We arrived. I don’t believe I need to say here that I recognized my house.
• • •
The story does not end here. It never does. I had enough composure to follow my great-great-great grandniece, who’d unknowingly just lost her virginity to me, through the shuttered, empty, abandoned house, through the enfilade of rooms so cold they could have been filled with snow. To visit her nursery, where a frosted window was framed by a graying curtain. Then—my study, where an armchair under a dustcover looked like a beheaded king. To stare at the desk drawers that could have still held my papers. To listen to more stories about myself—how I had acquired my black magic during a decade spent at the North Pole. To hug her when she wanted me to. To plant a kiss on her temple. To say, “We could bring life to this house, if you want.”
“Oh, don’t worry about it,” she said, chuckling. “It has a life of its own. Even like this, it does not make me sad. It’s part of me.”
Her great-grandfather was my grand-nephew Mikhail Andreevich, who must have learned my lesson, in the icery, quite well since he’d still remembered it on his deathbed. How many great-greats made it less incestuous? The feeling was that of breakage, of falling out of grace. There had been no miracle of love, no melting of glaciers that made her immune to my cold. Just the same old trait preserved through generations, my late brother’s accursed and blessed gift to me. But if that’s what it took to allow me to be with this woman . . . I already knew that I would accept it. I’d accept it, but I would never be as happy as I had been just hours ago, when I’d thought I was keeping my beloved warm. I’d accept it, of course I would. I just needed a little time to mourn. Just a little tiny extra bit of time.
I thought I could hide it, but maybe she saw something in my face. She said, “Papa hates this house. That’s why he has done nothing to keep it up. In his view the house embodies everything that is disagreeable in life. Everything unpredictable, ambiguous, un-Germanic. Grandmother said they could not have been more opposite, my papa and mama.”
“Why did he marry her?”
She shrugged. “Same as why they always married us. Beauty. Pedigree. And they think they can tame us.”
Later I would endlessly go over each one of her words. Was she already telling me everything I needed to know? Could I have prevented everything that followed?
She checked her watch and said we had to go. It was getting dark. On the way back she held her arm curled snugly around my elbow. But she mostly looked through the window and did not talk anymore. In St. Petersburg she told me she would call me on the telephone next morning. She had to go, she said. “Elizabeth, I have to have a conversation with your father. You realize that, don’t you?”
Everything could wait till tomorrow, she said. Everything, even that.
• • •
She never called me. Instead, a note arrived at my hotel. Inside was a sheet of poetry.
My strangeling boy, I went insane
On Wednesday, three p.m.!
A ringing wasp—a stinging pain
in a finger of my hand.
Unknowingly, I’d squeezed a wasp—and dead
it looked. Its stinger
Was poised, though, poisonous, to stab
My ring finger.
Will I be weeping ’bout you, will I linger
To catch a smile you’ll fling?
Look—isn’t it pretty on my finger,
This wedding ring?
My dear Alexander, this was the last poem Akhmatova read that night. Please accept my sincerest gratitude for the things you have done for me, and a heartfelt apology for all the trouble I caused you.
Farewell,
Your E. G.
I refused to believe what it meant. I stood in the middle of my suite staring at the letter and repeatedly practicing my meeting with her father, then took a shot of Cognac and headed to the English Club.
I found Mr. Wallace sitting over a fresh kill of The Stock Exchange News and beef Stroganoff. I waved the letter in front of his nose while refusing to disclose its contents. I kept insisting that I had to arrange for a private meeting with the Vice Minister of Ways and Communications on the subject of his daughter, and I needed Mr. Wallace’s knowledge of local customs. Was it at all possible to call on someone quite uninvited and in fact against someone else’s wish, if expressed ambiguously? Could a young woman be suggesting a more arduous pursuit of herself by writing to you, Farewell?
Mr. Wallace became quite interested. What was I so burning to discuss about our troublemaker Lizzy? Is it news? Newsworthy, that is? Scandalous? Is it going to upset her wedding? Oh dear.
“Mr. Veltzen, did you not know? What did she do to you, this Diane the huntress? It is in every newspaper, it will be held at Christmastime . . . Oh yes, of course, in every Russian newspaper, I beg your pardon. The unforgettable Miss Goretsky is about to give a gift of her hand in marriage to a Pfaltzgraff von Welleren, of a very old and very aristocratic Teutonic pedigree from Danzig, whose circumstances—between you and me—have lately become a tad straitened, undoubtedly because the family has been too focused on its Crusader past than on anything the least bit practical—”
I ran.
• • •
She never intended to marry me. To her, I may have been just a clueless, gullible Englishman-capitalist. Or someone Akhmatova could have fancied, the Gray-Eyed King from a parallel world where people spoke a different language and lived according to poems. Or a way to settle scores with her father. Or—or the dreaded—
—the dreaded—that she knew who I was. Ever since that stupid reckless aborted act of elemental magic. That she suspected I was her many-times-great-uncle, the family’s mysterious patriarch, the dream companion of her childhood, the ghost who had been privy to the lonelinesses and longings of her adolescence.
. . . I would never know and I am so tired of thinking about it decade after decade, but that is how these things go, and it does not help at all that I left St. Petersburg the next day, and come summer the war broke out, the First World War, the War to End All Wars, which instead expanded into the collapse of the four participant empires, which expanded into revolution, Bolshevik reign, terrorism, worldwide economic crisis, concentration camps, national socialism, communism, fascism, genocide, the Holocaust, more war and fallen kingdoms—
In all this mayhem, the tracks of one young songbird who was so busily weaving a nest of sublime unhappiness around herself, were forever lost; just as lost were the voices of those silver-tongued birds who sang off the stage of a pub named the Stray Dog, and other voices high and low, small and big, but all of them so unprepared for a wave after wave after wave of the brutal translation the twentieth century has made them endure.
Anamorphosis Abscondita: Things Seem Closer Than They Are
1914–2003
Let me just say it this way: in 1805 at Austerlitz we feared artillery canister the most. Canister was simply musket balls packed in a tin can that fell apart in air, raining its load on one’s head.
In 1914 the destruction produced by this archaic device was considered minute. Unsatisfactory. Behold the high-explosive shell. A British Army’s staple eighteen-pounder: it can be filled with shrapnel, or poison gas. It travels twenty times farther than the old canister. It pierces steel and earthwork. Now multiply its ravages by shell caliber, by pounds of trinitrotoluene, by pure numbers—hundreds, millions. The human mind is thought to have no grasp nor taste for zeroes, I am told. The death of a thousand is best told as the death of one, for it feels the same. I beg to differ.
What did I do in the wars, the one that was, quote, a More Terrible Than Ever War in the history of humankind, and the next one, the Yet More Terrible War? I donated fortunes to the Commonwealth’s defenses. I lost fortunes in the Russian revolution, the global depression of the thirties, the fall of the British Raj. And I made fortunes on military contracts. Not only hospitals and food depots needed refrigeration. Explosives needed it too.
In 191
4 I spoke—though not loudly enough—against sending Indian regiments to the Western Front. The French winter was too cold for the poor sepoys, and the inevitable invasion of bully-beef and biscuit rations into their provisions—was beyond disagreeable. In 1942 I was in Singapore when it was occupied by the Japanese. I helped a couple of Americans escape from a prison camp in Changi. Indian revolutionary guerrillas camped in my house then burned it.
What did I do? I survived, unlike so many who did not. Only, my cold spells have been getting more extreme since the thirties. Nerves, they now called it.
That’s all I will say. My story will pass speechless through the World Wars, bowing its head in humility.
• • •
Life goes on. Past bloodsheds become today’s favorite games children—and adults—play. Austerlitz is reenacted annually.
It is surely a matter of curiosity how a long-living man like me responds to the never-ending pressure of novelty—of a technological kind, of course—in his daily life. Shouldn’t I be leery of air travel and automatic soap dispensers? Should I not—if I drive at all—cap my speed at a neck-breaking thirty miles per hour? To answer: I am no different than anyone else, human or animal. One day we see new objects in our environment and we adapt. We go around them, break them, or use them. That I learned to poke at a keyboard of a personal computer is no more remarkable than a crow learning that only a paper bag with a certain logo contains tasty potato fries.
If a horse can speed down a freeway, blissful in his trailer, so can I.
• • •
In 1960, I received a letter.
Dear Sir/Madam,
My name is Anna-Marie Cazaux. At the behest of my passed away mother, Elizabeth von Welleren, née Goretsky, I am searching for relatives or anyone who knew Mr. Alexander Veltzen, the owner of Veltzen Enterprises, which dates to the beginning of the century. It was recommended that I write to your company because it may be a daughter company of Veltzen Enterprises. Please forgive me if my researches were wrong and this letter reaches you in mistake. However, if you or someone you know can help me, please reply to the following address . . .
It is obvious what I thought, isn’t it? I wrote an enthusiastic reply the same day. I was Alexander Junior, I wrote, in French. I was born in 1916 and lived most of my life outside Europe. My father had mentioned that he had traveled to Russia before the First World War and there met a woman with whom he’d fallen in love, Ms. Elizabeth Goretsky. I’d be very interested in hearing more, et cetera, et cetera.
I waited impatiently for her reply. I eyed her address—a small town close to Paris—and weighed the benefits of going there unannounced.
A reply did come. The words in her letter (she gratefully switched to French) rushed with such force, they stepped onto each other’s toes. Details poured, images flashed by. Anna-Marie was born in 1914 in St. Petersburg. By 1918 the family was fleeing from Bolsheviks. Kiev, then Odessa, then Turkey. Anna-Marie was too little at the time to remember much. Only an ugly fight between mother and father in Kiev: etched in the child’s memory were strange, mismatched images of a shattered chandelier pendant and red blood in a white bathtub. Later she learned that he wanted to enlist with the Army of Don, the White Army, to fight against Bolsheviks, and Mother threatened that if he abandoned them, she’d kill herself. Then another fragment, in Constantinople: Anna-Marie saw a slice of a melon lying on the street, picked it up, and tried to eat it, and her mother got very angry, then shook strangely and wept, right there, in the middle of the street.
They lost everything along the way, you see. In Paris, Mother took jobs as an interpreter, or secretary, or telephone operator. Father was jobless for a long time. They fought often. Father would say he would have rather died a soldier in the White Army. He wanted to move to Germany. Mother said, over her dead body. She’d say no one wanted him there, a disenfranchised Uradel, she said, penniless nobles like him were a dime a dozen in the Weimar Republic, they taught tennis to rich Americans to make ends meet. Did Herr Pfaltzgraff want to be a tennis instructor? Anna-Marie remembered thinking Mother was too hard on him.
“But I am getting so distracted,” Anna-Marie wrote. “I must not wear you out with our history. It’s just like anyone else’s history—so many people have lost so much in the wars. Perhaps I am just searching for explanations, even now as I write. Shortly before her death in 1953, Mother told me my father was not my father. She told me about Mr. Alexander Veltzen, and she made me promise to find him. She seemed not to appreciate or care—which was so much like my mother—that Mr. Veltzen would have been very, very old by then, more than eighty years old by her own reckoning, and most likely dead.
“I am sorry to admit that I did not believe her at first. I even told my father about her disclosure. What was I thinking, in retrospect? He dismissed it. He said Mother was just doing what she’d always been doing: trying to put a wedge between him and me. But last year Father passed away and I am free to seek the truth. The importance of it, for me, is immense. Pierre, my husband, says it will help me live on.”
I had to catch my breath before I could continue. My heart was tolling like a church bell. My forehead was getting wet with condensation. I had a child, absolutely, positively I did!
What if Anna-Marie had inherited some of my features? If my brother Andrei’s insensitivity to my ice had carried on through five generations undiluted, then surely the ice could be preserved in my own daughter! She was abnormal, like me, and that was what complicated her life and demanded explanations! I had to see her, because I could provide her with an explanation; the moment I saw her and touched her hand I would know—
Or would I?
Anna-Marie was not just my daughter. She was Elizabeth’s daughter too, and that meant she wouldn’t have felt my cold even if I wasn’t her father. Worse yet, I had no idea what a reunion of my and my brother’s features in one person would produce. What if they canceled each other out?
No, I simply had no way of knowing anything with certainty . . . I returned to reading.
In our family language was a battlefield. Mother preferred English and Father hated it. If she used English at home he invariably answered in German, which she barely knew. Before we immigrated to France, there was a battle of how much French should be in my life, and after it, how much Russian. France has had a growing refugee problem all through the twenties and thirties and there was a strong drive to assimilate, to become more French than the French. Father resisted it, but not out of love for Russia. It is complicated.
As a small child, I was delayed starting to talk because there were too many different languages circling around me. I of course did not even perceive them as discrete languages back then. They were just different ways to communicate when one was happy or angry, but most of these ways were dangerous, because if I chose wrong for my babbles, it would upset either Mother or Father. In the end, French seemed the safest ground, and I stuck to it, and the rest of them just withered away. I can understand some Russian and German but I don’t speak either, and I no more than get by in English.
It seems I can’t help smuggling my whole life story into this letter. I hope it is not too much of a nuisance, and I certainly would love to hear as much about you. I also hope that somewhere in your memories or family archives, there are clues that would help us. My mother had said she had written letters to your father. But please do not think that I am jumping to conclusions and already appointing myself your half sister. All I want to say is that I believe, no, I know that your father had left an everlasting imprint on my mother’s life, and I feel I would find a measure of peace even just knowing this imprint was mutual. (But please don’t take it to mean that your family’s relationships were anything different than what you know them for. Ah, I am sorry, there is no way to talk about those things without an awkward appearance of selfishness!) All I can do is apologize one more time for my intrusion, swear I have no interest to profit in any way other than spiritually, and implore you to keep thi
s conversation going.
I wrote to her saying I would come to see her.
• • •
Saturday, June 1961, Melun, about twenty miles east of Paris by train. She met me at the platform of her railroad station. She stood in a torrent of commuters, holding a handwritten sign, Alexander Veltzen. Her scanning stare was wary and guarded before it focused on me, approaching, and melted. “Are you Alexander?”
“Anna-Marie?”
She wore a plaid skirt and a sleeveless turtleneck. The chocolate brown of her hair looked dyed. Did she look like Elizabeth? Like me? I could not tell. She was an attractive woman, her beauty was of the kind that keeps with age; a downward, bitter curve in her full lips and shadows under her eyes made her look sophisticated, not worn out. She extended her hand for a handshake, then scrambled it into a hug. I hugged back. She noticed nothing out of the ordinary, as I had expected.
“Welcome to Melun,” she said.
She drove me past a small town square, along streets that ran up and down hill between endless stone fences of the same color as the cobblestones of Champs Elysées in 1814. There was a small stucco cottage, an overgrown garden, and a skinny man who tended peonies in a little clearing cut out in the otherwise rampant jungle—the husband, Pierre. A ruffled type with a five-o’clock shadow. “Pleased to meet you.”
I entered a dark, cool living room with a tile floor, a small TV set on a mahogany piece that perhaps had started in the nineteenth century as a small bureau; a pale bluish curtain over a narrow doorway to the backyard. Then a busy kitchen with prolific houseplants, babbling radio, an asthmatic refrigerator, a stack of pans on a stove. A small breakfast table was crowded with a wicker basket full of bread, an opened book, several newspapers, reading glasses, an empty breakfast bowl, half a lemon, a scallion spear, a booklet of train schedules.
I already liked them both. But I was confused: I perceived Anna-Marie as a woman, not a daughter. I looked her age. Seeing her did not trigger any visceral reaction in me. What did it mean?
The Age of Ice: A Novel Page 45