1812 Vin de glacier (ice wine)
A year later, despite the circumstances in which he found himself, Sobran was conscious that it was that night. He went to church, stood at the back while the congregation – culled of all those who had fled: the propertied, prosperous, well and whole, the well-placed and all their servants – stared at him in hostility. Poor sickly people. The priest was shabby, unused to officiating in so great a church. In the candlelight his beard looked verminous, seemed to seethe. He hadn’t stinted on the incense, which flowed sluggishly from censers swung by two elderly laymen. In the darkness above the candles gilt-tiled mosaics glittered like a nest of snakes stirring. Sobran looked up and saw Christ’s raised hands, the elongated flames of tapers standing in still air. His gaze found angels, in heavy brocaded gowns, and with perky, impractical wings, without sinew. Among the flock, all gold-haired and gold-gowned, was one with hands, feet and face as black as gangrene, as black as frostbite, but serene.
When he looked down, Sobran found a woman staring at him. Through the loose knit of the shawl that covered her head shone hair the colour of butter. Her skin was the watery white shade of a freshly cut raw potato, her brows and lashes as blond and glossy as straw. She didn’t look away, nor did she smile, just met his eyes with a look of sober calculation, then gestured with her head toward the door.
Sobran followed her out into the day. The street was hazy with smoke from the fires in the Chinese Bazaar. The square outside the church was filled with shadow-making rubbish, a wagon with a broken wheel, a split barrel, tangled bundles of bedding or clothes, dropped by refugees, perhaps in lieu of their corpses.
She took him to her house, a first-floor room, piled with dusty luggage. She had no money, no food, and was full of child. Sobran realised this as she climbed the stairs. Until then her walk had seemed stately, her body substantial, but all her own. He couldn’t understand a word she said as she stood in the middle of her chamber and pointed about her. She wasn’t pleading, for her tone was flat; nor defeated, for she showed not fear but pride as she let the shawl slip from her hair and began to unbutton her smock.
Her breasts were great, stiff, and veined blue. Sobran didn’t touch them, but took her hands and had her step up on a box, then he turned her and lifted her skirt. She wore no drawers, and her sex was like a heavy purse, in its blond hair as dark as cured meat. Her stomach hung, enormous, full term, her navel another nipple, but pressed bloodless. Sobran unbuttoned, spat on his hand, wet her and worked himself in. He thrust his arms through the silky cascade of her hair and took her breasts, as heavy and soft as kid wineskins, pressed them against her ribs, gathered her in, close, momentous, her braced legs and arms trembling, as she supported the weight of both of them and he passed through her ghostly pallor, her slippery grip, in a fiery point like gunfire, four explosions, then a dry fire, and he began to diminish.
Sobran couldn’t see, his ears rang – then a warm wave broke against his pelvis, and washed his shrinking penis out of her. Her waters had broken, and ran, glistening, down her legs.
Within a minute Sobran had pulled up his breeches, picked up his hat and coat and was on the landing outside her door. He hadn’t paid. She hadn’t called out, but he could hear her whimpering.
He went back, wrapped a blanket around her and got her on to the bed, told her he’d fetch a neighbour, a woman. Before going out again he pulled his purse from his tunic and dropped several coins into a wooden bowl by the bed, where they rattled among two withered pears and two dead wasps.
It was no squalid tenement. Every apartment was of a good size – several rooms, three floors and cramped attics – but all were uninhabited, only the large furniture remaining: bedsteads, wardrobes, tables and sideboards, one rolled mattress wedged hopelessly tight in a doorway.
Sobran went back out into the street. The few people there moved away from him. Soldiers around a fire, his own countrymen, laughed, told him to leave her, Russian whore. One, very sullen, asked if there was more, should he pump her up? He filled his cheeks to blow while jerking his hips a number of times. The other soldiers laughed. Sobran backed off and turned, alone, and looked at the blind windows, the littered road, near and far, the hazy sky over glossy gold bulbs of domes, gold chains strung, spire to spire, dividing the sky into high corrals for who knew what kind of cattle.
He went back to the church and spoke to one of the women at the rail, then to the shabby priest. He couldn’t make himself understood till an ancient man in black hobbled from a side chapel where he was praying at the tomb of some great family. As a great man’s servant he spoke French and interpreted Sobran’s plea – there was a woman, alone, about to give birth. The priest asked two old women if they would be so kind as to go with him. Sobran led them across the square, through the portal, up the stairs and to the woman’s door, then retreated back through them as they rushed forward to surround the bed. He saw her heavy white arm rise from the blankets. She took the priest’s hand. Sobran hurried away.
He passed the soldiers at the fire, and looting Austrian infantrymen from a levied contingent, criss-crossing from building to building like bees whose hives are being moved. He went back to the encampment in the Kremlin; and to Baptiste, who was on punishment for drunkenness, and polishing tackle outside the stable that housed the colonel’s horses. Sobran said he’d found a full sow of a whore and Baptiste said being in this country was as useless as fucking a pregnant whore – an imperial army that wouldn’t even defend this verminous cunt of a city but was happier to go and sit in a swamp. Did Sobran know that the city was again on fire, over the river? It was like trying to catch a lizard, making Russia a subject. ‘All we’ve got is the tail. And nothing to eat but weeks-old bread and soup of twice-boiled chicken bones.’ Beneath Baptiste’s hand, and the rag, the blacking and beeswax made the saddle-leather flash white.
*
Five months later they marched, with a wind at their backs that blew all the way from Siberia, that slowed and gripped, a freezing vice. Russia seemed to want to keep the Grand Army, after all.
Sobran marched among other gunners. They had long since abandoned their stranded cannon. Sobran’s wet breath had frozen, fastening his scarf to his mouth. He let it be. There was nothing to eat and no need to speak. For days he’d coaxed Baptiste; now he supported him. He watched their feet, and the trail of muddy snow the column made. He had known men to stray, thought he’d seen them through the curtaining snow, stumbling blots that shrank and dimmed. He forgot how to shout. Days ago, when he’d seen shapes, he had thought of ambush – the harassing Cossacks – but whoever lived here had only to leave the Grand Army alone in order to secure its ruin. Sobran hadn’t spoken all day, and it was a day since Baptiste had said his last coherent words, looking up at the column: ‘Where are our colours?’ The men around them now were a mix of three different regiments.
Sobran looked up again. The snow was brighter. There was some muttered speculation. Would it clear? Hadn’t the wind relented a little? A man from the Alps said that, if it cleared, if the sky opened right up, they’d all die of cold shortly after nightfall. Better hope it keeps snowing. There was a rumour of shelter ahead. Stone walls, food and fuel, their best hope.
Baptiste stumbled and they both fell, losing their place in the line as men moved around them, till one, still capable of neighbourly behaviour, helped Sobran get Baptiste up. They walked him between them. Sobran caught sight of another straggler, a wide-shouldered phantom in the blizzard. The column curved towards the figure, which stood, immobile, solidifying slowly. It was a wayside shrine – wood, shingles, ironwork, snow feathering the iron like goosedown. There was a pulse of relief through the column: the shelter was more than a rumour. Sobran turned his head stiffly to peer into Baptiste’s face. It was snow-crusted, his skin dark and ice-crisped, with raw fissures across the cheeks. Baptiste’s eyes were filmed and milky.
They limped on.
At the end of that worst stretch of the longest leg of the re
treat, Sobran didn’t know whether they had overshot the village, the shelter, or were perhaps coming at it by a spiralling course. He walked, his arm welded to his friend’s side, and didn’t register the moment of his arrival at the byre, didn’t see the thorn hedge, or batten fence, just stumbled over a stone lintel on to a flagstone floor strewn with straw, the lustre of summer still in it. Then his feet passed through a gory flood from the opened neck of a cow, steam boiling from the blood and creeping over the assembled soldiers like tendrils of marsh mist. Breath stood at each soldier’s lips like a phantom sunning itself on the threshold of a tomb.
Sobran found a place and set Baptiste down. He was too tired to wait for the thaw to permit him to unwrap his friend’s face, or his own. He went to sleep.
His flesh was petrified, replaced like petrified wood by brittle minerals. He warmed. The bed was warm. Its mattress had been slit and his body pushed in among the feathers, into a sleek container, a pod, or a boat, or two wings like hands cupped to catch water. A voice said, precise, a sunlit dewdrop shaking in a spider web: ‘You are an animal.’
Sobran woke sobbing. The skin of his cheeks, where his beard didn’t reach, had come away on the scarf as it loosened. There was no feeling in the scabbed tip of his nose, but he could smell roast beef. Someone helped him to sit up from the straw, and put a knife in his hand, spitted on its tip a thick slab of charred meat. ‘You’re lucky, I saved some for you,’ said the gunnery sergeant; then, ‘Kalmann died. We put his body outside with the others: Le Borde and Henri Tipoux.’
Sobran looked for grief but saw only the meat. He had no appetite, but the sight of the meat had meaning.
‘I’ve seen men do that, reach safety, then die,’ the sergeant said. Then, ‘Eat, Jodeau.’
Sobran took the edge of the cool bloody meat into his mouth.
1813 Vinaigre (vinegar)
The beneficiary of his friend’s will, and owner now of two south-facing slopes, a vineyard that straddled the road – for both Baptiste and the elder Jodeau were dead, one buried in the crowded churchyard three miles from his home, the other still melting into the soil of a village near Vilna – Sobran Jodeau stood, at moonrise on a night a week after midsummer, on the ridge that no longer divided his property into equal halves. He stood turned to the moon so that he could be seen – his face, and the half-mask of scars where the ice had clawed him.
When the angel came he stood between Sobran and the moon.
‘Look at me,’ Sobran said.
‘Frostbite?’ the angel asked, his voice mild and curious.
Sobran asked, ‘Why didn’t you counsel me to stay at home?’
‘I’m not here to advise you.’
‘You did advise me. You told me to marry Céleste.’
The angel was still for a moment, then moved his head slightly and said, ‘I don’t think I did.’
‘You said you would toast my wedding.’
‘That wasn’t a prediction.’
‘These past years – there were times when I thought you were with me. But they were the wrong times. Wrong for a guardian.’
The angel ignored this – didn’t seem to hear – but his voice was faintly altered as he went on, calmly frank as ever, but with the merest hint of hauteur. ‘I came those two nights. On one it rained. I went down into the kitchen of your house – looked at myself in the high polish on Céleste’s copper pans. I saw your daughter’s stable of hobby horses – all the matched blacks and browns and greys of her father’s socks. Your absence afforded her many horses.’
‘Why do you come here?’ Sobran asked.
‘I promised.’
‘I release you from your promise!’
‘It wasn’t you I promised,’ the angel said quietly.
Sobran, defeated, unable to raise a hand to the angel, either in anger or for help, dropped on to his knees. Then shame carried him through a barrier, and he cast himself forward to touch the warm smooth skin of the angel’s feet. He said, ‘I’ve been drunk and whoring. And a thief; I robbed the dead. My friend Baptiste is dead and I’ve profited by it. And Sabine forgot me. My other daughter, Nicolette, doesn’t know me at all. She cried and wouldn’t give up her place in bed beside her mother.’
One foot was moving under Sobran’s hand, tapping. Sobran stopped sobbing and sat back on his heels. Yes, the foot was tapping. The angel was looking at it too.
‘I’m making a mockery, of course,’ the angel said, ‘of my impatience. For me impatience would be unseemly, as if I took to wearing a timepiece. You should tell me about it. The fights in Tyrol. The battle, Borodino. How your friend died. The injuries you suffered and caused. Talk to me – I’m neither innocent nor ineducable.’
Sobran said, sulkily, ‘I must say this: you did promise these meetings.’
‘So did you, in very bad grace, then broke your promise.’
Something further occurred to Sobran. ‘Did you only suggest that I marry Céleste?’
The angel didn’t reply.
Sobran stepped up to the angel, and noticed as he did so that the angel was scarcely taller than him, and of a lighter build than he had remembered. ‘You spoke as though you knew what was best for me.’
‘Has what’s happened not been for the best?’
‘My friend is dead.’
‘He went before you …’
The angel was reminding Sobran that Baptiste was in Heaven – and Sobran wanted to hit him. He put his hands up, and the angel, by reflex, tilted his face out of reach – and into the moonlight, so that his beauty raised a glassy barrier through which Sobran couldn’t touch him, a barrier through which neither violence nor tenderness could pass. The angel went on, adjusting his words, his voice full of cool scorn, ‘Baptiste went into the army before you. He’d have died without you. And is Céleste not a good wife? Do you now not want a wife?’
Sobran stared at the angel through a minute of silent fury – it seemed to him on both their parts. Then he answered, ‘I’m satisfied with my wife, and I can bear the loss of my friend. But you trouble me. Why do you come here? Why did you first come and why did you promise to meet me again?’
The angel took a deep breath then huffed out hard through his nose, like an impatient parade horse. ‘I returned because it pleased me to promise you, and to keep my promise. I returned to see what happened about your love troubles. That first night, the night we met, I’d only stopped here to rest. The rose bush I carried was heavy. Or, to be exact, its damp roots were. It was of no great height and pruned back to dead wood, little more than a bag of roots in soil. I dropped it when I caught you – when you fainted. And I lost it. But the year it rained and I went down to your house I saw that someone had found and planted it. The pink rose I carried from Denmark and was transporting to my garden.’ Sometimes the angel was vague, and the other times exhaustively informative. It made him sound unreliable. He said, ‘I have a – I’m not sure what word best fits – a collection of earthly roses.’
‘You’re a botanist?’ Sobran gazed at the angel in amazement. A collection of roses seemed such an ordinary thing, like the passion of a country priest. ‘Aren’t all flowers to be found in Heaven?’
‘Everyone’s a theologian,’ the angel said, droll. Then, ‘All things thrive in Heaven, so are unlike their earthly selves. Anyone who hoped to grow earthly roses in Heaven would be obliged to keep fetching fresh specimens.’ The angel touched the young man’s face, where ice had gnawed his flesh. His touch was firm, like a physician’s, and his fingertips were evenly upholstered by resilient calluses, like the pads on a cat’s paw. The angel was thoughtful. ‘When are you truest, a perfect Sobran Jodeau? Is every scar or sign of age a departure? Where is your prime? How would I recognise you, thriving in Heaven?’ He withdrew his hand.
‘Tell me your name.’
‘Why? I’m the only angel you’re likely to meet in your lifetime. In your thoughts “my angel”.’
‘Is it a secret?’
‘No. My name is Xas. Like spi
t and vinegar – sass. X-A-S. I’m of the lowest of the nine orders. Unmentioned in Scripture or Apocrypha.’ He lifted his other hand – the one that hadn’t touched – to pass Sobran a wicker-wrapped wine bottle that he’d held all the while. ‘It’s Yayin, from Noah’s vineyard. The vintner’s family tell everyone that their vines were planted by Noah. They have made this claim since before the Crusades, sometimes believing, sometimes to increase the value of their wine. But Noah did plant that vineyard.’
‘Vines from rootstock that came through the great flood?’ Sobran asked, reverent.
Xas laughed. ‘The château’s cellared vintages are better. And, by the way, that’s what you should do – build a bigger cellar, and stop supplying all the château’s table wine. Do your best to hoard your best.’
‘We don’t have an inn, guests to entertain, a table to keep up. We are not gentlemen. And it’s a terrible trouble to transport bottled vintage. The longer the road the more is spoiled.’
‘I flew the Yayin from Palestine,’ the angel said; then, slightly excited and nonsensical, ‘Did you see the coalmines in the Ruhr? The machines that pump out the water?’
‘I don’t understand you,’ Sobran said.
‘Never mind, just make sure that, when the roads improve, you have good old wine to ship beyond your pays.’
‘More advice.’
‘Angelic husbandry.’ The angel shrugged. ‘I have time. I’ll nag at you next year too. Right now, before the dawn comes, I want you to tell me about the Grand Army, and the campaign. About Baptiste and how you fared.’