The Age of Ice: A Novel (41 page)

“We are not
pod Napoléonom,
” I said, unlocking the doors to the icery. “We are a sovereign country.”

“But you will do as he says.”

“You are overestimating his reach. What happened to the man who had all those silly nicknames for Bonaparte?” We stepped inside.

“And what happened to the man who used to be the grandest of historical pessimists? I can’t believe . . . Ouf! You ever . . . weed here?”

Mrs. Sawyer said, “Goodness gracious!”

“Please explore,” I said to Mrs. Sawyer. “The most mature specimen are in the rows farther back, on your right. If you like anything in particular, I’d be happy to cut it for you.”

Hand in hand, Mr. and Mrs. Sawyer started down the central aisle, now more tunnel than walkway, overgrown on all sides by my ice creations. I lingered behind. I’d had no visitors here since Anna’s death, and now it struck me how much my guests reminded me of two little children, venturing into my garden as if it were Baba Yaga’s forest. I thought I should probably start a lantern—though it was daytime, there wasn’t enough light inside. But to
weed it,
as Sawyer put it? These were no weeds. These were all carefully designed and sculpted creations.

Then I thought I still
was
a historical pessimist. I hadn’t changed—Sawyer
had. Yet I did not want to lose Sawyer because of Napoléon. I lit a lantern and went after the couple. I encountered a curtain of ice needles that had grown almost all the way down on one side; I was used to bending and squeezing past it, but Mrs. Sawyer, I realized, might have trouble getting through. Somewhat embarrassed, I broke off some needles and widened the passage. I went through but then realized that they hadn’t gone that way at all. I turned and looked around.

Ice does marvelous things. It makes light and sound travel, scatter, and diffuse in the most remarkable ways. Suddenly I could hear rather clearly Mrs. Sawyer saying, “This place is crazy!” and Sawyer replying in a hushed, through-the-teeth manner, “So he let it go a little. You’ve got to give him some slack, Evy, he’s lost his family!”

I backed out of earshot, I hid under an overarching dead blackberry frond that grew grapelike ice clusters all along its ice-encrusted length. I rocked my lantern—the light was producing lovely glitters in the ice-grapes. Anna used to like them so much. I said, “I’m here with the lantern.”

Sawyer turned a corner and approached, looking up and around.

I said, “It’s not an English garden.”

He chuckled, stopping before me, then looked me in the eyes. “I’m sorry. I really am. Things change.”

“I don’t change,” I said.

“That’s right! You don’t. You stay in one place, while the market doesn’t. How many times have we talked about investments? Growth? You could have gotten into shipping years ago, you could have owned those ships that now haul Lake Ontario ice. You could have owned ice-harvesting rights to Lake Ladoga by now! Massive! But no, that wouldn’t be Velitzyn special ice, now would it? It wouldn’t be
blue
!”

I said, “First, I cannot become a full-time merchant, I’ll lose my
noblesse
over it. Second, all labor that goes into my ice harvest is my peasants’
corvée,
and it can only go so far. I can’t make them work for me six days a week, even if I pay them for it.”

“Yes, I know all that, but there are ways around! Proxies! Hired labor!”

“That’s how I own an ice-creamery on the Nevsky Prospect.”

“And it is a fine enterprise indeed, but that’s not enough! I know all these feudal objections that you can mount, but forgive me if I point this out—the real problem is not there. You know that mass product is where profit is. Mass product and cheap labor. Or free labor. Every one of your feudal colleagues who pushes his timber, or flax, or broadcloth onto us
knows it. It’s the first and sometimes the only thing they know. It’s all about mass product, Alexander Maiklovich, while you insist on remaining a—boutique!”

“A what?”

“A boutique, a specialty shop. An exclusive, small-scale operation. What people need is cooling ice, not—this!” He waved his hand around. “This is marvelous, but your average Joe buyer, the third estate, the middle class, the pillar of economy, he can’t put this into his cellar, you know. He can’t afford it! Or even if he tries to, his wife will be spooked by it. I swear, that thing behind me is just like a cross between a giant artichoke and a Gorgon. I mean, look at it! You are a dear friend, but you are impossible to do business with. Not in this day and age!”

I kept silent, so he spread his arms and stated the obvious, “There. I said it.”

“I’ll start investing,” I said.

“Oh, Christ!” He stepped in and awkwardly enclosed me in his arms, then backed off. He wiped tears off his eyes and pointed a finger at me. “I’m going home. I have to. There is war. I need to be where I belong.”

That was it, then. One last truth: “Mr. Sawyer . . . Do you think me mad?”

“Of
course
not!”

“Was I ever different? Strange? In the Arctic . . . and after—”

“Evy? Evy, where are you?” He sounded almost angry. She was right behind him. With fake cheerfulness: “Oh, here you are. Are you ready to go?” He almost turned his back, then stopped midway, studied me as if committing my image to memory. “Ah, my dear Alexander Maiklovich, no more than usual. No more than ever.” Scooping Mrs. Sawyer’s elbow, he marched out.

I stayed. I kept rocking my lantern, watching flickers and flares in the bristly heads of the ice-bloom that Sawyer had singled out.
An artichoke and a Gorgon,
huh? I remember being preoccupied with a curiosity: why is it that in Russian the words
betrayal
and
change
have the same root? Was it because Russians changed far less than Englishmen and thus were more likely to regard change in and of itself as something negative, a
betrayal
?

• • •

Now that I was freed of the necessity to conform to the whims of the market, my creativity entered its High Renaissance. My designs grew like
Dr. Merck’s pump, they arched and towered above me. Now they truly did resemble chimeras of Gorgons and artichokes, and more. Blooming thistles with tentacles. Tulips with spider legs. I spent days transplanting ribbon ice on stalagmite ice. I captured snowflakes and affixed them to my inflorescences, until I got just the right texture. I encouraged ice in one place, and constricted it in the other, I trimmed, sealed, pinned, resected, cauterized, sprayed, dripped, ablated, fused.

Nadya, why won’t you leave?

Why did she stay? My elder grandson, Prince Mikhail Andreevich, age six, was now a veritable thug. He had taken to pinching—just like our mad Czar Paul II in his time. Young Mikhail had pinched Sophichka Merck, a good-natured, delicate twelve-year-old, her mother’s shadow. What could Sophichka have done to upset young Mikhail? Her only fault was her beauty—the Yakuti, Russian, and German blood in her had collided—colluded—to produce something wonderful. Why was Mikhail so angry? It
had
to be Varvara’s influence.

And now this latest—the princeling accused Druka Merck of the unthinkable: throwing into the fire the wooden Preobrazhensky grenadier Andrei had played with growing up, the very one I had given him, with a free-rotating grenade-throwing arm! By then twice repainted, the grenadier was no longer merely a toy, he was an heirloom! Throwing him into the fire? So unlike nine-year-old Friedrich Carl Wolfgang Merck, who spoke German with a cute Russian accent, and collected empty glass vials from everybody in the house and then played pharmacist.

I called them both into my presence. I sat outdoors in a garden chair, it was winter (it is always winter). I sat like Ivan the Terrible on his throne. I made them stand before me. “So, Mikhail, you speak first. Which one of you did it?”

“He did,” Mikhail said. “I was playing and he came and grabbed my grenadier and threw him into the fire.” He glanced at Druka and added, “And he laughed and said, only good for firewood.”

Druka, meanwhile, flared nostrils, blanched, and blushed. Finally I addressed him. “Is that what you did?”

“No, sir. I never did any of what he says.”

“Then why is he saying you did it?”

“Because he’s mad at me because I don’t want to play war! Because he hurts me when I play war with him!”

Mikhail shouted, “Liar! You never play war ’cause you want to play
kings and servants and always want to be a king and tell me German cusswords!”

“I never told you German cusswords! You cussed at me in Russian!”

On the remote chance that Druka was actually guilty, I sentenced both of them to stand in their separate corners for an hour.

Varvara was furious. I forbade her to interfere and sent her out. Mikhail threw a tantrum and pinched and bit Cyril, who had attempted to install him into his corner. Cyril complained that he lacked the authority to bring his young nobleship princeling to his senses. I slapped the young nobleship on the back of his head and threatened to put him in the corner of my dark, cold icery. This did not stop him fast enough, so I grabbed him and headed out. Upon a second thought, I took Druka as well.

I took them to the darkest, farthest corner (Druka helped me light the lantern because I kept hold of Mikhail). “If you two ever again in your lives try to speak falsely about another person for your own gain, this place will revisit itself on your memory. It will keep coming to you, and its ice will close all around you if you don’t swear to me right this moment that you will never ever, ever make lies. Swear or I’ll snuff the light and leave you here alone with ice. My ice is alive. It is hungry and it will gobble you up.”

I reduced the princeling Mikhail to whimpering. I’d extorted from him no fewer than three vows to be a good boy, each louder than the previous one. To Druka I said, “Do you know why you are here?”

He nodded.
Smart boy
.

Much good it did. While we were away, Varvara avenged on Nadya every bit of my heavy-handed treatment of Mikhail. Witnesses told me Nadya stood up for herself and her son—I was proud of her for that. And since she did not buckle, the Princess Velitzyn screamed at her, “Don’t you talk up to me, you half-blood whore!”

While Nadya did not let it get to her when Varvara accused her of poor parenting, this last accusation rendered her speechless.

• • •

You see, Nadya, it is better if you leave: nothing but bitterness in this old house.

I would have liked her to stay—she helped me live on. I would have liked her to go for a walk with me, and read a newspaper for me by the fire, and tell me her stories—but I couldn’t, because my daughter-in-law had been digging a hole for me. She had a big family, omnivorous brothers. She’d been writing letters to them, telling them all kinds of lies. So
one day I got a letter, no, two letters, one after another. One was from Baroness d’Anglairs:

Alexander dear,

I may be an old crone, but I still know which way the wind is blowing. Since we don’t ever see you around here anymore, you might not be aware of the kind of conversation in which your name is mentioned. In my salon, you are mentioned straight after His Majesty and his brother. Under the same subject heading, my dear, for your information, insanity is now in vogue, owing to those Britons and their King George III. It is now fashionable and progressive, decidedly European, to have a deranged old uncle and to have him pronounced incompetent and tucked away heaven knows where. Every young idler in this town dreams about this kind of arrangement, one that costs him nothing but is certain to bring him a windfall of inheritance. Every ingenue who used to be forever thankful that a fussbudget old aunt had taken her in and arranged for her future in exchange for a little respect—every one of them now perks her little ears when she hears this sort of banter. I don’t believe you, Alexander, wish to end up in those shoes. For Anna’s memory’s sake, please, please come out of your seclusion, show us that you are the good old friend, the witty charmer we used to know. One appearance by you I am quite sure will be more than enough to embarrass all those rumormongers.

The well-advised letter infuriated me. Idiots, gossip scavengers! What business was it to them? What did it matter that I went out into snowfalls and flurries and stood, my arms outstretched? I collected snowflakes, I let them settle on me, I caught the rare ones, I had a collection, a big, growing treasure. Where was insanity in it?

Do you know, Nadya, how difficult it is to make it so that a snowflake won’t ever melt?
True, I had done it to ice, but that, as far as I could tell, was all about pressing and crushing it in an outburst of rage. But a snowflake—one could not rage at it, now could he?
A never-melting snowflake, Nadya, is something only a bitter old man can make, holding it on his cold finger, and staring at it for long hours, and feeling nothing but vast, cold sorrow.

She would have understood it, if I told her. Still, we could not be close friends. That’s because of the other letter I received, the one from the old Moscow nest, the extended Velitzyn family. It was produced by the righteous
quill of a committee of my third and fourth cousins and nephews, those veterans of aristocracy, graced with old age after a lifetime of gainful service in the military or in government. The letter said,

Beloved relative,

It has become known to us that the Redrikovs, with whom you have had the insight to establish kinship, are flaunting certain letters from their sister, your daughter-in-law. The old man Redrikov was a man of honor, but the latest generation is nothing but swindlers who would not pass an opportunity to enlarge themselves at the expense of those in more fortunate circumstances. We’ve been shown this Varvara’s letters and read with our own eyes about all manner of mistreatment she is suffering at your hand, dearest relative. Furthermore, she alleges that you have taken in your adopted son’s mistress, a commoner, and that you favor her bastard children over Varvara’s legitimate issue.