The well-advised letter infuriated me. Idiots, gossip scavengers! What business was it to them? What did it matter that I went out into snowfalls and flurries and stood, my arms outstretched? I collected snowflakes, I let them settle on me, I caught the rare ones, I had a collection, a big, growing treasure. Where was insanity in it?
Do you know, Nadya, how difficult it is to make it so that a snowflake won’t ever melt? True, I had done it to ice, but that, as far as I could tell, was all about pressing and crushing it in an outburst of rage. But a snowflake—one could not rage at it, now could he? A never-melting snowflake, Nadya, is something only a bitter old man can make, holding it on his cold finger, and staring at it for long hours, and feeling nothing but vast, cold sorrow.
She would have understood it, if I told her. Still, we could not be close friends. That’s because of the other letter I received, the one from the old Moscow nest, the extended Velitzyn family. It was produced by the righteous quill of a committee of my third and fourth cousins and nephews, those veterans of aristocracy, graced with old age after a lifetime of gainful service in the military or in government. The letter said,
Beloved relative,
It has become known to us that the Redrikovs, with whom you have had the insight to establish kinship, are flaunting certain letters from their sister, your daughter-in-law. The old man Redrikov was a man of honor, but the latest generation is nothing but swindlers who would not pass an opportunity to enlarge themselves at the expense of those in more fortunate circumstances. We’ve been shown this Varvara’s letters and read with our own eyes about all manner of mistreatment she is suffering at your hand, dearest relative. Furthermore, she alleges that you have taken in your adopted son’s mistress, a commoner, and that you favor her bastard children over Varvara’s legitimate issue.
However little truth may lie in those slanders, we urge you to purge the root. Make it so the rumors have nothing to feed on. In his old age, even the most upright of men can fall into distractions, and you have always been a fruit of your own kind, having taken after your mother no doubt; thus many people around here find it not altogether impossible to imagine you in a scandalous if not depraved position.
This is our advice to you: remember what you are. Rein in your daughter-in-law. Correct the mistress situation. No one expects you to be celibate, but you have to agree that it does not befit an uncle to follow on the heels of his nephew into precisely the same place. We have always stood by you and would like to do so in the future, but if our good name is besmirched through your frivolities, we will be forced to take measures.
You see what they think of me, Nadya?
Thanks to Varvara’s insinuations, I was now a crazy old tyrant who had bedded his nephew’s—his adopted son’s—mistress. I was determined not to let Varvara prevail. Her inflammatory letters would be censored, her co-conspirator maid would be fired. She’d invented mistreatment—now she’d get the real deal. No more trips to St. Pete’s. All Varvara did there was complain, being a poor darling widow gave significance to her life. Shopping? She could order by mail. Whatever reasonably priced dresses she’d like—French, Italian, British, even the ladies’ fashions by our own, homegrown wonder Savva Matryonin (that’s right, that very Savva, the son of my remarkable Matryona), the couturier who left even the French in the dust, they said . . . Although, those newest designs, with their curiously high waistlines and not an inkling of a corset—did she really think they flattered her silhouette? Pardon me, dear daughter-in-law, but I have to tell you, Nadya has more style than you. Now, if you excuse me, I have work to do, my icery needs me.
• • •
Ice begets ice.
If left unattended, my ice creations would attempt to grow on their own. Appendages, unsanctioned, corns and calluses, unplanned. Disobedience! I had no tolerance for that. I was more demanding than your Versailles gardener, with his shears and tourniquets. I would break the ice, put it in a cast and let it heal, and break its bones again. Lacerate it, burn it, slash it. Scar it repeatedly, for best results of bulging joints, tumorous galls, confused, pluripotent outgrowths. Here, for all you’ve done to me. Here, for those you’ve taken away from me. That is for Merck. That is for Anna. That—for Andrei. Who is the master now, eh?
Ah, but the threat of spring! Recoil and cower, ye gardener-surgeon. To my ice: Please do not melt! I’ve been rough with you, my beautiful creatures. I’ve tortured you. But seeing you go like this, seeing you so sad and flaccid makes me hollow in my heart. Quick! Let us insulate the walls of the icery, barricade them against sun’s imminent invasion, pile bales of hay ceiling high, make it a giant cold storage so you, my flowers, would be able to live through the whole summer, so we can resume our exercises again, soon!
• • •
Nadya, Nadya, what had happened to you? No more light in your eyes, no more smile in your lips. Your red hair is turning gray. We have sucked the life out of you, haven’t we? But you know, you should not have told me that I was too hard on Varvara, particularly after she called you a whore.
I had barely said a word to her in two months, and with each new day it was a little more difficult to start talking to her again. But it was important to tell her this: she had better leave before my outraged relatives came for me. Any day now I was going to summon her and suggest that she moved on. You are free to go, I’d say, but not until we’ve talked about you and Andrei. How was it? . . . Yes, I’ve known, all these years. Do you dream of him still?
Then I would say that Andrei had cared deeply about her. That he’d left her an endowment. Would she ask for my forgiveness? Would I grant it?
Then she would pack up and leave. And I would be left all alone, like an iceberg that broke off a glacier and was now towed south by currents and winds, pushed slowly but inevitably to his melting death.
• • •
She left in 1810, in the middle of June. When she came to speak to me, she brought both Sophichka and Druka. She held them close as if they helped her stand. She said, “Forgive me, Sir Alexander Mikhailovich. I beg your leave. I think it would be better for the children.”
There were all those things I wanted to say . . . I stood up, went over to the bureau, pulled out Andrei’s will, gave it to her. She read. When she finished, her eyes were full of tears. She put her fingertips on his signature as if it were his hand that she was touching.
I said, “What if I asked you to stay?”
She looked me in the eyes. Slowly shook her head, making tears spill out and run down her cheeks.
I said, “We can arrange it through the Bank of the Nobility. I’ll give you a letter to the vice president.” After a second thought, with a small chuckle, “And a copy of this will. They may not trust my word alone. Many people think that I’m—well—crazy.”
She made this little wince—of pity and disbelief, I hope. But she didn’t say anything. She wiped her tears off and said thank you and God bless you, she told her children to thank me. Sophichka curtsied and Druka made a solemn bow. I told him to take care of his mother from now on, I ruffled his hair. That was as close as I dared to get to his mother, though I so wanted to hug her. I so wished we had enclosed each other in our arms and wept together. I know, I know, I’ve always known, I’d repeat. I love you both. All three of you. You. Andrei. Carl.
“Go!” I said.
She ushered the kids out, goading them before her, and they were gone.
I hate summer.
• • •
By 1811 Varvara’s character had soured completely. Whenever I asked her to read a newspaper for me, she’d purposely do it with all the wrong emphases and pause points, as if she did not understand what she read. If I pointed it out, she’d retort, “Why don’t you read it yourself, then? Are your eyes failing?”
If I made her go with me on a walk, she’d keep five steps ahead. “Walk abreast,” I’d say. “I shan’t be shouting to you for a conversation.”
She’d reply, “You are slow. And we hav
en’t been having any conversation at all.”
We were abandoning our feeble diplomacy for war, my daughter-in-law and I; in the meantime, Russia and France once again were en route to the same. I followed the developments religiously: Caulaincourt (the French ambassador to Russia) and Kurakin (our ambassador to France) traded hints and insinuations. Our army camped in Poland, and there was talk of striking first. I found the cavalier attitude among our generals rather astonishing. Even the ones who had tasted Napoleonic warfare and should have known better, Bagration for one, went around boasting on and off record that they’d give Napoléon an exquisite pummeling.
Above us all, the comet of 1812 was already visible in the skies.
That year started out strange. Temperatures jumped around. Winter was unsatisfactory. Spring—too hasty. May swung between extremes; hot spells and thunderstorms. At the peak of heat, Varvara completely let go of any dress code. Nightgowns and lounge dresses—what were her sons supposed to think? And servants too, that stableboy who got one eyeful after another, what was he supposed to derive from it, some kind of an invitation?
I felt acrimonious. I accused Varvara of cheating when I lost to her in a card game. She flushed. “Look who’s talking!”
I stated that unlike me, she was a confirmed liar—making up stories about Nadya and me was a good example—and she said, “If the word of a woman ever weighed as much as a man’s word, you’d be locked up, not me!”
I exclaimed that she was not exactly locked up, that she did it to herself, and also, “Darling, you are too mean for your own good. Even your own sons are not too fond of you.”
She raised the stakes with, “Say all you want. I’ll have my say when you are frail and bedridden,” and so I swore that I’d drag on for another decade, able-bodied, until her own spite had drained all the life out of her, and all desire to have the last say, not to mention whatever little womanly charm she still possessed. From there on, it was screams and belligerence, and rudeness to Andrei’s memory. At the culmination of it, she grabbed her head, looking about as if disoriented, repeating, Oh, my God, what is it?! Her eyes found me then, and she shouted, “Why won’t you die?!”
I riposted with another inflammatory polemic; a few hours later, alone and almost remorseful, I pondered her words. Why won’t I die? Truly, what kept me going? At seventy-one my limbs were agile still, my teeth stayed in my gums, my eyes still returned a clear image of the world. No needling calls to attention from my innermost parts, no major aches or gross failures. But for how much longer? And did I have a reason to live other than to spite Varvara?
No, I did not.
Not a week after that, the French crossed the Neman River into Russian Poland. Not just the French. Just about all continental nations who kept armies were bound by their treaties with Napoléon to go against us. All our former allies. Austrians. Prussians. Italians.
• • •
The cause of war? We were getting cocky. We were not adhering to the Blocus, we needed correction. Truly though? Mr. Nap needed another thrilling adventure for himself and his glorious army. We could be his other Egypt.
Veritably so. At first it seemed little changed. For most of June and some of July we could go for several days and not hear anything about the progress or whereabouts of the Grande Armée. It was as if it marched in another dimension; the immense geography it had to traverse was dampening its everyday impact. As if a body of people that huge could still be unaccounted for, lost for days, and then reemerge out of some woods next to another village, another town. Of course it wasn’t this way for those who lived within its trajectory. You could tell where it had passed by the wall of dust that stood over the road for days. By the trail of garbage and excrement. By the stench. It was always easy to find it if one wanted to . . .
In July 1812 the invasion was mostly a cause for my immediate neighbors to drop formalities and call upon me. Naturally, I suspected every one of these visitors to be a Redrikov or Velitzyn spy. A certain Kudelin, the next-door neighbor, was a particular bother. The way he walked in, twisting his head around, tapping his whip on his bootleg, polite though emboldened by the perceived legitimacy and gravity of his purpose! The front parlor was as far as he got and no sight of Varvara was permitted to him.
Kudelin and others all said they were concerned. What about, I would inquire. Europe had had a war almost every year for the past two decades, I would tell them, what was the big deal? The French would advance as far as they would, we’d accept a battle or two, men would die, then both sides would proceed to the negotiating table and that would be that. We might lose our part of Poland and then have to furnish an army to help Napoléon squelch the Spanish and the British, what else is new.
Yes, they would answer to that, but their revolutionary values . . .
What revolutionary values? It is no longer about anything revolutionary! Not for the past ten years. It’s power politics, business as usual.
But the peasant folk . . .
What about them?
The peasants brood. Some of them say the Antichrist is coming, so they get restless, moody.
Well, enlighten them, then. Inform them! Tell them their comrades in Poland and Prussia think nothing of it, just get themselves a secure place to stash food and have a knapsack ready so they can hit the woods whenever the enemy passes through. What a peculiar country we are, gentlemen, every other peasantry just grunts and hunkers down, then goes back to the fields, while ours—ours has to brood about the Antichrist and the end of the world, any excuse not to work!
The visitors would chuckle guardedly at my words, like children who are afraid of a magician but curious about his tricks and tales. On the one hand, he is a weirdo, they were thinking (it was written all over their faces). On the other hand, he is an old man, been around and abroad, and may know a thing or two. Still, they would say, we are going to have a meeting of local nobility to discuss the course of action, to present a unified front to anything that may come our way; would you care to come?
I came to one of those, sat through an hourlong discussion about the pros and cons of organizing a militia out of trained peasants, found it incredibly boring, never attended again.
Which is not to say I did not brood. I would stand in front of my mirror and recall Varvara’s words. Why won’t you die? There was nothing she must have wished for more than to have me reduced to a feeble remnant of a man. You wish the French came to annihilate you, I would tell my reflection in the mirror, then you could just throw yourself on them, in revenge for Andrei, and go up in glory. But no, that would not happen. The most likely scenario to happen was the one Varvara would love the most: sooner or later I would fall apart with age and become her victim. What a miserable future! . . . And, come to think of it, what a miserable present—to hang on to make hell out of one’s daughter-in-law’s existence. Such a sad and sorry little end to a life that at least at times looked as if it amounted to something!
The summer dragged. My icery, shuttered and barricaded against the sun, stood forlorn. I eyed it but never once went inside to check on its contents. Blame it on the French.
• • •
After we gave up Vilna without a fight and then lost Smolensk, it became clear that the French were not headed for St. Petersburg. They were headed down almost a straight line: Vilna—Smolensk—Moscow. I had to explain it to my peasants. By then I had taken my own advice and had been informing them. I bought a map and charted the Grande Armée’s course on it; my old Cyril and his nephew took part in it. “Look,” I told the peasant folk, “we are as far from Smolensk as Moscow is, but we are so much more to the north. Napoléon does not want to go north. Clearly, he wants to stay below us on the map, and the roads that lead to Moscow from where he is are, if not better, definitely broader. Simpler to follow. No marshlands!” They made me swear to them that Napoléon would not turn north, and—what the hell—I swore, as if I knew that madman’s mind as my own.
Still, in August there were fires. T
he word spread that folk in Smolensk were running away from the French and burning everything before them—and our local pyromaniacs must have developed an itch to do the same, just out of solidarity. My neighbor Kudelin’s barn burned. Then a part of another’s forest.
Some said the perpetrators were those who wanted emancipation, imported on the French sword. No fear greater to my neighbors than that the mouzhik, the peasant-man, would get it into his head that the French were liberators! Nobility meetings buzzed with agitation: what counterpropaganda to adopt? Why, French atrocities of course: When they come they will rape your mothers and children and gut your wives.
Smoke was in the air. Varvara was quieter, combed her hair with more zeal, listened carefully to my updates, kept her boys close. I kept “informing” my peasants: No burning. Business as usual. Napoléon wouldn’t ever get here, so where would it leave you with your silly conflagrations? You’d be the ones rebuilding, that’s all.
But what would happen if they conquered us, they’d say.
They don’t want to conquer us, they just want to give us a scare, I’d reply.
Would they hang our beloved father the czar?
Would they take us away from you?
Would they cut our heads off and throw us into a vat of boiling oil?
No, no, God, no!
• • •
Then came September. When Napoléon entered Moscow after the Battle of Borodino, everything fell apart. The sacred heart, our mother of the forty times forty churches, our lady of the seven hills, Czarina Moscow was abandoned to defilement! Church bells tolled. Women wept. Men meandered around, aimless. Some hooligan boys, some drunken vagrants agitated to form guerrilla bands and go beat the French. Some serfs went missing. My neighbor Kudelin, now an elected community safety officer, made daily patrols with a rifle. “You were wrong, Alexander Mikhailovich,” he told me triumphantly. “The enemy does not want a negotiating table. The enemy wants the Russian nation dead!”
The Age of Ice: A Novel Page 32