To the Hermitage (12 page)

. . . to wake next day to the world’s noisiest morning ever. The horns of the city watchmen are sounding, the bells of the church in the square exploding with sound. Within minutes cannons are blasting, bells ringing over the city of strange invention. Below the window, trumpets flare, kettledrums snarl, lines of imperial horse-guards trot with a clumping of hooves. He rises at once and goes to the balcony, still in his nightcap and shirt. Lines of soldiers march, the fountains are spurting wine. Parades of big-bearded priests strut past, and black-robed monks are swinging on the bell-clappers of all the onion-topped monasteries and churches. Beyond is the Neva, where galleys, yachts and merchantmen are flying their bunting and firing their pieces. From all directions, kings, queens, ambassadors and princelings from every state, duchy and margravate throughout Europe trot in their caparisoned carriages in the direction of the Cathedral to celebrate the great and sonorous nuptials.

Alas, despite that frantic rush and rattle of their journey, it seems neither he nor Narishkin will be attending the great and world-shaking ceremony after all. Narishkin has severe toothache, not to say the everlasting trots. As for our man, he simply lacks the clothes for it. His trunks, explain the servants, have been impounded for further inspection by the intrusive officers from the Custom House. In any case, he is utterly wigless. All that remains is to watch the ceremony with his host from his fine balcony, right over Saint Isaac’s square. And why not? Nothing could be better placed. The city is all there, spread out in view. Wedding bells ring, fireworks rattle, cannons explode, crowds cheer and wave. In due time the processions return, heading for the Hermitage. And here, surrounded by a battalion of the troops from the loyal Preobrazhensky guard, are the happy couple, riding in a carriage like a little castle . . .

Inside the coach sits the grim, prim young Archduke Paul Petrovitch, all pug-nosed and skull faced. This is the bitter neglected heir who will – when this fine ceremonial day turns into another, when state wedding becomes state funeral – confront the corpse of his imperial mother with the exhumed body of his murdered father (if, that is, his father really is his father, which most people including his mother would deny). Then in his turn he will be hailed as the new Tzar, crowned and fêted in the two Russian capitals. Then, four years further on still, he will be carefully strangled by his own courtiers, outraged by his excesses; many of them are riding beside him now. Next to him in the coach sits his German bride, radiant. She will take only a few years more to die in childbirth, as she seeks to deliver an infant that is most unlikely to be his. Then she will be replaced by one of her own sisters, rejected this time round.

The procession rolls on toward the Neva. Riding in the coach behind the happy nuptial couple, our man sees the one person who is so efficiently capable of making such past, present and future fortunes and misfortunes happen. This is none other than his own dear and powder-cheeked friend, the fastidious matchmaker Melchior Grimm. Considering all these things, Our Philosopher reflects they’re all no more than a wise man might expect. For, as he understands it, the life, pomp and motion of our passing days is just a form of stasis, one manifestation in some much larger and longer fatality which is probably already inscribed in some code or text or other. Maybe they are in the rituals of history, maybe they’re deep in the dynastic spirals of genes and tissue, maybe in the laws of chaos, chance and randomness, most likely in the great Book of Destiny, which is already written or in the process of being written somewhere up there in heaven above.

Which at once reminds our man; it must be writing time. As noise explodes, the celebrations grow, bells boom, noble crowds swarm toward the pink Hermitage, he finds a desk in a quiet corner, discovers a working quill and well. Not since he left the elegant if bombarded (Frederick of Prussia again) streets of Dresden has he had the time to write his postcards home. He scribbles away in pleasure, first to his spiky wife and dancing daughter, whose baby is expected soon.
C’est moi
, he announces proudly, I have arrived. Believe it or not, I’m in the right city. Throat so far uncut, but feeling more dead than alive. Most of my things are with me, apart from a nightshirt and my favourite wig. He reports in detail on his bowels, he admits his hacking cough. He offers them a promise: tempted as he might be to travel onward to the Great Wall of China, he’ll return as soon as he can by the quickest route he can, the moment his philosophical duty (creating a new Russia) is through. Thoughtfully, he adds some advice to his wife on the management of her extremely uncertain temper (‘Shift everything round at home, then unshift it, and shift it again, and everything will come out fine’). And then he recounts the bitter tale of the ingrate Falconet – whose welcome has been so icy, whose gratitude so hard to find. What could have happened to the fellow? What’s wrong? Thanks to him, I could by now be a ragged beggar, freezing to death in a Scythian snowdrift.

Utterly delighted he’ll have created a gossiping frenzy of indignation and gossip all over Paris, he picks up a second sheet. And so he sets down another letter, more reflective, intelligent, rebuking, mercurial, for this one’s to his charming, his philosophical, his not always enthusiastic mistress Sophie. He tells his adventures, reflecting as philosophers have to on the dying of passions and the weariness of age. He tells of his hopes, his dreams. He signs off lovingly, to her, her sisters, her interfering mother. Much later, as the music and human noise of a grand mêlée resounds from the nearby Hermitage, he eats a beetroot dinner at Narishkin’s fine table. There is a great crackle and blast of evening fireworks as he goes upstairs to his bedroom. Cannons from the warships anchored in the Neva volley out over the city as he lies down in his cold and comfortable Russian bed.

N
ORDIC GLOOM
. Middle-of-the-night, end-of-the-boat-pier, screaming-in-your-face, pure state-of-the-art Nordic gloom.

. . . I suppose it really begins to begin in that art nouveau bohemian café near Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theatre, as Bo, his bright Snow Queen and I reach the close of our fishy and totally teetotal meal. By now the time’s nearly eight-thirty, and beyond the café windows the great Nordic capital is already falling silent. The dour black-suited waiters who’ve been seriously shunning us all evening have suddenly grown full of energy. They wipe down the nearest tables in a frenzy, lean heavily across us to close and bolt the shutters. Then, over coffee, coffee-less coffee of course (‘We are careful never to take strong things in the evenings . . .’), as Bo begins to unbutton his little leather purse and carefully count his way through the copper and paper contents (‘No, do let me . . .,’ ‘
Nej, nej
, of course we will treat you, you are a most honoured guest from afar . . .’ ‘What lovely herring . . .’), I learn that these two cunning Lunebergs have all the time been squirrelling away a secret from me. In some fit of Nordic communion they’ve silently concluded that all’s not yet concluded, that this cold autumn night has but scarcely begun. Quite appreciating (Alma leans over the table to tell me) how intensely my life has been dedicated to new and dangerous art, how committed I am to the most illicit transgressions of the postmodern imagination, they wish to make a bold suggestion. Would I care for them to take me into . . . the danger zone?

I know exactly what this means. Of course I know all about Sweden’s puritanical permissiveness. Still, why not? Already I can see those oiled naked bodies, the healthy Nordic frankness, the glut of glistening firm bronzed blond frames. Except, as it turns out, not quite. Stockholm’s hottest ticket in town proves to be a concert by a bunch of student musicians in the
Aula
of the University. Here I can encounter the work of a new generation of Nordic composers: wild postmodern conceptualists who have determined minimalism has grown far too bulky, random improvization far too regimented. Tonight at nine they mean to go probing further, to the wildest shores of silence.

‘We knew you would want to go, of course,’ says Alma.

‘Unless perhaps your Cartesian dilemma has made you just a little bit sleepy?’ asks Bo, with the air of a playful joker.

I say yes, of course – yes is what I nearly always say. To be honest, I should have known better. Years of wandering the frontiers of the transgressive postmodern imagination have taught me what its key words mean. ‘Conceptual’ means: we haven’t thought about it much, but we’re cool, we’ll stay cool, and something will happen to which we can add the name of art. ‘Postmodern’ means: guess what, we managed to get a corporate sponsor to pay for it.

Which is why you find me, half an hour later, sitting on a hard wooden bench in a vast panelled academic hall. Given the avant-garde occasion, the audience is not quite what I would expect. It consists almost entirely of very elderly gentlemen with dark black suits, neat white beards, small state decorations in their buttonholes, and severe elderly ladies with corsages in their handsome but definitely period frontages. I shake frozen hands with a Doctor Gregorius This. I chat with a zimmer-framed Professor That. I am mostly invited to express my love of Grieg and Sibelius, though some daring soul speaks of Stockhausen. I stare up above at portraits of yet older professors and thinkers: wigged botanists, perukified classicists, grim black-clad Lutheran theologians who must have been hanging there on these academic walls for an eternity or longer. Then a small orchestra of pubescents, in evening dress, white student caps over their blonde crops, file on to the stage, bearing the usual array of musical instruments. An equally pubescent conductor makes a Swedish microphone announcement.

‘He explains this is a people’s creation. They have composed this work all of them together,’ murmurs Alma into my ear.

‘Fine,’ I whisper.

‘He says it is entirely conceptual and influenced by the nihilism of Kierkegaard,’ says Bo into my second ear. ‘The young are so clever, you must admit.’

‘I certainly do,’ I say.

Silence falls; the first item commences. Holding tightly on to their instruments, our orchestra of tinies sits onstage in total silence. From Alma’s whispers, I learn that for conceptual reasons they mean to remain like this for as long as it takes for something random to happen. What? Well, maybe someone’s mobile phone will go off. I nod. It’s wonderful. I nod again. And again. Then – whether it’s due to a long day of travelling or an excess of Baltic herring I don’t know – at a point ten minutes or so into this adventure I nod right off, into the blessed universe of sleep. For a while vague images of blonde bronzed northern frames strangely run through my slipping mind. Then some comfortable, morphine bourgeois peace overwhelms me. When I awake, to the sound of sudden applause, I can no longer recall where I am (Arizona, perhaps?), or who I am (not me, surely?). Nor do I know what has brought the awesome artistic silence to an end. But my own loud snores do have to be a serious possibility.

Now I know. I do know. There can be no excuse. This is just no way for an honoured foreign guest, guaranteed totally
alkoholfri
, to behave. It is our duty to be open at all hours to the cutting edge of art. We should all respect the seriousness of the avant-garde, even if it has been hanging around for ever, and honour the fresh creative impulses of the young, the radical and the new. Yes, it’s bad. It’s a cultural sin. Quite unforgivable. Yet nothing in the world could exceed the spirit of unspoken moral outrage which, at the interval, suddenly sweeps me out of the hall and into the foyer (‘Professor Erno Tikvist from the Nobel committee wanted so much to meet you, but clearly that will not now be possible’), and then fills the air-freshener-perfumed interior of the Lunebergs’ long, leathery and very informative Volvo (‘No smoking, no food, fasten seat belt, side impact bars, do not interfere in any way with the efforts of the driver’) as they drive me coldly back to my hotel through Stockholm’s silent, sober and no less rebuking streets. Bo is in the grimmest of moods, Alma even more the Snow Queen, as they decant me on the sidewalk outside the unlit lobby of my slumbering hotel.

‘Now you have had such a good sleep, I think you will be able to stay up all night, and write your paper for the Diderot Project,’ is Alma’s parting shot as – with many warning signals, and much flashing of the red and orange safety lights plastered on each surface of the car – they drive off, considerately, into Stockholm’s dark and chilly night.

I try to enter my night-lodgings, which have lost their spirit of gracious hospitality and are now completely shuttered and barred. A little random sleet is now falling, a police car patrols critically around the other side of the square. It takes me ten minutes of nervous bell-buzzing before a pyjama-ed night clerk appears (but it is ten-thirty already) and ungraciously grants me the loan of my own room-key, warning me that I may already have forfeited my right to order breakfast. I mount the back stairs – the lift is considerately switched off at this late hour – and find the way to my neat little bedroom.

‘Try our elite Sex Channel!!’ screams a card atop the small TV set. ‘Fabulous girls! Erotic Adventures!! Brand New Positions!!! Please keep the sound low and try not to disturb your neighbour.’

Sitting on the bed, I click the channel changer, surfing past blonde, bronzed frames, booby, brandished breasts, deep-furrowed buttocks, splayed limbs, erectile tissue, micro-camera trips through inner body tubing, an improbable cavorting of mass human and animal entanglements, in search of something that really turns me on.

Then there it is at last: the real world. In a snowy square in a squat, grey, towered city, a grey-green tank elevates and lowers its gun-barrel. Finally it takes aim on a great white public building by the river, constructed according to the highest principles of Stalinesque bad taste. In the tank-hole sits an ear-flapped driver and a fur-capped captain; the tank itself looks both dangerous and decrepit.
Cameras cut:
to a wide urban boulevard: a parade of thick-coated peasants in various forms of remarkable headwear marches boldly onward, ever onward, holding high a very old red flag. They’re setting buses on fire, building barricades in the wide streets. Fabulous histories! Military adventures!! Brand New Ideologies!!! I sit on the bed and watch, in a state of truly shameful excitement. Though the commentator’s voice is Swedish, it is not hard to appreciate what is going on.
Cut to:
the interior of the Duma; the deputies banging their desks; speeches by Yeltsin’s recent vice president, Alexander Rutskoi, and Ruslan Khasbulatov, the black-shirted and ambitious speaker of the parliament, who had been Yeltsin’s aides in resisting the last coup, against Gorbachev. I know them well enough. For weeks they and their supporters in the Duma have been out-manoeuvring Yeltsin and his crony oligarchic government, in a great game of Russian political chess. In the last days he has reacted by trying to dissolve the parliament. They have replied by trying to dissolve the president.