To the Hermitage (27 page)
Authors: Malcolm Bradbury
Leading to the second mystification. Our speaker offered to distinguish between a paper he didn’t give and a story he couldn’t tell. Suggesting he understands the difference between papers and stories. (
ALMA: But of course there is a difference. That is why we complained it was not a paper.
) Okay, what is it? (
ALMA: Papers make statements and stories make fantasies.
) You mean, papers make truth claims and stories make fiction claims? (
BO: Yes, exactly.
) I’m afraid there isn’t a real philosopher who could agree with you – not in America, anyway. (
SVEN: But that is just America . . .
) Right, let’s take what we heard this morning. What was it? A paper, or a story? (
AGNES: Of course it was a story . . .
) Did it make truth-claims, or fiction-claims? (
BIRGITTA: I have no idea, I just enjoyed it . . .
) What did it sound like? A witness statement, right? I did this, I went to this funeral, and so on. There was an ‘I’ in it, so you thought it sounded true. Like my story about being an Encyclopedia Kid – which I just made up, incidentally. (
BO: But this is absurd . . .
)
No, it’s a question about the state of intelligence in the age after reason. Look, let’s just suppose my name is Detective Inspector Gervase Hawkeye of New Scotland Yard. I’ve been presented with a worrying case-file: it’s the case of the Strange Death of the Author. It seems the victim, a British guy called Sterne, has just come back from Paris, where another author has been stealing from his work. Next thing he’s found dying in his London apartment, crying, ‘Now it is done.’ My duty is quite clear; I need to know what was done, and who did it. Consider what happened next. Our guy is given a hasty funeral, with no headstone. Within hours the grave is opened, and the corpse is on a table at Cambridge University, where they take off the top of the skull. Then someone claims to identify the victim, so the body is taken back to the graveyard and buried again. Years later, the body is dug up again, and only identified when some guy comes along with a marble bust. Frankly I’ve never heard a more suspicious set of circumstances. I decide to investigate the case.
Right away I seem to get the breakthrough I need. We have a new statement by a highly reliable witness, a college professor, no less. He knows where the corpus delicti now lies. He saw it reburied, in some place called Coxcomb in Yorkshire. What’s more, he can claim some two hundred other witnesses, all of them professors. There’s even a canon from York Cathedral called Cant. Canon Cant? Okay, it still sounds convincing, until I check the file more closely. Our witness has attended a funeral, sure. Except the corpse has gone walkabout in Wales. He wasn’t at the real ceremony at all. The actual burial occurs several months later, when the witnesses have all left, except for a few who were so full of sauce at the time they can hardly be expected to testify to what was happening. So what do we really have here? More suspicious funerals than Agatha Christie ever thought of. A respectable academic witness who, along with two hundred other professors, is quite prepared to take part in a funeral that didn’t happen.
Now let’s ask this: what is the real purpose of a funeral? To bury a known corpse, confirm the person is dead, and show the body has been interred, so the heirs can profit and the tax authorities can dive in. Therefore I have to ask myself, as an officer of the law, just why are all these academics so obviously conspiring together? My friends, I suggest we take a rather closer look at our witness. I put it to you he’s provided no evidence at all to show us Larry Sterne’s body lies in that grave. I put it to you there’s nothing to show that if a body was ever buried at that funeral it was Sterne’s at all. I put it to you his whole story is a continuous spiral of lies and deceptions. In fact I suggest to you this supposedly trustworthy professor is simply not what he seems.
So what is the real purpose of this mystification? In my opinion, your honour, our pleasant professor is actually part of a vast cunning academic conspiracy, the like of which the world has rarely seen. It spans several centuries, it takes in many parties. I won’t mention the Freemasons, the Illuminati, or the Templars. However, our friend did refer to Mozart, who of course died himself in suspicious circumstances – as Aleksandr Pushkin was to establish in his famous play
Mozart and Salieri
, a very remarkable portrait of the murderous jealousy that can be felt by one artist for another. (
BIRGITTA: I always thought that was because Mozart revealed all those Masonic secrets in
The Magic Flute . . .) Maybe. The fact remains that Mozart’s death remains mysterious to this day. So does Sterne’s. Which is why I start to ask myself – could it be that what was sauce for Wolfgang Amadeus was sauce for Larry Sterne?
Members of the jury, I ask us to consider again this apparently amiable professor who spoke to us all this morning. Isn’t it now clear that every single thing he said to you was exactly what he described himself as being interested in – a cock-and-bull story, a fictive tissue of lies? In fact I suggest to you that this guy is the front for a ruthless band of people who, over generations, have every need to hide the facts about the true life and death of Mr Sterne. Why? Maybe the answer lies in our friend’s own inadvertent words. Sterne was a famous and successful writer – great enough to go to court, rich enough to invest in property. Yet, even before he was dead, he was already forced to watch his work being re-used, recycled, plundered and plagiarized, a process that still continues. How do we prove a crime? Means, method and motive, right? Maybe today we’ll never really know what happened to Sterne in Paris and London. But we do know there’s hardly a serious writer of fiction then and now who didn’t somehow benefit from his death, and whose plagiaristic impulses and artistic jealousy were enough to lead to murder. My good friends, isn’t it obvious that – along with many other persons unknown, over the generations – the professor who sits so innocently among us is in fact a liar, a rogue, and a guilty party in the case of the Mysterious Death of the Famous Author?
BO looks at VERSO, utterly mystified.
BO
No, Professor Verso. I don’t think he meant that. He meant to tell us a true story.
VERSO
Ah. So you’re saying there are true and false stories.
ALMA
We all know the difference between fact and fiction.
VERSO
Okay. What are stories of fact? Histories, biographies?
BO
Scientific documents, medical papers, contracts, treaties—
SVEN
Manuals, instruction books, all those things.
VERSO
Encyclopedias? Works of philosophy?
AGNES
Yes.
VERSO
The Bible, the Koran, the Torah?
BO
In a sense.
ALMA
Of course. I don’t understand what you’re saying.
VERSO
Let’s take the things we call fictional. What are they?
BO
Novels, poems, plays. Comedies, tragedies—
ALMA
Fantasies, fairy stories—
VERSO
Take Diderot, then. He wrote works of philosophy, encyclopedias. He also wrote plays, novels, stories. Are they all the same kind of thing, or are they different?
BIRGITTA
You’re explaining that papers and stories are just the same?
VERSO
I’m saying they’re just two different systems for making narratives and organizing language. Some of them we call true and some we call fictional. And I’m saying that Diderot seems to have understood that too. Which is why a lot of his writings aren’t statements but stories or plays or dramatic dialogues with conflicting opinions.
BO
I really don’t see what you are trying to prove, professor.
VERSO
I’m saying the categories you’re using don’t exactly work. You see truth statements and fiction statements. I see different ways of systematizing thought and language. Some pretend to be true and some don’t. But maybe you remember what Diderot said about the task of the philosopher: ‘It can be required of me that I look for the truth, but not that I should find it.’
BIRGITTA
So papers and stories are really just the same?
ALMA looks at her angrily.
ALMA
Of course not. You can get a grant for one of them but not the other.
VERSO
Sure, they’re functionally different. But the truth is all of us, historians and scientists, philosophers and actors and novelists, we’re all really in the same boat.
BO
Then it is not this boat, I hope. Professor Verso, really. You have not helped us at all. You are confusing us further. If we listen to the two of you this morning, we will not have a Diderot Project.
VERSO
Oh, I think you might have something else. A real Diderot Project.
ALMA
Bo, don’t listen. This is a disaster.
BIRGITTA
I think it is very nice. I always prefer stories.
ALMA
Don’t you realize you are all behaving like very wicked children? If you start talking in this way, you could spoil the entire project. All this is your fault.
ALMA turns fiercely on MOI.
MOI
I had hardly anything to do with it.
ALMA
You had everything to do with it.
BO
Please, please. Let us try and stay calm. It is not quite the end of the world. Not yet. I suggest we take a break for today and consider how we want to use our Diderot Project. But remember, if your attitude is merely cynical, we may not be able to continue—
SVEN
You mean we won’t be able to go to Petersburg?
BO
Of course we go to Petersburg, Sven, we have no choice, I cannot turn round the ship. But we won’t have a valid project. Our researches in print will prove unproductive. Our grant will be threatened, and there may even be no book from it. Now, Alma, come. We will go to our cabin—
ALMA
You see what you have done, all of you? You see?
BO and ALMA depart. Omnes look at each other.
ANDERS
Oh dear.
AGNES
This was terrible.
BIRGITTA
Maybe we shouldn’t have—
LARS
It’s okay, my dears. Bo will come round to it all by the morning. He’s used to these things.
VERSO (
to me
)
I hope you didn’t mind what I said about you. It was all in the highest interests of philosophical thought.
MOI
I almost agree with you. In fact I might well have said almost the same thing myself.
VERSO
Only you couldn’t, could you? Which is exactly why every Moi needs to have a little Lui. Let’s go and see what’s happening in Russia. Feel like a Jim Beam in the bar?
‘Was there really a Canon Cant?’ asks Verso, as we squeeze ourselves a place at the packed tables in the Muscovy Bar.
‘There really was,’ I say, ‘but then don’t they say that truth is stranger than—’
‘What’s stranger than what?’ asks Verso, turning his eyes, with the rest of the shouting crowd, to the TV screens. Something new is happening in Mother Russia. In the windswept square outside the Duma, the tanks that have been slumbering have now raised up their barrels. In sudden sharp bursts of smoke and flame, they’re firing blast after blast. Their shells implode against the huge white building, and its turrets and cornices come crashing down. In moments the building’s ugly white bulk is white no longer. Marble and granite topple, and tongues of flame and thick smoke come snaking up out of its windows and scorching their way up its walls. There is firing from the windows, from the strange army gathered inside. ‘Jesus, it’s happening, this could be real history,’ says Jack-Paul Verso, sitting down to watch.
Window after window blows out. Reels of office paper, the core currency of bureaucracy and democracy, come scrolling out of the window holes and down the building’s side; they stay there waving in the winds, like someone’s uninscribed banners. All the time the shells keep firing, firing. The White House, which Yeltsin had defended two years earlier against one coup, has become the victim of another. It’s becoming a grey sepulchre, a pyre ready to burn, another state building sacrificed to keep the state. In front of the White House bodies are falling: protesters, onlookers caught in the cross-fire. Now white flags begin waving from the window cavities; the firing halts for a moment. Meantime, in a gilded state room in the Moscow Kremlin, Tzar Yeltsin is smiling at the cameras. His hair is grey, his face is very flat, his eyes are beaming.
‘He believes he’s done it,’ says Verso; and maybe he has. In a slow procession, deputies in jackets, white shirts, informal sweaters are coming from the burning building. The cameras zoom in. Their looks are defiant, their hands held high. Like so many Russian political adventurers before them – Pugachov and Petrashevky and Prisoner Number One – they have tried and failed, and fallen for the moment to the upstart tzar. Who knows if it’s the end or the beginning, if they’re finished for good or back tomorrow. For no end here is ever the end, and many strange things are written in the great Book of Destiny above.
In the Muscovy Bar everyone is shouting and quarrelling – everyone, that is, except for a couple of men who are quietly playing chess in one corner. The ship is in the fast-sweeping Baltic waves now, luffing and troughing its way homeward to Russia. Verso gets up suddenly, and there, I see, is Tatyana from Pushkin, cheeks heavily rouged, wearing a low-cut peasant dress. Verso takes her to the bar for a drink. And I take the chance to slip away, down the passageways, up the stairwells, wanting to find again the elegant and mysterious cabin in which I rather think I must have spent last night. I find my way to it at last, up on the bridge deck. A pile of luggage stands in the companion-way outside. It consists of my own suitcases, all neatly repacked. A copy of
Jacques
lies neatly on top of it all.
I tap on the door. It’s Lars Person who opens it, as I suppose I might have guessed. His hat is off, his shirt is open, he’s holding up a foaming flute of pink shampanksi.
