The Age of Ice: A Novel (20 page)

She shook her head. Then her mother grabbed onto the poke, and a silly tug-of-war ensued. Unwillingly, Sawyer let go.

How do I know what was said between them and what they looked like—in the daytime murk, in the
blarmed owl-light,
as Robeck would say? I saw because I had been lurking right there, examining a fascinating ice formation on a larch tree nearby. The ice looked like silk ribbons, about five inches in width, thin to almost translucent, pleated on one edge, fanned around the branch like a delicate ruff. Never before had I seen the ice so beautiful. Now I think it owed its existence to the same phenomenon that caused the ice on the porch—Feodor’s whimsical disposal of waste water. Its sublimation in the cold air, to be precise.

Sawyer bumped into me walking away. He was slow to recognize me, part of him still elsewhere. “She had a black eye,” he said and tapped on his cheekbone with his mittened hand. Then he withdrew deeper into his greatcoat and strode off, crunching on the snow.

It was so cold.

• • •

Fénelon, again: “He who has never felt his own weakness and the violence of his passions cannot be said to be wise.”

Robeck and I went to check on Semyon. Lying on a low pallet, the man met the towering surgeon with the stare of a chained stray. My job was to translate. Robeck inspected, Semyon squealed where it hurt. During a respite he addressed me, “Where’s the real interpreter? The little one? The jumpy one?”

Robeck glanced at me with a question mark. “He asks after Mr. Sawyer,” I explained.

“Mr. Sawyer is at the captain’s. He doesn’t mind it there as much as he used to.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Laid an eye on that girl, our Mr. Sawyer. The one that’s high in the belly.”

“. . . Jumpy like an oat-fed pony.” Semyon was grinning fondly. Then he winced in Robeck’s direction. “This one wants to chop me, no?”

Neither of them expected me to translate what they were saying, I don’t think. I said to Semyon, “He wants you to get better.”

Robeck folded his hand around an imaginary spoon and moved it up and down in front of his mouth. “Can you hold a spoon? Anything?”

Semyon was nodding—just in case, no doubt. “Try to hold this”—I offered him the bulb end of a thermometer—“as tight as you can.”

He recoiled. “Don’t you make me. A cursed thing.”

In a few days, Robeck opened his tool chest.

Inside, the instruments sat neatly, each in its nest of worn felt. A saw took one side; on the other were a family of knives of every size, also hooks, pincers, clippers, and a screw-based tourniquet. Some of the knives had been resharpened so many times that the blade edges had become concave. Robeck dripped some oil from a vial onto a whetstone, then pulled a strop of leather, darkened and glossy with use, over a wooden block. “Semyon?” I asked.

“Aye.”

He sharpened. I watched. He said, “Mr. Sawyer is sweet on Feodor’s wife.” The knife kept gritting. “He’ll only make it worse.” Another knife-sharpening pause. “Tell him to stop.”

It took me a whole scalpel’s length to put it in context. “Why me?”

“He looks up to you.”

Now the pause dragged until Robeck was down to his tiniest scalpel. I said, “Maybe Semyon will get better without amputation.”

“Aye,” he said, “no rush.”

If Robeck’s words were ever to freeze, they’d be just a smatter of pea-size, desiccated droppings. How was I supposed to understand them in their entirety?

• • •

Perhaps Sawyer indeed looked up to me—I was a much older man, after all. But could I “stop” him? Her native name was Ouchapin, Sawyer would explain, the
i
being a stand-in for the sound none of the British but possibly some Russian mouths could form. Her Christian name was Martha. She liked Sawyer’s hazel eyes and beardless face. She called bearded men “hairy dog-faces” and their blue eyes “made of ice.” Icy-eyed people were suspect for consorting with wild snow-spirits in the forest. The most fearsome forest spirit was Ulü-Toyon, who walked about in the guise of a
brown bear. Coming across Ulü-Toyon in summer was bad enough, but running into one in winter was an omen of an impending catastrophe. In general, the Yakuti pantheon was as populous as it was malevolent, the only exception being the compassionate mother of creation Asinilakh Aisit Khatin, whom Ouchapin thought the same as Virgin Mary—

On and on Sawyer went. “She’s an ethnographic treasury!” Then, glancing at Robeck, “What?”

“Her husband’s a dog-face. And an ice-eye.”

When Sawyer was upset, he would blink and his brows would flutter. And he would forget to translate where it was still needed.

“And a hector,” Robeck added.

“I thought she would not talk to you,” said I to Sawyer.

“Apparently I am persuasive!”

“Mr. Sawyer,” said Merck, “could you perchance ask the Yakuti about mammoth bones? If I could obtain some? Dr. Pallas had instructed me if I brought any back to the academy, it would be most propitious for our natural sciences.”

Merck was a remarkable young man—his dissecting intelligence and arrant pursuit of knowledge were matched only by his pernicious awkwardness with people. I doubt he mentioned a mammoth as a diversion, and either way, in a few phrases Sawyer returned to where we started from: “She hopes her baby will be born with the ice-melt on the Yasachnoi. It’s their belief: when the river releases, so should the child-burden. It will go easier.”

“Yeah, and when is that?” asked Robeck.

“In May.”

“Begad! She has no clue how long she got to carry, does she?”

• • •

Sawyer would tell me—much, much later—that I had become a refuge, of sorts. That I was a pillar of constancy, like frozen mercury: an older man who was always calm and composed. That my steady interest in languages, and in Fénelon’s designs for building an egalitarian society through administration of universal scarcity, helped Sawyer keep his mind off disagreeable subjects. How ironic.

My outward calm was the stupor of a man who used all his energy to get through reality—the reality that pinched, gnawed him; who had already deemed the expedition ill-organized and its plan to winter here on the Kolyma as asinine, but felt responsible for the people (as if it
was my fault that it was so cold). I do not remember being at peace. I remember lying low to the ground in our hut to keep below smoke and watching it waft, ghostlike. Watching how December hunger yellowed men’s faces, and worrying about scurvy. Wondering what was the temperature of living beings? Thinking how beautiful was ribbon ice and how ugly was human subsistence here at the fort—and being disturbed by the thought.

I remember being invited to Feodor’s izba, now also Captain Billings’s dwelling, and sitting down across the table from the captain. Being offered bilberry tea in a real teacup (the captain was relentless about having his tea service dragged all over Siberia). Seeing Billings’s smile, which even back then stretched so thin, one feared that his lips would snap.

The captain, having remembered me conversing in French a while back in Kazan, now used his imperfect knowledge of that language to communicate, bypassing Sawyer. Why? Because it was Sawyer he wanted to talk about. He was painfully awkward. What was Mr. Sawyer saying about Feodor? I said, “Feodor is disliked by many.” What were the Russian crewmen saying about Mr. Sawyer? I said, “Mr. Sawyer is liked.” Had Dr. Merck apprised anyone that half the Cossack families in these lands were infected with syphilis (
morbus gallicus,
the captain said,
French disease—
which was ever more awkward since he spoke in French). My answer was a definitive no.

Giving undivided attention to his teacup, the captain asked if I had any knowledge whether Mr. Sawyer and Feodor’s wife had—so to speak—come to certain terms—of endearment.

I was speaking a complete truth when I said, “I do not know.”

Well, could I admonish him, then?

I promised to. I finished my tea and I thought the visit was over, but the captain measured me up sourly and said, “The Middle Kolyma Fort is where our flour and butter come from—when they do come. We have been given the impression that the meager ration that we receive is all there is, that the Middle Kolyma can do no better. I have now received intelligence that Middle Kolyma is quite well stocked, and run, coincidentally, by Feodor’s own brother. Mr. Velitzyn, it may not be obvious to what extent we depend on good rapport with Feodor, but for your information, up to this moment the command of this expedition has not found ways to circumvent this man to procure any lasting supply of food whatsoever. I hope you make good of this news, Mr. Velitzyn, I do sincerely hope.”

Fénelon: “Those who fear the gods have nothing to fear from men.” And that is where I disagree with him.

When I stepped outside, I ran into Feodor himself. A bear, that man, as tall as me or Robeck, and twice as thick. Smelling of hangover and badly cured pelt, of years of feeding on that dried fish,
yukala
. He was in my way and knew it; his paws were tucked in his belt. He grinned. “God help, Your Mastership! The
tempa-chura
boss, yeah? The
glass stick
?”

I suddenly sickened with a thought that Feodor was here to sniff out the effect of Billings’s words. As if he
knew
what Billings would say to me. My hands clenched inside my mittens. In my life as a nobleman I would have shoved this man out of my way without giving him a second thought. Now—I raised my hand and second thoughts arose with it. A shove was transformed into a push, a poke, a tap on Feodor’s chest with my index finger. “Yeah,” I said, “temperature. You got one too. You’re no different.”

I walked away hating myself—and debating with an imaginary Fénelon for distraction.
Universal scarcity does not create equality
 . . .
Quite the contrary
 . . .
A steeper inequality of power
 . . .
thuggery
 . . .
Damned if you hit him, damned if you don’t
 . . .

So cold everything was, so dark.

• • •

Said Sawyer, Fénelon had also written, “Learn O Telemachus not to expect from the greatest of men more than is compatible with human capacity.” And we weren’t even the greatest of men, no, sir.

I told him, “Mr. Sawyer, I have heard the locals suffer much from venereal disease, both the tribes and the Cossacks.” Not a blink from him—he perceived it purely from an ethnographic point of view. “Oh yes,” he said, “very true, it’s called here
kilikinska,
but the worse one is smallpox; Ouchapin says smallpox strikes whenever a certain dead shaman arises and points with his one and only arm, which issues from his breast; and there she rides, Old Hag Smallpox, dressed in bloodred furs and driving a pack of bloodred dogs, and strikes whomever she meets with her fiery club!”

I pressed on. “Makes one wonder about our Feodor.”

“How?”

“That perhaps he too is affected—”

He blinked at me, he fluttered his brow. He said, “Do you know what I wish? That Smallpox’s fiery club punched him right in the face, I really do, Mr. Velitzyn.
Morbus kilikinska
is too slow for that devil.”

Fénelon had written, “It is only by flight that love is to be overcome.” In less than a week, Captain Billings took leave to visit a Yukagiri tribe’s village some forty versts away (an old Russian
versta
is close to 0.6 miles) and ordered Sawyer to accompany. They rode off in
nartes
—a kind of sled propelled by dogs—a mode of transportation peculiar to the Yukagiri.

• • •

A crewman ran in from the river. “A czar fish got caught! Come and look!”

I joined the crowd that gathered around a trap pulled out of the water. The creature was like a coarse, three-foot-long tadpole and just as slimy. Its front was bulbous, thick-lipped, and bloated; its hind end thin and snakelike. Slowly but stubbornly it curled left and right, scooping the snow. I heard Merck behind me. “A species of eelpout? I suppose one of the
Lycodes—
”

“A toothy one, mother. Eat ya,” someone said.

I pushed in through the crowd and crouched next to the “toothy one.” Its eyes twisted in their sockets, its jaws clenched and unclenched; but snow coated it, the thicker the more it struggled, and already scabs of ice were forming where only slime used to cover its writhing tail. I had a thermometer with me, as I always did by then—a habit turning into a need. I took it out of its sheath and shoved it into the eelpout’s throat.

And pushed it yet farther in, until it hit and ruptured something inside the fish. The eelpout’s tail crooked. Shiny yellow roe squeezed out of its bottom, losing their luster the moment they hit the snow. Men around me snickered. The fish twitched, I held, and so did the fish’s temperature, it held at +3º, +3º, +3º for good—I counted under my breath—four minutes, until the eelpout was all crusted in ice and her eye had become as dull and blind-white as her spilled roe. Only then the needle of mercury wavered and began its retreat.

The men were rumbling now. “Take it out! Spoiled her!”

I appealed, “It’s just a glass tube. Snow killed her, not I. It’s still good to eat.”

They were distrustful.

I hauled the eelpout off the bank to have the command do the rationing. Merck walked with me. “A while ago, Dr. Pallas, my mentor,” he said politely, “pointed me to treatises on
animal heat
. How remarkable that you, Mr. Velitzyn, are pursuing this intriguing subject. I studied
a ground squirrel the other day, and it appeared quite cold though it was dormant, not dead—”

On he went. It is peculiar now to realize that he first sought to befriend me owing to the temperature of an eelpout. His hands, by the way, were always three to six degrees colder than Sawyer’s and Robeck’s, even when I’d ask them to squeeze the thermometer’s bulb as a chaser to a brandy cordial. With time, I learned to see how Merck’s fingers were stiff and unruly even indoors (
caw-handed,
Robeck would say), and how he tried to conceal it—how he battled, day in, day out, with the reality that his constitution was singularly ill-suited for polar adventures. All for science, poor old Dr. Merck, all for Dr. Pallas. Presently he said, “They told me there is a mammoth just thirty versts up the Yasachnoi. A remarkably complete one, even with some hair still on. If only I could dispose our captain toward a reconnaissance trip!”