I heard myself saying, “Ice is the cruelty of the world.” And “What did I learn in the Arctic, you ask? This. That people—peoples—will never understand one another. That they will always be at war. That I am a monster. I have been taking advantage of your mother’s weakness. Is that what you wanted to know? Now you know it.” My own voice sounded strange. I hope he barely understood me by then. His breaths were spastic. Held back or pushed out, they flared his nostrils and cheeks as he tried to keep his mouth shut; his lips were white and drawn into a line, water lapped at them. His hair was crusted in ice.
He let out a growl—rage, pain, frustration. But he did not quit. He just grabbed the ice ledge, pressed his forehead into his knuckles, and squeezed his eyes shut. That’s how he’d stay, I thought. That’s how he’d stay until he froze. Maybe he wanted to freeze now. I followed the perimeter of the hole to him. “Andrei.”
“No.”
“You beat me.”
“No!”
He fought me, I think. Maybe he did not believe I was helping him.
I pushed then pulled him with my arms and legs. Once halfway out on a ledge, he lay on his side, unable to move. He slurred his curses like a drunk and his face was a mask of snow.
Just a shivering human, he kept saying, as I all but carried him back to the palace. Just a . . . shivering . . . human, lying face to the wall in his bed under a blanket and two greatcoats, coughing and shaking so violently his forehead would hit the wall. The first couple of times I put my hand on his shoulder he knocked it off. Then he gave in. I kept my hand on him and felt every shudder and spasm of his tortured muscles.
Just a shivering human.
• • •
Andrei relapsed into a chest cold but in due course his fit constitution prevailed and his coughs resolved come summer. Our relationship resumed on cordial terms, at least in public or whenever Anna was with us. But he avoided being alone with me, and whenever I held my stare on him for more than five seconds, he tensed up. He never again mentioned his ice-swimming.
• • •
On with the story, Mr. Velitzyn, do not flinch, press forward! Say it, say when first you began to believe there was something wrong with your wife.
When?—When I was no longer the only, the exclusive, deliverer of her ice. When I spied Nadya sneaking in plain frozen water, low-life chunks from some undignified and impure source—and this instead of the precious offerings of my icery, of the gifts of my love—oh, how offended I was, how hurt was my pride! Circumvented, dethroned, and for what?
I confronted my wife, I demanded an explanation of this degradation of taste.
She said she did not want to bother me. And I objected that it was never a bother but a joy to me and why on earth would she deprive me of it and mix Nadya up in it? So she said, “You’ve made such a ritual out of it . . . given it so much importance, that I sometimes feel as though—”
“What?”
“As though I want it to become unimportant. I want it to be as if it does not exist.”
Why, my sweet? Why do you want it not to exist? What have I done?
“I feel so old,” she whispered. “So tired of being . . . me. Of waking up each morning, in my body. And then to spend the day negotiating one or the other of its little rules. It’s like a collegium, my body, a perfectly inept Department of my Interior. And I am a petitioner, and every morning I start a petition anew. Do you understand?”
I wasn’t sure I did. “What do you petition for?”
“For my day. What if you had to apply to have a good day? And it absolutely had to be on a good half-folio paper, and if you do not observe the margins, then you have to wait till noon, when they accept nonstandard correspondence, except in those cases when they do not accept anything at all.”
• • •
Words are so ephemeral, they are not the fabric of reality, they could be merely an opinion, a fleeting mood. Anna had compared her body with a surreal bureaucracy—perhaps this meant nothing at all. Or was it something I should act upon, should I bring in a doctor from St. Petersburg, and thus admit to the reality of it? I asked her and she recoiled. “I don’t know, Alexander!” She too was fearful to act—she too perhaps would have liked to keep it in the realm of words alone.
For days I debated the matter with myself, then called for a doctor. I had him brought in, a dignified old German, a reliable caterer to all of St. Petersburg’s aristocracy. He spent time with Anna behind closed doors. I was in the parlor opposite the entrance to her apartments, restless. I wondered what he asked her about, what she told him. What he did to her. Did he tap on her chest? Did he measure her pulse, sink his knotty finger into her soft belly? My thoughts went to the ways in which the two of us had been making love for the past five years. I began to fear that Anna’s mysterious ailment was caused by it, even as I didn’t want the doctor to learn it. I prayed she wouldn’t tell the doctor about it, even as I realized that if she didn’t, he’d never be able to help her. But no, no, I assured myself, nothing we’d done could have weakened her health! How could it?
The doctor finally came out, rubbing his wrinkled hands as if washing them, and responded with a thin, satisfied smile to my jumping out of the chair. “Rest assured, mein dear Prince Velitzyn,” he said, “diet, rest, and distractions should take care of it in no time. At Lady Velitzyn’s stage of life it is not so uncommon to develop—how should I say it?—a trifle of spleen. Even a mere acknowledgment of the circumstances by a medical professional is often enough to relieve the symptoms, believe me. Have her take large quantities of warm water—this has never hurt anyone and it’s good for the liver. A once-a-day digitalis would aid her too. I left a prescription. More red meat in her diet will be beneficial as it will reduce the effeminacy of her vital force.”
I handed over his fee; he bowed, taking it into his hands that he still held curled up in front of his chest, raccoonlike. I said, “Anything else?”
He looked at me. “A change of scenery perhaps. A healthy dose of entertainment.”
Moments later I ran into Anna’s apartments and found her in the antechamber, seated, staring absentmindedly in front of her. I kissed her hand and held it. “How was it, my dear?”
She gave me a smile, fingered a prescription on the end table. “Once a day at bedtime, eight drops into a glass of warm water. I hate warm water.”
“I know, sweetheart, I know. What did you tell him?”
She rested her cheek in my palm. “I am a little tired right now.”
I knew the cue but I did not leave just yet. “He told me you will be all right.”
“Yes, he is confident I will,” she said.
I was sure Anna had not told the doctor about our ways. I felt relieved and guilty.
• • •
Andrei was a better son than I was a husband. In the late summer of 1801, he restored Anna’s vitality by letting her become his matchmaker. A certain Varvara Redrikov became the lucky bride, an offspring of an old, though more humbly endowed, noble family.
Varvara was not the prettiest one: her complexion was a little flat, her eyes somewhat beady, her mouth a tad too straight. Her bosom was full, though, her wrists slender, her manner cultivated enough, and she was by no means stupid. She was also sufficiently fond of Andrei (or of her status as his wife) to display contentment even after she learned that she’d live in Nikolskoe with us, while her husband would remain in St. Pete’s. But her heart was a small place: big enough to hold only Andrei and (barely) Anna; when it came to Nadya, Varvara had no kind words.
Still more disappointing was the fact that Anna’s esprit proved temporary.
• • •
But truly, how could it be anything serious, I thought? Assuredly, all of this would dissipate and we would go about our lives as we had before, in a mutually agreeable symbiosis with ice. I would carry my ice treats—a strawberry granita, frozen molasses—on a tray to Anna’s bedroom, the same hour as her son would step onto a callus of ice on t
he Neva and take a deep breath of the night’s freshness; and her lips and fingertips would be sticky with my melted candy, while Andrei would drop his fur coat, white cotton undershirt, breeches, and stockings onto the snow next to the pitch-black eye of water, new ice creeping upon it like a cataract; and I would stuff myself into Anna, and revel inside until she hurt more than she’d like and she’d tug gently at my ear, her custom, and I would withdraw; she would let out a moan of pain and pleasure, a murmur of flowering flesh, tantalized, closing its petals but hoping for more; and Andrei would throw his body into a black hole in ice, a growl of pain and triumph escaping him against his will.
Why couldn’t it last? Didn’t I hope it would? What a blind, blind man! Even after we summoned the same doctor several months later, and then another, and another. Why hadn’t the first one, the German raccoon, interrogated Nadya? Or Tata the maid? They could have told him more about Anna than Anna herself would have, and certainly more than I would tell him. They had seen the bedsheets, the chamber pot. So what if Anna wanted to conceal it—they could have, should have, spoken up! Why had the first doctor come in presupposing that Anna only suffered from a familiar case of female hysteria? And why had all others accepted from the doorstep that she was sick and so she would remain? My wife had not been sick before, and she did not have to be sick now. It was not her identity, not her nature, to lie in an airless bedroom, to mumble prayers to the icon of St. Nikolas the Miracle Maker in her bedroom’s corner!
But you see, dear Herren, dear Messieurs Doctors, I am a monster. I only thought about myself, even when I thought about Anna. I’ve withheld from all of you how my wife loved ice and how I used it to give her pleasure. None of you had asked, but if I’d told you, if I’d volunteered—could it have helped you to save her?
I remember, one day I was in the hallway and I heard Anna’s voice, it sounded so alien: an ill-tempered, bitter, old lady’s complaint. “Nadya, where is my candy?” I saw Nadya stealing past me with a glass of ice cubes, and I knew then that the “candy” was—irretrievably, irreversibly—not the ice of passion, but the ice of addiction, gelded, aged, and collapsing upon itself. The addiction that had outgrown me, because it was never about me in the first place. And you see—I was relieved at that moment. I thought, so it was not my fault then, I was just the eager tool of her craving. O coward, o monster! I was even angry at her: I felt deceived, I felt as though she never loved me! I told myself not to grieve, to put a distance between myself and this bedridden, dying old lady! O depraved creature! How could such horrible thoughts enter my head? No, Andrei, no, Nadya, don’t you tell me these things about God’s will and her time, it’s not her time, she is only fifty-five, I am supposed to go before her! Why are you even here, Andrei? Shouldn’t you be on duty?
Don’t look at me this way!
I remember them both standing before me, nodding—why were they so unanimous? What were they holding out to show me? A package. A medicine. This will keep her comfortable, the doctor says? This will ease her pain? This conveniently pure, rare, and novel magic salve imported from Darmstadt, this—what do you call it—morphine? Manufactured by Merck and Sons, is that right? Why of course, I trust Carl’s family’s inventions. I almost feel related to it. I’m sure Carl would have approved, don’t you think, Nadya? Will it cure her? No? I understand. I was just . . . Would you excuse me, please?
• • •
I believe it was 1803 when my wife passed away. But maybe 1804. I only remember it was after the Treaty of Amiens, after 1802. I remember she did not believe in peace and made me promise to keep Andrei safe—she knew war was coming, she knew. We were committed to war by 1804, but she wouldn’t have known it by then—morphine.
• • •
I’ve never known if Andrei was truthful with me when I interrogated him about his love life at the Iphigenie performance. But even if the love of his life had been a mere platonic dream back in 1799, it was no longer so by 1803. He had a terminally ill mother and a stepfather-uncle disabled by grief. She pulled the burden of caring for his mother, seeing nothing but a long gray path of widowhood ahead of her. It is no surprise that they found consolation in each other’s arms. I could have noticed—if I had any capacity to pay attention—the way Andrei would wait in the parlor in front of Anna’s doors, the way Nadya would come out and say, “Now would be a good time,” and hold the door for him as he went in, and follow him with her eyes. I could have added together all those trips Nadya took to St. Petersburg, ostensibly for Anna’s medicines.
I picture her walking into a dark, sour-smelling pharmacy, where vials of tinctures on oaken shelves chimed gently each time the front door opened and closed. She would be in her black dress, eyes downcast, the flame of her red hair suppressed ruthlessly by combs, pins, and a bonnet. She would lay banknotes out on a counter and accept a wrapped package into her gloved, discreet hands, hide the package in her sachet, leave quickly—no small talk, no smile—a widow on a sad mission. At the entrance perhaps, or maybe farther down the street, she’d meet an officer, a handsome captain of the Horse Guard Cuirassiers, he’d whisk her into his equipage, his white uniform glimpsed only once, as he opened the door for her. Silent and stiff, as if unfamiliar with each other, they would ride to a hotel or a rented flat. There the widow’s black dress would melt off her, and the officer’s white uniform would be cast off, and for the sake of one true moment of bliss in flesh and soul against all the troubles of the world, the sinners would consume each other, cling to each other the tighter the more guilt and sadness they felt—she about the sick patroness she was stealing time from, he about the pregnant wife he did not care for, and both—about the whole of the unfortunate, darkened House Velitzyn that would never be happy again.
I could have seen it—and maybe I did—in the way they stood at Anna’s grave: closer than they should have. Perhaps that’s when Varvara knew it, or maybe before; she had always been observant. He gave her two sons and little else. My dear Anna, you see what happened? Being a good son made your Andrei a bad husband.
• • •
When it became clear that the Horse Guard would go to war together with their new Master and Commander Emperor Alexander I, who was rearing to become the Liberator of Europe, Andrei was relieved, I believe. As much as he cared for Nadya, he could not have sustained the life of duplicity for much longer. The Third Coalition against—by now Emperor—Napoléon and the impending all-out war against France was to become our family’s redemptive furnace. Andrei, now a colonel, was determined to reap glory or death on a battlefield. Who was I to urge caution upon him?
But sitting at home waiting for news of his death was too much to bear. I had to go to war with him—as a civilian (my re-enlisting at the age of sixty-five, while possible, would have done no one any good). Andrei would have none of it, of course, and I didn’t bother to ask—we were not on asking terms. I decided to follow Andrei without his knowing. I left the house in the hands of my Cyril, and set out.
• • •
My traveling party—a carriage, a driver, two servants and some spare horses—was a droplet in a wave of moving humanity that was the supply train that lumbered behind the Imperial Guard. Blending in was easy. We left in mid-August, had a comfortable enough passage through Galician lands gilded by resplendent autumn, made a few stopovers (Kraków was memorable), and by the time we arrived on the scene, at Olmutz in Moravia, in mid-November, Feldmarschall-Leutnant Mack had already lost most of the Austrian army to Napoléon at Ulm, Vienna had been taken, and Kutuzov’s army, deployed ahead of us, was on the defensive, if not yet in full retreat.
When I had pulled strings to enroll my nephew in the Horse Guard, I thought that he would never see any action, like me. And indeed the brilliant Garde à Cheval had never been in battle or even on campaign. So, when our contingent received news of Austrian defeats, I wished we would just turn right around and go back to Russia—if only to teach a lesson to those inept Austrians. But my wish was not to be granted.
Not with Austrian emperor, Franz, expelled from his capital and looking up to Alexander I to right the wrongs. Not with our young emperor having suffered the inconvenience of traveling this far out. Battle was inevitable, the only hope was that the time and place would be chosen wisely.
• • •
This is what I remember. On the first of December (or, in today’s style, November 19), I lodged in a private home in the village of Welleschowitz, a mile north of Grand Prince Constantin’s camp. By then, I had created a few sympathizers and a good acquaintance. Illarion Nastyrtzev was a subcolonel in Preobrazhensky who still remembered a few regimental anecdotes that involved me; we had enjoyed each other’s company since the Russian border. I encouraged the subcolonel to make a habit of joining me for a nightcap and keeping me informed of what to anticipate come morning. For several days, the rumor mill was spinning full speed—we were giving battle—then not, Napoléon was prepared to negotiate—then not. The night of the first, Nastyrtzev dropped by quite late. “It is decided,” he said from the door, “tomorrow morning. You’d better not be a French spy, Alexander Mikhailovich.”
I suggested that he stay with me overnight. He graciously declined. I asked him what the allies’ battle plan was, and he cheerfully reported that he had not the slightest idea. He said, though, “It is going to be grand. Weyrother has some kind of plan. A sweeping maneuver.” He made a half circle with his arm. “Over ten versts of the front line. Sweeping!”
Weyrother, an Austrian, was appointed as Kutuzov’s chief of staff. Looking at Nastyrtzev, I wondered whether he was perhaps being ironic rather than impressed. I poured Cognac and toasted to the victory. He downed it, thirstily, and I refilled the glass. “At least we are staying in one place,” he remarked. “The Leib Guard. Let Austrians make circles around the field.” He smirked, then sighed. I said, “I’ve only fought Pugachev. Over thirty years ago. You?”
“Fifteen years back, as a sniveling rookie, in Finland, deployed in galleys. Under Dokhturov. He is heading the offensive in the South tomorrow, by the way—one of the columns. Pugachev—I seem to remember that story—you weren’t supposed to be there, no? How was it?”
The Age of Ice: A Novel Page 28
