Then something transpired. Some friction, some release of heat. The girls must have let the boys feel as if I was a contender. The millionaire sons and dashing officers began to size me up. Engage me in conversations. Elizabeth’s girlfriends began to flirt with me. They were putting together an evening party for “neighbors and friends” at the villa—a sure sign that somebody wanted to get close to somebody else.
That party. At one point the orchestra broke into a verse out of “Rule Britannia,” followed by a round of applause “for our honorable guest, Mr. Alexander Veltzen,” followed by a champagne toast. Elizabeth, featuring a charming décolletage, asked me for a dance. I said I hadn’t kept up with the latest fashions in dancing. “Fine,” she said. “I’d rather talk with you than dance. Shall we?”
At the terrace, velvety darkness reigned, roses overwhelmed with their profusion and fragrance, clematis and grapevine provided cover. What could be more conducive to—
She said, “Mr. Veltzen, I find you absolutely infuriating. Do you know why?”
“Why?” Obediently.
“Because I can see that you are interested in me. I know it. That time on Vasilievsky Island you practically chased me away, when I could easily see you wanted to tell me something. And now suddenly you are back. You are back yet you just keep—hovering! What have you come for? To sit in the sun with a newspaper?”
She was once again contradicting my every expectation. Yet I was certain I could keep this interaction pleasant and civilized. I did not intend to have another episode of uncontrollable emotion like the one I’d suffered at the shore of Vasilievsky three months ago. “I am sorry if I am bothering you. I can leave if you tell me to.”
“Oh please, Alexander, I don’t suppose you misunderstand me. Why would I want you to leave? I asked Papa to invite you, did I not? Do I have to come in and tell you that I am in love with you?”
She . . . what? Dear Lord, now I’m in trouble. She looked at me triumphantly. A fearless smile, shining, joyful eyes. No trace of bafflement. Instead, almost condescension: you poor old myopic Englishman, you can’t even see what’s within the reach of your own hand!
I heard myself grunt and clear my throat. She had me! “Elizabeth . . . well, the truth is . . . simply put . . . I don’t know what to say to this.”
She cocked her head. “Oh, really? I don’t believe you. I don’t think you believe yourself either!”
“An occasion such as this—is quite unusual—an ambush of sorts, I might say—” There I was, mumbling. She threw me off balance, she really did! Perhaps English words were just a play to her? Perhaps they didn’t weigh as heavy as their Russian counterparts?
She smiled again, narrowed her eyes. “Let me describe the occasion. A beautiful summer night in the delectable Russian Riviera, and a young lady whom many find attractive is confessing her feelings to you. Would you choose to punish her for her earnestness? Would you give nothing in return, not a single word of acknowledgment, not a single—kiss?”
Even as she stepped toward me, a singular thought darted through my mind like a little furtive fox—and all the preparations, all the roses and grapevines and velvety skies began to look so blatantly contrived—“Elizabeth? Is some kind of game involved here? A bet perchance?”
She made confused eyes and mumbled, “I don’t understand what you mean. What bet?”—and slipped yet closer to me, just as I felt a flash of anger—or lust—I could see she was lying—I could just see what was about to happen, and I thought, my cold waxing, I am going to hurt you, I want to and I will punish you for doing this to me—and I scooped up her head by the neck and let my other hand wrap around her pliable waist, and I stamped my mouth across hers, then gathered her lips like berries off a plate and proceeded to consume them, and the rest—the rest happened exactly as I thought, with the flashes of light, with idle millionaire sons and dashing officers, and loyal girlfriends springing from the greenery, from roses and trellises, to observe the utterly un-Englishman-like behavior their precious liar Elizabeth had elicited from that stuffy, hovering foreigner, to document it with their fancy new Leica photo-camera; all of it happened just the way I feared, except for one thing.
Elizabeth did not push me away in frigid terror. Nor did she slip out of my hands to laugh at me. Her lips and tongue were marvelously soft, wet, hot, and kept searching—somewhat frantically—for the best place of my mouth to nestle in, as if to hide from the scrutiny of her own sidekicks. And by the time we broke our—very public—kiss and she pulled back, now profoundly embarrassed, blushing and paling, lipstick smudged; by the time she whispered, “I’m so sorry,” and ran away, I was so beyond paying any attention to the eager eyewitnesses, that all their studious cheer and canned exclamations left their hearts and minds and slinked into velvety darkness behind trellises and roses.
The Urchin Princess did not feel my cold. Oh, what a world of difference it meant!
I began making plans even while still standing on that terrace. Find her. Tell her you love her. Forgive her. Propose to her. Kiss her again. In general, do more of this kind of kissing. Marry her no later than October—here, for better weather. Then leave for a sweeping honeymoon—Mediterranean, Middle East, Singapore, Australia, America. Show her the world. Could I be any happier!
But nothing worked as planned. Not from the very first hour of my new life. I looked everywhere for her that night but failed to find her. By morning doubts were already eroding my flawless plan. First of all, we barely knew each other, what with our two and a half dates, and no respectable lady should ever be brought before a marriage proposal that early. Then there was the issue of her father. I’d have to deal with him—and what if he was against my happiness? And then—what if her practical joke went deeper, what if in fact she did not fancy me at all? And by the way: what would be the fate of that photograph, showing us in a clinch and kissing? Could it be used to compromise me? Her?
The reality turned out to be even more unyielding. In the morning Elizabeth absolutely refused to see me and was said to be leaving. So I used one of my business telegrams as an excuse to put everything on hold and return to London. I needed time to think.
• • •
I am almost done. My story is already circling the drain but it’s not quite over. From England, I wrote a letter to Elizabeth and she replied. Soon we established a semblance of courtship via mail. I put the word love on paper—she reciprocated with a close-enough synonym. I succeeded in bringing up the delicate circumstance of an investment deal with her father, and she took no special notice. I managed to broach the subject of making her a Mrs. Veltzen in some agreeable future and she did not reject me. And yet . . . I kept asking her if I should probe the ground around the vice minister, to stage the big disclosure, but she kept holding me off until she’d “prepared” Papa. Because I no longer knew Russian life well, and because we communicated by mail alone, and I wanted her too much—I accepted everything she told me: and if one were to see through her eyes, nothing in Russia was straightforward, all lovers were star-crossed. Life teemed with existential obstacles, logistical difficulties, and senseless drama. As an Englishman, I was not expected to understand it, she claimed, so I just had to accept it and go along with it.
I still worried that saying I love you was not the same for her as saying, Я люблю вас. That I and everything about me was still delegated to the realm of poetic, or conversational practice, or something an English double of Anna Akhmatova would do. I dreaded to see another verse in her mail. Once I wrote her a letter in Russian. I said that I had started taking Russian lessons, and had it translated by someone I trusted. That she could now introduce simple Russian phrases into her letters. In her reply, she chastised me, in English, for involving strangers in our romance, and opined that Russian was too complicated to learn satisfactorily. She never wrote me a word of Russian.
By December we struck an accord: I would come to St. Petersburg. She instructed me to stop in the Hôtel Palais Royale. I meant t
o propose—officially and literally. No more synonyms or euphemisms.
I did as she bade, took a suite, and waited. Stood by the window. O the festive, snow-glazed, electrically lit, warm on the inside, crisply cold on the outside, St. Petersburg! The proverbial ship, her masts lit with yellow flames, the ship that flies through the night no matter how much snow and time have accumulated in her hulls!
I expected to meet Elizabeth the next morning, either downstairs in the restaurant or in one of those coffeehouses nearby. Instead, a note arrived, with an address. I flagged a cabbie and went. I found the apartment and rang at the door. She opened. She grabbed my hand and pulled me inside. She was thinner than I remembered her, and her cheeks were flushed. She looked me up and down then lunged forward and gave me her lips. “Do you love me?”
I said, “Yes. Do you . . . ?”
She dragged me into the living room. Her fur greatcoat was half lying on the floor, half hanging off the chair. Her gloves and hat were flung onto the ottoman. The room was small, all reddish-brown and plush with upholstery, drapes, and wallpaper; awash in heat from a tiled stove. A single window, a piece of a roof and a sky in it, was taped shut for the winter. There was a sweet gingerbread smell, as if from a bakery. The round table had a long tablecloth of red velvet over it. On it—a carafe and two tiny glasses, all made of old, yellowing, elaborately cut crystal. She wouldn’t let my hand go, she poured the liquor by sound, while holding me in her eyes. “To our meeting,” she whispered, passing me a shot of brandy.
“Elizabeth, why this place? Why are you so feverish?”
“Shh.” Her fingertip touched my lips. “I told you I love you. Stop asking questions.” She emptied her glass, licked her lips, and proceeded to kiss me again. Yet longer this time. Tighter. Getting drunk on it. Both of us. Then—an impossibility (it is still 1913, mind you). She pulled the pins out of her hair and it fell to her shoulders.
“Elizabeth, what are we doing? Why? It’s a disservice to you. I love you better than this!”
“Nonsense. I’ve made up my mind, so don’t you try to stop me!”
“But why?”
“Because I want to.”
Off with my greatcoat, with my jacket. My hand in her hand again, she pulled me into a bedroom, just as reddish-brown and hot. “Just hold me. Keep holding me while I undress. Don’t let go of me. Do your part, will you please? So many buttons and hooks, all these silly intermediate stages, what a nuisance, right? I know it is not what you may have imagined. But how can you feel alive if you come see me in a nightcap and gown and with a stiff upper lip, and extinguish the light? If all you embrace is a bunch of cloth? How can you feel in love if you haven’t struggled with ties and buttons, and garter belts and suspenders? Sorry, but I have to keep talking. Do you mind my talking?”
What is in your head, my crazy beloved? What mess, what did you think I was like, what book, what motion picture lies had you imbibed? “You must think that Englishmen are made of ice!”
“Well, yes,” she said. “Aren’t you?”
Even this—no bouts of chill could stop me now!
Andrei, Nadya, is this how you did it? Was your bed this narrow? A narrow, squeaky bed in a bachelor’s pad, daytime, a draped window. The best ever.
“Your ear.”
“Yes. A childhood accident.”
“Can I kiss it?”
“If you’d like . . . No biting please.”
“Sorry.”
Heat. O blessed heat. Do you know how deprived and deficient I had been all these years? Can you even imagine? You who bask in your habitual warmth, you who take your luxurious temperature for granted! Can you even begin to compare something that you don’t even notice, with the depth of my starvation, with the alienation of my absolute zero? If I were to be arrested for illicit sex an hour later and put before a firing squad on orders from the Government of Russia and personally from the enraged Vice Minister of Ways and Communications—I would not stop now. Can you understand how it feels to finally have a boiling point? To weep steam? To sweat gratitude? Do you know how wondrous it is to rub against her skin? To let her bend her legs and hook them behind my knees, to push my knees snugly into her buttocks, press against her curving hip with my stomach, cradle her head in my elbow, cup her breast with my hand, print words on her skin with each kiss, “What—do you—want me—to do with you?”
She said, everything.
. . . If I whispered into her shoulder, just under my breath, in Russian, she would not hear. May God keep you safe—ХраНИ ТебЯ ГосПОДЬ. Then—ЛасТОЧКа МОЯ, ПуШИНКа беЛаЯ, words that felt a hundred and sixty years old, words that would evaporate, effervesce, vanish the moment one tried to translate them.
• • •
For a while after, she lay very quietly, eyes closed. Then said, “What do I do now?”
“Nothing.” A kiss on her shoulder. “You are this man’s wife.”
“I am?”
“How are you feeling?”
She hugged my neck. “I feel great!”
She got up, pulled over her chemise, slipped out. In her absence I ran my hand over sheets—they seemed moist. Perspiration or condensation? I pressed my fingers onto the lacquered wood of the nightstand. Circles of haze began to grow ever wider around my fingertips. What was colder? I or a piece of furniture? Elizabeth came back. She brought treats. The art critic Arkady Bespechny—the flat was his—always kept a stash of gingerbread, she said. It was the best lunch I ever had—gingerbread and brandy in bed. With her next to me, my incipient fears dissolved. I was too busy hunting for gingerbread crumbs that fell between her breasts.
Suddenly she jumped to her feet: we had to go! We had to run or we’d be late for a train. What?! Ah, she just wanted to show me a very special place she grew up in—it was just thirty versts from St. Petersburg. “Elizabeth, can’t it wait, don’t we have to talk about something important?”
“Yes, but we can do it on a train, can’t we?”
A cabbie, then a railroad station. On the train she asked me how many loves I’d had before her. Two, I said. What were their names? Marie. And Anna.
She wanted more detail.
“Marie was my first love, unrequited. Anna became my wife. She’d passed away.”
“How long ago?”
“Over ten years.”
“What happened to her?”
“She became ill.”
“Do you still grieve over her?”
“Not anymore.”
“My mother died giving birth to me. Papa didn’t remarry, so my maternal grandmother reared me. The estate we are going to was hers. Now it is mine. When I was a girl I used to hate my grandmother. But now I realize she gave me a childhood that was so very special. I used to think of her as the Queen of Spades—you must know that story, it’s by Alexander Pushkin. The Queen of Spades, this old, evil woman who kept this young girl as her companion and captive and who drove to insanity a young man who sought her secret of winning in cards. In my fantasies I was that girl and my grandmother was the Queen. But by the time I turned fifteen, I understood that the Queen truly loved me and I began to feel so very privileged—I wasn’t the Queen’s captive, I was her apprentice, her accomplice. What other girl could say that she was the Queen of Spades’ beloved granddaughter?”
(I had read “The Queen of Spades,” and remembered it as first and foremost un- and more so, antiromantic. Rather, satirical and incidental. It was remarkable how it had transformed in Elizabeth’s imagination.) The train arrived at the Pavlovsk station. We found another cabbie.
“When I was a student of the Smolny Institute, I would tell the girls fairy tales about the Queen of Spades and myself. I made up stories of how we would conjure up the spirits of our ancestors. Grandmother’s house, you see, is very old. It still has volumes of bound magazines that date back as far as 1825. The Northern Bee, with Pushkin’s first print editions. It has chests with hundred-year-old clothes, all gray like ash, and see-t
hrough. Stories just lie around there, like dust, you can’t move things, or sweep, or open chests without stirring them up. Grandmother’s line is full of people who made good stories. When her father, my great-grandfather, was dying, in 1870, he was said to shake like an alder leaf and beg, ‘Please don’t leave me here, I am scared of them! I’ll never be bad anymore!’ Grandmother’s sister heard voices since she was fifteen and took strychnine at twenty-three. Her uncle became an engineer and exploded with one of his steam engines. Her cousin was secretly a nude model and ran off with an Italian opera bass. Her younger brother traveled to the Barbary Coast and became a Catholic missionary. They said he once exorcised a man-eating lion. There is still a lion hide in the house that is said to be a trophy he’d sent—it must be that exorcism didn’t always work. My own mother, before she married, wrote terrifying stories like Mary Shelley, and treatises on how God was electricity.
“Any one of their spirits could tell you volumes, I am sure. But I always favored our main ancestor. I made so many tales about him! They say he was completely insane, tempestuous and fickle, and ruled with an iron fist. Everyone was afraid of his wrath. He had a laboratory where he spent days and nights and nobody knew what he was doing. When later they came into it, there was nothing left, only empty space. They demolished it anyway. I am confident he was doing black magic. That’s what he does in my stories. I told the girls at Smolny that I would summon him, and that I would never be afraid of him. We were friends and he’d teach me magic, and never do me any harm even though grandmother used to say he could freeze water just by looking at it. And that he could animate ice sculptures so they would march around and do his bidding. That he once made a whole army for Mad Czar Paul and they sent it to conquer India but it melted on the way. Grandmother said, that man, our patriarch, did not die a normal death. He just disappeared one day, and no one could ever find him or his body . . .”
The Age of Ice: A Novel Page 44
