Ice Trilogy

by Vladimir Sorokin

  That day, when the service was over we began to leave the church with the crowd. Right behind us there was a sudden crush of people and several voices began arguing.

  “These Ukies are always barging ahead!” one voice said in Russian.

  “Those Moscow mosquitoes fly in just to push us around!” said another voice in Ukrainian.

  The weather was springlike, the sun was shining, and the remaining patches of snow crunched underfoot. Father and the aunts gave alms to the poor, while Nastya and I sat in the britzka and looked at the square in front of the church. It was jammed with people. Some were already drunk. The village people, the Ukies, loitered about here — as did the factory people who worked in Father’s plant. The plant was located about a verst from the village, but the factory settlement, built awhile back by my grandfather, lay just beyond the wide ravine. The Ukies shelled pumpkin seeds and made a hubbub; the factory workers smoked and laughed. Suddenly someone in the crowed screamed, we heard the sound of a slap, someone’s cap went flying, the crowd surged with excitement, and the men ran to the ravine. The women squealed and ran after them. The square emptied in a second; the only people remaining were the beggars, the cripples, two constables with big sabers, and my relatives.

  “Where are they going?” I asked Nastya, who was four years older.

  Still chewing on the host, Nastya smacked her palm on the back of the driver’s padded coat.

  “Mikola, where are they running to?”

  The swarthy Ukie with droopy mustaches turned around, smiling. “Well, miss, they’s run off like the divil’s kin to slug ’em in their mugs.”

  “Slug whose face?”

  “Them own selves, Miss.”

  “What for?”

  “Wouldn’t be knowing...”

  We stood up in the carriage. In the ravine the men had lined up in two ranks — the plant workers, mostly Russian newcomers, in one; the local Ukrainian villagers in the other. The women, old people, and children stood at the edge of the ravine and watched them from above. A hat flew up again and the fight began. It was accompanied by women’s shrieks and encouraging shouts. For the first time in my life I saw people deliberately beating each other. In our family, other than Father’s occasional cuffs and Mama’s smacks, or a disobedient child ordered to sit in the corner, there were no punishments. Father often yelled at Mother until he was blue in the face, stamped his feet at the servants, and threatened the manager with his fist, but he never touched anyone.

  Mesmerized, I watched the fight, not understanding the meaning of what was happening. The people in the ravine were doing something very important. It was hard for them to do it. But they were really trying. They tried so hard they almost cried. They groaned, swore, and shouted. It was as though they were giving one another something with their fists. It was interesting and frightening. I began to tremble. Nastya noticed and hugged me.

  “Don’t be scared, Shurochka. They’re peasants. Papa says all they do is drink and fight.”

  I held Nastya’s hand. Nastya was watching the fight in a strange way. It was as though she stopped being my sister and became distant and grown-up. And I was left alone. The fight continued. Someone fell on the snow, someone else was pulled by the hair, another guy would move back, spitting red. Nastya’s hand was hot and alien to me.

  Finally the constables whistled, and the old men and women shouted.

  The fight stopped. The brawlers went home cursing — the Ukies to Kochanovo; the factory folk to the settlement. My tenderhearted mother couldn’t help herself and cried after them, “Shame on you! Orthodox boys are on the front fighting the Germans, and you fight each other on a holiday!”

  The ends of my father’s thin-lipped mouth curled in a smile. “It’s all right, let them entertain themselves and get it out of their system. It will be quieter that way.”

  He was afraid of the strikes and walkouts that had shaken Russian factories in 1905. All in all, though, he was content: the mobilization didn’t affect his workers since sugar was considered a strategic product during wartime. The war promised great profits for Father.

  Mama got in the carriage with us, the coachman tugged on the reins, clucked, and we set off. I let go of Nastya’s hand. Two factory fellows passed by in homespun coats. One of them had a black eye, yet he was positively glowing with joy. The other guy touched his broken nose. Mother turned away indignantly.

  “There you go, master, sir, we taught those Ukies a lesson!” said the fellow with the black eye, who pulled something from his closed fist and showed it to me, winked, and laughed. “A Ukie tooth got stuck in the mallet.”

  His friend quickly bent over and blew his nose. Red drops colored the snow. These fellows were happy. Both of them had a kind of invisible gift. They had received it in the fight. And they took it home with them.

  I couldn’t understand what kind of gift it was. Nastya and the other grown-ups understood, but they wouldn’t say. There were many things no one would tell me.

  I discovered the world’s secrets for myself.

  At the end of July we moved to Vaskelovo. At noon, after a two-hour lesson with Madame Panaget, I had some baked-milk pudding with bilberries and headed for the garden to play until dinner. The garden had been built a century and a half earlier, but it retained only remnants of its original magnificence — the former owner hadn’t taken care of it at all. I loved to launch paper boats in the pond, climb on the willow tree that bent over to the ground, or, hiding behind the juniper bushes, throw pinecones at an old marble faun. But that day I didn’t feel like doing any of this. Nastya was practicing her music in the house; Mama and the nanny were making jam; Father had left for Vyborg to buy some kind of machine, taking Ilya and Ivan with him; Arisha and Vasilisa were dozing with their books on chaise longues. I wandered around until I reached the most overgrown corner of the garden, and suddenly saw our maid, Marfusha. Squeezing her body between two iron fence bars pulled slightly apart, she disappeared into the forest that began just beyond the garden. There was something entirely uncharacteristic in her furtive movement; plump and calm, she was usually unhurried and smiling, with silly, wide-open brown eyes. Sensing some mystery in Marfusha’s action, I wriggled through the fence and carefully ran after her. Her stern blue dress with its white apron stood out starkly against the background of the wild forest. The girl walked swiftly along the path, without turning around. I followed, walking on the soft, pine-needle-covered ground. A thick grove of old fir trees stood all around. It was dusky in the grove and only the rare birdcall could be heard. After about half a verst the grove ended: a small swamp began here. At the edge of the trees there were three shelters fashioned from fir branches. Every spring Father and his friends came here to hunt black grouse, which mated in the swamp. A whistle sounded from one of the huts. Marfusha stopped. I hid behind a thick fir. Marfusha looked around, and entered the hut.

  “I was thinking you’d not come,” a man’s voice said, and I recognized Klim, a young servant.

  “They’ll be sitting to dinner soon, the missus is making jam. Lordy, I hope they don’t miss me,” Marfusha said quickly.

  “Don’t worry, they won’t take notice,” Klim muttered, and they fell silent.

  I approached the hut stealthily, thinking to give a shout and scare them. On reaching the edge of the hut, I was just about to open my mouth, but I froze on the spot when I caught a glimpse of Klim and Marfusha through the fir branches. A sack was spread out on the ground inside the hut. They were kneeling, embracing, and sucking on each other’s mouths. I had never seen people do that. Klim was squeezing Marfusha’s breasts with one hand, and she was moaning. This went on and on. Marfusha’s arms hung helplessly. Her cheeks were burning. Finally their mouths separated, and curly-headed, skinny Klim started to unbutton Marfusha’s dress. This was totally incomprehensible. I knew that only a doctor was allowed to take a woman’s dress off.

  “Wait, I’ll take off my apron,” said Marfusha, removing the apron, folding it ca
refully, and hanging it on a branch.

  Klim unhooked her dress, bared her young, strong breasts with little nipples, and began to kiss them greedily, murmuring, “Sweetheart, my sweetheart.”

  “What is he — some kind of a baby?” I thought.

  Marfusha shuddered and her breathing was irregular.

  “Klimushka...my precious...Do you really love me?”

  He muttered something and unhooked her rustling blue dress even further.

  “Not that way,” she said, pushing away his hands and lifting the hem of her dress.

  There was a white slip under her dress. Marfusha lifted it. And I saw female thighs and the dark triangle of her groin. Marfusha quickly lay down on her back.

  “Lordy me, it’s a sin...Klimushka...”

  Klim lowered his pants, fell on top of Marfusha, and began to move back and forth.

  “Oh, we shouldn’t...Klimushka...”

  “Quiet,” Klim muttered, moving back and forth.

  He began moving faster and growling like an animal. Marfusha moaned and cried out, muttering, “Lord...oy, it’s a sin...oh my God...”

  Their bodies trembled, their cheeks filled with blood. I understood clearly that they were doing something very shameful and secret, for which they would be punished. I could see that it was very hard for them, and probably hurt. But they really really wanted to do it.

  Soon Klim grunted, the way men grunt when they’re splitting logs, and then he was still. It was as though he fell asleep, lying on Marfusha like a mattress. She kept on moaning softly and stroked his curly head. Finally he rolled over, sat up, and wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

  “Lordy...what if there’s a baby?” said Marfusha, lifting her head.

  Klim looked at her as though seeing her for the first time.

  “Yull come tonight?” he asked hoarsely.

  “Heavens, who’ll let me out?” she said, starting to button her dress.

  “Come when it gets dark,” Klim sniffed.

  “Klimushka, sweetheart, what’ll happen now?” she replied, suddenly hugging him close.

  “Nothing will happen,” he muttered.

  “Oh no, I gotta run,” she murmured.

  “You go, I’ll come along after,” said Klim gloomily, chewing on a twig.

  “It’s not wet on the hem is it?”

  “Nuh-uh.”

  I began to back away from the hut, then turned and ran home.

  What I had seen in the hut shook me as deeply as the brawl in the ravine. I understood with all my small being that both things were very important for people. Otherwise they wouldn’t do them with such passion and effort.

  I soon learned about childbirth from my brother Vanya. After that, the scene in the hut acquired another dimension for me: I understood that children are born out of a secret groaning, which is carefully hidden from everyone. Vanya informed me that children were only made at night. I began to listen carefully at night. And once, walking by my parents’ bedroom, I heard the same moans and growling. Returning to my own bed, I lay there and thought: What a very strange activity this is, making children. Only one thing remained unclear — why is it all hidden?

  In the morning at breakfast, when Marfusha, Klim, and Father’s old servant Timofei were serving us, and everyone sitting at the table was, as usual, discussing news from the front, I suddenly asked, “But is Marfusha going to have a baby?”

  The conversation stopped. Everyone looked at Marfusha. At that moment she was holding a porcelain dish from which the gray-haired, bulbous-nosed Timofei was ladling farina porridge onto our plates with his customary, long-suffering, anxious expression. Klim, standing in the corner of the dining room at the samovars, was filling glasses with tea. Marfusha turned redder than she had in the hut. The dish shook in her hands. Klim looked askance at me and grew pale.

  Mother saved everyone. Most likely, she had guessed about the ties between the maid and the servant.

  “Shurochka, Marfusha will have five children,” she said. Then she added: “Three boys and two girls.”

  “That’s right,” Father agreed, frowning as he spooned jam abundantly over his porridge. “And then — another five. So that there’s someone to go to war.”

  Everyone laughed approvingly. Marfusha tried to smile.

  She had a hard time of it.

  With each month the war intruded into our lives more and more. Vasily arrived home from the front. Not on his own two legs — he was driven from the train station in Father’s automobile. The automobile blew its horn three times, and we ran out to meet our war hero, who had written short but memorable letters. Vasily stepped out of the automobile and, leaning on the chauffeur and Timofei, began climbing the steps to meet us. He was wearing an overcoat and a peaked cap, and his face was very yellow. Timofei carefully held his wooden stick. Vasily smiled guiltily. We rushed to kiss him. Mama sobbed. Father walked over and stood nearby, gazing tensely at Vasily and blinking. His strong chin trembled.

  In Poland, near Lovich, Vasily had been in a German gas attack. Although my brother had been poisoned with chlorine, the serpentine words “mustard gas” slithered into me.

  Sitting in the parlor by the blazing fireplace, Vasily had tea and pastries and told us how he ran from the chlorine cloud; how he killed eight Germans with a machine gun; how two of his frontline friends were blown to bits by one shell, the warrant officer Nikolaev and the volunteer Gvishiani; how they silently took out the sentries with a horsehair string, “the Gypsy bride”; how to fight lice and tanks; what capital flamethrowers the Germans have; and what a multitude of Russian corpses lay in a huge wheat field after the Brusilov Offensive.

  “They lay in even rows as though they’d been deliberately arranged. When they moved to attack the machine-gun nests, they were mowed down like grain.”

  We listened, holding our breath. The glass of tea shook in Vasily’s yellow hand. He kept having to cough; his eyes teared up and were always red now, as though he’d just been crying. Vasily would grow short of breath when walking; to catch his breath he’d stop and lean on his walking stick.

  Father sent him to Piatigorsk to take the waters.

  Then a year later in Moscow my oldest brother took his own life, firing a revolver at his temple and a ladies’ Browning at his heart simultaneously. Vanya said that Vasily shot himself because of a married woman with whom he had been hopelessly in love even before the war.

  Father kept growing wealthier and ever more dependent on the war. His business moved up in the world. He acquired many new acquaintances, mostly among the military. He began to drink more, and more often, and was rarely at home, saying that now he “lived on the road.” Various thin-eared, energetic young men darted about him; he called them his commissioners. Now he was involved not only in sugar but in many other things as well. When he shouted into the telephone, bizarre phrases would reach my ears: “American rubber will grab us by the throat one of these days,” “There’s a shipment of crackers gone criminally missing in the warehouse,” “Those scoundrels from the land committee of the southwestern front are cutting me without a knife,” “Six cars of soap shavings have been delayed at the junction,” and so on.

  My grandmother, who was quietly living out the remainder of her life in the house on Ostozhenka, said one time at Easter, “Our Dimulenka has completely lost his head with this war: he’s chasing seven rabbits at one time.”

  And at the time Father really did remind me of a man in torment, racing hopelessly after something nimble and elusive. He himself grew no livelier for the race; on the contrary, he seemed to ossify, and his immobile face frowned even more. It seemed that he had completely stopped sleeping. His eyes shone feverishly and settled on nothing, roaming constantly when he had tea with us.

  Another year passed.

  The war had made its way into all the cracks. It had slithered out onto the streets. Columns of soldiers marched in the cities; at the station, cannons and horses were loaded onto the trains. Mama and I stopped
visiting Basantsy — it was “restless” there. Our entire family settled in Petersburg. Relatives were left behind on the estates. The wartime capital taught me three new words: unemployment, strike, and boycott. For me they were embodied in the dark crowds of people on the streets of Petersburg who wandered about glumly, and whom we tried to pass by as quickly as possible in the dark, in our automobile.

  Petersburg began to be called Petrograd.

  In the newspapers people wrote mean poems about the Germans and drew caricatures of them. Vanya and Ilya liked to read them aloud. All Germans were divided into two types for me at that time: one was fat with a meaty, laughing face in a horned helmet, a saber in hand; the other was thin as a stick, in a peaked cap, with a monocle, a riding crop, and a sour, disdainful expression on his narrow face.

  My older sister Arisha brought home a patriotic song from school. In her singing lessons, the whole class was composing music to the verses of some provincial teacher:

  Arise, Russia, oh great and spacious land,

  The mortal fight is now at hand,

  With the Germans’ dark force,

  With the Teutonic knights’ horde!

  Nastya and Arisha accompanied with four hands, and I sang with pleasure, standing on a chair.

  When we moved to the big city, I noticed that everything happened faster than in Basantsy or Vaskelovo: people moved and talked more quickly, drivers raced along and hollered, automobiles honked and rattled, gymnasium students hurried to school, newspaper hawkers shouted about “our losses.” Father would enter the apartment, throw off his sheepskin coat, eat hurriedly, close himself in his office with his assistant, and then take off in the automobile with his commissioners and disappear for a week. Mama also moved much faster; she was always going somewhere and buying something. We went visiting often and quickly. I had a lot of new friends — boys and girls.