The Age of Ice: A Novel (56 page)

I felt a pang of jealousy mixed with curiosity. Where did he know her from? What did he mean by “jolly good time”? I said, “One more reason to have joined us. I’m sure Princess Elizabeth would have been glad to see an—acquaintance, I presume?”

“I gave her English lessons a couple of years back. She was a handful. Incredibly headstrong. She argued with me about
pronunciation,
would you believe that?”

That this Wallace had taught Elizabeth something, even if it was just language, already irked me. Here was the man who had put words into her lovely mouth.
Golly, Velitzyn,
I thought,
you are in trouble
.
“Russians,”
I said. Then, “Which reminds me—” and I stirred us to business, which, on this occasion, meant talking about Elizabeth’s father and his
Germanophilia
.

At least, by the end of our meeting, I could be reasonably sure that there would be no mention of a drunken and ice-trick-performing Mr. Veltzen in the
Times
. And Mr. Wallace, in exchange for being so very helpful, got an exclusive peek at our, the delegation’s that is, score, at our gains and losses here in St. Petersburg.

• • •

My mind was set. I would make no effort to see her—it wasn’t even a decision. It was just the reality of my existence. That was my thinking until the evening of the same day, when a clerk at the reception desk gave me a sealed envelope. Inside was a sheet of poetry:

The Gray-Eyed King

Hail to you, O ineluctable ill!

Last night our king, the gray-eyed one, was killed.

Autumn. The evening was airless and red.

My husband came home for a break and said,

“He had been hunting, you know, and the folk

Say that his body was found by that oak.

Pity the Queen—so young, wasn’t he? They

Say that by morning her hair had turned gray.”

He went to the mantel, he found his pipe,

His pouch of tobacco, and left for the night.

I’ll go to my baby girl, kiss her awake

and look in her eyes that are beautiful, gray.

And listen to poplars that rustle and swing:

“He is no more, your gray-eyed one, your king . . .”

Below the verse was a postscript:

I said I would do it, Mr. Veltzen, and I did. That was a translation of the poem Akhmatova read first. They say it is devoted to Blok, who is her true love.

I hope you are well.

Kindest regards,

Elizabeth Goretsky

The next morning, as our party prepared to leave for the day’s scheduled agenda, finally an agreeable one—a daylong outing on board a yacht of a prominent industrialist named Mr. Morozov—the clerk handed me another letter. I didn’t have time to open it. We were loading into our fleet of Packards when I noticed the café au lait‒colored Austin, parked some distance from the entrance.

I suppose being stalked by the woman one is interested in can produce mixed feelings. I noted that the Austin revved the engine and left when it was clear that we were going away. As we rolled through gray proletarian suburbs with their strings of drying laundry and an occasional sloppy accordion pumping away, to Oranienbaum, I burned with impatience, waiting for a moment of privacy when I could read the letter.

I was not pleased to see Mr. Wallace on board. Why should the remainder of our visit suddenly receive his close scrutiny? In the yacht’s salon, where everybody retreated soon after we set sail, the conversation touched upon the paint bomb news, and one of the Russian guests said something to the end that
in this country, one can never be sure
. “Even the sweetest young girls, freshly educated at their Women’s Advanced Courses, even the tremulous daughters of nobility get all kinds of ideas in their lovely heads and become socialist-revolutionaries. Start throwing bombs at people, start shooting at people out of pistols. That is not like your
suffragettes
with their Mrs. Parkhurst! That, gentlemen, is far, far more disturbing!”

The café au lait–colored Austin
. The thought made me jeer at myself. What a splendid joke it would be if the Urchin Princess was simply stalking us Britons on some socialist party’s order! Bombs an option.
And you thought, you old goat
 . . . I separated from the group, came out onto the breezy deck, and opened her letter. Inside, to my disappointment and relief, was another sheet of verse:

See her hiding her face on the morrow

Under shadowy veil . . . “Why so blue?”

“ ’Cause I served him a cup full of sorrow

And I forced him to drink till he was through.

“Clenched his teeth, he. How tortured his stare was!

Stumbled out. Oh, how to forget?

I ran after him—down the stairs,

I caught up with him—down by the gate.

“Short of breath, I cried out, ‘I’m sorry!

‘I was joking! You leave me—I’ll die.’

Calm, he flashed me a smile. Calm and horrid.

Said, ‘It’s windy, you should go inside.’ ”

Mr. Veltzen, this was the poem Akhmatova read second. I am sorry if I may have seemed a little abrupt at our parting. By no means was it intentional. My fatigue was to blame. Would you like to attend a cinematograph theater tonight, to see a Russian motion picture starring our own Vera Kholodnaya? Kholodnaya means Cold. I should like to think you may find it amusing.

• • •

I reread the poem, then the postscript. Yes, she could have been crazy, or vain, or maybe she was a socialist revolutionary. Still, I felt elated. And anxious—though not because I could have been on some extremist party’s target list. No, because there was this girl, and she wooed me with poetry. This threatened my existence more than a bomb could.

Perhaps it was no coincidence that the theme of
I am sorry for the way I behaved
was both in a poem and in a postscript. And if so, could there be other clues? What if the Gray-Eyed King of Akhmatova the poet was the Ice King of Goretsky the translator? What if the Urchin Princess was not just translating Akhmatova into English but channeling her, in an unconscious endeavor to reenact her heroine in another—parallel—world?

Oh, forget it. The only result from all of this is that you, Velitzyn, are missing out on an important discussion that reasonable gentlemen are conducting in the salon right this very moment.

On the way to join the “reasonable gentlemen,” I ran into Mr. Wallace. “Mr. Veltzen! Found you at last. This may be of interest to you: the vice minister you are curious about has left for Moscow and is not due back until your departure. Does it tell you anything?”

Oh yes. Papa is gone on a business trip and his girl is free to do whatever she pleases.

I said, “What is he doing in Moscow?”

“I don’t know. Would you like me to find out?”

“Can you?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

• • •

It was with grateful submission that I entrusted myself to the will of waves, as Russians say, and made no attempt to leave the yacht outing or the evening reception on land that followed and that lasted till midnight. I hoped, for the sake of Elizabeth’s sanity, that the café au lait‒colored Austin would not be waiting for me by the time we returned. When it wasn’t, I was disappointed.

My visit was almost over. I hoped and feared in equal measure that she would not approach me again after her last two overtures were left unanswered. Doing nothing about it was my easiest option. I did not know where she lived. Or how to call her on the telephone, if she had one—
Operator, give me Lizzy Goretsky
? Goretsky the father was still in Moscow,
attending some right wing nationalist party’s gathering, as Mr. Wallace imparted to me. The vice minister had left the ball in my court—I was to decide whether I would play by his rules. Beginning with the bribe. This decision was better made from the comfort of my London office.

Two days before our departure, I wrote her a letter. I often wonder what my life would be like if I didn’t. At the time it didn’t seem anything fateful, more like an exercise in self-deception. I left the letter at the front desk. “Find a way so this is received by Princess Goretsky,” I told the clerk. I paid him. I wasn’t seeking her out, I assured myself. I was just being polite; silence was no way of treating a lady. If I saw her again after this, it would be just a coincidence.

My Dear Princess Elizabeth,

I am grateful for the marvelous introduction to St. Petersburg that you have so kindly offered me. I enjoyed your company and would have sought more of it, had I not been so constrained by my present responsibilities. Lamentably, our acquaintance must be brief. I wish you all the best, and remain, hoping you will realize your literary aspirations and happy to have served you as a conversation partner in English.

Yours truly,

Alexander Veltzen

On the eve of our departure I received a response. It invited me to hop back into the café au lait‒colored Austin. Of course I did.

Our second date began as if it were our first date ever. Elizabeth was different: none of the casual chatter of the commedia night. Instead, she was on tiptoe with me. Her smile was tentative, her witticisms—nervous. I said I wanted to visit a few sights of St. Petersburg—very particular ones. Would she bear with me? She conceded. We followed the Nevsky to the magisterial Palace Square, and left the Alexandrine column on our right (the column and half the buildings were not there in my time).
This is where the Ice Palace used to stand,
I thought,
where I was conceived
. I was born here too—in the Winter Palace, which used to be smaller and older, as if it had been living its life in reverse. The square used to be just a field of grass. The imperial herd grazed on it when I was a child. When I was a teenager, I stomped on packed dirt here, marching round and round in my cadet uniform. Past the Winter Palace on the other side of
the square was the Leib Company House, where I had lived in my twenties, before my company and the whole of Preobrazhensky were relocated beyond the Fontanka River, a complete wilderness back then . . .

Of course I told Elizabeth none of this. Not aloud, at any rate.

I asked for a stroll on the Admiralty Embankment. I offered her my elbow and her hand alighted on my sleeve, weightless. Below us, the Neva tossed, sleep-deprived and grumpy. Over there, in the streets behind the admiralty, in the Kirpichny Alley, was where Sawyer’s apartment had been. I told Elizabeth I wanted to say her name in the Russian manner. Would she teach me? The full name, with the title. She said,
Knyazhna Goretzkaya, Elizaveta Dmitrievna
. I repeated it, careful to keep the English accent. She smiled but said she did not want me to use it. Why? She didn’t like her name in Russian. It was the name of that Dostoevsky’s female character in
Crime and Punishment,
a poor, docile, innocent cow who gets axed by Raskolnikov because she happened to witness another murder. An epitome of passivity, victimhood. No, she hated being a Lizaveta. It dragged her down. But Elizabeth—well, that’s a different story, didn’t I think?

We walked past the Bronze Horseman and his formidable rear guard, St. Isaac’s Cathedral, a construction site in my time. There was once a bridge here; back then it was rebuilt each year over pontoons—all but devoured by the spring meltdown on the river. And now there were two bridges—one behind, one ahead of us.

We continued onto the English Embankment. This was where I used to drink ale with my friends. Andrei Junior’s last barracks—he left here for Austerlitz—were just behind the English colony. “Do you write your own poetry?” I asked.

She said yes. “Bad poetry.”

I said I enjoyed her translations and acknowledged that few people could produce anything of that sort. But I was not a man of letters. Had she thought of showing her translations to Mr. Wallace, the
Times
correspondent? She was acquainted with him, was she not? I could drop him a word . . .

She glanced at me with a perfunctory smile, of the kind with which an initiate meets a layman’s advice. I was already regretting I had brought poetry up when she said, “I’ve taken classes from him. In his eyes, I’d always be a bumbling pupil. And a
woman
. I don’t think he is fond of writing women.”

“I see. He is old-fashioned.”

“I suppose.”

I’m not like him. I’d dote on her, surround her with books to translate
 . . . If only I could. Doggedly, I headed across the bridge to Vasilievsky Island. Here at the Bourse—not the new one, but what used to be a warehouse behind it—Sawyer and I had closed our first ice export deal. And this—the
Kunstkamera,
you say?—used to be all of the Imperial Academy. On these steps I stood with Ivan Kuznetzov. Merck’s pump was in the yard out back.

We climbed back into the car and drove around the tip of Vasilievsky, then followed the bank of the Smolenka River. The Lutheran cemetery—this is where Merck was buried. If I went there, I might see Nadya’s grave too. And Druka’s and Sophichka’s graves.
My dear Elizabeth the Urchin Princess, can you help me against the tide of my memory?

We turned left onto Seventeenth Lane. “You are so quiet,” Elizabeth said.

A bakery, windows still lit, the owner inside, making bread. A luminous, raspberry-red globe of an apothecary’s sign. Nearby, a dozing
izvozchik,
a cabbie, with his dozing pony. Merck lived just a block from here.

“Semyon, pull over,” Elizabeth commanded. She slipped out and knocked on the locked bakery door. The startled owner opened up, there was a brief negotiation, then Elizabeth went in.
Here comes the socialist revolutionary party’s abduction plan,
part of me mused, quite aloof. Elizabeth emerged carrying a paper bag. “I am ravenous,” she announced, once in the car. The warmth and fragrance of the baked bread entered with her. “This is a hot
bublik
. Fresh from the oven. Would you like some?” She pulled out a kind of a bagel, only skinnier and larger in circumference. She broke out a quarter of it and presented it to me before I opened my mouth to respond.