To the Hermitage (13 page)

Now, evidently, the end game has begun. The Duma is no longer speaking in defence of parliamentary democracy: an ancient Russian package of nationalism, militarism, celebration of the glorious KGB and a return to the discipline of the Gulags is on offer again. A mixed, menacing band of soldiers and other armed men, a sudden army, is now strutting about the White House, and piles of automatic rifles are stacked for use.
Cut to:
Man in Lenin-like posture shouting into a megaphone from Lenin’s tomb in Red Square.
Cut to:
Tzar Boris, beaming strangely, and moving with that slow stately step that suggests he first learned to walk at some state funeral, as he passes through the grand rooms of the Kremlin.
Cut to:
several Russian experts in a Moscow studio, all wearing entire chestfuls of ancient military medals, and apparently explaining that this time Yeltsin has miscalculated disastrously.
Cut to:
blazered American ex-Secretaries of State in a Washington studio, telling us the New World Order that began when the Berlin Wall came down and Russia collapsed is finally over. Time to get ready; we’re returning to the Old World, Cold World Order again.

It’s all chaos, noisy confusion. History generally is. Yet from the confusion I grasp one sure and certain thing. To be quite frank, I have no real idea of what Bo Luneberg’s much-discussed Diderot Project is; many intellectual projects tend to end up like this. All I’ve grasped is that it involves a sponsored journey of homage to the life of a delightful writer-philosopher whose work I know and love, a free ferry-trip to the city of Saint Petersburg (Pushkin’s famous ‘shattered fragment of wanton power’, Gogol’s ‘cloudy city’ made out of straight lines, Anna Akhmatova’s ‘phantasmagora’), a visit to the glorious Hermitage and the library of the great Tzarina, a long serious look along the Nevsky Prospekt: in short, a solemn pilgrimage down the Enlightenment Trail to one of its prime sites. And I’m here because it is an enlightened intellectual project, because our admirable Bo can be – when he wishes – a wonderfully persuasive and learned fellow, and because I am, as I said earlier, one of those people who says yes to everything. But whatever our project is, one thing has surely now become luminously clear. This just ain’t going to happen. The chaos of history is busy, far too real and present, for that sort of high-minded academic junketing. Whatever our foray to the lost world of Russian Enlightenment was out to achieve, the great laws of reason tell me it’s definitely going to be cancelled.

And sad as that may be for the advancement of learning, right now this feels perfectly all right by me. I’m feeling tired, really tired, completely worn out by the events of the day – the early-morning check-in at postmodern Stansted, the briny Stockholm air, the visit to the Vasa, the long and wearying quest for Descartes, the herring dinner in the midst of an
alkoholfri
bohemia, the silent Kierkegaardian postmodern concert. I’m soaked in shame over my earlier somnolence; now I just want to sleep without sin. I’m far too drained to write an academic paper, on a subject and for some seminar occasion whose membership and purpose no one has properly explained to me. In minutes I’m undressed and safe under a vast Nordic duvet as big as a classic Amsterdam whore. Stockholm lies as enigmatically silent as a postmodern concert beyond the triple-glazed windows. In minutes more, the television set still flickering, I’m deeply, gratefully asleep. And this time without any orchestral accompaniment at all.

Morning. Here I am again. And this particular new morning announces itself with a clanging of trams, a bonging of public bells, a buzzing of planes, a honking of ships’ sirens resounding from some harbour not too far away. Plainly I’m in a foreign city. Through thin pastel blinds of a tasteful design, a faint and far from confident sun is trying to shine in and awake me, with not very much success. I am, after all, a well-known slugabed. I draw myself out of the usually reassuring world of sleep and into the far from reassuring one of regular daily consciousness. My dreams overnight have not been benign. Indeed, as I recall their traces, they’ve been truly terrible. There have been drowned corpses, huge ship-like churches with bleeding saints, silver coffins, skulls carved by glittering knives into the most mysterious shapes. There are soldiers in corridors, gun-barrels lifting into the air. I must presume conscience is paining me, and I wake anxious, guilty, sensing I’ve done something wrong. Have I? Of course I have, for God’s sake. Last night I slept in public in the presence of advanced creative art.

Right, so just remind me: where am I then? Stockholm, Sweden’s fine watery capital. When? Early October 1993. Why? I’m travelling on the Enlightenment Pilgrimage . . . A noise disturbs me. Across the room, the TV set I’ve fallen asleep in front of still flickers; and I see at once that history has gone on being busy in my absence. I find the remote, flip up the sound, try to discover what’s been happening. The voices stay confusingly Swedish, but it’s quite clear things in Moscow have not improved. Tzar Yeltsin – there he is, a strange drunken doll-shaped automaton – has departed imperiously for his dacha outside the city, though not, it seems, before cutting off all heat, light, telephones and refreshments to the White House and leaving it in a state of siege. The deputies – there they all are – have slept on benches, lain huddled in sweaters. Bands of armed mercenaries and police guards stand waiting in every corridor, anticipating the great night-time attack. Priests, communists, old believers and eagle-waving monarchists have gathered protectively around the building. ‘A terrible war is coming,’ Khasbulatov has promised them.

Now, as dawn comes to the barricaded, blocked-off White House, the legislators and soldiers are rising, feisty, ripe for action, gathering round microphones, intoning baritonal songs about freedom and glory, reading patriotic poems, announcing their wish to carry revolt through to a splendid and bloodstained end. The street parades – there they are – have multiplied, in scale, vehemence, rage, violence, zealotry. Down the street the red hammer-and-sickled banners of the old Russian communism march proudly this way, trying to call back the past. Up the street the red-blue-and-white banners of the CRS march just as proudly that way, trying to figure out the future. Here again come the Washington gurus, announcing in English that Yeltsin’s days are numbered, the free market era is over, and all sensible investors should start buying stock in Star Wars again.

So. I climb out of bed and walk over to the window (‘
WARNING
. Do not open. This window is for your viewing convenience only’). Here in the moral kingdom there seems not a great deal to worry about. Beyond the reassuring triple-glazing, the ordinary life of a delightful, solid and wealthy bourgeois city is under way. Across the courtyard, in the window of a pleasant grey apartment block, a small girl practises the cello, as every decent small girl should. In another a short-haired small boy boots up his personal computer, and will no doubt soon be hacking into the Nikkei Index. Maids in neat black dresses dust perfectly clean windows. Gardeners in blue suits brush up perfectly neat lawns. I head for the neat sweet-smelling bathroom. I take a shower, reusing yesterday’s soaking towels to announce my most sincere respect for Sweden’s beautiful lakes and seas. By the time I’m done, a forbidding maid has come in with continental breakfast. It sits waiting for me on the table: rich coffee, steaming rolls, bacterially-active yoghurts, free-range salamis, bilberry juice. A note tells me that this is all organic produce, and all the animals involved were wonderfully happy until shortly before I chose to consume them.

As big bear-like history rumbles on at the Baltic’s still distant other end, I sip my coffee, eat the animals, work out my own tinier, more tediously human plans. These involve changing my air-ticket, phoning my family to warn them their happy respite is over, packing, finding a taxi, heading for Arlanda and home. Plainly, no one possessed of logic and reason would be heading for Russia at this moment. But a scholar is a scholar, academic duty a serious matter. So first I pick up the telephone, dial 9, and call the Technological University to secure Bo’s personal confirmation that the Enlightenment Project has gone onto hold. The person I talk to is not our professor himself but one of his fluent and friendly secretaries. She tells me that (even while I’ve been waking, showering, snacking) the good professor has already been in, taught two classes, failed an incompetent student, marked a heap of essays and returned them, answered his correspondence, examined a doctoral thesis on Swedenborg, spread several false rumours to the press about the Nobel Prize, picked up his umbrella and gone off again. No one in the office seems to be quite sure whither, but gossip says that his steps lead eastward, and probably to Russia. No one is any surer when or if he will be back – though he is advertised in the corridor to deliver an important public lecture on the matter of the diphthong in just over two weeks’ time.

What does it mean? Could the Diderot Project truly be happening after all? Putting departure plans on temporary hold, I wander off into lovely Stockholm. The weather still stays nicely warm for the season; we may all expect a pleasant, crisp, sunny day. I do a little domestic shopping, and pick up a few high-priced Nordic artefacts to show
frau
and
kinder
I really have been away, and not just hiding in the attic upstairs. I go down to the waterfront, to inspect the busy ferry traffic. I watch the men play chess, and let my thoughts rove wantonly. For literary purposes, I revisit the food market: cold herring, non-alcoholic beer, leggy girls. I return to my hotel to check on my messages and then check out. There are no messages; no word has come from the battalions of the Enlightenment. I shall simply have to assume that, despite the bloody collapse of the state, the coming of a terrible war, and other such local difficulties, our Diderot trip to Russia is on after all. I summon a taxi, put my luggage into it, and ask for the ferry harbour. The driver of the Volvo (‘No smoking. No eating. Fasten seat belt. This driver never carries any change’), a voluble Turk, tells me that, even in this land of liberal decency, he and his kind are illiberally called ‘blacktops’, and constantly urged to go back to where they came from. This does not deter him from charging me a truly Swedish fare.

I unload my luggage into the middle of a drab, noisy, crowded, arc-lit concrete plain. The Stadsgardeskajan terminal is a thriving commercial madhouse. Freight-wagons shunt, huge refrigerated trucks fume, sea-gulls scream, seeking a passage to the distant sea. Cranes heave, vast orange containers swing high above me, sheds of warehouses ingest and disgorge. Vodka from Novgorod and Ikea chairs from the Upplands meet sound-systems from Korea and hashish from Pakistan. The sea stinks vigorously of oil. Along the dockside, beyond the terminal buildings, stand the Baltic ferries: vast floating hotels, each one lit up like Christmas, huge metal jaws jammed wide open to consume the long lines of cars, buses and container trucks waiting in rows on the concrete. Foot passengers swarm from buses and taxis and head for the wooden terminals. Helsinki, Tallinn, Riga, say the signboards. Walking under the arc lights, I look for the Russian ferries. I doubt they will be sailing; and yet, it seems, they are. At the entrance of the terminal shed is a big destination board:
SANKT PETERBURG
, it confidently declares. And beyond the customs shed a huge white ferry lies at the dock, pulsing away at its moorings, all ready for afternoon boarding. Only one problem. That’s not the right ship, the
Anna Karenina
. It’s an older, sharper, more aggressive sister vessel, the
Vladimir Ilich
.

And it’s now it really comes. Gloom, I mean: pure, deep-in-the-forest-on-All-Fool’s-Night Nordic gloom. But let me explain to you (as they so love to say in Sweden) the reason for my sensations of utter despair . . .

As I think I said already, I’m a writer: in other words, the sort of person who, by nature, love, vocation, motivation, prefers writing to doing, meditation to action, fiction to history, dreams to the world. For – let’s admit it – fiction is infinitely preferable to real life, which is a pretty feeble fiction anyway. As long as you avoid the books of Kafka or Beckett, the everlasting plot of fiction has fewer futile experiences, dull passages, worthless days, useless contingencies than the careless plot of reality written in Destiny’s book above. Fiction’s people are fuller, deeper, cleverer, more moving than those in real life. Its actions are more intricate, illuminating, noble, profound. There are many more dramas, climaxes, romantic fulfilments, twists, turns, gratified resolutions. Unlike reality or for that matter history, all of this you can experience without leaving the house or even getting out of bed. What’s more, books are a form of intelligent human greatness, as stories are a higher order of sense. As random life is to destiny, so stories are to great authors – who (despite modern theory) really exist, and provided us with some of the highest pleasures and the most wonderful mystifications we can find.

And few stories are greater than
Anna Karenina
, that wise epic book by an often foolish author. For, as Lev Tolstoy told us himself, history is a deaf man who answers questions nobody wished to ask in the first place. As he also said, history – the Napoleonic stuff, leaders, generals, great conflicts, revolutions and grand destinies – isn’t true history at all. That’s lived in the heart and home, in happy and unhappy families, among the trivialities and the dull domestic detail. In the end it is lived only in the self, the only place where anything’s really ever lived. Yes, Tolstoy was an annoying old prophet, who died in his eighties at an obscure railway station, following the fate of his most famous character, as if that too were written in the Book of Destiny above. It’s because the perverse old man was so right, and modern history feels so wrong, that I’m here in the first place. For several weeks I’ve been looking forward to sailing the seas on the
Anna Karenina
, along with the great quadrille: Levin and Kitty, Anna and Vronsky. When Bo Luneberg summoned me wet from my English bath with his mysterious telephone invitation to join his Diderot pilgrims, it was the name of the boat we’d sail on that made me say ‘Yes.’ (Even though I often do, as I rather think I said.)