The Age of Ice: A Novel (32 page)

Our “ice dinner” made news all over St. Pete’s. The most marvelous thing about it was that it was not the peculiar fetishes of the Prince and Princess Velitzyn under discussion, but the novelty of their menu. Soon requests came pouring in, and in due time you could say that if Count Rostopchin had an orangery, which supplied the whole town with oranges, Prince Velitzyn had an equally popular
icery,
which supplied—ice.

Still, this was more publicity than commerce. It did not befit a noble to put a price tag on the produce of his icery when servicing fellow aristocrats. My second lucky break came from Sawyer. After months of withering, rheumatic pains, petitioning the admiralty to pick up the tab for their treatment, and composing an English‒Aleut dictionary with the help of Robeck and the good old draught beer, Sawyer had bravely reinvented
himself as a broker at the St. Petersburg stock exchange. (This came through his acquaintance with Mr. and Mrs. Alistair Woodrow—Mr. Woodrow being a timber merchant of some significance, and Mrs. a fan of cockfighting and a matron saint to young men in distress.) Now with his broker connections, Sawyer came up with a business plan and made it a reality. Not that I was first in the
ice trade
—it had been a vigorous industry well before I came into it: every northern country from Norway to Russia stockpiled ice in winter and then sold it, come spring, to the southern countries to help them keep their foodstuffs unspoiled and their ice creameries churning through summer. But Sawyer made me stand out. “All of St. Petersburg’s aristocracy, even—between you and me—her Imperial Majesty Catherine the Great,
eats
Prince Velitzyn’s ice,” Sawyer advertised me to his fellow businessmen. “Is this not a mark of quality? If Prince Velitzyn’s ice is not worthy of residing in an English larder next to your good wife’s butter, then whose is?”

Sawyer knew how to be convincing.

By the end of winter in 1796, when the old sea route opened for navigation and the first merchant ships left Kronstadt for the British Isles, one of them was loaded with slabs and slabs of my ice—each wrapped in burlap and nestled in wood chips and straw, each stamped
Nikolsky Icery, St. Petersburg, Russia,
each tinted heavenly blue, so unique, so coveted by competitors in the years since, so unattainable for them. My trade secret, my mark of purity. And in separate crates, triple-insulated, swaddled like precious porcelain, was a shipment of ice flowers—fragrant lilies and roses, the most marvelous creations, the first ever on the market, destined straight for the remaining courts of Europe, to float in their champagne fountains, to adorn their trays of sturgeon and caviar—the blooms whose evanescence graced the last days of the old eighteenth century as French armies kept on marching: over Italy, over Spain, through the Low Countries.

• • •

Late in 1796, Catherine the Great passed away, surrendering the throne to her son Paul. Everybody inhaled and held it: what now?

Well, three years into his reign, our czar became charmed by Bonaparte and approved every surgery the French strongman had performed on Europe’s body. The czar even sent a contingent of Cossacks to India as part of the Russian-French plan to harass the British. Seated in the club of the English colony, Sawyer fumed and boomed about Bonaparte:
Boney
this
, Mr. Nap
that, which nicknames made me a bigger Anglophile each time I heard them. Sadly, Britain was getting lonelier and lonelier in her stand against the aforementioned Boney. Besides, Russia’s break with Britain hurt our business, Sawyer’s and mine. But it did not kill us—the new French elite also liked its ice cream cold.

If anything, the break with Britain killed the czar.

• • •

Commenting on Paul’s short reign and ugly end has since become a cottage industry and I shall not contribute another account. All that’s important for my story is that I—tracking right with my class—felt queasy about the new czar, and that there was a time—a year or two or more—when I feared that my adopted son was the new czar’s devotee and disciple.

This was, more than anything else, an unfavorable diagnosis for Andrei’s character.

Why? Czar Paul was a harpsichord-playing, romantic, perfectionistic, fitful—madman. Exactly the mix that makes tyrants and revolutionaries, utopian princes whose overarching theorems of common good are always and inevitably procrustean. He’d made a model of perfection, a gingerbread town out of Gatchina, where he’d dwelt before ascending to the throne. Now he aspired to make a whole gingerbread empire with us nobles as gingerbread men marching around his drill grounds to the tunes of his military bands, played on exactly five—and not more, as he personally ordered into law—instruments.

Hence, as visions of this caliber often require tools of expediency, Czar Paul’s “Secret Expedition” spied day and night for dissidents. “In my reign,” the czar once said, “only that one is an aristocrat at whom I look, and for only as long as I’m looking.” Pity those who squirmed in the glare of the royal eye yet endured, for this gaze alone fastened them to reality. A blink—and they’d dissolve in shadows of nonexistence.

This is important to me: when the czar personally harassed Andrei’s Horse Guard Regiment, drilled them, reorganized, and mixed with outsiders, and redesigned their uniforms at least nine times, each time making them equip themselves at their own expense, Andrei said not a word of complaint. He was a lieutenant of a troop for five years—the czar froze promotions or else advanced his minions at the expense of the regiment’s natives, but it was always “All’s well, Uncle Alexander. The discipline’s never been better.”

When the czar sent the regiment to lodge in the Tavrichesky Palace,
Andrei only shrugged. Horseman and horse, wood chips and manure entered the palace’s grand hall turned manège—dressage under bare candelabra hooks, sand and sawdust kicked in the faces of grand oil portraits. What a subtle toxin did this royal son inject into his mother’s body of achievement, what a poison for the imagination of an unsuspecting equestrian participant! Yet Andrei was demure.

When on a whim the czar exiled the regiment out of St. Pete’s, Andrei was unfazed. “Your mother worried herself sick,” I told him when, in two weeks, they were back in the capital. “You realize the rumor had it you were marching all the way to Siberia.”

And he replied, “Nah. Just to Tsarskoye Selo.” Then, glancing sharply at me, he added, “I wouldn’t have minded if it was Siberia. To finally see it. I only know what I know about it from you, and that hasn’t been very much.”

He was a strange young man, my godson. I said, “I only mean to say that His Majesty’s treatment of his
Garde à Cheval
is
irregular
. But I can see how His Majesty may impress a young man’s imagination as a visionary leader, I can certainly admit to that.”

Andrei’s stare was indecipherable.

• • •

Anna thus shaped her worries: “All this abuse and neglect is sure to push him toward debauchery.”

To which I said, “A little bit of debauchery becomes an officer. I certainly had not eschewed it in my day. Andrei seems too serious, it’s downright unhealthy.”

“Surely you’re joking. All fun and games your day was, wasn’t it? Not anymore, my lord, and you ought to know it better than I.”

“Would you rather have him get into politics?”

“God, no! Why do you even think thus?”

I shrugged. “He seems a man in search of a cause.”

This upset her. “How do you know? How can you tell, you missed ten years of his adolescence and you barely see him now. You know more about snowflakes than about people!”

Ah, Anna. She knew my weak spot, she did: a lingering, deep suspicion that I had a fatal flaw—that I lacked some human fiber that conducted empathy. A deficiency so absolute that I could not amend it even when I made caring for some people the task of my life. I know I could not trust Anna’s judgment on this, but still I wondered. Are we not blind to our true and inherent qualities?

For my part, I never managed to understand how Anna could contain two seemingly different women within her. One—Anna the house, as I’d come to call her, another the river Anna.

One was a jam maker and a matronly disciplinarian who’d say, “I need to have my son married and I need grandchildren. That’ll keep him away from your debauchery and politics.” Another was a sweet sinner: she’d place a cube of apple juice ice on my sternum and do things to me, the kinds of things that would make the cube stay frozen. Then she’d use my pelvis as a headrest and lick the apple juice off her fingers. She’d watch the beating of pulse in the pit of my stomach, the rise and fall of my chest. She’d say, “I know. What if he won’t marry because he has a mistress? Oh, no, what if it’s a Frenchwoman, one of those courtesans dislodged from Parisian boudoirs by the revolution! The life-sucking creatures! Haven’t you ever fantasized about one of those succubi? Haven’t you?”

Satiated, I’d mutter to the negative.

“Like this Mme Chevalier,” she’d insist. “The
prima donna.
Ah, I know, we should all go to the next performance by the French company, and you and I will watch how Andrei carries himself. Then you could ask him if he has someone on his mind.”

• • •

I’d always listened to Anna more than I was willing to show. Here we were in the Hermitage Theater for Gluck’s
Iphigenie en Aulide,
with Mme Chevalier in the title role. Never mind that attending the diva’s performances had lately become an entertainment more scandalous than refined. She had been Czar Paul’s favorite, mistress likely, and according to an article in one of those
imported
newspapers (remarkably missed by censorship), the royal admirer had her ears chopped off during one of his tantrums. Well, now the whole of St. Petersburg’s
beau monde
was showing up to scrutinize Mme Chevalier through their spyglasses to ascertain the integrity of her ears. Observations were traded during the intermezzo: she wore a wig, but also earrings. Did anyone see if they were attached to the wig?

Forget Gluck and his
Iphigenie
! Mme Chevalier was never a good dramatic actress anyway. But she
was
a passable thermometer for Paul’s inflammation, the poor thing: if she looked perky, the empire could go to bed in peace.

I culled Andrei from a group of young officers and we meandered around the foyer. Anna waved to us from a veritable flower bed of ladies in lovely gowns. My godson was vivacious and dapper.

“Your mother sent me to talk with you,” I said. “She wonders if perchance you’re considering marriage though not announcing it to us yet.”

He made a choking sound and stood at attention, but not on my account. A commotion of liveried servants and courtiers at the doors seemed to indicate that the czar himself might enter the hall. Chamberlains showed and motioned everyone away from the doors. The crowd began to shuffle: some were pushing to the front, others to the back. All, like sunflowers, turned one way. Candelabra dimmed and gilding blanched—or was it just my imagination? “Perchance there is already someone you favor,” I whispered to Andrei out of the corner of my mouth. I took a side glance at his profile, searching for revealing symptoms. A blush, a reddening ear perhaps? Nothing.

“There is no one,” he said.

“But I trust you
have
been with a woman, Guards Lieutenant, have you not?”

Now at least his brow twitched. “That would be a yes.”

“Good, good. A regular?”

He stole a glance at me. “How do you mean?”

“Somebody you might care for and who might gain influence upon you. Affect your decisions, make you do things that put you at a disadvantage.”

I could just see his ego flaring his nostrils. “I would never put myself in such a position.”

“Good,” I said. “So you have someone then. Just not someone you would marry.”

The ceremonial flutter at the doors ceased: the czar was not to grace the gathering with his presence after all. Andrei’s shoulders relaxed, he turned to me and grinned. “I have no one. Do not worry, Uncle.”

“I don’t worry.” I pressed further, “But we’d be happy to see you a married man.”

Chimes marked the end of the intermezzo. Andrei replied, “Says the man who got married not four years ago.”

Oh dear.
A counterattack. “Yes, but I’m not an example to follow. I’m an exception. Maybe I would’ve liked to get married young, I just couldn’t. You know why.”

“That I do. But if you married young you’d have kept away from my mother’s and my lives. Right?”

“That’s not what I meant! All I’m saying is that your mother has made
sacrifices for me, and I want her to be happy, and her happiness depends on you, and that’s why—”

He took my hand in both of his. The cruel confidence of youth glinted in his eyes like a switchblade. “I know. Are you cold? Turn cold, will you, Uncle?”

An ambush, unexpected and inexplicable! I yanked my hand free. “Why are you asking this? Why in a theater, for Christ’s sake?”

The glint in his eyes went away. “Yes. Of course, not in a public place. Well, I better get back, watch Act Two. My pals have a wager going, on Iphigenie’s ears. Got to watch her like a hawk.”

I stared after him as he disappeared into the crowd. A strange young man my godson was. An angry young man. That’s why, when the czar was murdered in his bedroom chamber in March 1801, in a coup that involved many officers of the Guard, I thought that Andrei was—

No. I am getting too much ahead of myself. I must let the sleeping 1801 lie. First I need to relate the following.

• • •

Back in 1795, I had introduced Dr. and Mrs. Merck to Anna, and she had made herself a friend and a patroness to Merck’s Siberian treasure of a wife. When Nadya Merck gave birth to daughter Sophie in 1797, Anna invited the Mercks to spend the summer in Nikolskoe. It was June, the poplar fuzz flowed. We would lounge outside in a gazebo. I’d stretch my legs out and balance a glass of Cognac on my chest, Anna would insist on rocking the baby’s cradle, and Nadya would trim and arrange freshly cut tulips in a vase and tell us how, when she had gone on her first date with Carl Heinrich, she got the very tip of her nose frostbitten because all they could do was promenade up and down the Irkutsk’s main drag, and they kept talking, and neither of them wanted the date to end.