Forget Gluck and his Iphigenie! Mme Chevalier was never a good dramatic actress anyway. But she was a passable thermometer for Paul’s inflammation, the poor thing: if she looked perky, the empire could go to bed in peace.
I culled Andrei from a group of young officers and we meandered around the foyer. Anna waved to us from a veritable flower bed of ladies in lovely gowns. My godson was vivacious and dapper.
“Your mother sent me to talk with you,” I said. “She wonders if perchance you’re considering marriage though not announcing it to us yet.”
He made a choking sound and stood at attention, but not on my account. A commotion of liveried servants and courtiers at the doors seemed to indicate that the czar himself might enter the hall. Chamberlains showed and motioned everyone away from the doors. The crowd began to shuffle: some were pushing to the front, others to the back. All, like sunflowers, turned one way. Candelabra dimmed and gilding blanched—or was it just my imagination? “Perchance there is already someone you favor,” I whispered to Andrei out of the corner of my mouth. I took a side glance at his profile, searching for revealing symptoms. A blush, a reddening ear perhaps? Nothing.
“There is no one,” he said.
“But I trust you have been with a woman, Guards Lieutenant, have you not?”
Now at least his brow twitched. “That would be a yes.”
“Good, good. A regular?”
He stole a glance at me. “How do you mean?”
“Somebody you might care for and who might gain influence upon you. Affect your decisions, make you do things that put you at a disadvantage.”
I could just see his ego flaring his nostrils. “I would never put myself in such a position.”
“Good,” I said. “So you have someone then. Just not someone you would marry.”
The ceremonial flutter at the doors ceased: the czar was not to grace the gathering with his presence after all. Andrei’s shoulders relaxed, he turned to me and grinned. “I have no one. Do not worry, Uncle.”
“I don’t worry.” I pressed further, “But we’d be happy to see you a married man.”
Chimes marked the end of the intermezzo. Andrei replied, “Says the man who got married not four years ago.”
Oh dear. A counterattack. “Yes, but I’m not an example to follow. I’m an exception. Maybe I would’ve liked to get married young, I just couldn’t. You know why.”
“That I do. But if you married young you’d have kept away from my mother’s and my lives. Right?”
“That’s not what I meant! All I’m saying is that your mother has made sacrifices for me, and I want her to be happy, and her happiness depends on you, and that’s why—”
He took my hand in both of his. The cruel confidence of youth glinted in his eyes like a switchblade. “I know. Are you cold? Turn cold, will you, Uncle?”
An ambush, unexpected and inexplicable! I yanked my hand free. “Why are you asking this? Why in a theater, for Christ’s sake?”
The glint in his eyes went away. “Yes. Of course, not in a public place. Well, I better get back, watch Act Two. My pals have a wager going, on Iphigenie’s ears. Got to watch her like a hawk.”
I stared after him as he disappeared into the crowd. A strange young man my godson was. An angry young man. That’s why, when the czar was murdered in his bedroom chamber in March 1801, in a coup that involved many officers of the Guard, I thought that Andrei was—
No. I am getting too much ahead of myself. I must let the sleeping 1801 lie. First I need to relate the following.
• • •
Back in 1795, I had introduced Dr. and Mrs. Merck to Anna, and she had made herself a friend and a patroness to Merck’s Siberian treasure of a wife. When Nadya Merck gave birth to daughter Sophie in 1797, Anna invited the Mercks to spend the summer in Nikolskoe. It was June, the poplar fuzz flowed. We would lounge outside in a gazebo. I’d stretch my legs out and balance a glass of Cognac on my chest, Anna would insist on rocking the baby’s cradle, and Nadya would trim and arrange freshly cut tulips in a vase and tell us how, when she had gone on her first date with Carl Heinrich, she got the very tip of her nose frostbitten because all they could do was promenade up and down the Irkutsk’s main drag, and they kept talking, and neither of them wanted the date to end.
He had bought her a caramel apple on that date, the best one she’d ever had, she said. I pictured a sunny winter Sunday, dressed-up folk sauntering past festive storefronts, and a girl in a bright red, flowery kerchief, accepting a honey-golden glazed fruit from a serious young man in a short winter jacket. This was happiness of a primeval kind, a happy version of Adam and Eve, and it extended all the way to here, it avoided all the entrapments of the Empire of Ice, it connected right to this summer evening, with little Sophie dozing in Anna’s lap—it was us, one of the versions of Anna and me—and I knew Anna thought of it the same way.
“But it’s nothing of course”—Nadya would hurry to put her nose tip in perspective—“compared to the frostbites Dr. Merck received in the Arctic.”
Merck himself was conspicuously absent from this idyll. He stayed behind in St. Pete’s and worked. He was supposed to come over at least on weekends, but soon even these visits ceased. What was he so busy with? Well, Dr. Merck was not just spending his days cataloging his collection of flora and fauna of eastern Siberia. He was trying to build a pump. A big and powerful pump that he could use to spray supercooled water with great force, in great quantities.
I learned this on my next visit to St. Pete’s, when I collected Dr. Merck to go to Sawyer’s apartment—to attend the next gathering of the “Arctic survivor club.” By then, those who’d come out of Siberia had found one way or another to stick it out. Most remained in service with the Baltic navy. Robeck was rising through the surgical ranks in the St. Petersburg Hospital. Voronin drew maps for the admiralty. Only Billings retired on the Arctic pension and settled in landlocked Moscow. He’d die in 1806.
I went into Merck’s office at the academy, a room adjoining Dr. Pallas’s emporium. Merck had squeezed a large desk into it; to its right were stacked boxes of his Siberian minerals and to the left stood something resembling a short fire hose attached to a lever-driven bellows. Merck fingered the brass tip of the fire hose and lifted it for me to see. “It’s a pinhole,” he said proudly, “for a very fine, forceful spray. It is the pressure and the final temperature that are the limitations right now. The colder the water, the more viscous it is, and the more force is needed to pump it. If it is supercooled, it needs to be under pressure even before it is pumped. All of that, of course, is because we cannot re-create the extremely cold air of the Kolyma, instead we’ll have to do with warmer air and colder water . . . But have you heard of the artificial cold? Vitriolated nitron is the most potent. If mixed with aqua fortis, it will produce a rapid cooling, over thirty degrees by Celsius. So what one could do is start at the regular winter temperature, and then add artificial cold on top of that, and then—”
He kept talking but I did not quite hear him anymore. While I had been thinking that we both had left our Siberian history behind and embraced our new, married lives, while I no longer even wanted him to study or explain my cold because I was intimately happy with Anna—he had not forgotten a thing, and this machine, this bloated device was growing out of our past. Just what was Merck going to do with its help?
He was waiting for my response. “It is . . . formidable,” I said. “Are you sure this is the right way to proceed?”
He frowned. “Perhaps you have a better design in mind?”
“I don’t mean just the design,” I said, and seeing how fast Merck’s face changed from eager to sullen, I realized with a sense of helplessness that the topic was volatile and to argue it required a great deal of diplomacy—something better done not on the fly. I said, “We’ll talk about it some other time. We should go now or we will be late.”
• • •
At Sawyer’s all went well until Merck, entirely out of
context, said, “They never meant to guide us along the coast. It made no sense to them. They simply followed their yearly migration route, the way they always did.”
Who, they? The Chukchi, of course, he said, on the trek to Angarka. At this, everyone perked their ears. Lehman asked, “How do you know?” Merck looked back startled as if he could not foresee that broaching such a dangerous subject would make him a center of attention. “I simply find myself arriving at this conclusion the more I think about it.”
Lehman said, “Well, what is it that you are thinking, Dr. Merck? Are you saying the chief lied to us from the very beginning? That it was a trap?”
“No, that’s exactly the opposite of what I think. I believe everything has an explanation that has less to do with contrivance and malice, and more . . . with simplemindedness and mundanity. The Chukchi chief did not lie. He listened to our request and it appeared rather foolish to him. He probably decided that rather than argue, he’d let life take its course. In his opinion there was nothing to do on the coast in winter. No food for reindeer, no protection from the weather. He was certain he knew better than we did how to get people through the winter, that’s all, and in his mind, we were there just to get through the winter.”
Sarychev, Robeck, and a few others joined forces to change the subject, but Lehman became agitated. “What, we should blame ourselves now? What about our equipment? Our notes? And what about—that knave, that—Darkin? What about him?”
Merck shrugged, looking tense and unhappy, though not dissuaded. Equipment? Useless weight in their point of view. Notes? Even more useless for a people with no written language. “What we saw was just the everyday way the Chukchi lived. It’s a hard life in an unforgiving environment. They simply expected us to be like them. To have the same rules, the same understanding. Just as we expected them to be like us.”
Voronin broke the silence. “So that’s what it was—a misunderstanding?!”
Merck nodded. “A—cultural—difference, to be precise.”
“In God’s name, Dr. Merck”—Voronin sprang to his feet—“you should not be saying such things to our faces. To the face of Mr. Velitzyn, to whom you owe your life! To whom we all owe the fact that we came out of there at all! With all due respect, this is an affront!”
Merck’s hands were shaking now—I especially remember how the stump of his ring finger was twitching—and then he too rose, knocking his chair down, and started shouting at us, red in the face. This was so unlike him or, for that matter, unlike any normal, civilized man, that everyone was dumbfounded, yet more so when we realized Merck was raging in a mix of Russian, German, and God knows what else. Instead of—I assume—Gemütskrankheit, an illness of the soul, Merck kept saying, Gemekraiheit. His Weltanschauung—a worldview—was more like Weltanchayoon, as in the Chayoon Bay we had wanted to reach but never had.
By the time I shook off my astonishment, our doctor was spewing more foam than words and slamming the tabletop in a rage. Sawyer and I nudged Merck back into the chair, Sarychev ran in with a glass of water, and we made him drink—his teeth clattered against glass, and he drew breaths as noisily and spasmodically as Darkin had, once upon a time. Merck inhaled some water, and a torturous bout of coughs seemed to have knocked him out of his fit. When he was done coughing, he was almost his usual self. “I am so sorry,” he said, looking at the floor. “I feel unwell. A terrible headache.”
I took him home. In the carriage he was plastered over the pillows, flaccid. I urged him to rest and be quiet, but he wouldn’t obey. He looked and talked as if he were flayed open and couldn’t hold the edges of the wound together.
“Embarrassment. Disgrace. Such a complete embarrassment. Just had a glass of wine, no more. You’d think I was drunk. I should never attend there again, I shall not be welcome. You must be appalled, Alexander Mikhailovich. You must have lost all respect for me. But you have to believe me, I did not intend any of it to happen like this. I don’t know what’s come over me. I feel as if I am running out of time. I wish I had insisted on a Lutheran ceremony, I wish she’d put that ring on my good finger on the other hand. But now it is on a stump, so it’ll all be stumped. I made a promise, you know that. I made a promise and I am so lost. I don’t know if I’m doing it right. Please, Alexander Mikhailovich, you ought to tell me what I should do! You have to tell me!”
A promise. Of course—the Yasachnoi scene, the winter of 1787, when I had begged Merck to keep it a secret, what a glaciated form he had found me in. It was an unpleasant memory. Worse yet, wasn’t I a hostage to Merck’s designs now? If I showed a dislike of his pump machine, what if he went on to tell everyone that I had been a block of ice when discovered? I said, “I am and always will be your friend. We all know what weight sits on our souls, and no one is expected to ever forget the past—only to let it be past and focus on the present, where you, sir, have a perfect wife who adores you and a beautiful baby daughter. Being a dutiful husband and a doting father is the best cure.”
All of it may have sounded a trifle too therapeutic because he exclaimed, “You are evading the answer! Why are you avoiding a straight answer?”
“I am giving you the only answer I can think of,” I said. “You may be right about the Chukchi. We should have been wiser, we the more civilized people, should have been more insightful, but we were just as the savages, not seeing past our own noses, our own habits and morals. We came in expecting to order them around and ended up no better than them. You are right. Still, you should get on with your life. Start breathing. Take care of your health, see a doctor.”
It only got worse. “I am a doctor,” he said bitterly. “And I made a promise. Ten years ago, the winter of 1787. Remember it? I made a promise to the Almighty. Do not tell me you know nothing about it!”
What the hell was he talking about? The permafrost in my stomach heaved and pressed on my diaphragm. Puzzle pieces churned in my head: he’d always looked to me for advice since 1787. During the gunpowder storm on Kamchatka he’d asked me why he was punished. He’d made a promise to the Lord and expected me to know about it. Why?!
The carriage arrived at Merck’s apartment building—and I could distract us by helping him onto the curb and up the stairs.
Merck’s housekeeper, a stolid, second-generation German emigrant who spoke very little Russian, studied Merck with a ferocious concern on her face when I explained to her that he was unwell. I intended to say good night and rush back to Sawyer’s, to catch up with their drinking and try to dissolve the slab of worry in the pit of my stomach. Merck however, begged me to stay awhile. In just five minutes, he said, he’d meet me in his study.
The study was a small, orderly, and sparse room, save for a busy desk—you could see that the latter was off-limits to the housekeeper’s scouring pad. It looked as if Dr. Merck spent his off-work hours laboring on much the same things as at the academy. I picked up a sheet, it read,
Ducks noted in the vicinity of Tauisk:
Anas nigra
A. crecca
A. acuta
A. fuligula
A. clypeata
A. formosa
A. strepera
A. falcata
. . .
and it went on and on—to geese, loons, sandpipers, et cetera. It was just a field note from our expedition, but for some reason, to me it read like a madman’s chant. Other sheets were covered with whole paragraphs of Latin and yet others—with German, Aleut, Russian. Words going every which way, curling around doodles of human profiles, birdlike shapes, creeping plants. “Sea lion—adakhuk. Porpoise—mangak. Seal—shunk. Octopus—utkhuit . . . My dear friend: in the Zeittlenkeit that surrounds me, my mind emigrates my Korpes and visits endlessly upon a scene of murder. It is difficult to be lived for six months among people with not the faintest restrictions of laws, instead used divinations even to decide whether the own father live or die. A shaman forcefully strained to energrenze, then lifeless attached to news Ang spoken, aroused himself and strangled the poor m
an who did not make a single motion to protest with human red organs his own hands . . .”
My skin crawled with frost as I read this. Those disjointed sentences again! Those nonsenses, those untranslatable words! Merck’s linguistic meltdown at Sawyer’s was not a stand-alone episode. And yet—murder—it was about Darkin, wasn’t it? About me!
“Herr Velitzyn.” The housekeeper startled me. “Herr Doctor said you can stay for the night. I’ll make accommodations in this study.”
“That would not be needed, I am not staying,” I said. “Where is mein Herr?”
Merck entered the room. “Here.” He had changed into a house robe and a nightcap, he smelled of medicines and he carried a water bottle, which he pressed to his head, when seated. He held his head gingerly, as if afraid to spill its contents. “Frau Fretzl, serve us tea. Very strong please, for me. Alexander Mikhailovich, would you like tea?”
“No thanks. You should go to bed,” I said.
He pretended not to hear. When Frau Fretzl exited the room, he said, “You are not thrilled with my project. Why? Wasn’t it what you wanted me to do? I’ve placed all my hopes on that work. That work is my promise. I have to fulfill it. Am I not . . . doing it right?”
That word promise again. I hated it by now. “I do not recollect ever wanting you to do anything in particular.”
He grew upset. “What about that time in Kamchatka? You told me to seek ways to reproduce your frozen state experimentally!”
“I did no such thing. You suggested it yourself. I merely listened and nodded. Now I think that this machine—”
“Why have you kept me close? Why have you helped me? Watched over me? Protected me from cold? Stolen food for me and fed me when I could not do it myself? Why are you taking care of my family for the summer? Why did you give me a ride home just now?”
What was he getting at? “You are a friend and you saved my life. I am indebted to you.”
The Age of Ice: A Novel Page 25