The Colors of Cold

by J. M. Sidorova

  She remembers nodding, tears on her face. She remembers Marquis holding her, some weeks later, murmuring into her ear, People, you know, they call these things fear, and rage, and shame. But you are not like other people. What you feel—these upsets—they make your magic work. Your cold. They are useful. Necessary. They make you special.

  And thus she began calling these things, her feelings, by colors—blue, red, white—because her feelings are unlike anybody else’s. She does not even know what others would call her blue upset, her red upset. She doesn’t care to know.

  She thinks of her patrons. Of all those who had come to her boudoir with the white flower Ressentir in their hands, with the requests to “experience her physically.” Whatever names they’d have for her upsets would be wrong, wrong! She peels her shift off her shoulders and begins to free out her arms. She glimpses several more snowflakes in the air across the stage from her. They fall to the floor, they melt. Why is it only the blue upset, only the slightest hint of red, like a fresh bruise, that she feels?

  * * *

  Hear me out, Julien said yesterday night, and she did. “It’s not me. It’s my other leg that feels cold, the one that is missing. I lost it in Russia, during the retreat,” he said.

  How could a missing leg feel anything? She backed away from him and sat on the taboret in front of her vanity.

  “I thought you of all people will believe me,” he said, breaking a shiver. She kept silent, so he added, “Because of the snow maiden. I’ve seen her. I’ve gone to your performance. Then after the show the old gentleman in a wig was selling those flowers, ‘For a private audience with the snow maiden,’ he said, and I thought—”

  She interrupted him. “You thought you’d meet the snow maiden that I conjure?”

  He was abashed. “Yes… I don’t know. Maybe—you let me ask the snow maiden for… to undo what was done to me. She was like an angel. And she appeared in snowfall. I thought, maybe—” He looked into her face and blushed.

  What she desired most of all that moment was to stamp out his stupid phantasms. To yank him hard and slam him into the ground of her truth. There is no “snow maiden,” it’s just me! And there is no such thing as a cold, missing leg. And I can’t help you. “It’s been a year and a half since 1812,” she said sternly, “your leg, Julien, it no longer exists. It was burned or buried, or both. It’s just no longer there, you understand it, right?”

  “It does exist.” He clenched at his stump with one hand, then with both. “Last time I’ve seen it attached to me it was frozen into ice. Trapped in it. I prayed for escape.” He started rocking his upper body back and forth. “Next thing I remember, it was gone. I gave up my leg so I could get out of there, and I accept that. But it’s still frozen into ice. And I can feel it. The pressure. And the freezing cold.” His fingers clasped tight around the stump’s end as if he were making a tourniquet to check the flow of influence from far, far away, from the icy wastes of Russia.

  Radiant cold, she thought. If only Monsieur Pictet and those other men from the anatomy theater could hear this! She said, “What about spring? And summer? They have summer in Russia, don’t they? Is your leg cold in summer?”

  He nodded.

  “So you’re imagining it then,” she concluded. “Ice melts in summer.”

  “No, you don’t understand! This ice—that trapped my leg—it will not melt, ever. They store it—someone must have. You know how they harvest and store ice there? They must have taken it, my leg and all, to some cellar and they will keep it there captive forever!” His face glared with conviction, his good leg bounced on the ball of its foot.

  Julien the one-legged veteran, you are mad. “Who would do such a thing, freeze your leg in ice and then cut it off and keep it? How did you survive this? Have you not been wounded in battle, attended by a surgeon? Sent to a hospital? Is this not how it really happened?”

  “I told you how it went,” he cried out. “I don’t remember anything else!”

  He hugged himself, shivering. His eyes teared up and the tip of his nose turned red as if he were truly freezing. He doesn’t want to remember, she thought. Sweet Mary, mother of God, behold what Napoléon has done to these boys. Weep for them. What is this one going to do when they kick him out of Les Invalides? How will he fend for himself if he’s going to shake like this half the time, as if he were out of his mind? What’d happen to him if the Russian army were to enter Paris?

  She approached and took his hand softly. “Julien, why don’t you come here and lie down on this ottoman. And close your eyes, and keep them closed no matter what. Then you can ask the snow maiden for help. All right?”

  She helped him out of the chair. As he settled on the ottoman, she told him to rest and wait. She tiptoed into the corner and pulled off her gloves and shift. She was upset enough, with blue and white colors of upset. She returned and slipped in next to him, took his hand and placed it on her breast. His fingers twitched over her nipple. She cleared his forehead of the strands of his hair and kissed it. “Make a wish.”

  * * *

  Marquis is the only family she has, and yet she can’t explain it even to him. She wants to tell him, My blue upset, even my red upset, no longer work on stage. She imagines how he smiles absently and shakes his head and says, But, Cherie, you are my powerful magician. You can—

  No, listen to me, she insists. There is a white upset that I feel, what is it? The white upset, the strongest, strangest of all, the kind that overtakes her against her will when she lies under a white flower patron—Ressentir, Égalité—it is blazing white before they squirm away from her, exclaiming, some with distress, others with thrill, You really are cold, girl, colder than a corpse. You’re burning my privates, I swear!

  The white that rises from the bottom of her belly, and it feels like revolution itself, she thinks, with the terror and with toppling of marble statues and with chasing people out of their homes—only it is all inside her, while she stands, like this, on this stage, right now, naked more absolutely, more hopelessly, than even the armless Venus over by the door, and she wishes—

  And she wishes that Julien did not leave, yesterday, the way he did. She told him to make a wish. He hid his face between her breasts. His shoulder jerked as shivers passed through his body. She waited, stroking his hair. She waited for his wish, but above that—for him to admit the obvious—how cold she was, how it had to mean she was the snow maiden, lying next to him. Then, she would say that she granted his wish. Who knows, maybe it would help him.

  Instead, his shivers eased off and he said, “Ah, Constance. I am just a fool, aren’t I? A fool’s dream. The snow maiden doesn’t exist anywhere but on stage.”

  Still unwitting, still blue and white, she pressed the back of her hand to his cheek and said, “Don’t you feel how cold I am? I am the snow maiden.”

  He opened his eyes, pulling back to see her better. “Why do you say that? You’re not cold at all. You are very kind, and lovely, and you pity me, and I am thankful for that, but… you don’t know ice. You can’t speak for it.” He sat up on the ottoman and wiped his eyes.

  She asked again, incredulous, “You don’t feel that I am cold?”

  “What? No.”

  Only then did she let her stunned mind consider what this could mean for her. Hope? She was a girl whose emotions made her cold—the stronger the emotion, the colder—and here was a boy who seemed not to notice it. She let herself be carried away for a few fleeting seconds, forgetting all these years, everything that happened between now and that anatomy theater over a decade ago. And just then, just that very second he heaved a sigh and said, “I know that is how I survived. I traded my leg for a fighting chance. But there are times when I just wish that I could feel the cold the way I used to. Like everybody else. With my fingers. My forehead. But I don’t. You can put ice to my skin, and I won’t know. I’m a cripple. The only cold I ever feel is the ice-trap on my missing leg. I don’t wish my leg back. I just… All I want is to be normal
again.”

  And this, these words and nothing else, suddenly made her red, so red that she jumped up and shouted, “Go away! Get the hell out!”

  He scrambled up, repeating, What’s wrong with you? What did I do? He was reluctant to leave, and so she shouted, I don’t want you! and threw her powder and rouge boxes and stockings and gloves at him, until he collected his crutches and managed to clatter to the door and shut it behind himself.

  * * *

  It is this memory, today, now, on stage, that catches her breath, that makes her clench her hands and stare senselessly at the faces of her audience, at the walls, draperies, lanterns. There will be no miracle. It’s over. There is no point.

  Marquis keeps pulling a cantabile out of his violin. Chairs creak. And creak. The weasel-man clicks his tongue.

  “That’s it?” somebody mutters. She bows her head. She’ll leave now. She expects catcalls. She hears the chairs scratch the floor as the audience rises to its feet. Then the cantabile peters out. There is a strange movement in the air, half gasp, half breeze, and then she hears Marquis exclaim, “Behold the snow maiden!”

  To her left, in the focal point of the other mirror, a ghostly shape is coalescing, a perfect silhouette of her, a reflection, a nude made in her image out of falling, swirling, sparkling snow. She barely gives it a glance, but she is relieved. She has done it, the miracle. Again. It snows. She is so tired. But she’s free to leave the stage now. Another show is over. Everything returns to its tracks.

  They will applaud. Then Marquis will sell some papier-mâché flowers out of the tin bowl.

  But on this, the twenty-ninth day of March 1814, she looks up and to the back of the room, and forgets she wanted to leave. Snow falls and falls, out of thin air and onto the floor. She stares. She can’t tell when the door cracked open, when he clanked in, but he is standing there now, crutches angling out like bony, flightless wings; he’s come back, and he is looking her in the eyes.

  The snow falls thicker and thicker, it piles up, it fills in the silhouette within which it falls, and spreads around it like a shiny halo; and as the ghostly form solidifies, feet to waist to shoulders to head—as snowflakes turn to ice and ice becomes a maiden—Cherie feels red, and blue, and white, but mostly—something else.

  It’s not an upset. She doesn’t need to give it a color. “Make a wish, Julien,” she whispers.

  An excerpt from The Age of Ice

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  The Age of Ice

  By J. M. Sidorova

  Available from Scribner July 2013

  If you enjoy this excerpt, click here to download the full text.

  Age of Ice

  Currently available from Scribner

  An Acclaim for The Age of Ice

  “The Age of Ice rekindles every far-flung childhood memory you have of what it means to experience a great book.”

  —Téa Obreht, New York Times bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife

  “Everything you could want in a novel.”

  —Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

  “Ice binds the characters and shatters them apart, and the far reaches of the novel—Siberia, St. Petersburg, Paris, Herat, Calcutta, and New York over hundreds of years—are spanned as if by bridges of ice. Sidorova has created a tale at once familiar and foreign, thawed out of history and yet still fresh.”

  —Paul Park, author of A Princess of Roumania and Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance

  “I’m in awe. The Age of Ice is a luminous vision, a waking dream, utterly delicious. Sidorova is the best new writer I’ve come across in years.”

  —Rudy Rucker, author of The Ware Tetralogy

  Map: St. Petersburg 1740

  Birth

  I was born of cold copulation, white-fleshed and waxy like a crust of fat on beef broth left outside in winter. I was born of seed that would have seized with frost if spilled on the newlyweds’ bed. I was born on the twenty-seventh of September because in the month of January my parents had been sealed in a wedding chamber made of ice.

  The year was 1740. The place—St. Petersburg, Russia. My country, corseted, wigged, and powdered on top but still darkly savage at heart, was panting and retching after the marathon Peter the Great had forced her to run. My would-be father, Prince Mikhail Velitzyn, scion of a family ancient and stately, had been transformed into a court jester. He had been forced to wear red-and-white-striped stockings and pretend to be a hen—to brood an imaginary clutch in Empress Anna Ioannovna’s menagerie of dwarfs, cripples, freaks, and victims. This was his punishment for an alleged affair with a Catholic noblewoman.

  I’ve never met that woman. She may have never existed. The one whose existence is certain was Avdotia Buzheninova, a jester by birthright and a humpback, whose act was to writhe in a mockery of yearning, to clutch her breast and wail that she was lusting for a husband. The empress loved the gag, they say—so much so that it inflamed her head with an idea of a jester wedding.

  That winter was brutal, and generous with precipitation, thus permissive of all manner of arctic entertainment: making snowmen and leaving men out in the snow, sharpening blades of axes and ice skates, freezing little birds and little maids in flight. By January, upon the empress’s whimsical orders, a palace was erected out of ice blocks—the purest crystal blue, ripped out of the Neva River’s winter hide and chiseled to diamond perfection by the empress’s slave architects. Inside the palace was a wedding chamber, a canopy bed on a dais, with heavy drapes half drawn, cascading to the floor—all made of ice.

  The wedding opened with festivals and masquerades. Dwarfs trumpeted and freaks paraded. A procession followed, and at its head strode the empress herself, dressed as the Queen of Sheba. She danced, quaking her regal fat, perspiring in her sleeveless gown. She led my parents to the wedding chamber, gave them the blessing, and locked them up for the night.

  Idle tongues used to say it was for fear of being left forever inside the frosty chamber that my parents fulfilled their connubial duty. But what do they know of ice, those idle tongues? No one but an abused prince and his slave bride know how fingers, skin taut with cold, nail beds bruise-blue, climb into warm recesses of the flesh, hiding from frostbite. How sweat and tears freeze and join with ice, becoming part of the curtain, part of the bed. How flesh shivers, giving its seed up as the last drop of oil for the dying fire in a night that is as long as winter. How dawn glows through the walls of ice, and lights up the cavern, and finds them fused together, clinging to the residual warmth of each other’s blood.

  Only in the morning did the guards go in, to find them half dead on the ice slab of their wedding bed. Nine months later, two boys were born. My brother Andrei came first, a perfect infant. I found my way out a day later. I was smaller and paler than Andrei, and once I cleared the womb, our poor mother expired. Everyone was certain that a colorless runt like me would not see his first summer. But they were wrong. They knew nothing of ice.

  In Corpore Vili, or The Early Phenomena

  1740–69

  Empress Anna Ioannovna died a month after we were born, and my father retired from his clown duty and fled the capital for the family estate near Moscow. Peter the Great’s daughter, cheerful Elizaveta, eventually ascended to the throne, while Father married a proper, if unremarkable, noblewoman. Soon Andrei and I had a half sister and another sibling on the way.

  The extended Velitzyn clan never let Father forget his ignominy, and the episode was a frequent punch line. Back then, no one was coddled. The age of delicate senses had not yet dawned, nerves had not been discovered. Father helped himself by letting his temper loose. The only concession he ever won was a ban on house jesters and fools, much lamented by the family members. We had to depend on our household pet for entertainment—a brown bear who sat on a chain by day and roamed the grounds as a watch by night, and who would dance for a treat when in the mood. Father was like that bear, I would think
years later. Both fearsome, both wearing an indelible weak spot: one a chain-link in his nose; the other, a foolscap, once and forever.

  My brother and I were treated to the story of our less than noble origins as soon as we were able to listen. I remember Andrei telling me (we were five or so), “If Anna Ioannovna didn’t die, you’d be a jester!” To which I replied, “We both would’ve been jesters. But if she hadn’t died we would’ve killed her!”

  I uttered the murderous verb with the gusto only a child can get away with. Andrei returned a sharp glance. “To avenge our father? So that he would love us?”

  It stunned me that this particular reason had been absent from my mind until Andrei brought it up. My reasoning, if you could call it that, went toward a takeover of the throne to found an empire of jesters, freaks, and cripples. I looked at my brother, at his serious face. Was there something important I did not yet understand? “Yes,” I said. “Why else?”