Ice Trilogy Read Online Free

carefully hidden from everyone. Vanya informed me that children were only made at night. I began to listen carefully at night. And once, walking by my parents’ bedroom, I heard the same moans and growling. Returning to my own bed, I lay there and thought: What a very strange activity this is, making children. Only one thing remained unclear — why is it all hidden?
    In the morning at breakfast, when Marfusha, Klim, and Father’s old servant Timofei were serving us, and everyone sitting at the table was, as usual, discussing news from the front, I suddenly asked, “But is Marfusha going to have a baby?”
    The conversation stopped. Everyone looked at Marfusha. At that moment she was holding a porcelain dish from which the gray-haired, bulbous-nosed Timofei was ladling farina porridge onto our plates with his customary, long-suffering, anxious expression. Klim, standing in the corner of the dining room at the samovars, was filling glasses with tea. Marfusha turned redder than she had in the hut. The dish shook in her hands. Klim looked askance at me and grew pale.
    Mother saved everyone. Most likely, she had guessed about the ties between the maid and the servant.
    “Shurochka, Marfusha will have five children,” she said. Then she added: “Three boys and two girls.”
    “That’s right,” Father agreed, frowning as he spooned jam abundantly over his porridge. “And then — another five. So that there’s someone to go to war.”
    Everyone laughed approvingly. Marfusha tried to smile.
    She had a hard time of it.
    With each month the war intruded into our lives more and more. Vasily arrived home from the front. Not on his own two legs — he was driven from the train station in Father’s automobile. The automobile blew its horn three times, and we ran out to meet our war hero, who had written short but memorable letters. Vasily stepped out of the automobile and, leaning on the chauffeur and Timofei, began climbing the steps to meet us. He was wearing an overcoat and a peaked cap, and his face was very yellow. Timofei carefully held his wooden stick. Vasily smiled guiltily. We rushed to kiss him. Mama sobbed. Father walked over and stood nearby, gazing tensely at Vasily and blinking. His strong chin trembled.
    In Poland, near Lovich, Vasily had been in a German gas attack. Although my brother had been poisoned with chlorine, the serpentine words “mustard gas” slithered into me.
    Sitting in the parlor by the blazing fireplace, Vasily had tea and pastries and told us how he ran from the chlorine cloud; how he killed eight Germans with a machine gun; how two of his frontline friends were blown to bits by one shell, the warrant officer Nikolaev and the volunteer Gvishiani; how they silently took out the sentries with a horsehair string, “the Gypsy bride”; how to fight lice and tanks; what capital flamethrowers the Germans have; and what a multitude of Russian corpses lay in a huge wheat field after the Brusilov Offensive.
    “They lay in even rows as though they’d been deliberately arranged. When they moved to attack the machine-gun nests, they were mowed down like grain.”
    We listened, holding our breath. The glass of tea shook in Vasily’s yellow hand. He kept having to cough; his eyes teared up and were always red now, as though he’d just been crying. Vasily would grow short of breath when walking; to catch his breath he’d stop and lean on his walking stick.
    Father sent him to Piatigorsk to take the waters.
    Then a year later in Moscow my oldest brother took his own life, firing a revolver at his temple and a ladies’ Browning at his heart simultaneously. Vanya said that Vasily shot himself because of a married woman with whom he had been hopelessly in love even before the war.
    Father kept growing wealthier and ever more dependent on the war. His business moved up in the world. He acquired many new acquaintances, mostly among the military. He began to drink more, and more often, and was rarely at