The Age of Ice: A Novel (61 page)

I found it funny that we entered the grounds through the stables. A sign of the times, I thought. “They plan to make it a museum of equipages,” Anna-Marie said. “Would you like to visit the château first, or the garden?”

“Up to you.”

“Palace, then.”

Once inside, she assumed the role of tour guide. She must have done it many times with her students. It flowed freely, a tale of the royal minister Fouquet who was destroyed because the palace he’d erected for himself had elicited the Sun King’s envy. It was too opulent for its own good, all of it, including this gloriously regal, dark bedroom where we stood now, where even a narrow enclosure for visiting the ministerial chamber pot had no permanent door. Anna-Marie said, “These palaces, they are like doll houses. They look as if front walls of the rooms are sliced off, and contents are on display. Bedrooms, bathrooms. And behind them, on
the windowless inside, there is this network of secret passages and small, wall-papered doors into which the extraneous objects, the unwanted details of life are whisked away—bloodied sheets, rejected food, dead babies.”

I know.
I was born in a palace just like this one and whisked up and down narrow stairways. “I hope you don’t tell this to your students.”

She smiled, baffled. “No. Did I sound practiced?”

“You sounded as if you love history. But don’t you think that everyone is like this, more or less? With rooms on display and dark passages behind them. I know I am. Aren’t you?”

In reply, she only tugged on her turtleneck. We exited onto a vast balcony: ahead of us was an expanse of immaculate lawns and hedges with round ponds and cones of evergreens, then a string of stone arches, and beyond it a wide ascending alley that ran into the horizon, a solitary statue perched midway.

Anna-Marie said, “See that Hercules statue over there? Le Nôtre, the landscape artist, employed what they call a reverse perspective here,
anamorphosis abscondita
. That alley is narrowing, so Hercules seems closer than he is. Shall we try to walk to him?”

We walked past all the lawns and around the long side of a narrow rectangular pond. The groundskeeper drove to us in a golf cart, asked if we needed a ride. We declined. The chestnuts that framed the pond were saddened with some kind of rusty blight. We climbed up the stairs and then ascended the alley. We reached Hercules, gigantic at close range.

“Not so far away,” I said. “I thought he would be farther.”

“It’s not really the Hercules that gets you. It’s the alleys that start beyond him. Have you ever had a forest in your childhood, the one that used to seem so big, so unexplored, and then you grew up and the forest turned out to be just a little patch? Well, this garden is the opposite of that. Let me show you.”

She did. We peeked into one alley that branched off into the forest. It curved. It seemed to become a tunnel in greenery. There was no opening on the other end.

Anna-Marie said, “Perhaps the architect measured exactly the distance you can walk in these dainty little silk pumps, over round river rock gravel, in crinolines and corsets, under July sun and horseflies—because there are always horseflies here on a sunny day—before you get exhausted and give up. I can just picture one of them, standing just like we do now,
staring hopelessly into this tunneling alleyway. So maybe the architect measured at what point those strollers, or maybe those escapees, those young chevaliers and maidens, would give up, then added a few more dozen meters in all directions—and
voilà,
the garden is endless. Now of course we could just hitch a ride in a golf cart and find out exactly where it ends. The architect did not take those golf carts into account.”

“I know what you and I have in common,” I said. “We are afflicted with
anamorphosis abscondita
. Things seem closer than they are. Yesterday you said,
la Beresina
. Do you know it is the name of the Russian river that was the last straw that broke the back of la Grande Armée as it fled from Russia in 1812? My skin still crawls when I recall that flight. What did you mean to say? What had gone horribly wrong?”

“You seem closer than you are.” She said it in a probing, half-questioning way, as if just to hear how it sounded. “Let’s go back.”

I took a deep breath, exhaled. “Wait. What if I were your father? What if I didn’t age and could do magic? Make water freeze just by touching it? What if you could do it too?”

There is that look people give you when they think they did not quite hear what you said but do not want to admit to it. I’d seen it on the Angleesh Pottinger. Now Anna-Marie stared at me that way. Then she smiled. “Or what if you were a con artist who wants to earn my trust to swindle me out of my lovely little cottage and teacher’s savings? Or an actor whom Pierre had hired to help me release my inhibitions? Or a secret agent of the comrade General Secretary of the Soviets, or of the Iranian shah, on a mission to abduct Her Luminosity Pfaltzgravine von Welleren, a German-Russian-French noblewoman, the last of her line, to staff their harems?”

Still, I did not give up. “None of the above,” I said. “Just your father.”

“I don’t like your sense of humor.”

“Why do you keep pulling your collar up?”

“Why do you have this look about you? You smile but your eyes are on guard. As if you never know what to expect from people. Why?”

“Because I never know what to expect from people.”

“Why did you not bring any photographs of your father?”

“What for? You’re looking at him.”

“Seriously!” She crossed her arms and headed back to the palace.

“Why do you not want Welleren to be your father? Or Veltzen, for that matter? What are you hiding?”

She stopped and whipped around. “Jesus! A shrapnel scar is what I am hiding. On my neck. Can’t help being self-conscious about it. Kids—students—they stare. What did you think it was? I happened to be on a wrong side of a street in 1944, ten days before the liberation, that’s all.”

I caught up with her. “Here!” She was holding the collar down. On one side, the skin of her neck carried a splatter of scars that looked like small belly buttons.

“It’s not bad at all. You are a beautiful woman, you shouldn’t be so worried about it. See? I haven’t got an ear.”

I captured her hand and pressed it to the side of my head. “Did your mother ever tell you Mr. Veltzen missed half an ear?”

Her fingers curled around my stub, then eased away. “Let go.”

I did. “I am so sorry I allowed it all to happen this way. I shouldn’t have let your mother go, no matter what.”

“Enough! This is not funny at all! Drop this role-playing, this psycho-nonsense, this—just drop it, okay! I hate this kind of stuff ! When people—dissect, and deconstruct, and when everyone is a drama queen, and speaks in riddles, and betrays each other and stays miserable just because they are too clever and cute to be faithful and happy and—”

She may have been talking about her mother. It didn’t matter. There was no ice in her. “Okay. I’m sorry. Let’s go back.”

We went, she two steps ahead of me, I following her like a dog. “I’m taking a shortcut,” she said, and dived into the wood that surrounded the open geometry of the lawns; she led me through a chain of narrowly cut, tunneling trails and secluded meadows, sometimes with grottoes or water basins. This is where those chevaliers and maidens, having given up on escaping from the park, would have settled for a lesser reward of sex. There was something touching in the way she marched so sternly through it.

We climbed into the car but she tarried to start the engine. She put her hands on the steering wheel and took a deep breath, then slammed the wheel with the heels of her hands. “Okay. There used to be two of us. Me and my twin sister. I was Anna and she was Marie. When Marie left us, I took her name in. So it won’t be orphaned. Now I am Anna-Marie. Pierre does not know. Nobody aboveground knows. I am living for both of us. And it is killing me—”

With that, she broke down.

• • •

The story never ends. She told me that every tale I had heard yesterday was—a lie?—no, a half-truth, because it had an unmentioned second presence, a twin sister. (Ah, Elizabeth, what cruel brand of poetic justice had been served on you for your transgressions into poetry: two, no, one child to feed and clothe when you have lost everything to wars and revolutions!)

Elizabeth and I had twin girls, Anna and Marie. One a peacemaker, another a rebel. One took her stepfather’s side, another sided with the mother. One stayed put and another left the nest for a man. He was a Jew, a German Jew, a doctor. He was twenty-four, he lived in a refugee settlement in Paris. He’d lived there since 1933, still hoping to get proper papers to be able to practice medicine. How did they meet? Marie was so secretive about him. Just hints and brief remarks. Maybe it was a twin thing—Marie protected her individuality. She was like a tigress, she loved like one. His name was . . . Anna didn’t even know his full name. Marc something. Fromm? Frohman?

They may have had plans. Marriage. Naturalization. Did they legalize refugee Jews who married French citizens? Perhaps he did not want to burden her this way. He wanted to ask her hand as a man in his own right. But by 1935, the National Committee of Relief all but publicly announced that France should free herself of the refugee burden. Some Jews were sent back to Germany. That was
after
1933. There was fear. Desperation. And then these people approached Marc—people from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. How would he like to escape to the Soviet Russia? Something called KOMZET—the Committee for the Settlement of Working Jews on the Land—was active there since the twenties, and it had helped so many already! It set up prospering communities in the sunny Crimea, in the Ukraine. No pogroms, no persecution, free and honest labor, and respect instead. And now there was the greatest ever plan in the works, a new Palestine in Russia, in the Far East, on the Amur River—how would he like to be a pioneer in the brand-new world, in the independent Jewish Republic, the Soviet Zion? And to be a doctor there, to help his people bring forth a new beginning!

Marc talked it over with Marie. Marie agreed. Russia was the country of her birth, after all. Yes, her family had run from Bolsheviks, but that was then, and this was now. So many things had changed. So many people had gone there and come back to tell stories about miracles of communism. Besides, young people in love were supposed to go to the edge of the
earth and make something out of nothing for themselves, and the more it infuriated their damaged parents, the more reason there was to go.

So they went. Maybe they got married right before it. Maybe they had a ceremony at the railway station, before embarking on the
Trans-Siberian Express
; and then there were days and days of rocking in a sleeping car, making love, dreaming about the future. Or maybe they married on the Amur, and it was a snowed-in, Jewish-Siberian ritual in a tiny log cabin, under the mighty cedars of the Palestine of the North. Maybe they’ve known such happiness as mere mortals would never know. For those few moments that they were man and wife.

They were never to be heard from again. They vanished. The details leached out a drop a decade, if at all. Most of the twenty doctors who were selected to go to Birobidzhan in 1935 were arrested by Stalin’s NKVD. Because a word was sent—even as the party was still en route, a word, they say, was sent from Paris straight to the Kremlin through trusted channels—through some Russian-resident-turncoat-communist-international-activist-informer—a word was sent that one of these doctors was a Gestapo spy. That he, that Nazi secret police spy, that Marc Fromm—or Frohman—was heading to Russia to subvert the Soviet cause from the deep Siberian underside of it.

Maybe they were arrested the moment they crossed the border. Maybe they never got to see the Amur River of the Soviet Zion. A firing squad for him, GULAG for her. They were just two out of many souls who were used up to erect the infamous circus of the Moscow trials. Maybe they were tortured. Maybe they signed their names under every lie that was mounted against them and their friends. Maybe not. But they say the “spy’s” own father-in-law had sent the word. The father-in-law who happened himself to be a Nazi operator, which of course makes it even more obvious that the wretched son-in-law was anything
but
a Gestapo man.

“I am living for both of us,” Anna-Marie said, “and it is killing me, because von Welleren did it. God, he worked for the Germans since before 1935! I’ve always known, even if I thought I didn’t. He destroyed his one daughter and he saved another. Why did he do it, why? This is what haunts me. Am I like him? How could he have done this to Marie and then cared for me, for Mother and me, all through the occupation, and worried, and pulled strings so they took me into a German hospital when I was hit by that shrapnel and had their best surgeon work on me so the pieces wouldn’t move and nick an artery—and that was when
de Gaulle’s brigades were days away from Paris! If I wasn’t his daughter, why? Because I was the tame one? Because my only sign of protest was to take Marie’s name so I would be a living reminder? He ignored it. I wanted him to see I was Marie too, but he did not believe me. I am not Marie. Marie would have spat in his face. She would have shot him. And me—I am a silent protester, ha, easily ignored. The fearful one, the peace-loving, considerate one. I never brought it up.

“I hate them both! Why, why did they not divorce?! Why did Mother cling on to him? My famously fierce mother, what did he have on her?

“I don’t want him to be my father—because this will give me an easy way out of guilt, but at the same time it really won’t, it only helps Welleren. Because it would mean that he had sacrificed his one stepdaughter to get back at our mother, to avenge all these years of being treated like a pansy—he’s had all these reasons, while I—I just let it happen to my own twin sister and never ever said anything!

“And now you arrive and offer me a brand-new father, a clean one, who’s never even been close to any of it, never had to choose between his dignity and his safety, a rich and likable man who’s been survived by another rich and likable man, and I just can’t—I can’t, it just makes me so sad—”