She apologized and hurried out.
• • •
How was it, Nadya? Was Andrei a good lover? Did he make you forget everything, your children, your shame? Did you realize that what you had with Carl was but an academic, scholastic version of passion? Did you trust my son? Was he a friend to you? Did you worship him? Was he funny? Did you pray together? Laugh? Cry? Did he lace your corset, your booties? Did he buy you presents? Intimate ones? Did you have nicknames for each other? Did you have embarrassments, near-disasters, lucky escapes, awkward run-ins, secret messages, favorite jokes, resolutions, quarrels, vows, great revelations? Was it thrilling? Was it bitter? Was it worth it?
“Yes,” she would say, walking up from behind, putting her gentle hands onto the back of my armchair. “Yes, Alexander Mikhailovich, it was worth it. I shall never ever regret it. I know you blame me for his death too. We share the blame. Here we are, the two of us, we are all that’s left. We are convinced we’d loved him best, known him best, worshipped his true self. But at the same time we are the bearers of his undoing. How sad it is. And how strange.”
She says all that and strokes my hair. She is no longer Nadya, she is Anna. Dreams, goddamn dreams.
• • •
In 1807 we went to war again and fought the French some more, bloodily and inconclusively, at Eylau and Friedland, now alongside Prussians. After we signed the first Treaty of Tilsit with Napoléon, we were obliged to join his continental blockade of Britain, or the Blocus, as we used to call it back then. Our ports closed to British ships. Trade was supposed to cease, again. In February 1808, Sawyer visited me in my home and brought along his new wife, a former Mrs. Alistair Woodrow, now in charge of the late Mr. Woodrow’s sizable timber operation. She and Sawyer had known each other ever since she, then a married woman, adopted him as a charitable cause after his return from the Arctic, and they had become quite embroiled over all kinds of things; connubial interest—whenever that had ignited—but one of the ingredients in a mix. I remember how, back in 1804, Sawyer confided in me that Mr. Woodrow, who, along with Messrs. Thornton and Boyle, was one of the wealthiest English merchants in St. Petersburg, was instructed to forward a considerable sum of money directly to Czar Alexander I and a few of his key courtiers to keep alive our interest in the war against Napoléon. That’s in addition to already existing, official subsidies, Sawyer explained with a wink. (With his typical boyish excitement, he could not help hinting that he was personally involved in some of those transactions.)
Now, in 1808, our Mr. Sawyer looked somewhat stiff under the added weight of wealth and responsibility. A far cry from the young man who fell head over heels for the sixteen-year-old wife of a sadistic Siberian Cossack. Though perhaps it was precisely the memory of Ouchapin that made him seek a relationship where he would never be able to govern the woman he married. The widow Woodrow, ten years his senior, was like a mother to him. If she thought that she had rescued him like a puppy and nursed him to full manhood, she wasn’t that far from the truth. “Martin dear, will you be needing your cane?” she asked him when they were getting out of the kibitka by my front entrance.
“No, I’ll manage,” he said; then, offering his elbow to support her, “Watch your step, Mrs. Sawyer, it’s a bit icy right here.”
He must have liked the sound of it: Mrs. Sawyer.
“Prince Velitzyn—how do you do,” she said, and extended a hand—a big, gloved lump of energy which I squeezed briefly and released. She was solid-framed, slightly stooping. A trifle taller than Sawyer. Her hair was golden-red, eager to escape the oppression of a fox fur bonnet that almost rivaled a Napoleonic guard’s bearskin in size.
I entertained them in my study. Under different circumstances, I might have enjoyed their company. Alas, Sawyer informed me that I now had to find a third party to ship my ice goods. Besides, if I wanted to reach the British Isles, that third party would have to sail out of Archangel, not Kronstadt, and go over the Scandinavian peninsula rather than through the politically stormy Baltic.
As if this was not bad enough, a burgeoning ice-harvesting enterprise was now active on the immense Lake Ontario in the New World, an operation for which I was no match, and which could ship to Britain unmolested, any time of the year. Most damning of all, Sawyer said he and his wife were returning to Britain. “Right, Evy?” He glanced at her for support. “It’s high time to go home. Staying here gets harder and harder all the time because of—you know, the situation. I am sorry.”
I thought if he hadn’t married, his home would’ve been here, in the smoky St. Pete’s apartment with a view of the admiralty’s spire, in the stuffy club, on the noisy floor of the stock exchange. It was for Evy’s convenience that he now abandoned the idiosyncratic mixture of English and Russian we usually communicated in, and spoke proper English—which made me realize that my own English had become stale. The lost cause of the Tower of Babel came to my mind, as if the responsibility for it lay on my shoulders too. As if we were just now smitten with the proverbial curse and were segregating into our respective languages, our ability to understand each other slowly fading—
I found myself wishing this visit was over and the Sawyers were on their merry way.
Instead, Sawyer begged me to give them a tour of my icery. Evy wished to see it. Having reinstalled Mrs. Sawyer’s fox fur coat on her broad shoulders, we headed out. I said to Sawyer in Russian, “You and I—we could have managed. We’ve been through embargoes before, haven’t we? We could trade with continental Europe, as we did in 1799.”
He didn’t answer immediately. Mrs. Sawyer walked next to him, attached to his elbow, looking eager. Then, out of the corner of his mouth and now in our dear mixed lingua franca, pronouncing my patronymic in his special, Anglicized manner, Maikl-ovich, he whispered, “Things izmenyautsya, Alexander Michaelovich. Ranshe it was one thing, a now it is a very different situatsiya. Think of it, we are praktichesky in the opposite war camps. Britannia on one side and everybody else under Napoléon on the other.”
“We are not pod Napoléonom,” I said, unlocking the doors to the icery. “We are a sovereign country.”
“But you will do as he says.”
“You are overestimating his reach. What happened to the man who had all those silly nicknames for Bonaparte?” We stepped inside.
“And what happened to the man who used to be the grandest of historical pessimists? I can’t believe . . . Ouf! You ever . . . weed here?”
Mrs. Sawyer said, “Goodness gracious!”
“Please explore,” I said to Mrs. Sawyer. “The most mature specimen are in the rows farther back, on your right. If you like anything in particular, I’d be happy to cut it for you.”
Hand in hand, Mr. and Mrs. Sawyer started down the central aisle, now more tunnel than walkway, overgrown on all sides by my ice creations. I lingered behind. I’d had no visitors here since Anna’s death, and now it struck me how much my guests reminded me of two little children, venturing into my garden as if it were Baba Yaga’s forest. I thought I should probably start a lantern—though it was daytime, there wasn’t enough light inside. But to weed it, as Sawyer put it? These were no weeds. These were all carefully designed and sculpted creations.
Then I thought I still was a historical pessimist. I hadn’t changed—Sawyer had. Yet I did not want to lose Sawyer because of Napoléon. I lit a lantern and went after the couple. I encountered a curtain of ice needles that had grown almost all the way down on one side; I was used to bending and squeezing past it, but Mrs. Sawyer, I realized, might have trouble getting through. Somewhat embarrassed, I broke off some needles and widened the passage. I went through but then realized that they hadn’t gone that way at all. I turned and looked around.
Ice does marvelous things. It makes light and sound travel, scatter, and diffuse in the most remarkable ways. Suddenly I could hear rather clearly Mrs. Sawyer saying, “This place is crazy!” and Sawyer replying in a hushed, through-the-teeth manner, “So he let it go a little. You’ve
got to give him some slack, Evy, he’s lost his family!”
I backed out of earshot, I hid under an overarching dead blackberry frond that grew grapelike ice clusters all along its ice-encrusted length. I rocked my lantern—the light was producing lovely glitters in the ice-grapes. Anna used to like them so much. I said, “I’m here with the lantern.”
Sawyer turned a corner and approached, looking up and around.
I said, “It’s not an English garden.”
He chuckled, stopping before me, then looked me in the eyes. “I’m sorry. I really am. Things change.”
“I don’t change,” I said.
“That’s right! You don’t. You stay in one place, while the market doesn’t. How many times have we talked about investments? Growth? You could have gotten into shipping years ago, you could have owned those ships that now haul Lake Ontario ice. You could have owned ice-harvesting rights to Lake Ladoga by now! Massive! But no, that wouldn’t be Velitzyn special ice, now would it? It wouldn’t be blue!”
I said, “First, I cannot become a full-time merchant, I’ll lose my noblesse over it. Second, all labor that goes into my ice harvest is my peasants’ corvée, and it can only go so far. I can’t make them work for me six days a week, even if I pay them for it.”
“Yes, I know all that, but there are ways around! Proxies! Hired labor!”
“That’s how I own an ice-creamery on the Nevsky Prospect.”
“And it is a fine enterprise indeed, but that’s not enough! I know all these feudal objections that you can mount, but forgive me if I point this out—the real problem is not there. You know that mass product is where profit is. Mass product and cheap labor. Or free labor. Every one of your feudal colleagues who pushes his timber, or flax, or broadcloth onto us knows it. It’s the first and sometimes the only thing they know. It’s all about mass product, Alexander Maiklovich, while you insist on remaining a—boutique!”
“A what?”
“A boutique, a specialty shop. An exclusive, small-scale operation. What people need is cooling ice, not—this!” He waved his hand around. “This is marvelous, but your average Joe buyer, the third estate, the middle class, the pillar of economy, he can’t put this into his cellar, you know. He can’t afford it! Or even if he tries to, his wife will be spooked by it. I swear, that thing behind me is just like a cross between a giant artichoke and a Gorgon. I mean, look at it! You are a dear friend, but you are impossible to do business with. Not in this day and age!”
I kept silent, so he spread his arms and stated the obvious, “There. I said it.”
“I’ll start investing,” I said.
“Oh, Christ!” He stepped in and awkwardly enclosed me in his arms, then backed off. He wiped tears off his eyes and pointed a finger at me. “I’m going home. I have to. There is war. I need to be where I belong.”
That was it, then. One last truth: “Mr. Sawyer . . . Do you think me mad?”
“Of course not!”
“Was I ever different? Strange? In the Arctic . . . and after—”
“Evy? Evy, where are you?” He sounded almost angry. She was right behind him. With fake cheerfulness: “Oh, here you are. Are you ready to go?” He almost turned his back, then stopped midway, studied me as if committing my image to memory. “Ah, my dear Alexander Maiklovich, no more than usual. No more than ever.” Scooping Mrs. Sawyer’s elbow, he marched out.
I stayed. I kept rocking my lantern, watching flickers and flares in the bristly heads of the ice-bloom that Sawyer had singled out. An artichoke and a Gorgon, huh? I remember being preoccupied with a curiosity: why is it that in Russian the words betrayal and change have the same root? Was it because Russians changed far less than Englishmen and thus were more likely to regard change in and of itself as something negative, a betrayal?
• • •
Now that I was freed of the necessity to conform to the whims of the market, my creativity entered its High Renaissance. My designs grew like Dr. Merck’s pump, they arched and towered above me. Now they truly did resemble chimeras of Gorgons and artichokes, and more. Blooming thistles with tentacles. Tulips with spider legs. I spent days transplanting ribbon ice on stalagmite ice. I captured snowflakes and affixed them to my inflorescences, until I got just the right texture. I encouraged ice in one place, and constricted it in the other, I trimmed, sealed, pinned, resected, cauterized, sprayed, dripped, ablated, fused.
Nadya, why won’t you leave?
Why did she stay? My elder grandson, Prince Mikhail Andreevich, age six, was now a veritable thug. He had taken to pinching—just like our mad Czar Paul II in his time. Young Mikhail had pinched Sophichka Merck, a good-natured, delicate twelve-year-old, her mother’s shadow. What could Sophichka have done to upset young Mikhail? Her only fault was her beauty—the Yakuti, Russian, and German blood in her had collided—colluded—to produce something wonderful. Why was Mikhail so angry? It had to be Varvara’s influence.
And now this latest—the princeling accused Druka Merck of the unthinkable: throwing into the fire the wooden Preobrazhensky grenadier Andrei had played with growing up, the very one I had given him, with a free-rotating grenade-throwing arm! By then twice repainted, the grenadier was no longer merely a toy, he was an heirloom! Throwing him into the fire? So unlike nine-year-old Friedrich Carl Wolfgang Merck, who spoke German with a cute Russian accent, and collected empty glass vials from everybody in the house and then played pharmacist.
I called them both into my presence. I sat outdoors in a garden chair, it was winter (it is always winter). I sat like Ivan the Terrible on his throne. I made them stand before me. “So, Mikhail, you speak first. Which one of you did it?”
“He did,” Mikhail said. “I was playing and he came and grabbed my grenadier and threw him into the fire.” He glanced at Druka and added, “And he laughed and said, only good for firewood.”
Druka, meanwhile, flared nostrils, blanched, and blushed. Finally I addressed him. “Is that what you did?”
“No, sir. I never did any of what he says.”
“Then why is he saying you did it?”
“Because he’s mad at me because I don’t want to play war! Because he hurts me when I play war with him!”
Mikhail shouted, “Liar! You never play war ’cause you want to play kings and servants and always want to be a king and tell me German cusswords!”
“I never told you German cusswords! You cussed at me in Russian!”
On the remote chance that Druka was actually guilty, I sentenced both of them to stand in their separate corners for an hour.
Varvara was furious. I forbade her to interfere and sent her out. Mikhail threw a tantrum and pinched and bit Cyril, who had attempted to install him into his corner. Cyril complained that he lacked the authority to bring his young nobleship princeling to his senses. I slapped the young nobleship on the back of his head and threatened to put him in the corner of my dark, cold icery. This did not stop him fast enough, so I grabbed him and headed out. Upon a second thought, I took Druka as well.
I took them to the darkest, farthest corner (Druka helped me light the lantern because I kept hold of Mikhail). “If you two ever again in your lives try to speak falsely about another person for your own gain, this place will revisit itself on your memory. It will keep coming to you, and its ice will close all around you if you don’t swear to me right this moment that you will never ever, ever make lies. Swear or I’ll snuff the light and leave you here alone with ice. My ice is alive. It is hungry and it will gobble you up.”
I reduced the princeling Mikhail to whimpering. I’d extorted from him no fewer than three vows to be a good boy, each louder than the previous one. To Druka I said, “Do you know why you are here?”
He nodded. Smart boy.
Much good it did. While we were away, Varvara avenged on Nadya every bit of my heavy-handed treatment of Mikhail. Witnesses told me Nadya stood up for herself and her son—I was proud of her for that. And since she did not buckle, the Princess Veli
tzyn screamed at her, “Don’t you talk up to me, you half-blood whore!”
While Nadya did not let it get to her when Varvara accused her of poor parenting, this last accusation rendered her speechless.
• • •
You see, Nadya, it is better if you leave: nothing but bitterness in this old house.
I would have liked her to stay—she helped me live on. I would have liked her to go for a walk with me, and read a newspaper for me by the fire, and tell me her stories—but I couldn’t, because my daughter-in-law had been digging a hole for me. She had a big family, omnivorous brothers. She’d been writing letters to them, telling them all kinds of lies. So one day I got a letter, no, two letters, one after another. One was from Baroness d’Anglairs:
Alexander dear,
I may be an old crone, but I still know which way the wind is blowing. Since we don’t ever see you around here anymore, you might not be aware of the kind of conversation in which your name is mentioned. In my salon, you are mentioned straight after His Majesty and his brother. Under the same subject heading, my dear, for your information, insanity is now in vogue, owing to those Britons and their King George III. It is now fashionable and progressive, decidedly European, to have a deranged old uncle and to have him pronounced incompetent and tucked away heaven knows where. Every young idler in this town dreams about this kind of arrangement, one that costs him nothing but is certain to bring him a windfall of inheritance. Every ingenue who used to be forever thankful that a fussbudget old aunt had taken her in and arranged for her future in exchange for a little respect—every one of them now perks her little ears when she hears this sort of banter. I don’t believe you, Alexander, wish to end up in those shoes. For Anna’s memory’s sake, please, please come out of your seclusion, show us that you are the good old friend, the witty charmer we used to know. One appearance by you I am quite sure will be more than enough to embarrass all those rumormongers.
The Age of Ice: A Novel Page 31