To the Hermitage (14 page)

Yet now, instead of sailing in the grand presence of fiction, I’m fated to sail aboard history: grim Mr History himself. Vladimir Ilich! The man who for our dying century made the whole notion of history so undesirable, made it not just unattractive but unwise even to get out of bed. I can see his sharp face now, up there on a bronze plaque just below the bridge of this smoking white ferry. There are the foxy features, beard thrust out arrogantly, one arm thrown out in the famous pose, pointing the way to the triumph of history he means to soak in as much sacrificial blood as possible. This man was once a musician, a man who read books and wrote them, till the dream consumed him. Riding his closed freight train to Petersburg’s Finland Station, he felt that History was dawning, and nothing now could wait. He became prophet of turmoil, a Robespierre to Rousseau, a Danton to Diderot. He turned reason to passion, reform into revolution, progress into pogrom, betterment into bloodbath. Before long he was grand high executioner: hangman to the kulaks, murderer to the gentry. Politics, he explained, was simply the art of banging people over the head.

True, he had very little time. The brain in his head was rotting from within. When he died in the house at Gorky, they cut out the precious cerebellum, to study the biology of his genius and compare it with all the great brains in pickle. The surgeons who examined it discovered the truth (the great thinking machine was rotting), but did not dare tell it. That was the greatest poisoned chalice: Lenin’s rotting brain. He was god for a generation; the folklore celebrated his super-human triumphs, his strange charisma. It was said he could perform miracles, save lives by touch, had a golden arm. His enemies were everyone’s enemies; by definition, those who survived were friends. But for several years now it’s seemed his day was over. We belong – at least till these last few days we thought we did – not to the Age of History but of the End of History. Ours is no longer a time of ideology; in fact it’s the Age of Shopping. Politics have turned into lifestyle, Star Wars to Nintendo, history into retro. For years the statues have kept tumbling, one by one. Iron Feliks, Feliks Dzershinsky, the man in the big dark overcoat, was winched from his perch outside the Lubyanka and sent to the scrapheap where he consigned so many; may he never come back. Vladimir’s tricky big-booted secretary, Stalin, lies broken stone and metal in weedpiles outside a hundred cities, dismantling, deconstructing, defacing.

So how does Ilich – perhaps the man of our century I dislike most, though for some reason his bust still stands on my British mantelpiece – survive? His face still stares off the rouble. His brain, cut into little strips, went adrift in the medical laboratories, but his waxen body still lies saint-like in the tomb in the Kremlin Wall he never wished to occupy (save for three weeks every summer, when he goes to the country for rest and rewaxification). Teams of embalmers sustain the holy relic, which many think still alive; eight assassination attempts have been made on the waxen corpse. True, Vladimir’s Kremlin statue is already back in Gorky – and, if Tzar Yeltsin survives the next few days, Lenin’s waxwork Posterity could soon be facing meltdown. The city he gave his name to (the city it seems I will be visiting shortly) he came to reject and punish, starving its people. He moved the capital back to Moscow, leaving Leningrad to sag on its watery Baltic foundations. No wonder its people voted to take back the name old big-boot Peter (‘What is dat?’) gave it two centuries ago.

Which is why once more it says
SANKT PETERBURG
here on the Stockholm ferry pier – just as it must have in the tzarry days before 1914. And yet somehow Vladimir Ilich, Lenin, is firmly with us still: his name on the bow, his mask on the bridge, casting his foxy, fierce political gaze over the Baltic travellers as he must have done through all the years since. I can’t really think he likes what he sees. I’ve toted my luggage into the wooden terminal now. The place is packed, the crowd pushing forward, shouting, heaving cases, waving tickets, flourishing passports. And this crowd is a crowd from the End of History: no doubt about it. First comers are the Japanese, led by a guide holding high a yellow flowered umbrella. They arrive in a line, dressed in black and white, each with a little Lycra backpack, rolling wheelie coffin-suitcases across the rubber flooring with the noise of a regiment of tanks. They pause, photograph the universe, then move on. Next come the Germans, executive-class, huge-bodied, very present; their hair blow-dried, their socks of silk, their shoes of crocodile leather. New Deutschmark adventurers, they are plainly looking for the new opening to the east. You can easily tell them from the Swedish businessmen – who are quieter, shyer souls, smaller-boned and bodied, with lighter briefcases, thinner shirts, plainer shoes, lesser ambitions, commercial fingers half-burned before they start. The Americans, of the usual backpacking kind you find everywhere, trekking through the galaxy, carrying their rough guides, baseball caps on backwards as if this way were just the same as that, listening to native hiphop through earphones plugged into their mastoid bones. A group of grey-haired American widows, all dressed like golfers, cruising the world for eternity, happy to be free of matrimony at last.

Last – Lenin watches in total incredulity – come the new big spenders: the Russians themselves, ever criss-crossing the Baltic on an unending buying spree. They’re late, of course; when you’re out of Russia every economic moment counts. Like the great Tzarina, they will purchase anything just because it exists – though for them the rule is the pinker the better. Toted on their shoulders, as after some massive adventure in rape and pillage, are all of the following: electric guitars with western plugs; boxes of soap; automatic sewing machines; Black and Decker garden strimmers; huge table lamps with art nouveau shades; electronic keyboards; whole cartons of jars of instant coffee; huge cardboard crates of Wash and Go; AIWA CD players; Barbie dolls in their booby American sex-uniforms; large dinosaurs from Jurassic Park; pocket calculators; bleepers; fax machines; electric mowers for imaginary lawns. They wear a trophy piece of everything: pink designer sunglasses, some with the labels still dangling; brand-new trainers from Adidas and Nike; baseball jackets celebrating American teams; big baggy Bermuda shorts. They’ve triumphantly plundered Benetton T-shirts, Gucci loafers, Vuitton-style handbags, Pierre Cardin-resembling shirts. Lenin stares blankly over their heads – surely hoping for some even more future future, where none of these things could be happening. Formalities to board are starting. We’re all jostling aggressively forward, talking, shouting, moving toward whatever lies ahead: customs, passports, immigrant, history, Lenin himself.

But what can have happened to Bo? I look back over the tumult of moving heads, uncertain whether to board or no. Suddenly there he is, entering the terminal at his usual slow, affable professorial ramble. He’s carrying his small umbrella, sporting his Burberry jacket, looking round with his kind academic smile. Behind him comes icy Alma, in a large suede coat and a fur hat like a rabbit, evidently clad like Lara for the Russian winter. She seems to be a beast of burden, for her arms are filled with cardboard boxes and a stack of files. Luneberg walks along the line of jostling passengers on the further side of the metal railing. He halts, unfolds and holds up a large handwritten sign.
DIDEROT PROJECT
, it says, and it works wonders. From here and there in the pushing crowd, a small group of devotees begins to detach itself, waving, gesturing, struggling through to reach him. I am one of them, of course.

Luneberg dismantles the railing and allows us to join him, greeting his small flock of philosophical pilgrims one by one. Meanwhile Alma has opened her cardboard boxes to reveal the familiar goodies of an academic congress: plastic wallets, name-tags for our lapels. Then she hands out little treats: tickets for shipboard meals, entrance tickets for the Hermitage, tickets for our cabins. I look around the party: nine of us. Each single one seems to know Luneberg perfectly well (but then we know he knows everyone); none of us seems to know any other. Who are we all then? How did we come to be here? What are we all doing? What is this about? Luneberg, affable as ever, shows no sign of any explanation. Nor does he perform the usual social offices. It’s down to us to introduce ourselves to ourselves, inspecting each other’s nametags, offering small self-announcements and handshakes.

Who’s here, then? First, there’s Anders Manders. Finely trimmed blond beard, freckled skin, firm face, eyes of a limpid blue. He is, he explains, a Swedish diplomat who was once a counsellor in the Leningrad embassy. Sven Sonnenburg: thin-faced, must be in his forties, dressed in faded denim overalls. He shyly explains that he’s a carpenter who specializes in the making of tables. Birgitta Lindhorst: big, red-haired, busty, early forties, quite wonderfully dressed. She, it turns out, is not just personally but professionally huge. For she’s a diva, an international soprano who has just been singing in
Eugene Onegin
at the Stockholm Drottningholm Theatre in the course of a world tour. Agnes Falkman, tall, Nordic, beautiful, with a blonde chignon. Also in denim overalls, though hers are of the designer kind, plastered too with all the usual messages of concerned protest – against air, water, earth, fire, food, smoking, cars, cattle, men. She works for the Swedish trades union movement, which, as everyone knows, runs the country. Then a guest from America – Jack-Paul Verso, in Calvin Klein jeans, Armani jacket, and a designer baseball cap saying
I LOVE DECONSTRUCTION
. I know his type at once: he’s a funky professor. In fact he’s Professor of Contemporary Thinking at Cornell, author of that well-known book
The Feminists’ Wittgenstein
. I’ve met him before, heard him lecture at some Californian conference or other, talked to him at some punch-drunk Gay and Lesbian Cash Bar in the hotel foyer. He’s trouble, the American academic high-flyer type, intellectual adrenalin personified, always push-push-pushing to be where it’s all at. And then, finally, there’s Lars Person. He says he’s a dramaturge from the Swedish National Theatre; he has a big white face, a saturnine black beard, a bohemian’s floppy blue hat.

A very mixed salad of people to be interested in Denis Diderot, I murmur to Verso – who just happens to be standing beside me.

‘Oh, come on now,’ he says, ‘that guy was interested in every who, which, why, what and however that ever existed or might exist in the world. We’re just the kind of crew he might have expected. You know, I only have one little problem with all of this. Just what the hell is the Diderot Project?’

‘You don’t know?’ asks Agnes Falkman.

‘I sure don’t.’

‘Does anyone know?’ asks Birgitta Lindhorst.

‘I imagine you are not asking me,’ says Anders Manders diplomatically.

‘Something to do with furniture,’ says Sven Sonnenberg.

‘I don’t think so, it’s about theatre,’ says Lars Person.

‘Hey, Bo, come on, explain,’ says Verso. ‘Just what the hell is this Diderot Project?’

‘In a few days’ time, when we are all having interesting experiences in Russia, all you wish to know will be fully revealed,’ says Bo.

‘And then I know you will agree we have devised a very interesting adventure for you,’ says Alma.

‘Great,’ says Jack-Paul Verso.

‘Just tell me, please, who in the hell was Diderot?’ asks Birgitta the Swedish Nightingale, turning to us all.

‘He was a philosopher of the so-called Enlightenment,’ says Verso.

‘A writer of stories,’ I say.

‘Also a playwright,’ says Lars Person.

‘Did he like women?’ asks Agnes Falkman.

‘Oh, sure, he definitely liked women,’ says Verso.

‘And tables?’ asks Sven Sonnenberg.

‘He kinda liked tables too,’ says Verso.

‘What about music?’ asks Birgitta.

‘He was completely fascinated by music. He wrote a whole book about the nephew of the composer Rameau.’

‘Jean-Philippe Rameau, the inventor of modern harmony?’ asks the nightingale. ‘Rameau who made operas about the winds and the torrents and the spheres?’

‘That Rameau. But the book’s about his clownish nephew, who’s the classic confidence man.’

‘Excuse me, I hope you’re all realizing that our leader Bo has gone on board already,’ remarks Lars Person.

And so he has. Our leader strides on ahead of us, through tickets and customs, passports and immigration: Diderot sign held high over his head, Alma with her boxes in frantic pursuit. At the formidable sight of his professorial demeanour, all officialdom seems to melt away; his path is smooth. An uncertain rabble of international pilgrims, we heft our luggage and follow, off and away on the Enlightenment Trail. We march through the halls of the dusty terminal, out on to the quayside, smelling of ship’s oil. We climb up the ship’s loading gangway, heading for the open port. Ahead of us go the Japanese, pulling their wheelie coffins, the Germans, swinging their contract-packed briefcases, and the crowd of Russians. All loaded with their trophies of the modern shopping mall.

The moment we pass through the ship’s side Russia lies waiting: hospitable, noisy, confusing, just waiting to pounce. Balalaikas cluck, samovars bubble, fur-hatted boyars leap. Big-booted cossacks are already performing some Siberian version of the limbo dance. It’s this way to the casino, that to the duty-free. Here is the Caviar Heaven; there’s the Turkish massage. Heavy fur-hatted stewards wait in a row to take away our luggage. Pink-cheeked stewardesses stand in white overalls, like a bevy of bright Russian dolls, ready to lead us off to our cabins. Down a deck or several, to a long passageway where a row of metal cabin doors stands open, as in some carpeted modern penitentiary, to receive the newest intake of inmates. The cabin I’ve been assigned to is unquestionably modest. In fact it’s no more than a neat green box with bunkbed, washbasin and a tiny shower room off it. It’s an interior cabin; so we can take it for granted I shan’t be seeing much of the Swedish archipelago, the glories of the Baltic or anything other than a swinging shower curtain from here.