But it had to be me.
I had to sit down on the floor. I couldn’t catch my breath. I was no longer buoyantly happy. Now that I was aware of myself, it seemed people would become aware of me too. But no one paid me any heed, except the urchin boys who kept offering me their leaflets. No one was afraid of me—Paris must have seen worse.
The crowd flowed past me, indifferent. I could sit like this, under a windowsill, on a waxed, thick-skinned parquet, for as long as I wanted, even late into the night. Couldn’t I? I took off my bonnet. I picked some leaflets out of dropped litter and read about the size of the “paradisaic garden” between the legs of Amorette from upstairs, the jardin where one forgets one’s woes. Then I read an invitation to an evening gala in another jardin, this one in the city of Paris, not in Amorette. Le Jardin de Tivoli. I read every word many times over; reading gave me an illusion of being insulated from the crowd. Then a movement caught my eye: some coins landed in my bonnet (it still lay on the floor next to me). The donor—whoever it was—was already walking away with a crowd when I tried to identify him. Or her. Now I had five francs.
The entrance fee into the Tivoli Garden was two francs. It took me about an hour to wander there from the Palais Royale.
The Tivoli. I walked candlelit alleys, trails and trails of flickering little flames that made the evergreen hedges look darkly alive. One path opened to a circus show in a meadow, rope dancers walking high up above people’s heads, a torch in each hand. Another meadow held a chamber orchestra. A third was populated by mimes. A dark red Harlequin pawed a canary-yellow, squirming Columbine; in the bushes, a twilight-white Pierrot aimed an arrow at them, his hands quivering more than his bowstring. I saw a fountain and heard laughter. I saw lovers kissing, their bodies arched over the sandstone edge of the fountain’s basin. I wanted the garden to be endless. I wanted to lose my way in it.
Suddenly—popping, whistling sounds, and fireworks shot into the skies. Wheels of fire, starbursts, crackling and sizzling, fiery blooms; like a cannonade, wisps of smoke, whiffs of brimstone, flakes of ashes floated overhead. I clenched up, but it was not war, it was harmless, everything was all right around me—cries of joy, clapping of hands.
As the festivities wound down and groundskeepers with bright lanterns walked the alleys, I crawled into the darkest corner, the densest shrubbery, into the narrowest crack under the arborvitae. I lay on my side, my head to the ground, feeling tired and safe, though happy no longer. Still, I never once thought of going back to Champs Elysées. I remembered about the pastry, pulled the box out, and set it on the ground before my face. I smelled chocolate. Rich and dark and smooth. My nose couldn’t have enough of it. I lay and gazed at the little white box in front of me as if it were a bivouac fire.
I opened the flaps of the box and tilted it. A chocolate-glazed cone showed out of a nest of waxed paper. The smell of chocolate blossomed, and with it—my eyes filled with tears, my mouth splayed open, my whole body crawled with frost. Fragments of memories blew like a snow squall, and whirled, piling in the niches of my skull until they formed a complete—and undeniable—picture of what had happened to me . . . Before I knew it, I was hacking and smashing the pastry with my ax, beating the chocolate pulp into the carpet of old needles, into a hole in the ground; dirt and bark and cream filling flew all over and hit me in the mouth, eyes, cheeks, but nothing helped. Nothing helped.
It wasn’t the British hussar’s or the pastry’s fault that I had lived as Old Man Frost for a year and a half, and now, on this spring day, April 6, 1814, six days after the war ended, I recovered my humanity.
• • •
People called the winter of 1812 brutal. Brutal, yes, and not with regard to the weather; as for that, it had not been brutal enough for me. I’d hoped it would turn me into ice. But I did not know that only the Arctic cold could do it to me. The regular cold only hobbled my mind but left me dragging on, barely self-aware. Had I known it, I would not have wandered into the flurries on that October night in 1812. I swear I wouldn’t have.
The memories that I’d recovered told me that I’d ceased to be a normal man on the very first morning of my “escape.” The night before, I’d pushed deep into the woods until undergrowth and debris let me go no farther, and lay down to freeze. I did not expect to wake up. But I did—as Old Man Frost. Then, I must have drifted on, come across a band of peasant militia, and tagged along for a while. Then we ran into the army’s path. The Chernigovsky musketeers who adopted me must have made a regimental mascot, a pet, out of me. Truth be told, I was very helpful, especially in wintertime, oh, I had so many uses during the mere two months that the Grande Armée crawled back home over the frozen Russia, dying at every step along the way.
Never before had ice been allowed to feast with such abandon on human flesh. I don’t know how it came to this. But they—the invaders—had come so grossly unprepared. Long-term effects of cold combined with the absolute imperative to march . . . men trudged on limbs that were frozen solid. Numbness, followed by sudden paralysis. Old Man Frost passed men who were still alive but in a state of torpor, men standing on their knees and making no effort to get up. Give one of those a push—and he’d tip over like a toy soldier made of frozen flesh. Frenchie-tipping. Old Man Frost had done it and he was amused. No, no. I had done it.
At every bivouac some of them sat down in embers to warm themselves up, and smoked, and burned without feeling it. The smell. When they shed bloody tears, that was just about the end. Their guts and bladder would follow by letting go of what little remained in them. That was why practical folk preferred to snatch their pants for loot while the wearers were still alive.
Burlap and straw. The French would gather straw into a sack and sleep on it, then strap it around themselves on the march, for warmth. So prisoners came handily with their own burlap sacks. Old Man Frost remembers how militiamen got rid of prisoners. Did he do it? No. Did I do it? Make them step each into his sack and hop down to the river. Whoever was the fastest. Maybe the prisoners thought the fastest would be spared. Then one could beat them down into their sacks, and tie the sacks up. Then dump the sacks into a hole in river ice. A peaceful hole made so a fisherman could fish. So a peasant wife could haul out her water for household chores . . . Into this hole. Goading them with a stick, so they would be dragged under ice. My Andrei had saved people from ice. And I, his godfather, his hero, had done the reverse.
The sound of ripping burlap would make me shudder years later.
When I wound up with the Chernigovsky, we would get caught up among the retreating stragglers. In a village, every fire, every warmed-up hovel, every piece of bread pulled out of a knapsack drew those unfortunates in like moths. They pressed themselves indoors, squeezing, stepping onto one another. You let them in, there would be no peace all night. They wouldn’t be quiet. They’d start hurting in the warm air, when their frost began to thaw. Some soldiers threw them bread, and the Feldwebel said, “Don’t attract them!” Some poked at them with bayonets to shoo them away. Some skewered bread on bayonets and poked. Too many. Too far gone. Enemy. Old Man Frost was sent out to chase them away. Old Man Frost could stay out all night, on guard, while his keepers would rig a sauna in a hut. He would watch out, so no one surprised the bathers. Clear nights, vertical columns of smoke, oozing from countless fires. Razor-sharp stars above. Somebody screaming. Somebody singing. Old Man Frost knew just enough not to look into the fire. He did not want to recall any of this, or any of his recent or distant past. He thought if he kept his eyes off fires long enough, he’d be far gone too. He hoped he’d never become human again, even if he could not become ice. He was wrong.
I didn’t know at the time that every foreigner who had lived in Moscow—and whose nationality had the misfortune of being represented in Bonaparte’s troops, which meant just about everyone—had left with the French, because—yes, because they feared repressions from the returning Russians. So many civilians were on that road, mixed with the troops. They did not have
to be there. They shouldn’t have been.
Old Man Frost remembers one family—a mother with two small children. She was . . . No, say it. Say how it was. My keepers made her dance with me. For bread. They said, Dance with our bear. I was the “bear.” Her children watched us. Around us, men clapped and cheered, and someone blew into a fipple flute. But she only stared up into my face. With this complete, terrorized concentration that could be mistaken for—hope? She smiled too. It was a dead smile. Her freckled face was starved. She tried to match my stomps and jumps. She tried. But she was falling behind. Too weak. When she fatigued—quickly—she just sat down. Just folded up and remained so. Just sat there. Didn’t cry. Her collapsed skirts made this puffy—bulwark—around her. Why were there just skirts? Had she no greatcoat? Her poor legs were stretched in front of her. Her footwear was mismatched: one valenok, a felt boot, and one miserable shoe with a wooden overshoe, quite fallen apart and showing a sickeningly swollen ankle. She just sat. My keepers turned to go, it was no longer cheery. Someone yanked me away, someone dropped bread in her lap. The piece sank into the puff of her skirts. Someone, not I, threw it. I only stared. That’s all. That’s what I keep seeing. Those puffy skirts. And those outstretched legs, in a valenok and a shoe. One foot still alive, one frozen dead.
• • •
. . . I remember Vilna, when our troops entered. Festive joy in the air, sparkling snowflakes. The command held a victory ball and all the local nobility attended. I remember hearing the cotillion, smelling wine and roast. The Chernigovsky got to march to the other end of town for billets. There was a hospital there, turned prison. They were throwing typhoid corpses and near-corpses out of second-floor windows. It was easier that way than dragging them down the stairs. I could still hear the music.
These are the things I remembered. There must be worse things I had forgotten. How can any of it be?
I had come out of my home, in October 1812, to join Anna and little Andrei. To die. Instead, I lived to commit violence.
I suppose it is the question that I am not the first to ask, so much so that by now it could be considered rhetorical: Why is it that the only two places on the European continent where Napoléon stumbled were the religiously zealous, grit-of-the-earth, backward, peasant countries, like Spain and Russia? The countries that could paint the French as Antichrist’s minions and treat them accordingly? Does total victory require total violence?
Don’t answer.
Answer instead this one: I looked to be many things in those mirrors of the Palais Royale. But I did not look seventy-four years of age. Was my renewal fueled by the lives that Ice had fed on? Was I an ice flower, a tumid bloom that jutted out and opened on an overfertilized, gorged ice-field?
Or had I come out of my mother’s womb this way?
Am I culpable or not?
Nor All Your Tears
(1814 TO 1850s)
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
—Omar Khayyám, Rubáiyát
After the night in Tivoli, after I wept, smeared dirt on my face, gnawed on the head of my ax, and wept again—I kept on living. Somehow, days kept filing in: sunrise, then sunset. I exited the garden. I went to a barber. I ate bread and held it down. I looked for jobs. I knocked on every storefront, bookstores to vermin exterminators, and offered myself for hire. My other options were to panhandle or skirmish for the scraps of farmers’ markets and grocers, to fight over sodden bread or fish-soiled cheese with the shell-shocked and the crippled, the very men who had been made this way because of ice—and me. And days just kept on coming.
Eventually, an Oriental rug store owner took me. His name was Ossip Vassilian and he had been born to an Armenian father and a Russian mother. From my very first day of employment, he told me wondrous stories about himself: how he had been spying for Russia in the Persian Armenia, how he’d switched allegiance to Persia when the neighboring Georgia was annexed by Russia in 1801. How he had performed critical duties for both the French mission to Tehran and the Persian mission to Paris between 1805 and 1810, being friends with the recently departed Persian ambassador in Paris, Asker Khan. Whatever the truth, Ossip did appear as a perfect political, as they used to call politicians back then: a cordial, smooth-talking, generous, and peculiarly untrustworthy man. While he did sell a rug now and then, his store doubled as a club: a motley assemblage of persons, distinguished and not, visited Ossip’s back rooms for no other reason, seemingly, than to sample sweetmeats and smoke kallion (similar to Indian hookah): a liberated artist, Mme Vavin; Mr. Jaubert, a former diplomat in Tehran and now a professor; a young poet, Boucher, who worked on something about plague and love in an Oriental paradise, to name just a few.
On occasion, I wondered why Ossip had taken me in. Not for work—there wasn’t much of it. Not out of sympathy, I had wits enough to realize. Maybe for my French, or because I’d look good around the shop, what with my height and mournful, Old Testament mien. Or—because he perceived me a simpleton. And a broken man.
He was right, of course. I stood over my own ruin, so to speak, suspecting myself of foul play, and uncertain whether I could rebuild on the same spot. Besides, who is to say that I hadn’t been made slow in the head during my term as Old Man Frost?
• • •
One memorable night, a traveling British couple wandered in. The young man was friends with the Boucher fellow. The woman, Miss Mary, struck me with her resemblance to my Anna. The same clear, high forehead, the same serene sadness in her eyes. She looked unwell, or self-conscious. She appeared less entertained than her companion by this late-night visit to an exotic Oriental hideout. She noticed my staring. As I served them halvah and kallions, and the males went into a heated political discussion, Miss Mary asked me, “Who are you?” There was marvel in her voice. “A wanderer. I come from far, far away,” I said. “From the North.”—“What’s North?” she said. I went on to tell her—because she looked so much like Anna and listened so beautifully—about the nightless days and the stately palaces of ice that floated past a sailing ship over sunset-colored waters, about polynyas and ice drifts, about the deep freeze that lures you into his cradle, and then squeezes his hand over you, ever so slowly, gently . . . I’d like to think I’d made an impression on her: why else then did the piece she jotted down just two years thereafter, the famous Frankenstein, open with a scene on an Arctic-bound ship?
• • •
Ossip had not hired me for my looks, or my French. He was grooming me for something special. The occasion soon presented itself.
In March of 1815, Bonaparte returned to the Continent. On the twentieth he entered Paris, to the cheers of the crowds. That day I came from the streets anguished. I saw miserable veterans—with their missing limbs, skin ulcers, oozing eyes—the victims of ice. I saw them crawling out of the woodwork everywhere, screaming Vive l’Empereur, shaking their crutches. I could not understand why. Their Empereur had abandoned them in the clutches of ice! Nor could I comprehend why the very same civilians who only a year ago had cheered the Coalition liberators, now so devotedly turned to the man who had nearly bled their country to death. I felt an acute, desperate need to run away, to a place where Boney’s name would have never been heard of, where his wars would not ever reach.
Ossip found me sitting in my corner, shivering. He had a chore for me, he said. A business associate of his was traveling to Persia, and he fancied to send me along with some correspondence, since I had served him so well over the past year and he had developed a complete trust in me; but now that he saw me, he worried on account of my feverish state—would I be able to stomach the journey or was I falling sick?
Persia? Why, by all means, I could leave today! Ossip could see it already: even as the prospect of leaving Europe and seeing all these fabled, warm, tropical worlds was opening to my eyes, my shivers
and sweats seemed to resolve quite miraculously!
The irony of it is, my “escape” from Europe did not take me completely away from Bonaparte, whose portrait I saw in the Persian crown prince Abbas Mirza’s palace long after Mr. Nap was expelled from France for the second, and last, time. Nor did it relieve me of war—on the contrary, I was thrust into something that was later called, vaingloriously, the Great Game—the contest of diplomacy, war, and espionage in which Russia and Britain competed for influence and conquest in Asia. The game that, in some form or other, is arguably played to this day.
• • •
As I traveled from Paris to Marseille, then by sea to Messina and on to Izmir in Turkey, I always had chaperones. A friend of Ossip’s, then a friend of a friend; one hard-baked man succeeded another in a chain of custody, each subsequent one more divorced from the trappings of Europeanism and less fluent in French. Even someone as benumbed as me could wonder: Why couldn’t all these guides be Ossip’s postmen? Why me? Ossip’d never sealed his letters, only wrapped them in cloth, but I knew them to be written in Turkish. Even if I was tempted, I could not glean their content.
In Izmir, a most civilized and likable young man met us at the port. Speaking lively French and smiling pearly whites, he introduced himself as Najar Alibek, Asker Khan’s nephew, and said he’d lived in Paris for more than five years and loved every day of it. “Alexander?” He beamed at my introduction. “Like the Russian czar? Like Alexander the Macedon?” When I gave him the letters, he unwrapped them, skimmed a few sheets, and cast a quick evaluating glance at me. Then he said that he and I would travel east to Tehran.
• • •
I remember rocks and dust, ancient ruins that looked like mud cakes that some playful giant had shaped out of the land and then abandoned. The whole country seemed to be sinking—softly, languorously—into disrepair, roads and bridges and mosques; like an old man who’s lost track of time, unwilling to look ahead and patiently enduring his too many, long years. The only two things that stayed in perfect and timeless order were the mountains, and the ubiquitous and ingenious devices of irrigation.
The Age of Ice: A Novel Page 34