manège—dressage under bare candelabra hooks, sand and sawdust kicked in the faces of grand oil portraits. What a subtle toxin did this royal son inject into his mother’s body of achievement, what a poison for the imagination of an unsuspecting equestrian participant! Yet Andrei was demure.
When on a whim the czar exiled the regiment out of St. Pete’s, Andrei was unfazed. “Your mother worried herself sick,” I told him when, in two weeks, they were back in the capital. “You realize the rumor had it you were marching all the way to Siberia.”
And he replied, “Nah. Just to Tsarskoye Selo.” Then, glancing sharply at me, he added, “I wouldn’t have minded if it was Siberia. To finally see it. I only know what I know about it from you, and that hasn’t been very much.”
He was a strange young man, my godson. I said, “I only mean to say that His Majesty’s treatment of his Garde à Cheval is irregular. But I can see how His Majesty may impress a young man’s imagination as a visionary leader, I can certainly admit to that.”
Andrei’s stare was indecipherable.
• • •
Anna thus shaped her worries: “All this abuse and neglect is sure to push him toward debauchery.”
To which I said, “A little bit of debauchery becomes an officer. I certainly had not eschewed it in my day. Andrei seems too serious, it’s downright unhealthy.”
“Surely you’re joking. All fun and games your day was, wasn’t it? Not anymore, my lord, and you ought to know it better than I.”
“Would you rather have him get into politics?”
“God, no! Why do you even think thus?”
I shrugged. “He seems a man in search of a cause.”
This upset her. “How do you know? How can you tell, you missed ten years of his adolescence and you barely see him now. You know more about snowflakes than about people!”
Ah, Anna. She knew my weak spot, she did: a lingering, deep suspicion that I had a fatal flaw—that I lacked some human fiber that conducted empathy. A deficiency so absolute that I could not amend it even when I made caring for some people the task of my life. I know I could not trust Anna’s judgment on this, but still I wondered. Are we not blind to our true and inheren
t qualities?
For my part, I never managed to understand how Anna could contain two seemingly different women within her. One—Anna the house, as I’d come to call her, another the river Anna.
One was a jam maker and a matronly disciplinarian who’d say, “I need to have my son married and I need grandchildren. That’ll keep him away from your debauchery and politics.” Another was a sweet sinner: she’d place a cube of apple juice ice on my sternum and do things to me, the kinds of things that would make the cube stay frozen. Then she’d use my pelvis as a headrest and lick the apple juice off her fingers. She’d watch the beating of pulse in the pit of my stomach, the rise and fall of my chest. She’d say, “I know. What if he won’t marry because he has a mistress? Oh, no, what if it’s a Frenchwoman, one of those courtesans dislodged from Parisian boudoirs by the revolution! The life-sucking creatures! Haven’t you ever fantasized about one of those succubi? Haven’t you?”
Satiated, I’d mutter to the negative.
“Like this Mme Chevalier,” she’d insist. “The prima donna. Ah, I know, we should all go to the next performance by the French company, and you and I will watch how Andrei carries himself. Then you could ask him if he has someone on his mind.”
• • •
I’d always listened to Anna more than I was willing to show. Here we were in the Hermitage Theater for Gluck’s Iphigenie en Aulide, with Mme Chevalier in the title role. Never mind that attending the diva’s performances had lately become an entertainment more scandalous than refined. She had been Czar Paul’s favorite, mistress likely, and according to an article in one of those imported newspapers (remarkably missed by censorship), the royal admirer had her ears chopped off during one of his tantrums. Well, now the whole of St. Petersburg’s beau monde was showing up to scrutinize Mme Chevalier through their spyglasses to ascertain the integrity of her ears. Observations were traded during the intermezzo: she wore a wig, but also earrings. Did anyone see if they were attached to the wig?
The Age of Ice: A Novel Page 24