To the Hermitage (37 page)

‘That’s right. What do you think?’

‘My dear fellow, of course,’ says our man, slapping Grimm’s thigh. ‘What you need is a nice little mystification.’

‘That’s it, exactly, a mystification.’

‘So, first you tell Her Serene Empress it’s poor Mozart who’s tone-deaf. Say the poor little kid can’t even hold a tune in a bucket. So how could you, an honest courtier valuing her fame as one of the age’s patrons, bring an off-key juvenile all the way from Salzburg to mock her perfect pitch?’

‘But she knows the Emperor Joseph admires him to heaven. And the Italian courts, and the King at Versailles.’

‘All of them tone deaf too.’

‘But if I say that, I offend Mozart. And that I definitely can’t afford.’

‘No, of course not. When you were in Paris you had his portrait painted, didn’t you? Now you’re selling copies of it everywhere, so of course he’s got to be a genius, or your royalties go down.’

‘He is a genius. What do I say to him?’

‘Tell him the truth, as far as you can. Say the Empress is crazy to have him here at court. Nothing in the world would make her happier than to have his little trickiness wandering round the Hermitage. Just one problem. The weather here’s so cold you can’t possibly play a piano or tune a clarinet. What’s the point of becoming court musician in a country where you can never play more than half a concerto?’

Grimm laughs, reaches out, embraces him. The cosmetic dust from his cheeks falls over the dark philosophical suit.

‘I tell the Empress Mozart is tone-deaf!’ he cries.

‘Now I know exactly why I like you, Denis. Now I know why you really are my very best friend.’

‘Not counting all your other very best friends? I only wish I could sit on a splendid throne for you, and you could kiss—’

‘But you do, my friend, you do. The high throne of reason.’

So they go to the door together, they embrace again, fond brothers that once more they are.

‘There’s just one thing, my dear Denis,’ Grimm says fondly, as he pulls his cloak around him and steps into Senate Square. ‘That drab black suit you wear. I know it’s a thinkers’ suit, but I’d drop it. Try blue or red. Get something with a little gold frogging, like this.’

‘Frippery, self-disguise, textile fantasy, body-promo,’ says our man. ‘It’s the philosophy of the whorehouse. It’s not how we look outside, it’s the state of our souls within that really matters.’

‘Not a bit. That’s the problem with mind, it’s all on the inside. Believe me, dress is all. You can tell that by the frowns. And you’re top favourite of the court now, you can easily afford it. All the best shopkeepers will be delighted to make you over for the prestige. But remember. Top people like top clothes.’

‘Ridiculous. Really? Not really?’

Well, what else could you expect from dear old, loyal old, vulgar old friend Grimm?

J
UST A LITTLE MORE THAN
200 years before the day I first arrived in Saint Petersburg (for remember, for all my good intentions I never did make it to Leningrad), a rather striking sailing vessel tacked up the Neva River and anchored in the harbour, which in those days – the time in fact was the high summer of 1777 – lay directly opposite the Hermitage. It was a splendid yacht, whose owner and crew proved to be British. Indeed the figure on the poop turned out to be a famous, if not scandalous, English traveller. Her name was Elizabeth Chudleigh, though she generally called herself either the Countess of Bristol or the Duchess of Kingston. And why not? She had married both of these gentlemen, though it seems without properly advising the one about the other. Her too rapid journey from Bristol to Kingston had brought her into trouble with the British courts and the British press, and she’d won a remarkable reputation back home for bigamy, imposture and false inheritance. Like many of her sort – and at that time there was somehow quite a lot of her sort – she now preferred to live on the continent, first of all in Paris, where she settled for a while, and then across the breadth of Europe.

Fatally attractive, she would never be short of reputation or company. And, since the possessions, trophies, even the platoon of servants that served her were not quite legally hers, she found it wise to carry most of her boodle with her. This is why she had commissioned a fine yacht to carry her wherever she went; now it had docked in Petersburg. The more distinguished locals soon discovered that the boat was a mobile Aladdin’s cave: a floating museum of excellent possessions, a seagoing cabinet of curiosities, of whom La Chudleigh herself was hardly the least. Here, on the Neva, in full sight of the Hermitage, she entertained: quite sumptuously, according to some; quite disgustingly, according to others. Soon she was one of the spectacles of Petersburg, and had attracted the attention of the great Empress herself. This was an age of English tastes, in everything from dress to gardens. La Chudleigh sent home for more possessions, more servants, more docile English gardeners to fill the city with roses and herbs.

Before long she was a striking figure at court, the theatre, the opera: an aristocrat, a grand courtesan, a maker of fashion. The Tzarina much enjoyed her bravado, until it became just a little bit too interesting to her own Grigor Potemkin, after which she grew a little bored. But not, though, before – when a Baltic storm blew up and damaged the yacht out in the river – she granted the Duchess of Kingston, or Countess of Bristol, permission to build herself a glorious house in the English taste on the shore overlooking the Neva. It rose up, a little bit of Britain, with English gardeners and English servants. But it was a little bit of Russia too, for a large vodka distillery was set up in the grounds, doing much for her general popularity.

But of all the tastes, the fashions, the trophies that Elizabeth Chudleigh brought over with her to Petersburg, quite the most splendid item was a quite amazing silver clock. She had some time back commissioned it, in London, from James Cox, the finest of the British jeweller-watchmakers. In an age of intricate and wonderful clocks, when time-pieces were toys and fables of the meaning of the universe, this one was thought by many the finest in the world. For ease of transportation it had been dismantled, and it arrived in Petersburg flat-packed and without instructions. So when the moment came for the clock to be properly put together again, it took a Petersburg craftsman two years to link all its amazing intricacies together.

Thus a huge silver peacock made out of many separate pieces stands up on a stump amid an intricate forest of branches. Among the branches are concealed creatures of all sorts of different kinds and sizes: a cockerel, a squirrel inside a cage, an owl, a grasshopper, a lizard, a snail, and various mushrooms that conceal the dials that clock the time. When an hour strikes, a chime of bells begins to play. The owl moves, the squirrel spins in its cage, the cockerel crows, and various other actions are provoked. The peacock itself turns, bows, and spreads out its huge tail. By the time the clock was assembled again, the chimes had already rung for Elizabeth Chudleigh. She herself died back in her favourite Paris. But the clock itself remained in Russia, and it was duly acquired by the duchess’s admirer, Grigor Potemkin. He was the victorious hero of the Tauride, the Empress’s best general and her one-eyed lover. She gave him the greatest of gifts (the Tauride Palace, dinner services from Sèvres and Wedgwood, many thousands of dead souls). He longed to return the compliment. He acquired the Peacock Clock and presented it to her. And she placed it in the Small Hermitage.

That’s why, amid a press of what feels to be a hundred thousand jostling tourists, we Diderot Pilgrims are standing around it right now. Galina has brought us here, of course. Galina has decanted us from the mini-bus in the middle of Palace Square, right beside the Alexander Column, on an old site of history: the scene where tzars more than once sent out their cavalry to slaughter their people, and where, in 1917, the commissars sent in the people to slaughter the cavalry and the tzars. The Red Revolution, it seems, is far from forgotten: another red flag demonstration is taking place in a corner of the square, watched by armed policemen. Big banners wave and loudspeakers blurt; a band of marchers sets off toward the centre of the city, shouting passionately as they go. None of this impresses Galina.

‘Politics, take no notice!’ she cries. ‘Do not even look! Just follow me!’

And so, a small band of Enlightenment pilgrims, we surge across the square, between the menacing Intourist coaches, and storm the steps of the Winter Palace.

Except the gates today are not locked, and the doors are wide open. For something has happened to history these days. We may be at the scene of great and revolutionary events, ten days that shook the world, events that seemed so grandly historical and truly real they had to invent a new art to go with them, called proletarian realism. Naturally, since the real events were so much smaller than the events that reality required, painters, opera-makers, film-directors and the authors of works of history improved them. Even the photographs were inaccurate; it was necessary to brush out some and brush in others. This is a common problem with History, history the great power, inevitable, inescapable, progressive, written in the great Book of Destiny above. The reality frequently fails to concur with what has been destined, which makes it necessary to correct it, so that what happens is brought into perfect harmony with what is.

Odd, though, that the great inevitable machine called History should have gone on to produce what we witness here right now. For, where the people surged and the great gates tumbled, American backpackers knock back their cans of coke, Japanese tourists photograph each other standing next to something or other, and weary-looking Russian army conscripts smoke on the steps and eye up the endless supplies of young foreign girls. Inside, in the great buildings, vast tour parties sweep past each other, going in all directions, up and down the staircases, along the thirteen miles of stone corridors, into the twelve hundred rooms of paintings, objects, every kind of treasure, two million different items from all over the world. And from all over the world the people come to see them. They swarm through the Little Hermitage, the Big Hermitage, the Old Hermitage, the Hermitage Theatre, steered about in sheep-flocks by those bossy Russian guides who once used to promote socialism, comradeship, peace and world friendship and now promote Constructivist posters and
Demoiselles d’Avignon
T-shirts.

Today the world seems to be one museum after another. And of course everyone wants to see this one. Hermitage now means museum; museum now implies Hermitage. Tzar after tzar added to its boodle and multiplied its trophies. Collector after collector added their private contributions, general after general came home with more trophies. Loot from other museums came as spoils of war; while other wonderful things that were here once have been sold abroad, looted, ransacked away, shared out with other museums in Russia. But however much has been and gone, everything you can think of is somehow still here, and in the most amazing quantities. World-famous paintings hang in an unbelievable profusion. Every age and stage of art is depicted, from primitive to the highest baroque and the richest romanticism and so, in the great cycle of being, back down to primitive abstraction again. Every material, precious or semi-precious, has been mined, chipped, shaped, forged, fashioned. Every kind of human skill, craft and art has been used. Every nation and people seems to be represented. Every image and icon is kept in stock.

So history now has become a kind of noisy museum: a glittering, booming place of wonders, a scene of half-indifferent worship. Paintings and objects take the place of history and power. Tour companies take the place of popular revolutionaries, surging up and down the stairs. Indeed it can only seem as if history – for so long our aggressive and murderous master, sweeping us into ever more horror and atrocity – has suddenly become our servant and friend. No longer here to spill blood, no longer urging ideology or faith, no longer requiring death and sacrifice, no longer raging and purging, it instead deposits bright and well-lit scenes before us: glittering Fabergé and glinting Sèvres, brilliant Impressionist chiaroscuros and raw Cubist splashes, fleshly Rembrandt human puddings, strange vivid Constructivist collages.

Tired travellers look at it all, in a kind of worried desperation. Painting after painting passes across the retina, signals to the brain-cells, passes into confusion, excess, redundancy. The tourists pause a while, hunt round for the tea rooms, the chairs and the couches (and why are there never enough?). They put down their cameras, they take off their shoes. Girls chitter and chatter in front of the huge Rembrandts. Boys chase them through the endless rooms of the building, from gallery to gallery.

‘And all this is simply for myself and the mice to admire,’ the great Empress is supposed to have said once, in quiet satisfaction, after the great boatloads sent north by Golitsyn and Diderot arrived, were uncrated, hung on new walls that had to be built to display them. Now the collections collect the tourists in their millions, coming from every part of the globe.

‘Tourists, dreadful people, please ignore them,’ says Galina imperiously, ushering us all through the rooms. ‘Guides, they’re all terrible, don’t listen to them!’

But why should we? We have our own guide, Galina, and she is clearly beyond compare. She knows everything and for some reason is permitted to go everywhere, just like some insuperable force.

‘
Bonjour, mon brave!
’ she cries to the guards in gallery after gallery. ‘
Félicitations, mon ami!
’

She opens doors in walls and we find ourselves in small offices, where curators smoke secretly and restorers paint.

‘
Parfait!
’ she tells them. ‘
Voilà mes pèlerins! N’oublie pas ton français.
’

‘
Pardon! Attention!
’ she shouts as she cuts a swathe through huge and well-armed tour-parties, who open up and scatter as she makes her attack.