She snuffled. She held on the very brink of hysterics. “No. I shan’t leave without you. Get the porter, get the night warden to take care of your doctor.”
“Anna—”
“I—I hate your Arctic.”
Did she see right through to my soul? Warmth is guilt.
• • •
I did as Anna bade. I left her side for just one moment, to get help. I saw that Merck had cajoled my servants into hauling his subject upstairs to his study. He now sat at his desk, and the prostrated man on the pallet was mounted right on the desktop, over papers and books. Merck waited like a well-mannered little boy at the dinner table. He waited—for a treat, for a miracle. That’s the last I saw of Merck that night, before I found the warden and told him to bring in gendarmes.
I am told that Merck remained calm and composed as long as they let him sit next to his victim. From time to time he rose to wipe the trickling water and check for vital signs, then sat tamely back down. But it took a doctor and two gendarmes to part him from the man, now dead. I am told Merck had his stroke en route to the policemaster’s, which was—sadly—for the better. Better to be an invalid than a madman.
And I? I followed Anna to the ball. Assuming the burden of complicity and embarrassment, my dearest wife arranged with Count Stroganov’s butler that I could dry myself inconspicuously. I know not what lies she made. Then I unveiled my ice creation. In my dreams, it sits in the grand ballroom as it did then—amidst wreaths and garlands—and splendorous couples swirl past it in a Viennese waltz. Only, if I look closer, I see that it’s not my fountain, my firework, my cornucopia. It is Dr. Merck’s dead man, glazed in ice.
• • •
He wasn’t a monster, he really wasn’t. He was just a man desperate for a higher purpose in life. And he was sick: strangely, bewilderingly, incurably sick. The responsibility is not his, it’s mine. I am the monster.
After the stroke, his right side became weak, and when he recovered, he was a different man, yet again. A delicate, tentative man. No more fits of rage or interest in science. He spent time with Nadya and played with Sophichka. He drew a seal, an octopus, a whale for her.
He sired a son.
It was a brief reprieve before the final act of his sickness.
Merck died of his second stroke in 1799, shortly after the birth of his son, Friedrich Carl Wolfgang. Before that he gradually lost his faculty of speech. One by one, the languages he commanded abandoned him. Only his native German stuck with him till the end—it suffered loss after loss, disfigured, but it stayed.
It was so tempting to believe he did not think of me as a demon anymore. He never chased me away when I sat by his bed. His hands lay on his chest, and the ringed stump was peacefully still—though not of its own volition—his right side was paralyzed by then. Now I realize it could have been but acceptance: him giving in and letting a vulturish demon stay by his side and wait for his soul to vacate his dying body. Even making small talk in the meantime.
How sad, how brave—
Sitting by that bed, I confessed to him. I said, “Dr. Merck, I did what you did. I too performed an experiment on a man. Back at the Upper Kolyma. On Feodor. I watched him freeze. I was measuring his body temperature. I wanted him to die. But he didn’t. And then Darkin—remember?—you’re right, I shouldn’t have killed him. Darkin died because Feodor hadn’t.”
He munched his lips and lisped, “Fidikh. Kal. Woofgan.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“Fidikh Kal Woofgan. How daughter says her baby brother’s name. Fidikh—Kal—” He smiled. “I speak this like too now.”
. . . How lonely the mind and how fragile. And yet, one of the last things he ever said was, “You told me: Chukchi had one word for life, hope, and faith—yejtel. So true.”
Thus ends the story of Carl Heinrich Merck, a man who found the insight of mind to forgive the savages who wronged him, and savagely killed a man in an experiment; a Dr. Faust who believed that he had been contracted by God, and then believed he had been contracted by the devil, and in truth wasn’t contracted by either.
A month after his death, I was reading his archive—what was left of it. He had burned everything but this, the field report he had bequeathed to me: “In a few German miles traveling up the Yasachnoi we encountered a majestic ice formation that blocked our way . . .”
And thus I learned how glorious my ice had been and how right. And I mourned for both of us.
Merck is the reason I have never again let a scientist or a physician come near me. Merck is also the reason why, when Andrei Junior reached out for me, on a March night in 1801, I all but pushed him away.
• • •
At the funeral, Nadya Merck nearly fell to the ground and had to be held up by Sawyer and me when the priest said Dr. Merck was taken from us “in the flower of life.” There was something so grossly, hideously unjust in this phrase! The faculty wives whispered that Nadya needed to be watched, or she’d forget to breast-feed infant Friedrich. I suppose it was only natural that Anna took upon herself the responsibility of watching her, transferring the remainder of the Merck family, minus Frau Fretzl, to Nikolskoe. I am grateful to my wife.
When, in six months or so, Nadya started showing signs of recovery, Anna dissuaded her from taking flight back to Irkutsk. Then she repelled Nadya’s impulse to flee in the opposite direction—toward Darmstadt, to surrender into the Merck family fold. A year turned into two, then three. And then Anna no longer took care of Nadya—the roles became reversed.
What year was it? The nineteenth century had opened, the countdown had begun.
• • •
At midnight on March 11, 1801, Czar Paul died in his just-finished St. Michael’s Castle, a faux medieval fortress he had inserted in the middle of St. Petersburg. His body lay in state, a peculiarly severe head wound and multiple scrapes on its face speaking to the fact that he hadn’t “died of an apoplexy.” He had been murdered. This truth, however, was moot, and those who’d learned it met it with disregard, or at most, aversion, instead of indignation. The conspiracy of looking the other way was more widespread than the conspiracy of assassination.
I was, shall I say, not upset by His Majesty’s passing. Yet I always picture his murder exactly the way I had committed it on Darkin.
We in Nikolskoe learned the news on the twelfth. Being an ex‒Leib Guard and knowing how we do things, I had no difficulty imagining that the czar’s death might have been encouraged, and not without the Guard’s involvement. The question was, which regiments and how heavily? Was my alma mater, Preobrazhensky, the eager tool of imperial transfiguration, as its Russian name ever suggested? Or Semyonovsky? Or Izmailovsky? And what about the much-abused Horse Guard? What about Andrei, Guards Lieutenant Velitzyn?
I expected Andrei to use the day of interregnum for a break, to fall back on home, to share the news in person or at the very least via a missive. He didn’t. On March 13, I went to St. Pete’s myself.
Fields, a cemetery, a cattle market, stables, ammunition stores, churches, all lidded by an overcast sky. In town, the Preobrazhensky village, the main nest of my regiment, was very quiet. Next, I went by St. Michael’s Castle, where a small flock of cadets contested to throw snowballs over the wall. I rolled past, onto Kirochnaya Street and to Tavrichesky Palace. So many streets and boroughs in this town were inhabited, were animated in fact by the army! Regiment upon regiment, Leib Guard and regulars—and today all of this musculature lay suspiciously still, not a twitch from it.
I made stops. I visited officers who knew me, who had served under me. I asked some questions.
I found Andrei at the Tavrichesky, napping in his room. The room was small, a mere side thought, a pause on a straight dive from the door to the window where St. Petersburg’s gray sky reigned supreme. One of the window’s sections was held half open by a leather strap tied to the windowframe and a neckerchief tied to a nail in the wall. Thus, when I opened the door and entered, the window did not slam, o
nly twitched, like a hobbled horse. Andrei snored away in full uniform minus boots and saber, which lay in front of me on the floor.
It was, I could imagine, very cold in the room. Cold and fresh, though an undertone of Andrei’s sweat, a centaurian mix of man and horse, was unmistakable. The smell jabbed me with envy: here I was, pushing sixty, while this young man was entering his best years . . . To intellectualize this animus was to tell myself, one more time, that my godson just had to be my ideological opponent, the czar’s backer. But what if I was wrong?
“Uncle?” His voice was ragged. He sat up.
“Night shift?”
He nodded suggestively, not definitively. I sat into a high-backed chair by his writing desk and he leaned against the wall—with resignation, I thought. But why was his room so ascetic? Czar Paul’s austerity creed? I pointed at his window. “You keep it fresh in here, don’t you?”
He affirmed it by way of coughing, nodding not just with his head, but with his whole trunk.
“I thought you’d come home. After the night before yesterday . . . Are you ill?”
“No. I was, that is, but now just a cough lingers. I’m all right.”
I said, “Ill and sleeping with your window ajar as if it’s the middle of summer. Why wouldn’t you come home?” I could well be channeling Anna.
He sucked in a sigh. “I’m on duty. Why’d you come?”
“Daytime naps are what I see of your duty so far. I came so you can tell me firsthand what is going on. Were you posted in the castle the night before yesterday?”
“No.” His voice had a rougher edge.
“No? Some old friends of mine say you were out around midnight. Where were you?”
He broke into suppressed, clenched-teeth coughs. His eyes welled with liquid. It was just the coughs, I thought, but then, when he looked up, I doubted myself.
“Friends of yours,” he said, and grinned at me, over his wet eyes. “So, would you have liked me to be happy now . . . today, after the twelfth—or saddened?”
I chilled so much that his room air must have approached the dew point if it wasn’t there already. It wasn’t just what he asked but how. He was probing whether I had been for or against Czar Paul. He understood as little about me as I did about him, and was as awkward in figuring it out. I leaned forward. Say happy. No. Say sad. “Which is it, Guards Lieutenant?”
The tears in his eyes were not from coughing. “Neither,” he whispered. “Not happy, not sad. It doesn’t matter to me one bit. I paid no attention. I’m sorry to disappoint you.”
Impossible! Liar! I felt fooled. “I would have liked you to be happy. Right now. As I am. Not to be in tears—”
“That’s not—”
“Then where the devil were you that night?!”
He clenched his fists. But he spoke in an even voice, “Outdoors. I can show you. Walk with me to the park. Please.”
I followed Andrei out. He went straight from bed, only shoved his feet into boots. He took no coat.
Tavrichesky Park is big, easily five times the size of the palace. It is a melancholy place. Rooks roost in its leafless trees. A large, misshapen pond behind the palace’s rotunda extends deep into the park. Andrei strode and spoke without looking at me: “When you came from the Arctic I thought one day soon you would call me up and tell me about it. Not the pretty tales, not the anecdotes. The real tale, what you went there for. In the name of the brotherhood of ice. But you never did. You shut me out. You went to Maman, to your English friends. You went to your ice.” Astride, he scooped up a handful of snow and packed it into a ball. “But you never went to me.”
He turned to face me and bounced the snowball in his hand. Then he stepped backward and crossed from the ground onto the ice of the pond. “You were my hero. I never meant to keep secrets from you. You made it so.” He was backing farther onto ice, watching me as if to make sure I’d follow. I did. “This is cold”—he hefted the snowball, then pointed at me with it—“but your hand, if I touch it—will be warm.” He tossed the snowball into my hands. “Are you cold yet, Uncle? Will the snow melt in your hands now or not? Even if it doesn’t, I’d still perceive your hands as warm. Why? No one knows. It just is.” He paused to cough.
“Andrei, you are on ice,” I warned.
“I know!” He stomped his foot. “And so are you!” He turned, arms swinging, and continued forth, in wider, angrier strides.
A frozen pond all around us. Did I hear it crunching, cracking the March ice? All bumps and slush, snow mounds, puddles and drifts. Its boundaries imperceptible, the pond could be vast or small—one could not tell. It was . . . it was just like in one of my Arctic dreams. With Darkin. I stumbled and stopped, limp in the legs, reliving the sensation of being trapped—in ice—being bound and held down by a pack of Chukchi boys—so vividly, so starkly—
“Andrei!”
“Yet I am not like you,” he almost shouted now, pausing yards ahead of me, kicking at snowdrifts. “I am not cold! I can’t make ice! I am just someone who can arm-wrestle you without getting frostbitten. So, what now—that’s it? That’s what I’m here for—to hold your hand? A mere shivering human, so inferior to you that you don’t even care to confide in me?”
“Andrei, wait! You don’t understand—”
I forced my legs to move; he jolted and set off again, slipping, sliding, stomping all the while, challenging the ice he walked on.
“No! That couldn’t be all that I am. So I’ve been working on it for ten years now. Each winter, almost every day. I am as impervious to cold as a shivering human can ever be.” He stopped and turned. “And I will go beyond human, I will thrive in ice!” He watched me trudge in. “Thirty-two minutes—that is my longest record!” He opened his arms wide, lifted them level with his shoulders.
Then he fell backward.
The splatter of water and ice shards hit me in the face as he screamed, a terror-howl morphing into a shriek of joy, “This is where I was that night—here!”
Anna in me cried out for her son, You’ll drown, you’ll die! But she was only one of my parts. Another cringed: such vigor, such juvenile ambition—such outrage! Some boastful young buck—not my son—who wants to best me, a silverback male—thus—more power to him. Let him risk his life—let him die and leave my turf to me!
Another was the permafrost in my abdomen. It heaved and hurt. I saw the blanched skies. Nothing thrives in ice! I saw Merck, methodical and insensate, ice-glazing a bound man, and myself, the monster, watching.
“You fool! Get out at once!”
He laughed. “Join me!” He worked hard, head and shoulders bobbing up and down in the ice mash. Chunks of ice brushed his face. He was short of breath, coughing. He put his elbows on the ice ledge, leaned. “Is it reluctance I see? What, on earth, are you afraid of, Uncle?” His legs were kicking. The edge broke off, he grunted and dipped in. I lunged, dropped to my knees, grabbed his hands just as he latched onto me and pulled. Our tumble was undignified and violent like a Darkin dream. He was stronger. Or more desperate, or favored by gravity. I fell in his hole and went under.
I struggled with the water, not with the cold. I am not a good swimmer. I pushed away ice chunks that pecked at me from all sides. I struggled until I anchored myself to the ice ledge with my forearm, then I could float comfortably. I blew on the water because it tickled my lower lip. “You shouldn’t have done it.”
He had pulled back to the other end of the hole and was observing me. His breaths came out ragged and hasty. Fear, awe, and curiosity mixed on his face; he drew a grin and started coughing again; he forced a breath through his nose, he spat. Floating ice crowded him. He rode low in the water, he kept his arms below the surface—water being warmer than air, I understand.
He said, “Warm enough for you?”
You’ll never thrive in ice—you’ll catch a deadly cold—you’ll drown—more power to you.
I said, “I’ll tell you what I’m afraid of. It’s not a game. Ice is treacherous. It pu
ts thoughts into your head. Makes you feel as if you are drunk. As if you could cradle the world in your arms. Then you freeze to death.”
He panted. He spat, his lips trembling. “Try me.”
I remembered a fifteen-year-old boy who once upon a time had dunked his lower half into a barrel of ice-cold water. Although his mother had thought the boy had been punishing himself for something he had seen his uncle and another man do, he had done it then to prove himself special. He was doing it now for much the same reason. He was already very, very special. He was what they later would call a sea lion in Russian, a polar bear in English, an ice-swimmer in Finnish.
But right now, he treaded water in front of me, jaws clenched. He struggled to breathe. I floated. My mind began to wander away.
I envisioned him sneaking out of the barracks at night—he, his orderly, and a lantern. He would jump into the many rivers and rivulets, ponds and canals of the winter St. Pete’s, while his awestruck orderly would hold the lantern in one outstretched hand and his master’s ticking Breguet in the other. The involuntary gasp for air, the rushing heart—he’d learned to control them, he’d learned not to be afraid of them. He’d learned to crave this jolt that made him feel ten times more alive, to master the bone-sawing pain that, I am told, sets in at once and grows until one’s skin goes numb.
I floated, he treaded water. He fixed me with his stare. But twilight was blurring his face now—or was it my mind getting distracted, gliding away to the cruelty of ice, the kindness of snow? “Andrei, get out of the water.”
“No.”
He was that boy in the barrel, who had become this young man, and for this very reason he had never, ever told his mother about his ice-swimming, even though it was never because of what he had seen his uncle do to that man, no, it was the cold, you see, the cold that he doesn’t feel, you know that cold, Anna, you’ve felt it, haven’t you, you’ve felt it inside you—it burned you, even though you believe you like it—see, it is so hard to explain all these things, isn’t it? Aren’t they better left unsaid?
The Age of Ice: A Novel Page 27