“Well, maybe not exactly narrated by him . . .”
Early in 2006, a strange sequence of events made me realize that The House of Ice was after all a part of my destiny. On February 6, Luba went to UC Berkeley to give a job talk about the historical romances of Pushkin and Lazhechnikov. (She got the job.) On February 8, a life-size replica of the 1740 House of Ice was unveiled in St. Petersburg’s Palace Square, directly across from the Hermitage. It was almost as if Luba’s attention to Lazhechnikov’s out-of-print classic had generated some kind of etheric projection. Of course, the ice palace wasn’t really an etheric projection; its construction had required five hundred tons of ice and $150,000, underwritten by a city-wide initiative called White Days (designed to boost tourism in the winter off-season). For three hundred euros, you could get married in the House of Ice, and for three thousand euros you could spend your whole wedding night there, just like those unfortunate jesters.
Luba and I had to get close to it—to touch it with our own hands. I decided to pitch the story to The New Yorker, which had recently published my first piece of journalism: a profile of a former Thai kickboxing champion who now ran a gym in San Francisco. The New Yorker conceded that it might be nice to have a “Postcard from St. Petersburg” about the ice palace—but only so long as I was “already going to be in Petersburg anyway.” Unversed as I was in the ways of print journalism, it took me ten minutes to figure out what they really meant: they didn’t want to pay travel expenses. For neither the first nor last time in my academic career, Grisha Freidin saved the day. He helped me round up two thousand dollars in departmental funds, in exchange for which I was to write a report about the role of Lazhechnikov in the Russian cultural imagination, and also take some photographs of a house in Petersburg where Maxim Gorky had once lived. (Having copied the address wrong, I ended up taking pictures of a neighboring Yolki-Palki: one of a chain of affordable nineteenth-century-themed taverns. Finding it odd that the Russians had turned Gorky’s house into a Yolki-Palki, I remember going inside afterward to eat a pirozhok and contemplate the vagaries of history.)
“We really appreciate your undertaking this assignment on your own steam,” my editor told me on the phone. “Just remember, we don’t want a travel piece. What we want is a postcard, a snapshot, with lots of wonderful details. Do you know what I mean? Like if you can get an interview with whoever made the doorknobs—little things like that.”
“Interview whoever made the doorknobs,” I repeated, jotting it in my notebook.
“Doorknobs are just an example. Another really wonderful thing would be if you can spend a night inside the ice palace. You know: ‘Three a.m. I hear a dog barking.’ Do you think it’s a possibility that they would let you spend a night there?”
“Well . . . I think you can rent it as a honeymoon suite for three thousand euros, but first you have to get married there.”
“Uh-huh.” I heard my editor pause to drink something. “Well, see if you can get them to let you stay there without getting married, for a few hundred euros.”
I was interested to learn that, although the magazine wouldn’t reimburse me for a normal hotel, they were willing to spend up to four hundred euros for me to spend a night in an ice palace, listening to the dogs bark.
I got to Petersburg one day before Luba, who saw me off with repeated warnings to stay clear of skinheads. Petersburg has a reputation for hate crimes, and she said the two of us, with our prominent noses, would have to try to keep a “low profile.”
Copious, fine-grained snow gusted and swirled through the night skies, rattling against the windows of the taxi. I had made an online reservation, which proved to occupy one floor in an amazingly cheap hostel on the Liteyny Prospekt, a narrow, dark building. In the entrance hall, behind an apparently soundproof window, a tiny wispy-bearded old man, resembling a Dr. Seuss character, was staring intently at a very old radio. When I knocked tentatively on the glass he hurried outside, greeted me in halting but very correct English, and insisted on carrying my suitcase up the four flights of stone stairs to the hostel rooms. Behind an enormous purple upholstered door, which the old man unlocked with a huge skeleton key, lay an irregularly shaped area with sofas, armchairs, and a blaring television set. Sprawled on two of the sofas, five deeply Slavic-looking men with thick necks and shaved heads were eating tinned meat from gigantic tins and drinking beer from even more gigantic cans. Because of the way the room was arranged, the old man and I had to walk between their sofa and the television to get to the hallway. The shiny-headed Slavs, who had been laughing loudly at something, fell silent and followed us with their eyes.
Luba is going to kill me, I thought.
“Pilots, you know,” the little old man whispered, setting down my suitcase at the end of a dark passage. “We get a lot of them. Nice boys.” He demonstrated three times how to lock and unlock the door. “It doesn’t hurt to lock your door at night and leave the key in the lock.”
The room was painted pale green, and contained two collapsible steel cots, a wardrobe, a table, and two chairs. A chandelier hung from the ceiling—not from the center of the ceiling, but almost in a corner, like a sleeping bat. (“Was it my heart—a bird—that was caught in your locks that unfortunate night,” as the immortal Navoi wrote, “or was it bats of some kind?”) Outside the bay window, sodium lights turned everything a dull pink: the street, the steps, the eddying snow. Here and there, lone Russians in shapeless fur coats and hats rushed along the sidewalks, eyes fixed on the ground.
I thought about trying to go to bed, but I wanted to shower first, and couldn’t work up my nerve to go to the communal bathrooms, which were a few feet away from the pilots and their television. I put my coat back on and headed out for a walk.
“Good evening,” I said to the pilots on the way out.
“Good evening,” one of them replied.
An eviscerating wind blew in from the canals. Humanoid statues glared down from every alcove and pediment; atlantes and caryatids rolled their eyes under every portico. Petersburg is a scary place. In literature, it often figures as the scene of a murder.* Furthermore, the tap water is supposed to cause giardiasis. Bearing this in mind, I stopped at a grocery store to buy bottled water and, taking a pointer from the pilots, a five-hundred-milliliter can of Baltika. In front of me in line were two men with unshaven, alcohol-ravaged faces. They were both buying boxes of chocolate decorated with roses and music notes.
“And a teddy bear,” one of them growled at the clerk, who languidly handed him a huge, sad-looking gray plush bear. Only then did I notice the cardboard decorations and realize it was the night before International Women’s Day. The two men paid for their chocolate boxes and stuffed them in their jackets. The one who had bought the bear shoved it under his arm. The last thing I saw as they went into the snow was the head of the sad-looking gray bear sticking out of the man’s armpit.
When I got back to the hostel, the airmen were nowhere to be seen. I took a shower. Warm at last, I spent the rest of the evening sitting on my cot, sipping the icy beer and reading Anna Ioannovna: Evgeny Anisimov’s definitive biography of the empress who decided to marry her jesters in a house made of ice.
Today, Russians remember Empress Anna primarily for her love of jesters, dwarfs, and Germans, all of whom enter into her biography at an early point. In 1710, when Anna was seventeen, her uncle Peter the Great arranged her marriage to Duke Friedrich Wilhelm, the German ruler of the small duchy of Courland: a strategic alliance, intended to bolster Russia’s support of Courland against its big neighbors, Prussia and Poland. At the wedding banquet, the tsar cut open two pies with his dagger. A splendidly dressed dwarf jumped out of each pie and together they danced a minuet on the table. The next day, Peter treated his guests to a second wedding: that of his favorite dwarf, attended by forty-two other dwarfs from all corners of the empire. Some foreign guests saw a certain symmetry in the double wedding, one between two miniature people, the other between two pawns in the great game of European politics.