The Age of Ice: A Novel (54 page)

“Do you think there will be war?”

What a switch of topic!
I remembered the Congress of Refrigeration in Vienna, three years ago, listening to a speech by a gentleman from Germany who supervised the country’s municipal slaughterhouses. The meat man, who looked professorial in his spectacles and bow tie, had said,
We all are aware that the future war would be more terrible than ever,
and called for governmental preparedness. I chilled, but at the same time could not help noticing a stir in the audience: entrepreneurs caught the pleasant aroma of
military contracts. Refrigeration for the army, now
. And the
most terrible
war? Maybe, hopefully . . . it just won’t happen.

It was not with a light heart that I said to Elizabeth, “The war is likely. But not inevitable.”

And what did she do? Just made a little shrug and said, “Papa says we should have cast our lot with the Germans. He is very fond of everything German.”

Well, I say
. Whatever happened next, my little outing had already paid for itself.

“I should really like to hear more about the Malay Peninsula,” she added.

All I could do was sit back on the plump cushions of the Austin, and marvel. The other day her father had indicated he would like to be bribed. He had brought it up with the dignified nonchalance of a career corruptionist, in fact. And now—this. Giving me such a treat as an outing with his girl—that would be so contrary to his stance in our little negotiation. Did he even know?

Was I adventurous?
Yes.
Did I have a family?
No. (If only she knew. The last time I had been physically intimate was in the 1880s, with a Malay girl who did not care how cold I was as long as she had enough opium in her body.) “I am a widower,” I said, wondering why I was departing from my official image of an all-time bachelor. Did I want to appear safer and more sympathetic? Or was I simply longing to speak truthfully?

We pulled over by a wrought-iron fence; two decked-out guards stood by the gate. Through tall trees, their leaves still young, I glimpsed a gathering of lights and heard music. The fragrance of blooming lilacs flooded me as I got out of the car. The Urchin Princess emerged next, her dress suddenly unfolding like a swan’s plumage. From God knows where she now had a pelerine on her shoulders, black on the inside, white on the outside, and her hat had acquired an overhanging white ostrich feather. She pulled two tickets out of her purse and handed them over to the guards, then curled her arm around my elbow and nudged me in.

Candlelit alleys. Twilight-white statues. Yellow, red, and green lanterns. And lilacs, lilacs, lilacs—the powder-purple froth on the mouth of spring as she performs her sacred rites.

I saw couples, some masked, some costumed. I saw crinolines and breeches, frills and pompadours, rocking feathers and dominoes. I heard laughter. Spring smells the same everywhere—I think it is just the smell of warm oxygen, nothing more—but one always associates it with the first time and place he remembers inhaling it. In my case: St. Petersburg, 1764, spring, the Moika waterfront, evening. I am sauntering, young and happy, back to my Preobrazhensky barracks from a rendezvous with
la petite comtesse
Marie—

I had better stop, I told myself. No need to disturb those memories of youth, coldness was all that would come of it. Luckily, Elizabeth didn’t seem to notice. “It’s a fund-raiser,” she was saying. “Would you like a glass of champagne? There should be a performance, I think it has already started.
Balaganchik
. Mmm, how to translate? A little traveling circus? A fairgrounds theater? You’ll see. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of Alexander
Blok? He’s the author. Half the female population of Russia swoons over him.”

Balaganchik,
yes. I understood this. I received two flutes from a waitress who was dressed as Marie Antoinette. The black choker on her bare neck looked just like an old guillotine cut. Elizabeth continued, “I take it back. Not half of the female population. Only a small fraction of it that can read.” She sipped out of her glass. Mine, clenched in my hand, was beginning to get covered in hoarfrost. I cleared my throat and said, “After you,” hiding my free hand in my pocket.

There was a small amphitheater in a meadow, a stage, an orchestra pit. Torches fluttered and smoked on each side. On the stage—pallid Pierrot with his flapping, flaccid white sleeves, swarthy Harlequin in leotards that sported asylum stripes and an exaggerated codpiece; but where was Columbine? “What is the fund-raiser for?” I asked.

“Schools for factory workers’ kids.”

The way she said it—righteously but trying not to look it—made me smile.

“Why are you smiling?”

I swallowed half the champagne in one gulp. “I am just a clueless foreigner.”

It was a strange performance. Sitting through it seemed optional. Guests talked and milled about. Actors addressed guests from the stage. It felt as if everyone had seen the play many times, so much so as to have become part of it. “After I die, nobody leave,” Pierrot announced. “There will be a dance by the pond.”

The public laughed. For some reason the actors’ speech sounded fake to my ear. Perhaps I’d grown unused to Russian. “You’d have to translate the lines for me,” I lied. “I can’t follow it.”

“Oh yes, of course. Would you like to walk some more? I’ve seen the play. I can recite it by now.” She turned her flute upside down and watched the champagne pour onto the ground. The worst of my cold spell was over, but I felt as if I was full of cavities.

We passed through alleys, past benches, meadows, and tents. Gas torches were burning behind metal grills and shadows slipped in and out of the tents: a sleeve of Pierrot, Columbine’s petticoats. I snagged another glass of champagne.

Balaganchiks,
Elizabeth said about the tents. To me, they looked just like Empress Elizaveta’s pleasure tent, from the days of my youth.

“Would you consider yourself a Pierrot or a Harlequin?”

“Neither.”

“It can’t be neither. It has to be one or the other. That is why
commedia dell’arte
is timeless.”

I pondered the Pierrot/Harlequin dilemma. “Harlequin.” I had a vague idea what it meant. Something untamed, risky. And a large codpiece. “He does not die.” I emptied my second flute and wanted something stronger.

She smiled, incredulously. “How do you know?”

We came to a pond. A willow washed her long braids in water like a mermaid. Hadn’t somebody Russian already made this metaphor? In Russian folklore, mermaids are drowned girls. They don’t have silver tails, only white shifts and bare white feet. They are more like water nymphs. Elizabeth started a cigarette and while it lasted, abridged the Balaganchik storyline. I sat on a bench, she stood in front of me; the firefly of her cigarette tip darted away from her lips—when it made circles in search of a suitable English word, and back—casting a glow on her mouth when she mumbled the verse in Russian. “Are you tired?” she demanded.

“No.”

“How do you like my city thus far?”

“Better than before. Why are you doing this?”

A kissing couple broke into our nook and retreated apologizing. Elizabeth stared after them, twisting the cigarette stub, then extinguished it with her thumb and forefinger. She looked so serious, almost sad. I could hear more laughter behind the trees. I set my empty flute on the bench next to me—I knew she would not sit down. Pierrot must have died already because now there were music and dancing on the other shore, across water. “I have to show you one more place,” she said.

We retraced our path back to the alleys, to music and twilight, and glimpses of a bare arm of Harlequin, of Columbine’s white stocking. We worked our way through the dancing crowd. Elizabeth hung on my elbow. Then it seemed, shadows pranced sideways, something black streaked in the corner of my eye, something splashed. Running feet. A woman screamed in a piccolo voice, then giggled. Commotion, confusion. A Columbine was staring at the front of her dress that dripped with dark blood, a Harlequin was twisting wildly around, looking for a culprit. More and more screams—frightened, surprised, exhilarated, and hysterical alike, still more laughter, and wet, plopping sounds, and racing shadows behind the trees. Plop! Something like a water-filled balloon
landed on the ground in front of us and burst with dark red. A splatter across Elizabeth’s dress. She grabbed my hand. People ran. We ran. It still seemed a joke, though maybe it wasn’t. Above us, Pierrot’s voice undulated in that tempo of stretched-out lyrical affect that sounded so fake to my ear,
“Gospoda, gospoda, kuda zhe vi, ved eto vsego lish klukvennii sok!”

Which phrase, though it can be translated accurately, somehow loses its potency in English: “Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, where are you going, it’s just cranberry juice!”

• • •

Elizabeth translated this for me, while breathing heavily in the back of the Austin, absentmindedly pulling the ostrich feather off her hat, then snapping it between her fingers. Pierrot, you see, at one point in the play, is bleeding out with cranberry juice. He says that much. He bleeds and the public laughs.

It wasn’t blood, on her dress, but not cranberry juice either. Just red paint.

“Semyon, I’ll smoke. Don’t you dare tell Papa,” she dropped to the chauffeur. She lit a cigarette, inhaled, bit on her nail, chuckled curtly. “That’s some real St. Petersburg for you. We party for their benefit, they throw paint bombs at us.” She looked at me. “That wasn’t part of the program. Some kind of saboteurs. Ruined the dress, but no matter. I am not going home. Will you go with me to one more place that I wanted to show you?” Almost begging.

“You saved me from the attack of killer balloons,” I said. “I’ll follow you anywhere. Even if my pant leg is stained red.”

She laughed.

• • •

The place she took me to next was called the Stray Dog, an underground club of sorts. The sign was hand-painted, and a crowd of prospective patrons milled on the Italyanskaya street corner. We pushed and pushed, through the queue, down the stairs to a door at the basement level and then a corridor that opened into a room full of people seated at tables. Tropical birds and flowers were painted on the walls, and the air was thick with fumes of wine and tobacco smoke. “I am with an important foreign guest,” Elizabeth argued her case with the host, in Russian. “I am showing him the best of the best.”

“He has to leave something of himself in the book,” the host said. “Something valuable. A confession. Otherwise, no entry.”

The book was huge and bound in thick leather. The Book of the Dead, I thought out of context. Elizabeth was slightly discomfited by the demand when she translated it. “It’s all right,” I said. I wrote,
Alexander, the Ice King
. She stared at the words.

The host made me shudder when he hit a gong and shouted in Russian over the cacophony of voices, “Princess Lizzy Goretskaya and an overseas guest Alexander, the ice king!” The words
overseas guest
lose their connotation of mockery when translated into English. This usage is archaic; Russians would choose it over “a foreign visitor” if they want to add a touch of pomp or ridiculous exoticism. Besides,
Ledyanoi Korol
means Icy King more than Ice King. I prepared myself for embarrassment, but the eyes of the public only rested on us and our paint splatters for maybe two seconds. Elizabeth blushed but did not seem irked. I thought she liked to be seen with me. Then she waved to someone she recognized, and two chairs were conjured for us at one of the round tables by the painted wall. I chose the seat that placed her on the side of my good—uncut—ear.

On the table were two bottles of cheap red wine and a half-moon of bread. Faces around the table shone with drunken camaraderie. A striking brunette on our one side, and on the other—a balding man who reminded me of the French cook Diadya Vasya; farther down, a dandyish naval officer, two older ladies, and more faces, faces, blurring in the warm air. Hands were shaken over broken bread crusts. Names and more names. The Diadya Vasya look-alike had a playful voice of a professional quipper. “Welcome to the dog lair, M’sieur Alexander. I am Arkady Bespechny, an art critic,” he said in heavily accented French.

“Lizzy, so who is your handsome stranger?” the brunette was whispering to Elizabeth.

“Mademoiselle Goretskaya, are you too coming from the
commedia
night? We see you got tagged . . .”

Apparently we were not the only guests marked by red paint.

The wine was a sour Chianti. I shouted into Elizabeth’s ear, “Do they serve anything stiffer? Brandy?”

“They don’t serve anything. We’d have to ask.” She was back to her confident self. The place charged her. She scanned the room, affectionately. “There!” She pointed. She got up and went to the center of the room, to the long table crowded with people. Her hips, her shoulders moved differently; she knew she was being watched and welcomed it. She leaned
forward between two men. I gaped at her back, at the tightened curve of her skirt. She rested her hand on the back of the chair of one of the men. He turned to look at me: he had satiated, slow eyes and a raven-black goatee. What a devil. He resumed his conversation even before my Urchin Princess turned to go back. I felt offended for her.

She brought me some Cognac in a thick-walled glass. “Courtesy of Mikhail Kuzmin,” she announced. Her face was flushed and her eyes kept gliding lovingly around the room, seeing, not seeing. She sat down and brought her lips to my ear. “Here is how it is. That long table I just went to—poets, writers, actors, thinkers. The cream of the crop. All the other tables—the rest of us, the public. We are kindly allowed to watch them. That man who shared with you his Cognac, that dark one, Kuzmin—is a walking scandal. A certain young officer has committed suicide over him, if you know what I mean. He’s a talent, though, he writes poems, prose, and music. And that woman with dark hair on the opposite end—that’s Anna Akhmatova. She is the greatest poetess of all Russia. We’ll see, maybe we’ll make her read her poetry tonight. She’s married to that man over there, who looks like a junker. It’s Gumilev, also a poet. But everybody says she’s in love with Blok, who couldn’t care less. Balaganchik, remember? That was Kuzmin’s music, by the way. Blok does not come here that often—”