To the Hermitage (33 page)

I get up to look out too. A huge and battlemented land-shadow is rising from the cold oily waters in front of us, surrounded by a mass of moving grey ships. On the decks down below us, sensing a change in the climate, the Diderot pilgrims have suddenly begun to appear again: Agnes and Sonnenberg, Verso and the Swedish nightingale, Bo and Alma, looking happy and chattering warmly as they stare out over the side. Here, in a hurry, comes Lars Person.

‘Kronstadt?’ I say.

‘Revolution Island,’ says Manders. ‘Where the sailors started the Russian Revolution. And where Catherine the Great came to arrest her own husband Peter, so she could jail him and take over the throne.’

‘This means we’re getting near then?’

‘Kronstadt’s where the old harbour used to be. Just beyond is the sea-terminal at Vasilyevsky Island. You see, you really are going to Petersburg, after all.’

And it’s that same night, as he’s lying in his cavern of a bed near the nightstove in the Narishkin Palace, that our man has quite the strangest of dreams. He’s following the usual daily summons, crossing the great imperial square, making his approach to the grand Hermitage. Yet it’s all in the half-light, and the place is oddly empty. No sentries are standing stiffly in the boxes, no guardsmen wait inside in the halls. No footmen stand at the top of the great staircase, no servants flit about the corridors. The mirrors reflect nothing, not even the emptiness. All the stairwells are silent. He walks alone and unattended along the many long corridors, which are lighted only by the moon. Every one of them is empty of people, except for just one. There is the betoga-ed figure of Voltaire. He’s grinning, waving, rising from his marble armchair. His hair is white as wool, his eyes are little flames of fire. He strips off his toga, and, standing there, ancient and naked, he shouts a warning, something quite mysterious about sunshine and the Turks . . .

Up on the walls are the huge paintings he’s sent in his homage all the way from Paris. But they’re scratched and stabbed through, some of them running in water, others covered in thick layers of dust. There are statues along the corridor, lit up strangely by the moon. But the Canovas have lost a hand or two, and some are without their heads. Falconet’s sculptured angels now have the fangs of devils, and the paintings of ancient ruins seem to have come alive. Loud rude voices are shouting in distant corridors, and glass shatters in a window somewhere close. He goes on toward the indoor garden – but the plants are all wilting, the birds do not sing. He passes all those imperial ante-rooms, and every one is empty. In one the chess pieces lie scattered across the chessboard. In another the billiard table has been draped with a huge grey shroud. He enters, as he’s learned to do, the imperial drawing room. But today there is no chatter. No ambassadors or emissaries sit waiting. No courtiers stand about, no maids-in-waiting. And over the sofa her portrait has grown dusty too.

Yet, beneath it, there she is. She’s lying there, head on a pillow, spread out grand and comfortable, naked. Her breasts are large and pendulous, her stomach a wide imperial tract of territory, a vast expanse of tundra. To the lover of Rubens, this is majestic grandeur. She looks him up and down, and it grows apparent that the black philosopher’s suit he wears for court is missing. All the time he has been buck-naked too.

‘Late again, Mr Librarian, extremely late,’ she murmurs.

‘Deepest apologies,’ he says. ‘There is fog on the Neva.’

‘Come close, Mr Philosopher,’ she says. ‘I’m sure you know very well why you were really called here?’

‘I was never quite sure, Your Imperial Majesty.’

‘Voltaire would have gladly done it if you hadn’t, you know that.’

‘But he’s eighty, and toothless. The whole world knows his stomach rumbles. And even I am sixty.’

‘You are nothing, you are ageless. One day like an old man of a hundred, the next like a small boy of ten. I never know which one to expect.’

‘But here, your most sublime and imperial—?’

‘Why not here? Where else? It’s the lover’s hours. The palace is empty, there’s no one can disturb us. Yes, here, sir, and now. Before all the ambassadors come fussing.’

‘Yes, Your Imperial Highness.’

‘You know I should really send you away at once?’

‘That would be the entirely just action of an entirely just monarch.’

‘Oh, come here, sir. I felt you would bring me sunshine—’

‘If I do truly have your permission—’

Frankly, she spreads her legs wide. Obedient, he works himself between. She smiles gently down at him. Gently he moves forward, begins to touch the warm centre of imperial Russia. The spirit of France in him, cautious at first, begins to glow. He floats on, sailing between the twin shorelines of the estuary that is opening before him. He finds the harbour front, gets ready to dock.

‘Onward,’ she murmurs, drawing him in with her arms, ‘remember, you have come here a thousand leagues for this.’

Now he can feel himself gliding, riding along the English Embankment of the Neva, past the spire of the Admiralty, past the Peter and Paul. He turns down Nevsky Prospekt, and now the whole of mysterious Russia lies before him, unknown, unentered,
verst
beyond
verst
of sedge and marsh and steppe. Cossack bearskins yield before French shakos. Soon his galloping European forces will take Moscow, reach southward down to the warm and sunny Caucasus, northward toward Siberia, permafrost, arctic snow . . . till suddenly he’s arrested; something is pulling hard on him from behind. Four angry court dwarves are heaving at him, taking him viciously by both arms and legs.

They break open the confused embrace, they angrily drag him loose. They lift his body and carry it to the open window. Now he’s hurtling out, rolling over the snowy embankment, down into the ice-crusted Neva. The ice breaks open, with the most dreadful cracking. The muddy waters gape. It’s sickeningly cold down here, but also surprisingly hot. He’s sinking, yet he’s swimming. He’s vanishing for ever, and yet he’s still content. He’s going downward, but rising upward. And all the time he’s doing what he always does best; he’s busy explaining.

‘Sleep is the condition when our animal ceases to exist as a whole entity. A dream is almost always the result of a sensory stimulation. It’s almost a transitory form of illness. When we are asleep, it’s the activity of our own continuing consciousness that creates all these sensations we believe we are aware of. Coordination and subordination of the various human faculties are lacking. The master, our self, is thrown upon the mercy of his servants, abandoned to the frantic energy of his own uncontrolled activity. The self at the centre of the human web is active and passive by turns. Hence the sense of disorder so characteristic of dreams.’

‘So does that mean in dreams we become completely without reason?’ asks the charming Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse, who has suddenly joined them and is sitting beside his bed in the river.

‘Not quite, what we are looking at is a picture of things that have been taken from experience and entirely reconstructed in the mind,’ explains Doctor Bordeu, who stands with his hat off somewhere in the room. ‘Sometimes these sensations can actually appear so vivid we aren’t quite sure whether we’re wide awake or dreaming.’

‘Then surely this condition of sleep can actually be quite dangerous,’ observes Madame de l’Espinasse, looking at him with concern.

‘I’ve told him that countless times,’ says Bordeu, ‘but he still pays no attention.’

‘What are you thinking about now, doctor?’

‘I am thinking about the ways of great men, mademoiselle, like the genius Monsieur Voltaire,’ says Bordeu. ‘I’m reflecting on how a truly great man is put together. About how he’s learned to tyrannize over his sensibility and his passions, learned to reason, become the centre of his own human bundle, control himself and everyone else around, master the masters of the world. Because those are the powers of the completely rational man. Yet, believe me, even our glorious Voltaire nightly visits the world of sleep. Even genius has its dreams and its disorders. Even the clearest mind has an unconscious stratum. Well, is everything absolutely clear now, my dear mademoiselle? Where’s my hat? I’d better be on my way. I have another patient to see in the Marais.’

‘So how are you yourself, Doctor Bordeu, my friend?’ he asks, rising up to the surface of the water. ‘And what are you doing here in the middle of the Neva with our good Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse, at this unholy hour of the morning?’

‘You’ll find out one day,’ says Bordeu. ‘But right now, if you want to wake content and whole in the morning, you’d better get back off to sleep.’