I squirmed.
Varvara grew dramatic. I’d lecture her that Kudelin and his like were just as afraid of their own peasants as they were afraid for the motherland, if not more, and that it was simply laughable to see how they’d now become so possessed with their own patriotic rhetoric, as if they hadn’t, a month or so ago, adopted it in a calculated move to keep a lid on their serfs. She’d accuse me of cynicism, defeatism, denial, Francophilia. She’d wander around clenching her hands and saying she was worried about her brothers in Moscow. I’d say they must have been just fine, evacuated with everyone else east, to the city of Ryazan. She’d say, how could I be so certain, did I open and read a letter addressed to her and then destroy it?
Then she’d go listen to what they said in the village church. She’d return wide-eyed, seething with fears, and at the same time proud of herself for joining with the common folk in times of trouble. She’d tell me that I’d been lying to her about the French. She’d watch, from a window, the brave safety officer Kudelin making a stop at our mansion while on his rounds. “Now what on earth is the man patrolling for,” I would grumble. She’d say, defensively, “Runaway serfs, troublemakers, French spies.”
“French spies?”
“Yes, there is nothing funny about it, Alexander Mikhailovich. The other day they caught one, he swore on his mother’s grave that he was not a spy but a tutor to some local family. That he’d denounced his France back in 1793 and had nothing to do with it since. Shed crocodile tears, babbled about deportation and internment. Couldn’t explain satisfactorily the matter of his being in those particular woods.”
Now she even talked like Kudelin. She must have been meeting with the man somehow!
“What did they do with him?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Gave him to militiamen?”
Alas, poor Yorick. I had my own dangers. I was certain she’d use every patriotic excuse and loophole to turn the tables on me. How about spreading a word that I was a French sympathizer! That I was preparing a welcoming party for Napoléon! Storing ammunitions in that icery of mine—why else would I keep it locked!
Me, a French sympathizer! If I could lay my hands on Napoléon, I’d strangle him. But I beg your pardon, I still remembered the French cook Diadya Vasya, and the way he had stood by his splendid table, in Irkutsk, at Merck’s wedding—searching for signs of approval on diners’ faces and blooming with smiles when he found them. Don’t ask me to demonize Diadya Vasya!
One day I told Kudelin not to patrol on my lands. I told him that I knew what he was after (Varvara, of course!), that he violated my privacy, and that I didn’t need his services. He looked at me as if I was insane. Said, “You know, common people are talking about you, Alexander Mikhailovich. That you have made a deal with Napoléon so he won’t come here and won’t harass the local folks. Believe it or not. Your own peasants have been saying that. I’d say, very curious, isn’t it, where they ever got this idea?”
I could have laughed. Varvara didn’t have to bad-mouth me, a simple echo of my own words, distorted in transmission, polarized by fear, was enough to do me in!
• • •
It was like this for a month. Napoléon sat in Moscow watching it burn, watching things go undone on him. I too couldn’t help participating in my own undoing. Varvara was growing stronger every day on her diet of patriotism. I was certain she was conspiring with Kudelin, her new ally. And I knew I was going down, one way or the other. An escape plan—if you could call it that—was shaping in my mind.
Rains had started in the first days of October and kept coming, off and on, almost every day. I unlocked the icery and went in, after three months of neglect. What a godforsaken place! A stench of mold and rotting hay, stale water, mouse droppings. Shuttered windows, mud, and—molten, ulcerated, stooping shapes—what was left of my ice. How ugly and how fitting! It does not just resemble you, it is you. Never again should you, Alexander Velitzyn, come here to practice your so-called art—because this is how godawful it is, in all its pockmarked decrepitude, look at it! Tear the boards off the windows, disperse the hay, knock down and shatter the rotting ice carcasses. Never again! How foolish, how insane you were. Now, kick open the door, let the stench out. Look at the fields, take a breath of air, you know exactly what to wish for, you know when—as soon as the first snowflake comes circling down from the skies and settles on your hand.
When we heard the news on October 21 that the Grande Armée was on the move again, at first there was a great wail of fear: now they were coming for St. Petersburg! Even Varvara for one brief moment forgot she hated me and fluttered into my study seeking consolation—semi-dressed, eyes wide. The mood passed quickly, though it remained possible, if increasingly unlikely as days went on, that the Grande Armée would take a turn north.
I’ve told you that year was an odd one. Morning frosts in early October, skim ice in water puddles. Freezing fogs. And rain, rain, rain, in between. When seasons break like this, rapidly, even I can’t help but feel shortchanged, as if I’d never known the splendors of winter. But not this time, no. This time I was grateful, because I had to hurry. And all I needed was a little frost to help me along.
On the night of October 26, drizzle turned into snow. I stood by my window and watched as snow kept falling and falling. I pulled out boxes of my snowflake collection, emptied them into a sachet, stuffed it into my breast pocket. I went downstairs and donned Cyril’s sheepskin greatcoat—then took it off. I did not need it.
I tiptoed out.
I walked, breathing snow, feeling weightless—the way only a youth can feel when he is falling in love for the first time, and snow is falling for the first time in his love. If snow kept on falling like this and covered all the fields ahead of me, I’d find that road to Orenburg and walk on it day and night, and meet Anna and little Andrei, and save them from Feodor Napoleonovich Pugachev, and we all would live happily—ever—after.
Forever.
Intervita: A Pause Between Lives
1812–14
There is a long and a short version of what had happened to me. I like the short version better, it makes me look less culpable. It goes like this:
One day I woke up in a foreign land, under a makeshift canvas canopy. I woke to clamor—steel on steel, ax on wood, spoon on bowl, hoof on cobble; to speech, song, laughter, wafts of smoke, smells of cookery—all around me were troops. Russian troops. But the land was France. That’s what I had been told. My canopy was on the Champs Elysées near Paris. It was spring.
I knew some of it upon waking—recovered it just as anyone fresh out of slumber regains his bearings within seconds. But this time something was different. It was in the wonderment that arose in my head: with all the noise around me, how could I have slept? Sun danced on a sagging canvas above my head. A fly sat there, rubbing its front legs together. There was moisture on my brow—dew or sweat. My tongue rolled in saliva like a pig in mud. I swallowed and almost choked. This was different too. But how?
I looked over my prostrate length, knowing the body as mine but at the same time observing its details as if after years of estrangement. I wore officer’s leather boots and ill-fitting blue uniform pants with golden galloons, but above them was a peasant’s red robe girdled with a rope. My back was sore—I had slept on an ax that was tucked under the girdle. I had a thick beard and my hand that scratched it was coarse, veinous, and tinted gray from pallor and dirt. On my head—as my hand discovered—was a bonnet lined with greasy fur. My other hand rested on a rifle.
I felt buoyant. Happy? I got on my knees, picked up my knapsack and rifle. The rifle suddenly felt heavy and burdensome. I put it down, let it lie as it was. Straightening my back, I stepped from under the canopy. A big road of powdery yellow dirt and huge cobblestones ran in a straight line through our encampments, past rows of houses that grew ever denser, to the clustering of grand stone buildings a half mile beyond. I’d always wanted to follow that road and see what the buildings were, I realized.<
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Men by the nearest campfire greeted me with banter. I mimed an urgent need to urinate and staggered away. The miming, the exaggerated manner came naturally; they would have expected it, just as they expected me to shield my eyes from the campfire, to look the other way. But this time, I knew I acted it, an observer of my ways, not a partaker. It was not me. I pretended.
Because I wanted to go away—down the road of dirt and cobblestones, away from the men who had taken me in and kept me around. This was different too.
• • •
And there she was, the grandest of European cities.
I walked smiling. I weaved between soldiers, tents, horses. I approached a freestanding arch and halted, craning my neck: atop of the arch stood a sculpture of a Roman quadriga driven by some classic deity or hero, with two more gilded personages standing at the horses’ sides. An inscription on the frontispiece opened with: L’ARMEE FRANCAISE EMBARQUEE A BOULOGNE . . . MENACAIT L’ANGLETERRE . . . and concluded with NAPOLÉON ENTRE DANS VIENNE, IL TRIOMPHE A AUSTERLITZ EN MOINS DE SEN JOURS LA COALITION ES DISSOLUTE. I read it all and I understood it, but the words were mute. They were not sounds, just combinations of letters that stood to describe the campaign of 1805: Napoléon threatened England, took Vienna, was victorious at Austerlitz, et cetera. I hadn’t spoken French in two years—in fact I hadn’t spoken much at all—but now I wanted to say things, to taste them on my tongue.
Ahead of me was the most splendid palace. I loitered in its court, then attempted to go around. A river embankment was on my right, and I paused there to watch some Russian soldiers fishing off the quay with makeshift rods. A corpse or two floated past. There had been a battle. But then the war was over, I remembered that.
I left the riverbank, circled the palace and dived into the narrow streets. People were everywhere. Soldiers, officers, burghers, workmen, merchants, beggars. Women, girls. Languages rolled over me from all sides, like smells. Whiffs of French, German, English, Italian. Whiffs of fish, baking bread, apples, cadavers, perfume, cold ashes, tallow, wet stone, caramel, charcoal, urine, pot roast. To my left a Prussian Rittmeister was in over his head trying to negotiate a price for a head of cheese at a street stall. Further along—three Russians dressed in brand-new civilian attire huddled over a guidebook, while their escort, a shabby Frenchman, stood waiting, smiling patiently. I passed coffee shops, porcelain shops, palm readers, vegetable vendors. La boulangerie. La fromagerie. La pâtisserie. My tongue and jaws moved now, rediscovering the shape of these beautiful words that felt like hot fresh pastry or a slice of soft crumbling cheese in my mouth. But my voice? I did not even know what it would sound like . . .
A placard in a bookstore’s window said that Napoléon had abdicated in a palace called Fontainebleau. And that the allies had chosen to show royal magnanimity and to spare Paris. Perhaps that was why I was different? The placard was dated April 6, 1814. I pondered it: the grand parade and pomp of the past few days, the cheer and merriment on Champs Elysées now made perfect sense to me, as if they too were arranged on a placard.
“Kazak, kazak, galava boli?” Two girls in a window above the bookstore. Giggling. They spoke a makeshift Russian; moreover, it was me they addressed. I gave them the broadest ever smile, I wanted to say oui, mesdemoiselles, just to be nice to them.
Then a gaunt invalid in a doorway looked at my pants and snarled, in French, that I was a robber and a murderer. “Who did you rip them off, you jackal?” I suppose I wasn’t meant to understand it, but I did. I smiled at the veteran too, and walked on.
But now they got me thinking. Contrary to what the girls suggested, I was not a Cossack, and my head did not ache—of hangover, I presumed. Was I a robber and a murderer? Who was I?
That tall, stooped man reflected in windows and vitrines, the man who moved in a deliberate manner as if somnambulant or disabled—had to be me. Before today, even if I saw my reflection, I would not have known it for myself or would have remained indifferent to it. Now my appearance too was waxing with meaning, like the placard’s announcement. I hovered under the eaves of the Pâtisserie Stohrer, trying to discern what my face looked like in the reflection. But all I could see beyond a bushy beard and a matted chevelure were some creases and two niches for eyes. Cakes and pastries behind the windowpane obscured the rest: a row of sumptuous cones of la religieuse in the front (I read the tag), and in the back, trays and trays of charlotte aux fruits rouges, beignets pomme-abricots, pâte d’amande fruits, pains au chocolat, chouquettes, et cetera.
The vendor noticed my fascination, said, “You want one of these? Yes? For you—one franc.”
Until he said it, the thought of actually trying a pastry was absent from my mind. But now that he suggested it, my mouth filled with saliva. One problem, though: I rubbed my fingers together as if doling out change and then spread my arms—no money! But the vendor was insistent. “Russe, yes? You have rubles? I’ll take a ruble.”
I shook my head—no rubles either. I was becoming upset by my muteness. Words swarmed in my throat but scattered and fled like roaches when I thought of opening my mouth and exposing them to the light of day.
Behind me, somebody said in English, “Here, one franc. Give the fellow his pastry, will you?” I turned to behold a British hussar lieutenant, a young man, in his mid-twenties, maybe. Neat and trim, curly hair, a fine mustache. An open, friendly face. He flashed me a smile, I bared my teeth in response. “For the victory,” he said. The vendor gave him a pretty little paper box and he pressed it into my hands. I didn’t even know which one of the pastries was inside. I was about to say something and my heart was jumping up and down in preparation. The words were bubbling up, making me lightheaded—
“Thank you, sir,” I said in English. And, turning to the vendor, “Merci, monsieur.” I turned red with effort and fled the scene just to get out of there. But the seal over my throat was broken! I kept on walking till the rush subsided. Then I stopped to put the pastry in my knapsack—I was not going to eat it in haste. It would have to be the right, the special, moment.
I came to the vast Place Vendôme; in the middle stood a brass tower, covered bottom to top with reliefs. Sightseers queued at the tower’s door. I waited for my turn, took the tight corkscrew of stairs up to the observation deck. Some Austrians ascending ahead of me kept knocking on the walls, as if to make sure they were still brass—and indeed the walls responded with muffled dings of a grounded church bell. “Gentlemen, imagine we are inside a giant cannon,” one of them said. I imagined. A cannon, its mouth open to the sunny skies and empty of devices of war, for once. Full of people instead. The thought made me queasy. Why?
I reached the top. Off to the right before me—the gilded dome of the Invalides, the amputee heaven (I kept eavesdropping on the Austrians). To the left—the blackened twin towers of Notre Dame stood over the gently curving band of the Seine. Palaces were everywhere—Louvre, Tuileries, Luxembourg. The dreamy Boulogne forest was away in the distance to the right; I had cut down a tree there the other day. Behind me, far away—the heights of Montmartre with sentinel windmills; there just a few days ago the final battle had been fought. One of the Austrians said that three-fourths of the last resort rally, the boy-soldiers, fourteen-year-olds from l’École Polytechnique, had perished there. Another remarked, “Don’t they always?”
They shook their heads. I was beginning to like them. I wanted to tell them that at least the war was over. That those two girls in a window above the bookstore, and the British hussar, and the pastry vendor—had not been afraid of me. That I was meandering in springtime Paris, alive, alone, without my rifle and with a French pastry in my knapsack.
But it was just too many things to say at once.
• • •
Everybody went to the Palais Royale and so did I. There was so much to read there! Placards, bills, and pamphlets. On the top floor of the Palais, there were all kinds of prostitutes—so said the leaflets distributed by urchin boys. A blurb could be had for free, while for a
sou you could get a two-page description of what exactly to expect from a blonde Amorette or a brunet Émile. This was sold along with all kinds of other handy literature, such as an autobiography of the “Glorious Emperor of the Russians, Alexander,” written purposely (believe it or not) for the people of France.
The ground floor had shops, a burlesque theater (where they ran a History of the French Revolution from the Beheading of Louis XVI to the Advent of Bonaparte), freak shows, shadow shows, fortune-tellers, belly dancers, jewelers, blind fiddlers, opium dens. The second floor had games of chance, restaurants and cafes, even public baths. Public toilettes! And it had—mirrors. Leaning over my shoulder from the scarlet-red walls, lurking in niches and corners, even immured into the plaster of the ceiling. They bounced my reflection back and forth between them, they toyed with me. They were like comedians with deadpan faces, they handed me over to one another, belabored me like a joke . . .
It had to be me. The man in the mirrors looked feral and savage, the skin of his face was sallow and parched. His mouth was overgrown by a beard, and his eyes glared between the overhanging hair below his bonnet. His long arms hung as if they were not accustomed to being unoccupied. He still had an ax tucked at his waist, the blade chipped with use. The longer he hovered in the mirrors, the more his shoulders rode up in a self-conscious hunch, as if he did not believe he belonged here. He looked, I thought, like Lazarus just after the resurrection when the man was already walking but hadn’t quite lost the smell yet.
The Age of Ice: A Novel Page 33