The Age of Ice: A Novel by J. M. Sidorova Read Free Book Online Page A

one day when a lackey approached. “Your Nobleship, a situation is downstairs. Kindly attend to it.” I registered Anna’s curious glance upon me before I left to “attend.”
    The situation was standing in the backyard, between a chicken coop and a workshop. She had a boy of four, maybe five years of age, clinging to her arm. “For the third day straight she comes,” the lackey commented. “Says you asked for her, stubborn thing.”
    Flushed already, I told the lackey to be on his way, then approached her. “Matryona, is it?”
    She bowed her head.
    “Your child?”
    She nodded. “Savva.” And then, holding my stare captive, she headed toward the chicken coop.
    Inside, Savva climbed the plank to the roost. “Mama, look—a hen with a cowlick,” and his mother said, “Look for a red one, baby,” and then she opened her greatcoat for me and let out her breasts. The areolae wilted in the cold air. I watched though did not touch myself in front of her—still too shy. But the next time, and the time after that, and later—I was shy no longer.
    Before she left on that first day, Matryona pointed to some freshly hatched eggs. “I’ll take these? No?”
    “Yes,” I said hoarsely.
    Then I returned to the mansion, checking my clothes for chicken scratch, and rejoined the parlor company. “I’ve digressed. Where were we?” Anna looked up from her needlework, then dipped her head down like a pupil who did not know the answer to the teacher’s question and was afraid to be called upon.
    • • •
    In the chicken coop. Then in an old barn, where Matryona deadbolted a rickety door. Then in a woodshed, where she lifted her skirts, and the decrepit linen, the hemp rope–fastened wrappings she wore on her legs, were the color of dead skin. Afterward: to putter back to the mansion, dump my fur coat on the floor, leave footprints of snow all over. A feeling of shame, as I checked myself in the mirrors: God help me .
    Was it to this look that Anna had started responding? Suddenly it had become so easy to find her alone: by the fireplace, in the renovated nursery, at a table covered with cups and saucers and raspberry pastries. She watched me break a pastry and abandon it. I asked, “Why are you so unhappy?” and saw confusion on her face, as if she were giving her soul an emergency inspection.
    “I am not . . . I’m happy. Do I not look it?”
    “Do you believe that people can explain their true selves to each other through words?”
    “Yes, certainly, I do.”
    “And yet you can’t manage to ask me the questions that have been on your mind since you first saw me. Isn’t it so?”
    It was so easy to discombobulate her!
    Meanwhile: In a cold bathhouse, where it was too dark to see. In a fisherman’s shack. In the workshop, where Matryona fingered a newly finished crib that smelled strongly of flaxseed oil. In the creamery, next to trays of milk, where Savva lost a milk tooth eating cream off a skimmer. I never touched her. We rarely spoke. She is neither a wife nor a widow, our lackey told me when I asked. Her husband had been drafted into soldiery, which those days meant—for life. God knows what she lives on . Tough working her land lot by herself, and her boy’s too small yet.
    I pocketed tea cakes for Savva when no one was looking.
    • • •
    Anna said, “Very well, I’ll ask.” This time, she had sought me out. I sat at a table, playing solitaire, she insisted on standing. She said, “What do you and my husband hold against one another?”
    I made her wait for my answer. “Our differences. Or similarities. Maybe we each dislike our own reflection in the other.”
    “You are not being earnest.”
    “You are not asking the right question.”
    “Are you seeking my company because you want to annoy your brother?”
    What splendid riposte! There were a few embers smoldering behind that demure facade. Yet I rewarded her only by another deck-shuffling pause and then by a very loaded, “ No