The Age of Ice: A Novel

by Sidorova, J. M.

  • • •

  There is a memorial for the Angleesh in St. Thomas’s Cathedral in—now—Mumbai. It was built with public funds raised through subscription. I read the announcement in a newspaper.

  I made a contribution.

  Lost in Translation, or Vesna Svyashennaya, Le Sacre du Printemps, The Rite of Spring

  1906–14

  It’s always the same story. A trader ventures to a new land in search of fortune. Then he brings in a soldier—to protect his profits. On the soldier’s heels comes in a politician—and a priest—to legitimize and sanctify soldiers’ and traders’ activities. None of them can desist. It’s their nature.

  Ports become cities become states become colonies of the British crown. Singapore was one.

  The tale of my ascent as a businessman belongs in some grand old scholarly tome called From Rags to Riches: European Colonists in Malaysia and the Industrial Revolution. But of the events that might not make it into the book, a few salient ones are:

  There is a man who lives in a threadbare shack on Changi Beach, some ten miles northeast of town. He comes up with an ingenious recipe for making ice: five parts water, one part himself. Mix ingredients and let them rest in a deep cellar under the shack. Remove the body of man from the body of water when the latter begins to freeze, and insert vessels in which some of icy water is mixed with common salt, three parts to one. Such mixing cools the solution down another 21 degrees Celsius, enabling the rest of the water to turn to solid ice. And from there—ice makes more ice. In this respect, ice is just like money.

  The man is wise. He’s heard of Lord Kelvin. He’s learned it by heart: The second law of thermodynamics states that heat will not pass from a cooler to a warmer body unless some adequate compensating event occurs in connection with the transference. The man does no magic. His “adequate compensating event” is raw emotion, and in its deficit—a tad of hashish or later, of opium—and the reverie that follows.

  There are more and more buyers for his ice, and he is ragged. He feels trapped. He is afraid of Chinese gangs that control opium trade and of tigresses that are said to swim across the strait to give birth to their cubs on the island. A monkey who steals his food seems a spy to him, and rustling bamboo becomes sand that spills from the Maranjab Desert into the Gobi and back, all night long. Once, he forgets to get out of his tub in time and is stuck in ice. He has to wait till it melts to wriggle out, it takes hours, and then his legs barely support him. He collapses and weeps for the ruined ice batch.

  Then one day at the port he sees a steamship. She is the Tuscany, here from Maryland, of the United States of America. Four masts are still attached to her but they are lone and bare because she does not need these relics, the sails: a beefy stack in her middle unfurls cloud after cloud of coal smoke, and a giant propeller churns under her stern. The man thinks about tradition and inertia, and imagines how she will shed her masts if given half a chance.

  Her sole cargo is ice.

  As he stands over his measly ice cart, the man has a vision. He too has been a relic, a lone and bare mast that sticks to its old ways—and why should he go on like this? He sees the whole world in one breathtaking frame—and the world is hungry for ice. He hears the ice dragged in from the Himalayas and Tibet, chiseled out of the Great Lakes and scraped from the Karakoram Desert, he sees icebergs harpooned and hauled in, like whales, off the coasts of Australia. He watches men in spectacles and tweed jackets fastening pipes to pumps to steam engines, burning coal, pressurizing and releasing noxious liquids and gases, ammonia and ether and sulfur dioxide—all to make more ice. So that Australian beef gets to Britain and British Ale—to India, unspoiled; so that peaches keep through winter, and in the sunny French Riviera, vacationing ladies and gentlemen can take their liqueurs frozen on a stick.

  Why should the man not partake in this gold rush? How ludicrous and pathetic he is—cowering in his hole, birthing his ice by the cold sweat of his brow! There are other ways.

  The man spends all his savings on a warehouse at the port and makes ice storage out of it. Then he goes to the heads of merchant houses, the Scots, the Chinese, the Arabs. He says, I am the man. I am the best return on your investment in ice.

  That’s his story.

  • • •

  By the time Singapore was fully absorbed into the Pax Britannica, I was well made, hear that, Mr. Sawyer? No longer was I a specialty shop, my dear old boy. At the turn of the twentieth century we—my Australian meat-packing partner, Harrison and Co., and I—introduced to Singapore the first of our icehouses cooled with man-made cold. We called our enterprise what it was—Cold Storage. Now it is a supermarket chain. And that was just the beginning.

  Meet Alexander Veltzen, a nearly perfect Englishman with the official status and passport of a British subject, globe-trotting industrialist with stakes in refrigeration and refrigerated shipping far beyond the Malaysian archipelago. He has mansions in Singapore and Bombay, and a favorite hotel in London where he makes extended visits. A regular traveler on P&O and BI steamships, he knows by heart the sea route Bombay—Suez Canal—Alexandria—Venice. When his associates wonder about his origins, the Brits guess he was born in one of the colonies, and the Indians suppose it was in Great Britain. No one dares to ask—Mr. Veltzen is known as a stern and private man.

  What of the rest? I was not dying. My fears and sorrows had fallen by the wayside somewhere between a hundred twenty and a hundred sixty years of age. How long could one worry? My appearance had settled on that of a forty-five-year-old, plus or minus, and there crystallized. And whenever the old Prince Velitzyn stirred in me and gave off a foreboding that all this pumping heat to make cold, all this violation of Ice’s birthrights, was sure to bring some existential blowout to humanity, the new Mr. Veltzen just shrugged and did something philanthropic.

  No worry. No guilt. Nothing.

  • • •

  In 1906 at the World Expo in Milan, Lord Revelstoke, my banker, introduced me to a certain Mr. Rutkovsky, an associate of the new Russian foreign minister, Mr. Izvolsky. “All you need to know,” Revelstoke said, “is that this gentleman was quite instrumental in securing Russia’s recent loan with us. Now he is out shopping for investment capital. He may make things sound easier than they are, but he has a point. How would you like to have Russians build a new railroad from the Black Sea on to Europe proper, where your refrigerated cars will be moving goods to and fro?”

  In my jaded opinion, Mr. Rutkovsky was one of these newcomers who become so excited after arrival abroad and a couple of dates with big business that they are eager to short-sell their homeland in concessions for pennies on the dollar—not out of greed or lack of patriotism—they are simply dying to be counted in, to make their country a player in the world of modernity.

  In thinking thus, I revealed my inherently paradoxical conviction that Russia was backward and inferior, and yet at the same time dangerous. When my businessmen colleagues feared and distrusted Russia—after fifty years of chessboard moves and sacrifices of the Great Game—I sneered. When other colleagues called for condescension to Russia (however smug), saying that she was now a toothless shadow of her former self—which her recent humiliation at the hands of tiny Japan proved beyond doubt—I likewise sneered.

  All the more profoundly did Lord Revelstoke’s suggestion stir my brew. “There will be talks in St. Petersburg,” the banker confided. “We cannot but follow France’s example and enter into an agreement with Russia. It is just a matter of time before we will sign the entente cordiale with our beloved nephew Czar Nicky.” (He was referring to the kinship and closeness between the czar and our own monarch.) “When it happens, British capital will flood Russia. I would not mind seeing us—you, Mr. Veltzen—far ahead of the race.”

  He said that King Edward VII himself was brokering a visit of British dignitaries and industrialists to St. Petersburg. How would I like to be one of the delegation? I said I’d think about it.

  Last I’d seen Russia
was in 1812. I’d had no need nor want to go back, and now I was divided. The old Prince Velitzyn, a calcified mummy, was stirring. If I did visit Russia, would it be because I wanted to make more money? Or because I secretly longed to see her, if only to gloat at her misery? If I didn’t go, was it because I was afraid to see Russia miserable or afraid to see her living happily without me?

  Two days later I telegraphed Lord Revelstoke from Brussels. I was game. But in the end, the visit did not happen. Czar Nicky begged for a postponement (in a personal letter to the king), citing the lingering unquiet in the country. (Rural areas were still under military curfew after the 1905 uprisings, and he had just sent home the first Russian parliament.) The joke was that the monarch was embarrassed to entertain foreign guests in a house that was not yet made tidy—even after the signing, in August of 1907, with much wrangling, of the Anglo-Russian Entente.

  • • •

  My disappointment at the cancellation made me realize how much I wanted to go. By the end of the decade I was restless. In 1910 in Vienna, at the International Congress of Refrigeration, I was busy sending my own feelers. By then even those colleagues of mine who had perceived Russia as a toothless shadow were changing their minds. Russia was really a benevolent giant, ready to leap into the future, not unlike some kind of big Feodor Shalyapin, the bass who had made Paris swoon in 1907. Ah, haven’t you heard? The Peking‒Paris rally, haven’t you seen that daring Italian, Prince Borgia, he drove all through Russia in an automobile—and came out to tell the tale! “Russia is navigable,” he asserts with a smile, what a charming understatement! And haven’t you seen Monsieur Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes perform in Paris? Some kind of highly sophisticated classical barbarism, ah, so esoterically Russian! Europe, as reflected in the green eyes of a Russe mermaid, wild, lustful, and sage with the wisdom of the ancients, the wisdom that we, ladies and gentlemen, have lost here in our much too pragmatic world!

  Thus extolled the newspaper Le Matin, in pieces placed nicely adjacent to the ads for the Russian treasury bonds. Evoke your wisdom of the ancients by financing the Russian budget deficit, invest wisely, and you’ll haul in a green-eyed, silver-tailed Russian mermaid. Russia is like an ocean, mighty, but navigable—come forth, entrepreneurial Columbuses!

  In 1912 the Ballets Russes was giving Stravinsky’s Petrushka in Covent Garden in London during my visit, and Lady Revelstoke committed me to going. My sense of the aesthetic had been confused, as she correctly pointed out, by all manner of Asiatic strings, winds, chimes, and tambours, by performers masked in layers of chalk, rouge, and charcoal or wearing visages of dragons and monkeys, and mincing around, swaying, and freezing in various contorted attitudes, or wailing in impossibly high-pitched voices. Art as ritualized restriction. The more constricting, the purer the art form.

  In Singapore, they perform something called Kavadi, when men mount many-tiered ornate decorations over their bodies, held up by long spokes, with the ends anchored in the flesh of the bearers’ torsos. Then, like live pincushions, they stomp and twirl for hours until they collapse. I don’t know what I expected that night in the theater from the Russians. Some kind of imperial serf ballet? Tutus, definitely. What I saw . . . what I saw in Nijinsky’s title part was all and none of the above. He wore thick, crude mittens on his hands and danced as if they were his skin, as if he was never able to take them off and hold anything—anyone. A serf, a kavadi dancer, a hand amputee, a human soul trapped in a thick carapace of chalk, rouge, and charcoal, immured in a brickwork of reality, and yet—managing to break through, to flare through cracks, to give off a rainbow flash of its irreproducible wonder—all momentary, all doomed, all bound still—because that is the way life is. Like a pocket of air in ice.

  Petrushka the doll—or should I say Pierrot?—falls in love. Rebels against his puppetmaster. Then dies, outmatched.

  • • •

  I had to go to Russia. I could not sleep that night in my hotel suite after the performance. Between two and three in the morning, it grew so quiet that I could hear the electric buzz of streetlights, and clicks and crackles from the gilded embossed wallpaper on the walls. The suite smelled of my cigarettes, Armagnac, and leftover hors d’oeuvres: cucumber, cold cuts, pineapple. The curtain fluttered like Petrushka/Pierrot’s white sleeve in the last, anemic farewell. Goddamn that Nijinsky!

  I tossed and turned and at long last—I was sailing into Russia in an automobile, and the snowy fields around me were heaving like an ocean. Some peasants gathered to watch my progress, dressed like Nijinsky’s Petrushka, only cruder, dirtier, with huge stiff hands. They stood in their little boats, two-three to a boat, and stared at me. Then I was suddenly in St. Pete’s, on the Nevsky Prospect. The Nevsky was strange, though, irregular and potholed, snow mounds abounded on it and grass grew between its cobblestones. Nijinsky/Petrushka peasants were crowding the sidelines, milling impatiently, as if waiting for me to pass so they could return to the mainstream. All the while my advance was getting harder, the snowdrifts growing bigger, the grass—taller, and then—a chair would appear in the way, then a cast-iron stove, lying on its side, then a dead and bloated horse. And yet I had to hurry on, because I was late and because this place did not seem friendly at all, and so I ran faster and faster, and then, because I was rushing so much—I tripped. I fell, and once I did, the Petrushkas swarmed onto me and drowned me in the Nevsky, which had become a shallow stream, because they were waiting for me to trip, and because I was Captain Cook.

  A dream.

  • • •

  In the spring of 1913, British business emissaries were finally to visit Russia and I was along for the ride.

  We chugged, in a steamer, through the restless Baltic Sea. In the thickest fog, one of my companions jokingly hoped that we would not be taken for Japanese and bombarded, as the jittery Russian Baltic fleet had done to British trawlers back in 1905 at Dogger Bank—the first thing they did after they poked their nose out of the home waters of the Gulf of Finland, gearing up to go to Japan . . . The joke precipitated a grim comment that these days one should rather avoid being taken for a German, not a Japanese, which was followed by a no less grim pronouncement that if we were perceived as Germans, Russians would in fact give us a warm welcome, not shoot at us.

  St. Petersburg met us with a proud display of its modernity: newspaper stands where headlines shouted away in all European languages, the Singer Sewing Machine Building crowned with a remarkable revolving, illuminated globe, glittering vitrines of chocolatier Kraft on the Nevsky, Druce’s fragrant perfumery, colorful bookstores, cream soda shops, coffee shops, fashion shops, theaters, cinemas, jewelers, advertisement posters everywhere, banks, trams ringing like bell towers, crowds of finely clad people. A passable European capital in other words. What did I expect, crinolines, breeches, and tricornes? Military austerity? But surely, if I were to ride just outside of this glowing metropolis, I’d find that the time did stand still, that the peasant country still hauled the same old yoke, in the same garb, and with much the same contraptions. Didn’t it?

  We lodged in the Hôtel d’Europe, a grand enterprise outfitted with all the latest conveniences of modern life—they even had a telephone in each suite, even if it connected only within the hotel. Next was a reception in our honor. The Russian officialdom came in force. Names with long, zigzagging patronymics weaved around us; I pitied my genuine British colleagues. In due time, a grand old man approached me, he resembled Kaiser Wilhelm I, but attached to his elbow was a young woman—eyes slightly narrowed, scarlet-red lips pouty, cheeks a tad indrawn, as if she pinched them between her teeth. Short fluffy bangs—rare at the time—under a heap of light brown hair held up by several crescent-shaped silver combs. She would have been no more than twenty years old. “Prince Dmitry Petrovich Goretsky,” the host was announcing when I thought, What a dirty old man, Prince Goretsky—to have such a young thing for a wife . . . “Vice Minister of Ways and Communications,” the introducer continued. I’ll be having talks with this Gor
etsky soon, I noted, and finally moved my stare from the young thing’s silvery evening gown to the vice minister, just when the introduction finally reached its climax, “and the Princess Elizaveta Dmitrievna Goretsky.”

  I bowed my head to the dirty old Kaiser Wilhelm I and said some pleasantry in French when I heard, in a loud English, “How do you do, Mr. Veltzen!”

  Her voice was husky—like that of a little boy whose fledgling vocal cords can’t keep up with his delirium of growth, play, happiness. She extended her right hand—a perfect, narrow leaf of a hand, loose in the wrist as if hanging off a stem of her arm; no wedding ring. I took that leaf by the fingertips and kissed it. How do you do. “Elizabeth Goretsky,” she said.

  A daughter.

  At the banquet she sat far away, but her voice seemed to reach out to me over the din. A splash of throaty laughter, a thrilled question mark, “Is that so?” I would turn to it, cast a glance: she would be engaged in conversation. She would not be looking at me. I dubbed her the Urchin Princess and told myself she was too loud.

  The entertainment was a chamber orchestra with a Tchaikovsky concerto. It wasn’t the orchestra’s or Tchaikovsky’s fault that by the end of it, brokering and scouting were in full swing, and only titular officials, loafer guests who had come to have a good time, and the ladies were still seated in front rows; everybody who meant business was in the back. No time was to be lost. Mr. Rutkovsky, my acquaintance from London, came in handy as social glue. My suspicion was confirmed: if I wanted a piece of Russian railroad, I had to go through the Urchin Princess’s father.

  • • •

  The next day we visited Thornton’s textile factory at the outskirts of St. Pete’s. Our cavalcade of Packards passed a horse-driven tram stuffed full of people—a glimpse of the life of the proletariat. Indifferent gray faces jerked in unison behind the wagon’s railing as the Clydesdales yanked it into motion.