He gave me a glance and kept busy. Still, I latched onto him as if he was a solution. He was reciting his rules of admission, Guardsmen first! Unless it keeps bleeding! “There”—he pointed—“you, sir. Did you apply your sleeve as I told you? Is it tight?” The paling cornet he addressed gave an extra twist to an improvised tourniquet on his forearm, and swooned momentarily. The surgeon bent over for a closer look. “Let’s go. I can cut it off.”
“No, no, just dress—maybe—cut later—”
The cornet’s wrist was badly shattered and blood percolated through like a spring brook.
“Later you’ll bleed out. I’m doing you a favor, young man. On your feet, let’s go.”
“Are you from the Horse Guard?” I asked the cornet.
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you know Colonel Velitzyn?”
“Prince Andrei Andreevich?” The cornet began to raise himself from the ground and I gave him a hand. “Yes, him.”
“Thank you. I do, yes.” He cringed, and it suddenly made me certain Andrei was dead. Or maybe it was the patronymic he used, based on my brother’s first name, not mine.
The surgeon eyed me—“You were next to me before the battle”—and goaded the cornet in. I tagged behind, my next question lying on my tongue like a lead ball. They sat the cornet on an ammunitions caisson and propped his arm on some others, stacked two high. Nearby a tin tub—like ones at the barber’s, only full of cinders not suds—pumped heat. “Just to dress, maybe?” said the cornet.
“My son had taken the eagle of the Fourth Line Infantry,” I said, “and now he’s missing.”
“Doesn’t mean he’s dead,” the surgeon said. “Unless there was an eyewitness. And even then. Two-thirds of people out there in the field are not dead. With a spyglass you’ll see them crawl . . . Cornet, don’t stare at it. Look away. Look at this gentleman. Tell him, did you see Colonel Velitzyn die? I’ll be done in under two minutes.”
The cornet shook his head in the negative as they cinched his arm almost to hourglass shape with a leather belt. “Numb enough yet? Now let’s pull that skin up your forearm.”
“My son commands the second squadron of the Horse Guard,” I insisted with the leaden logic of an obsessive. “You’d think people would know where their squadron commander is, if he was still around.”
“Are you his father?” the cornet asked and grabbed at me with his left, shaking hand. He was just out of boyhood, seventeen at most. “I am,” I said.
“Cornet, let’s hear ladies’ names in alphabetical order,” said the surgeon.
“Alexandra—”
“Louder, I can’t hear you!”
“Agraphoena! Alexandra, Anastasia, Anna! Avdotia—”
The surgeon slit through the cornet’s arm in two semicircles at angles to the bones so that the flaps of flesh opened like jaws of a fish mouth from whose throat the ulna and radius stuck out like foreign objects; the surgeon’s mate peeled those meaty jaws back—Arina! Axinia!—the surgeon pinched one artery then the other with smoking-hot forceps, then took a hacksaw to the bones, and Valentina-Varvara-Vera became one yowl, the cornet’s ashen, perspiring face squeezed into my hip and I wrapped my arm over his ears and eyes, keep going, but before the expulsion of Galina and Darya, both bones were sawn off, followed by a polishing touch-up of a file—and the patient parted with Ekaterina, Elizaveta, Elena, Evdokia, Evgenia—a pinch of vitriol dusted the fish mouth—Zinaida—the wretch groaned and the mate let the fish-mouth close and the surgeon sutured it shut.
“—Claudia, Ludmila, Maria, Nadya—”
“That’s it,” the surgeon said. “Well done, young man. Every one of these ladies and girls hereby so gallantly named now prays to nurse you to health and grace your long days.”
He headed out, his patient briefly rendered inarticulate. When I joined him, he was making another note in his sketchbook. “One minute thirty-nine seconds plus suturing.” He turned, said, “I am Semyon Kessler. And you—”
I named myself and he said, “Pleased to meet you,” then shouted, “Next!”
“Who is going out to the field to collect the wounded?” said I.
He squinted into the distance. “We’re losing daylight . . . Look at this crowd, Sir Velitzyn. And these are the walking wounded. Going out to the field? Right now—no one is.”
“My son may be there. If I can help—”
The cornet staggered out on his own two feet, buoyed by God knows what power and showing off his bandaged pollard of an arm to the waiting crowd. “I’m good to go! It’s nothing, gentlemen! It’s nothing!” And seeing me, “You, sir. Did I tell you Depreradovich sent Prince Andrei to His Majesty to deliver the trophy, the Fourth Line’s eagle?”
“No . . . when?”
“After we came back, of course! The trophy and the news of our upset. Lucky man, your son . . .”
I don’t remember ever thanking that poor cornet. I took leave of him and Kessler to follow Andrei’s tracks. About then, the news spread that the French had halted north and west of us. In all likelihood this was it for our contingent—though not for the rest of the army.
Southwest of us, at the village of Sokolnitz, Buxhoeveden’s divisions were still holding their ground, unmoved from where they had advanced early in the morning. Buxhoeveden either did not know that he was left alone in the field, or did not care. Perhaps an aide-de-camp dispatched with the news had been killed en route. Perhaps this aide-de-camp could not get through. Perhaps none was sent. The fact is: none of ours, nor Bagration’s, nor Kutuzov’s main forces moved an inch to bail Buxhoeveden out. Even when we could still hear guns in the distance, even when in our plain sight the French started drawing south—all the forces that’d just opposed us in the vineyard. They went on while we stayed.
Some of Buxhoeveden’s contingent was slaughtered to a man, some taken prisoner, and some . . . If only any of us kept on moving at least, never mind fighting, just showing up—it would not have happened. If only—
This is how it went down. I reunited with my horse and followed the road south to the village of Austerlitz—this was the route Andrei must have taken an hour before. There, I ran into the other half of Preobrazhensky and into Subcolonel Nastyrtzev; and when I asked, many had heard about a horseman with the Fourth Line’s trophy. Andrei had made an impression: the white knight, the battle-worn cuirassier who rode in with the enemy’s colors flapping at his stirrup: the prize, a gilded eagle rousant on the tip of a pike dangling head-down like a snared partridge. A gesture, to be sure, but so forgivable and making it easier for me, besides, to track him. Thereby I learned (once I reached the headquarters) that he had not stayed. The evasive white knight had moved again. Where to, in God’s name?
To Buxhoeveden’s divisions.
What pushed him? The sadness on the face of our defeated emperor? Thoughts of Nadya? Of me?
The point is, he had volunteered to ride farther south and reach the last troops left fighting as the French were drawing all their forces around them. Reach them, and tell them to fall back lest they’d be encircled. The point is, he didn’t have to go to the other side of the battlefield, three miles away, but he went. And doggedly, I followed.
By the time he arrived, the retreat was already on the way—as a disoriented, mad dash, for the survivors did not know which way to turn, where to connect with the rest of the army. The infamous flight across ice was already happening, when remnants of Dokhturov’s and Langeron’s columns were retreating over frozen ponds—the Sachan. Napoléon later claimed that 20,000 Russians drowned in those—what propaganda hogwash, they couldn’t bloody hold twenty thousand bodies; and what kind of ice they were covered with—an early-December-in-Western-Europe ice, it could not have held, no one could have thought that it would hold, now could they! They just had nowhere else to go! And most of them made it, trudged right through; artillery and ice took only a couple of hundred, no more, not the least because—
Because my godson was there. He beheld it—and
everything must have become so clear, so self-evident, so beautiful. This was his purpose, the reason for his existence, the reason he had just survived the mash of the vineyards without so much as a scratch. This was why there was the brotherhood of ice, and why he was an ice-swimmer, the true John the Baptist of the North, the one who rescues people from cold water, not lures them into it!
I found him by going toward the greatest clamor and commotion. The ponds stretched far right and left, and were a hundred, maybe more, yards wide. On the far side, a mass of troops was pressing right to left along the bank toward a far-off causeway—a roundabout route under shellfire—and some were spilling onto the ice, perceiving it as a coveted shortcut. When I reached the shore, the ice had already given way under them—and many were made into helpless pups, ice-shocked and thrashing. When I reached the shore, I saw Andrei’s horse, just released by his rider and bounding out of shallows, flanks steaming, and Andrei—charging toward the melee, still impossibly on top of the failing crust like a magical tightrope walker, shouting, “Fear not, fella-a-as! Don’t climb it, break it, water is warm!”
Cannonballs fell on the other bank, bouncing, rolling onto ice, sizzling, plunking into the water. More screaming—impact explosions—canister? shells? was the enemy getting closer?—and another crazed swath broke off the fleeing mass and fell into the pond; the water writhed and swarmed with bodies now, bubbled with human heads; too many of them in a hole of water, no going back nor forward, a razor edge of ice all around and no outlet made fast enough, and Andrei shouted, “Who on horseback—break the way! On foot—follow!”
Some horsemen pushed forth and some would have, were not their mounts besieged by desperate souls—swarming, clinging from all sides like sea monsters roused from the deep. Whips flew, beasts and humans screamed—somebody tangled up in a stirrup, somebody disoriented pushed the wrong way—Andrei grabbed a rolling cannonball and used it to smash ice, and when he sank, finally sank himself into that man-ice mash, he turned around and attacked the ice, shouldered it, cracked it, opening a passage, leading, making way for men; and I was halfway across the pond when I broke through with one leg, ice ever a trickster trying to slow me down, but I pulled out and just then hot air swished at my face and a cannonball burst through ice not two steps ahead. “Andrei Velitzyn!” I bellowed. “Careful, they’ll drown you!” and then I was next to him at last, and he cried, “You?!” and I, “Who else, damnit!” and he, “Then stop fortune-telling and help!”
And it was good. No matter the fears (I a weak swimmer), the pushing, mashing crowd no matter—it was good, my feet could feel the bottom, we were together, Andrei and I, and I laughed, oh I laughed. So happy to break ice for my Andrei, I was. So elated to lock arms with him and shout, “Just the shivering humans, hear that?”
“What?”
“Who only have eight degrees of freedom! between life and death, yet they smash ice! and build ships—don’t cling, lads!—and make warmth out of deep freeze with their breath alone!”
“Shivering humans?”
“Yes, Son, not monsters, not me—just the fearless shivering humans like you do the greatest magic of all, that’s what I learned in the Arctic, that’s what it was!”
We reached our shore and doubled back, in what now became a throughway of open water. I tried to stay close to Andrei, and if I didn’t look at him directly I heard his voice next to me. I lost track of him maybe for just one moment, just a short little second.
And suddenly, he was no longer there.
I remember halting, stupefied. Men pushed and pressed past me, but I was helpful no longer. I kept looking left and right, wading back and forth, but I could not find him. A disappearance, sheer, plain, and shrill; no holding him in my arms, no dragging him ashore, no hearing his last words. He was above water and the next moment he wasn’t.
I swear it wasn’t hypothermia. It wasn’t ice. It couldn’t have done this to us. A French cannonball had to have killed him, a shell. Contused him, drowned him, pushed him under ice. I kept looking. I ended up looking for him even back in the vineyards, for that’s where I remember myself standing, hours later. Maybe I thought he had left and gone to rejoin his troops. I don’t know what I thought.
I remember a deepening dusk and freezing rain. From the far end of the field, wind blew fragments of the antiroyalist “Marseillaise” interwoven with chants of Vive l’Empereur! Wandering lights in the fields—the French were out and about poking at the dead and wounded. An air of something perversely festive—a weird Christmas, as if those people with lanterns were out caroling. An occasional burst of speech or laughter. A gunshot from time to time. I shouted, “No more killing! Shame on you!” And someone shouted back in a busy, annoyed, and very French voice, “He begged me to! What am I supposed to do, walk away? Eh?”
I remember, even when silence would fall, the battlefield felt strangely alive. Here and there a soul still held the fort, flesh against ground: I am. I am. I still am. I could feel the hum of this obstinate I am all over the body-strewn field. I could see it: a horse sat patiently on his haunches observing his hind legs, broken off. A man picked dirt off his spilled guts and folded them back into his stomach. But there was also another, terrifying kind of life. The leftover life of the flesh. The whole field was warmer than me. I could feel it pulsing, dripping, churning, cooling but slowly, effluvia lingering. A twitch, a rustle. The empires had worked so hard to forge a single body of war out of their soldiers, and they had succeeded, in a manner.
In my dreams, the scene gains terror. The darkness is deeper, the falling sleet thicker. I am alone, outnumbered. I hear crawl and creep around me, bodies furtively joining into a sheet, a different kind of a glacier. “Andrei?” I keep calling, but less and less loudly. I am so afraid. I know I need to say something to this ever-growing audience. So I begin, careful not to start crying, “In the Zeittlenkeit that surrounds me—”
Sometimes when I have this dream I get to see what happens next. I see lights and hear someone banging on a canteen. “Wake up! Anyone alive, show yourself!” I see surgeon Kessler with his leather-bound sketchbook. Between me and his wagons, the field lifts hands, groans, help.
• • •
A curious case of Prince Velitzyn, Alexander Mikhailovich, an older man. Found wandering in the field of battle in wet clothes and showing extreme coldness. I am sure that’s what Kessler wrote in his sketchbook after he had come across me. I left his care the next morning—as soon as I could string two thoughts together. A day later, they found Andrei. He had floated up, Subcolonel Nastyrtzev told me.
A Struldbrug
1805‒12
Struldbrugs are a peculiar race Gulliver encountered in his travels. A struldbrug’s life begins as any normal person’s would, and reaches a ripe old age, and then an overripe age, and then—he just would not die. But instead of appeasing him, this condition makes a struldbrug ill-tempered, burdensome, and annoying. He may tell you, as I just did, that his friend died, then his wife died, then his adopted son died. He may even blame himself for these deaths, just as I do. Ironically, it is this feeling of guilt that makes him into an ill-tempered old man who vexes the remaining few still around him—something he, in turn, feels guilty about. It is the fact that all his loved ones have passed on that makes him feel like a struldbrug.
I am so sorry.
• • •
On December 4, 1805, Subcolonel Nastyrtzev and other kindly souls from my old Preobrazhensky put me in a carriage and told me I had to accompany Andrei’s remains home. Our hero, they said, should rest in peace and comfort in his home soil, not in a mass grave in a foreign land. So that his children, your grandchildren, Prince Alexander Mikhailovich, they told me, would visit him and be proud of their father, reading on his tombstone, a cavalier of the Order of St. George. Apparently, the brass had already made an application to the emperor, and His Majesty had nodded. The high award to Andrei was virtually guaranteed.
God bless Nastyrtzev, he was so helpfu
l, he explained it all to me so patiently. And so, for days and days, I rattled on in my carriage, Andrei’s coffin strapped to its rear, and my back felt every bump and rut he had to endure. The most horrific journey.
Back in Nikolskoe, it was all a charade. While one woman pretended that she grieved more than she actually did, another had to pretend that she grieved less. I was watching poor Nadya at the wake. The mourners all flocked to Varvara, held her hands, whispered condolences, showcased their empathy with their offerings of water and aromatic salts—which it was Nadya’s responsibility to run and fetch pronto.
I saw the glances Varvara shot at Nadya. Revenge comes in so many guises!
I remember thinking that I should speak to Nadya. Tell her that I did not condemn her, that I was on her side. But I feared breaking down in her presence. I barely held together as it was. I sought refuge in my icery, the cold and drafty former barn with naked windows without panes and frost on doorjambs, with snowflakes nesting, like swallows, in the shadows between the roof beams. I would walk between the rows of my creations. Their fragrance—a tone of mineral, marmoreal purity and a touch of wet-cold rot, was like a drug to me, like Anna’s morphine. For hours I wandered, stood still, or lay flat on the dirt floor, inhaling it. For as long as I did this, the pain in my soul seemed to lessen.
Why didn’t Nadya leave? Why did she stay where it hurt the most? Why would she go to Anna’s and Andrei’s graves and stand over them like a votive candle, quietly burning away? She had means. There was a trust fund set up by the academy for Druka’s education, and Carl’s pension had been accumulating for a decade now. Besides, my Andrei had left her a small endowment in his will. I hadn’t told her about it yet, because bringing it up would imply that I knew they’d been lovers. A most awkward admission. But if she were ready to leave, if these were my last words to her—then perhaps it wouldn’t matter so much, would it?
Once, Nadya came into the icery. I don’t know how long she was observing me—my back was to the door. I was trotting down an aisle between my ice flower beds, calling softly, Andrewsha-a-a-a! I only noticed her when I turned around to make another pass. We both were startled. Then I approached. Her eyes, her nose were red—she must have been crying. Only the very tip of her nose was white, the tip that had been frostbitten a lifetime ago in Irkutsk, with her Carl. Part of me wanted to touch that little white tip and say, “I’ve been crying too, kid.” But another part of me, embarrassed at her finding me in such a sorry state, was already saying, “Do not ever come here uninvited.”
The Age of Ice: A Novel Page 30