The Age of Ice: A Novel (44 page)

But now they got me thinking. Contrary to what the girls suggested, I was
not
a Cossack, and my head did not ache—of hangover, I presumed. Was I a robber and a murderer? Who was I?

That tall, stooped man reflected in windows and vitrines, the man who moved in a deliberate manner as if somnambulant or disabled—had to be me. Before today, even if I saw my reflection, I would not have known it for myself or would have remained indifferent to it. Now my appearance too was waxing with meaning, like the placard’s announcement. I hovered under the eaves of the
Pâtisserie Stohrer,
trying to discern what my face looked like in the reflection. But all I could see beyond a bushy beard and a matted chevelure were some creases and two niches for eyes.
Cakes and pastries behind the windowpane obscured the rest: a row of sumptuous cones of
la religieuse
in the front (I read the tag), and in the back, trays and trays of
charlotte aux fruits rouges, beignets pomme-abricots, pâte d’amande fruits, pains au chocolat, chouquettes,
et cetera.

The vendor noticed my fascination, said, “You want one of these? Yes? For you—one franc.”

Until he said it, the thought of actually trying a pastry was absent from my mind. But now that he suggested it, my mouth filled with saliva. One problem, though: I rubbed my fingers together as if doling out change and then spread my arms—no money! But the vendor was insistent. “
Russe,
yes? You have
rubles
? I’ll take a ruble.”

I shook my head—no rubles either. I was becoming upset by my muteness. Words swarmed in my throat but scattered and fled like roaches when I thought of opening my mouth and exposing them to the light of day.

Behind me, somebody said in English, “Here, one franc. Give the fellow his pastry, will you?” I turned to behold a British hussar lieutenant, a young man, in his mid-twenties, maybe. Neat and trim, curly hair, a fine mustache. An open, friendly face. He flashed me a smile, I bared my teeth in response. “For the victory,” he said. The vendor gave him a pretty little paper box and he pressed it into my hands. I didn’t even know which one of the pastries was inside. I was about to say something and my heart was jumping up and down in preparation. The words were bubbling up, making me lightheaded—

“Thank you, sir,” I said in English. And, turning to the vendor, “
Merci, monsieur
.” I turned red with effort and fled the scene just to get out of there. But the seal over my throat was broken! I kept on walking till the rush subsided. Then I stopped to put the pastry in my knapsack—I was not going to eat it in haste. It would have to be the right, the special, moment.

I came to the vast Place Vendôme; in the middle stood a brass tower, covered bottom to top with reliefs. Sightseers queued at the tower’s door. I waited for my turn, took the tight corkscrew of stairs up to the observation deck. Some Austrians ascending ahead of me kept knocking on the walls, as if to make sure they were still brass—and indeed the walls responded with muffled dings of a grounded church bell. “Gentlemen, imagine we are inside a giant cannon,” one of them said. I imagined. A cannon, its mouth open to the sunny skies and empty of devices of war, for once. Full of people instead. The thought made me queasy. Why?

I reached the top. Off to the right before me—the gilded dome of the
Invalides, the amputee heaven (I kept eavesdropping on the Austrians). To the left—the blackened twin towers of Notre Dame stood over the gently curving band of the Seine. Palaces were everywhere—Louvre, Tuileries, Luxembourg. The dreamy Boulogne forest was away in the distance to the right; I had cut down a tree there the other day. Behind me, far away—the heights of Montmartre with sentinel windmills; there just a few days ago the final battle had been fought. One of the Austrians said that three-fourths of the last resort rally, the boy-soldiers, fourteen-year-olds from
l’École Polytechnique,
had perished there. Another remarked, “Don’t they always?”

They shook their heads. I was beginning to like them. I wanted to tell them that at least the war was over. That those two girls in a window above the bookstore, and the British hussar, and the pastry vendor—had not been afraid of me. That I was meandering in springtime Paris, alive, alone, without my rifle and with a French pastry in my knapsack.

But it was just too many things to say at once.

• • •

Everybody went to the Palais Royale and so did I. There was so much to read there! Placards, bills, and pamphlets. On the top floor of the Palais, there were all kinds of prostitutes—so said the leaflets distributed by urchin boys. A blurb could be had for free, while for a sou you could get a two-page description of what exactly to expect from a blonde Amorette or a brunet Émile. This was sold along with all kinds of other handy literature, such as an autobiography of the “Glorious Emperor of the Russians, Alexander,” written purposely (believe it or not) for the people of France.

The ground floor had shops, a burlesque theater (where they ran a
History of the French Revolution from the Beheading of Louis XVI to the Advent of Bonaparte
), freak shows, shadow shows, fortune-tellers, belly dancers, jewelers, blind fiddlers, opium dens. The second floor had games of chance, restaurants and cafes, even public baths. Public
toilettes
! And it had—mirrors. Leaning over my shoulder from the scarlet-red walls, lurking in niches and corners, even immured into the plaster of the ceiling. They bounced my reflection back and forth between them, they toyed with me. They were like comedians with deadpan faces, they handed me over to one another, belabored me like a joke . . .

It
had
to be me. The man in the mirrors looked feral and savage, the skin of his face was sallow and parched. His mouth was overgrown by a
beard, and his eyes glared between the overhanging hair below his bonnet. His long arms hung as if they were not accustomed to being unoccupied. He still had an ax tucked at his waist, the blade chipped with use. The longer he hovered in the mirrors, the more his shoulders rode up in a self-conscious hunch, as if he did not believe he belonged here. He looked, I thought, like Lazarus just after the resurrection when the man was already walking but hadn’t quite lost the smell yet.

But it
had
to be me.

I had to sit down on the floor. I couldn’t catch my breath. I was no longer buoyantly happy. Now that I was aware of myself, it seemed people would become aware of me too. But no one paid me any heed, except the urchin boys who kept offering me their leaflets. No one was afraid of me—Paris must have seen worse.

The crowd flowed past me, indifferent. I could sit like this, under a windowsill, on a waxed, thick-skinned parquet, for as long as I wanted, even late into the night. Couldn’t I? I took off my bonnet. I picked some leaflets out of dropped litter and read about the size of the “paradisaic garden” between the legs of Amorette from upstairs, the
jardin
where one forgets one’s woes. Then I read an invitation to an evening gala in another
jardin,
this one in the city of Paris, not in Amorette.
Le Jardin de Tivoli
. I read every word many times over; reading gave me an illusion of being insulated from the crowd. Then a movement caught my eye: some coins landed in my bonnet (it still lay on the floor next to me). The donor—whoever it was—was already walking away with a crowd when I tried to identify him. Or her. Now I had five francs.

The entrance fee into the Tivoli Garden was two francs. It took me about an hour to wander there from the Palais Royale.

The Tivoli. I walked candlelit alleys, trails and trails of flickering little flames that made the evergreen hedges look darkly alive. One path opened to a circus show in a meadow, rope dancers walking high up above people’s heads, a torch in each hand. Another meadow held a chamber orchestra. A third was populated by mimes. A dark red Harlequin pawed a canary-yellow, squirming Columbine; in the bushes, a twilight-white Pierrot aimed an arrow at them, his hands quivering more than his bowstring. I saw a fountain and heard laughter. I saw lovers kissing, their bodies arched over the sandstone edge of the fountain’s basin. I wanted the garden to be endless. I wanted to lose my way in it.

Suddenly—popping, whistling sounds, and fireworks shot into the
skies. Wheels of fire, starbursts, crackling and sizzling, fiery blooms; like a cannonade, wisps of smoke, whiffs of brimstone, flakes of ashes floated overhead. I clenched up, but it was not war, it was harmless, everything was all right around me—cries of joy, clapping of hands.

As the festivities wound down and groundskeepers with bright lanterns walked the alleys, I crawled into the darkest corner, the densest shrubbery, into the narrowest crack under the arborvitae. I lay on my side, my head to the ground, feeling tired and safe, though happy no longer. Still, I never once thought of going back to Champs Elysées. I remembered about the pastry, pulled the box out, and set it on the ground before my face. I smelled chocolate. Rich and dark and smooth. My nose couldn’t have enough of it. I lay and gazed at the little white box in front of me as if it were a bivouac fire.

I opened the flaps of the box and tilted it. A chocolate-glazed cone showed out of a nest of waxed paper. The smell of chocolate blossomed, and with it—my eyes filled with tears, my mouth splayed open, my whole body crawled with frost. Fragments of memories blew like a snow squall, and whirled, piling in the niches of my skull until they formed a complete—and undeniable—picture of what had happened to me . . . Before I knew it, I was hacking and smashing the pastry with my ax, beating the chocolate pulp into the carpet of old needles, into a hole in the ground; dirt and bark and cream filling flew all over and hit me in the mouth, eyes, cheeks, but nothing helped. Nothing helped.

It wasn’t the British hussar’s or the pastry’s fault that I had lived as Old Man Frost for a year and a half, and now, on this spring day, April 6, 1814, six days after the war ended, I recovered my humanity.

• • •

People called the winter of 1812
brutal
. Brutal, yes, and not with regard to the weather; as for that, it had not been
brutal enough for me
. I’d hoped it would turn me into ice. But I did not know that only the Arctic cold could do it to me. The
regular
cold only hobbled my mind but left me dragging on, barely self-aware. Had I known it, I would not have wandered into the flurries on that October night in 1812. I swear I wouldn’t have.

The memories that I’d recovered told me that I’d ceased to be a normal man on the very first morning of my “escape.” The night before, I’d pushed deep into the woods until undergrowth and debris let me go no farther, and lay down to freeze. I did not expect to wake up. But I did—as
Old Man Frost. Then, I must have drifted on, come across a band of peasant militia, and tagged along for a while. Then we ran into the army’s path. The Chernigovsky musketeers who adopted me must have made a regimental mascot, a pet, out of me. Truth be told, I was very helpful, especially in wintertime, oh, I had so many uses during the mere two months that the Grande Armée crawled back home over the frozen Russia, dying at every step along the way.

Never before had ice been allowed to feast with such abandon on human flesh. I don’t know how it came to this. But they—the invaders—had come so grossly unprepared. Long-term effects of cold combined with the absolute imperative to march . . . men trudged on limbs that were frozen solid. Numbness, followed by sudden paralysis. Old Man Frost passed men who were still alive but in a state of torpor, men standing on their knees and making no effort to get up. Give one of those a push—and he’d tip over like a toy soldier made of frozen flesh.
Frenchie-tipping
. Old Man Frost had done it and he was amused. No, no.
I
had done it.

At every bivouac some of them sat down in embers to warm themselves up, and smoked, and burned without feeling it. The smell. When they shed bloody tears, that was just about the end. Their guts and bladder would follow by letting go of what little remained in them. That was why practical folk preferred to snatch their pants for loot while the wearers were still alive.

Burlap and straw. The French would gather straw into a sack and sleep on it, then strap it around themselves on the march, for warmth. So prisoners came handily with their own burlap sacks. Old Man Frost remembers how militiamen got rid of prisoners. Did he do it? No. Did
I
do it? Make them step each into his sack and hop down to the river. Whoever was the fastest. Maybe the prisoners thought the fastest would be spared. Then one could beat them down into their sacks, and tie the sacks up. Then dump the sacks into a hole in river ice. A peaceful hole made so a fisherman could fish. So a peasant wife could haul out her water for household chores . . . Into this hole. Goading them with a stick, so they would be dragged under ice. My Andrei had saved people from ice. And I, his godfather, his hero, had done the reverse.

The sound of ripping burlap would make me shudder years later.

When I wound up with the Chernigovsky, we would get caught up among the retreating stragglers. In a village, every fire, every warmed-up hovel, every piece of bread pulled out of a knapsack drew those unfortunates
in like moths. They pressed themselves indoors, squeezing, stepping onto one another. You let them in, there would be no peace all night. They wouldn’t be quiet. They’d start hurting in the warm air, when their frost began to thaw. Some soldiers threw them bread, and the Feldwebel said, “Don’t attract them!” Some poked at them with bayonets to shoo them away. Some skewered bread on bayonets and poked. Too many. Too far gone. Enemy. Old Man Frost was sent out to chase them away. Old Man Frost could stay out all night, on guard, while his keepers would rig a sauna in a hut. He would watch out, so no one surprised the bathers. Clear nights, vertical columns of smoke, oozing from countless fires. Razor-sharp stars above. Somebody screaming. Somebody singing. Old Man Frost knew just enough not to look into the fire. He did not want to recall any of this, or any of his recent or distant past. He thought if he kept his eyes off fires long enough, he’d be far gone too. He hoped he’d never become human again, even if he could not become ice. He was wrong.