“Prince Alexander . . .”
I stopped. “I can recommend you as a tutor to a family or two in Moscow. Or even farther out. St. Pete’s does not seem to agree with you.”
“Thank you for your kindness. I shouldn’t let you trouble yourself on my account.”
“And if I insist?”
“I’d rather stay here if I might.”
“Why?”
He tarried with the answer.
“Let me rephrase it. If I went with the expedition, would you come?”
Baffled, he only made a few helpless sounds. I watched him for several seconds, then continued on my way uphill. If he did manage to utter his yes, at long last, I did not hear him, the rustle of surf drowned his words.
• • •
I suppose one can live like that, year in, year out. But sooner or later, there comes a day . . . My nephew and I were in the imperial manège, where he was doing jumps for his aptitude test. I applauded his steady handling of his Arabian through a couple of bullfinches. The boy was proud of himself: that sprightly short gallop he elicited from his beast was a show-off; and afterward he dismounted next to me like a ready-made garde à cheval.
“Well done,” I said. “You’re already a better rider than me.” This may have given him courage to proceed.
“Uncle,” he said. “Why didn’t you marry Maman?”
So he knew. He’d pieced it together, my fourteen-year-old nemesis, who stood lightly blushing but not averting his gaze, a boy dark-eyed and clear-faced like Anna, and with hair the color of ripe wheat, like my brother. Shocked at first, I next felt an odd tingle of hope: what if I could share my secret with him? A young and open mind might well be just what it takes to accept me as I was, with all my anomalies. I took off my gloves. “You know how spouses are expected to be very close to each other? Close—skin to skin, that is what spouses do, right?”
He nodded steadfastly, although he now blushed all the way to his ears.
“For reasons beyond my control or comprehension, I am ill-suited for that. Let me show you.” And without further ado I wrapped my hand over his wrist.
I felt it in my fingertips. I had been negotiating with my cold for more than two decades by now, I knew how to make it work on demand. I swear I did. Yet my godson only looked at me, puzzled, and said, “What are you going to show me, Uncle?”
“Don’t you feel it?”
“Feel what?”
How bizarre I must have looked to him—an uncle who just declared himself unfit for marriage and then conspiratorially squeezed his nephew’s hand, all but winking. My shock and disbelief mixed with an unnerving I have been here before . . . wanting to apply my cold when I needed it . . . and failing . . .
But I did not have time to reminisce. I had exactly one chance to restore my credibility and my reputation in my godson’s eyes. At any price.
“All right, follow me.” I said it in a tone that preempted objections. I just about pushed him into my berlin and rushed to Ivan Kuznetzov’s hideout. I ferreted Ivan out, stuffed him into the carriage next to my nephew, and we sped to my apartment. I ordered them to come upstairs.
I marched them both into my office and slammed the door shut. “Take your clothes off,” I said to Ivan, “everything above the waist.” As he hesitated, I tore off my dress coat, my waistcoat, and then my shirt. “Now,” I urged him and he submitted, sneaking glances at me as he undressed.
Andrei Junior, warily: “Uncle?”
“Quiet and watch!” To Ivan, “Come here. Kiss my hand the way you did once.” I extended a hand but he did not move. His ears, even his neck, were beginning to glow bright red and he now hid his eyes from me. “Come on. Do as I say. You have to do what I ask of you. Right?”
He approached—cautiously, like a wild fawn. Still, he approached. He took my hand. His mouth hovered over my palm—now opening, now closing, as he swallowed a lump in his throat. He was panting. Then he shut his eyes, and his lips touched my skin.
He may have lingered, or could have. I gave him my palm, taking a step forward, pressing it into his mouth. Before he could break the kiss, I hooked his head with my other arm and drew him in. I smashed him into my body, my palm over his face, my arm wrapped around his head and shoulders. He made a muffled exclamation; his hands found my torso to hold on to, but recoiled, then pushed into me in an attempt to break free. He was thrashing now.
“Uncle!” Louder, more frightened.
When I pushed Ivan away, tears and snot were running down his face and he shrank into himself, hugged his skinny trunk as if hit by a winter storm. “What is it,” he whimpered, his teeth clattering.
“What’s happening, Uncle? Why are you doing this?” Andrei was hysterical.
“Tell him.” I yanked my chin toward Andrei. “Tell him what it was like. What did you feel, tell him now!”
“Cold,” Ivan gasped.
“Say it again, louder. Say it!”
“COLD.”
“How cold?”
“Freezing cold . . .”
I flipped open a letter box and scrawled my signature over a check. I closed in on Ivan (he backed up), grabbed his hand, and stuffed the check into it. “Now get out of here. Out of this country. Go to Paris, London, Göttingen, wherever the hell you wanted to go. Become the scientist that you’ve always wanted to be. And don’t think of me again. Go!”
When the door closed after Ivan, I turned back to my godson. He stared at me, thoroughly terrified. He was on his feet, but under my stare he sat back down, on the very edge of the sofa. I was standing between him and the door, otherwise he would have fled, I am sure. I collected my shirt and pulled it over. “You asked me why I wouldn’t marry your mother. This is what would happen if I touch your mother as a husband. If I touch her in elation, in joy. Or if I touch somebody else in anger. Or in fear. Or in shame. This is what happens when I touch people when I am anything but absolutely calm. When I touch anybody at all. Anybody except you, and I’ll be damned if I know why.”
He kept silent. He glanced at me now and then, and his face was frowning, thoughts swirling in his head. I calmed my breath, laced up my collar and cuffs. “Let’s take you home now. I am sorry I scared you. I had to make sure you believed me.”
Andrei kept quiet in the carriage, staring out the window. When we arrived at Anna’s, I asked him to keep it secret and he nodded, very serious. He climbed out and then tarried by the door.
“Was my father like this?”
I misunderstood at first. “Like me?”
“No,” he said, “like me.”
I opened my mouth to answer, and then, suddenly, the eyes of my mind widened: that night when I tried so hard to stay my brother’s fever, he said, You are heating me up—not cold though it should have been, and before that, Andrei Junior, clinging to me, Godfather Alexander is here!—not cold though it should have been—my brother, Andrewsha, again, hugging me, fighting me, running toward me through the enfilade of rooms, not cold, not cold, not cold—my God, it wasn’t me, it was them, and I was blind, blind, blind!
“Yes!” I exhaled, tearing up against my will.
“Oh, okay. Bye,” he said, turned, and ran up the stairs.
This was how I learned, four decades too late, that my aberration made exceptions. Looking back, it made sense—my brother and I shared a womb, we had to learn how to be close. We had to and we did—only, how could we have squandered the wonder that had been born to keep us together; how could we have repelled each other so profoundly that I glimpsed it only when squeezing his dying hand?! And then I had wasted fourteen years of my godson’s life being on guard with him, when I could have been sitting him in my lap, holding his hand, snuggling with him before a hearth, bear-hugging him, and not being the reserved and tense and cold uncle that I’d been, but the hearty, profuse, warm uncle that I had wanted to be, and that he deserved, a fatherless son!
I ordered my coachman to gallop away. “Keep going,” I said, “straight to Nikolskoe.”
>
Back to the old tub with you, poor son of a bitch. Go pity your wretched self in your hot water.
• • •
My confession to Andrei had two consequences. The first one was agreeable—my godson embraced the new status quo and graciously entered into my conspiracy. I let him feel special, let him be a master of the Secret Order of Ice. If it made him square up and look at this or that mademoiselle with more confidence—so be it.
Oh, for crying out loud, let is not a word to use here—I wanted this union, I cherished it, as if it were catching up on the time lost with my brother. He spent time with me in Nikolskoe; we went for long rides and I told him stories. I told him about my science of cold. Cold is not a mere absence of heat, Andrei. I am not a deficiency incarnate. I have something to give. I even told him how his father and I had made a campfire in our ice palace, as boys. How this little fire kept me going when all other memories abandoned me. I think he liked stories like this.
But there was also a second consequence, a disagreeable one.
I suppose I should have been alerted to what was brewing in his head when at the age of fifteen he asked me, “Uncle, does it make you tolerant of cold?” To which I answered, “Yes, it’s possible that I am somewhat sturdier that way than your average fellow.”
“How much sturdier?”
And I answered, “Honestly? I don’t know.”
“I can’t believe you haven’t tried to learn,” he said—my teenage, dismissive judge. “How about me?”
I doubted we shared that trait, but I did not want to be a naysayer. “I am not sure. What do you think?”
He shrugged.
No more than a week after that exchange, Anna demanded to see me and told me that one night, having returned earlier than usual from her ladies’ club, she found Andrei with his lower body submerged in a barrel of ice water. I pictured him: a skinny shivering boy, biting on his lip, clenching onto the rim, his knuckles white . . . That was not the worst part. The worst part . . . She must have interrogated the boy and he must have tried to tell her the truth in an attempt to explain his strange behavior—all he was doing was investigating whether his insensitivity to Uncle Alexander’s coldness was transferable to any and every kind of cold. But the only thing that came out of my nephew’s efforts was that Anna now cornered me in my study and said, a look of torment on her face, “When I inquired what made him resort to this form of self-punishment, I learned that you and Ivan Kuznetzov had done some sort of demonstration in front of my son. Is it true?”
God, was there ever a more unfortunate misunderstanding than this? I did not fare well saying, “I can only imagine what you think had happened there, but I can assure you that none of it was anything other than educational.”
“Educational?” she flared. “He calls undressing with another man and embracing—and God knows what else Andrei doesn’t dare tell me—‘educational’!”
I stared dumbly.
“What is wrong with you, Alexander?” she cried. “Oh, God, what is wrong with you? All these years . . . all these rumors that trail behind your name—your brother warned me—your best friend Svetogorov warned me—”
She held nothing back. She went on to list every bad opinion about me ever floated, from “self-absorbed and petulant” to “transgressive” to “freakish,” every perverse and absurd interpretation of my every action: that I had physically hurt Marie Tolstoy and consorted with St. Petersburg’s seedy underside, that I am a secret founder of the city’s most famous brothel, and that I had an affair with Ivan—this was from Svetogorov’s mouth, as well as another, the most outrageous one, that I had abandoned Svetogorov on the road to Orenburg for fear of joining Freiman’s army as it was deployed against Pugachev.
How does one even begin to—
“I know I fell under your spell willingly,” Anna was saying. “And I kept dismissing all these tales, but now that I’ve come face-to-face with your compulsions, how dare you insult my trust by pulling my son into them? How can you be so selfish, so obsessed with whatever it is that urges you to be the way you are?”
• • •
This was the end, really. It felt as such. A final, irrevocable end, when one gives up and runs.
After Anna banished me from seeing Andrei, the rest just fell into place. I put my affairs in order, I wrote down my will. At first Commodore Loginov was not keen on my proposal: no, I couldn’t just go to the Arctic as his personally appointed overseer. What of the chain of command? Only if I carried out some cover function could I become a member of the expedition. But what function? No one needed a Guards Major to command a handful of Cossacks on board. I knew no English, I could not draw, I was no botanist, no surgeon, no astronomer, no seaman, no shipbuilder. Besides, I was too old. The two top commanders, Billings and Sarychev, were in their twenties, while I was forty-three. How would I like taking orders from a twenty-four-year-old? And a commoner, for that matter? “Every one of them is of humble origin, my Prince, not even of the merest gentility.” And last but not least, how did I even know I could tolerate the cold? The kind of cold that freezes quicksilver?
This last thought gave me an inspiration. “Commodore, if nothing else, you could count on me as the last man walking when even quicksilver is frozen solid. And this is no small matter. Are you aware that the question of the exact temperature at which mercury congeals is one of the presently unresolved challenges? Have you heard that the Royal Society of London reportedly shipped a load of thermometers to Fort Albany, Ontario, to address precisely this crucial scientific problem? Well, we have conditions far better than Ontario. And I just happen to be quite familiar with thermometry. The world virtually expects us to lead the way with the scientific study of severe climes, and I am offering to conduct it, and mind you, at less expense to the admiralty, because I certainly do not need a lifetime pension!”
That was how Prince Alexander Velitzyn became Mr. Velitzyn, a member of the unprecedented, expansive, and expensive Russian-British expedition to the Arctic, a master and commander of three dozen thermometers, and a secret agent who was supposed to report directly to Commodore Loginov.
• • •
Loginov kindly agreed to offer his house as neutral ground where I could say good-bye to Andrei. Anna brought him in and waited in the parlor, while Loginov, Andrei, and I were in the study. The commodore tactfully retreated to the other end of the room and occupied himself with reading. I hugged Andrei and he clung to me.
“It’s my fault,” he said. “I tried to explain, but she wouldn’t listen. She said I was ashamed of myself. What would I be ashamed of?”
“None of it is your fault,” I said, sitting him down and keeping my arm around his shoulders.
“But why won’t you explain it to her. In your words!”
“Just as she did not understand what you meant, she and I also have a misunderstanding, a different kind, but nonetheless . . .”
“But why?!”
“When you’re a grown-up man, you’ll understand,” I said. “But listen. There is something else. You’ve seen how I can be and you’ve asked me what else I can do. That’s why I need to go to the Arctic. It’s a place where all the answers are. And when I return, you and I will know exactly what ice wants with us. Right?”
Was I making this tale up as I spoke? Yes and no. Some of it was already in me, if only not so tidy. But as he nodded solemnly—as I saw my confession working magic on my boy’s spirits, I began believing in it myself. That was how my godson and I drafted our destinies for the next two decades to come.
Except that his draft set him on a road to an untimely end.
• • •
I went to check on Ivan Kuznetzov. What moved me? Curiosity perhaps, that genuine mixture of ruthlessness and compassion. Had he been there, I would’ve offered him to go to the Arctic as my assistant. Wouldn’t I?
But Ivan was gone. The familiar basement apartment was now occupied by a somber shoemaker, his wife, and three children.
<
br /> I never saw Ivan again, but I want to think that he did leave Russia, that he’d gone to France, to survive the Revolution, the Jacobins, the Terror, the Directoire and the ascent of Napoléon. There, in Viviers, in the abandoned orangery he rented from an impoverished nobleman owner, he saw through the missing glass panel in the ceiling the first appearance of the Great Comet of 1812 in the starry skies above France and wondered tiredly what new calamity it spelled for the shaken Europe.
Or perhaps he had gone to the British Isles. There, on the Isle of Skye, standing on the heather-covered hill close-cropped like the sheep that grazed on it, he saw the comet in its full fury, two angry streams of fire blasting off its head, and he would have meticulously measured the length of the streams over the course of several nights.
Or perhaps . . . Didn’t I later see a record of John Smithson, an astronomer, on the passenger list of the Beowulf, sailing from Bremen to Baltimore on March 15, 1790? John Smithson is the same as Ivan Kuznetzov. So perhaps he had gone to the New World, to the United States of America. There, from a belfry in New Madrid, Mississippi Territory, he saw the Great Comet, and made an entry in his diary, one of his last: “Indians believe that this comet is a manifestation of the Great Spirit, a portent of better days for their people.”
I hope it was he.
• • •
By the end of the year 1785 I was traveling east.
Water had failed me—it did not make Anna and me happy—and I was going back to ice. But not as a defeated refugee. No, as a warrior brandishing a thermometer for a sword and determined to conquer the Empire of Ice.
L’Empire de Glace
1785–93
Our sojourn in the Empire of Ice lasted almost nine years. Including the years that it took us to get there and back. The vastness of my country of birth is mind-boggling, and I am sure Empress Ekaterine, born and raised, after all, in the tiny claustrophobic German principality Anhalt-Zerbst, had no clue what a humongous, cold-blooded, slumbering beast let her claim sovereignty over itself. If one travels posthaste, almost twenty-four hours a day and changing horses at every transit station, a 420-mile trip from St. Petersburg to Moscow takes at least six days. From there to Kazan (the city I went through on my way to Orenburg ten years ago) is another week. But from there on, one leaves Orenburg to the southwest and climbs over the spine of the Ural mountain range only to discover an infinity unfolding on the other side. Weeks turn into months, hundreds into thousands; the farther one goes the more his speed of travel declines, as if in a Zeno’s paradox nightmare. Truly, whatever St. Petersburg and Moscow may think about their geopolitical weight, both together plus everything before the Urals is but a small, brightly colored crest of feathers on the beast’s head, and only a few get to trudge the full length of its mammoth-bone spine, and peek in its permafrost eye as its third lid flashes the dark aperture open—only a few get to look into it and come home unaltered.
The Age of Ice: A Novel Page 13
