To the Hermitage (39 page)
Authors: Malcolm Bradbury
DAY SIXTEEN
HE enters, in his black suit, looking tentative and uneasy. SHE is sitting on the sofa. SHE looks at him, smiles. A large box of golden trinkets is beside her.
SHE
Ah, there you are, my good friend. Come over here. Look, what do you see? Presents . . .
HE looks into the box. It appears to be full of watches.
HE
What, you mean . . . for me, Your Majesty?
SHE
Yes, sir. You have been late for these meetings far too often, my dear philosopher. That’s for you.
SHE reaches into the box and draws out a very beautiful gold pocket watch on a chain. HE looks at it. HE looks at her. HE’s touched.
HE
Dear lady. Are you really sure?
SHE
Of course. You’re pleased?
HE
How could I be more so? A golden hunter, Your Majesty. A watch for the pocket. To hang from a golden chain on my leaden chest. And with your own portrait, always there on the face . . .
SHE
So you accept it?
HE swings the watch against his chest.
HE
Of course. No gift could give me greater pleasure. After all, what more displays the spirit of our age, the cunning intricacy of our universe, than a watch. With this one small ticking machine we can see our place and way in the world. We see the world’s not a seamless entity, but a mysterious clockwork motion that spins us in space and time—
SHE
You do consider God to be the great watchmaker then?
HE
No, I consider man to be the great watchmaker. What supreme intelligence! With what cunning we comprehend how time spins in the cosmos, how space twists in time. What is the universe compared with our modellings of it. Where was it made?
SHE
This little watch? Switzerland, sir. Geneva.
HE
The Swiss, a people of great craft and independence. Some say they make the best watches in the world—
SHE
Or very near Geneva. These watches were sent from Ferney by my dear Voltaire. You know he’s set up a colony of craftsmen?
HE
I heard. Eighty watchmakers all tick-tocking away in his workshops. Such a thoughtful gift.
SHE
Not exactly a gift. He sent me a crate of five hundred of them.
HE
Five hundred? Soon Russia will have more time than it knows what to do with.
SHE
I praised his devotion to craft and enterprise. In return I got this large crate of watches. And a bill for fifty thousand pounds.
HE
I’d heard Swiss time often comes expensive. Permit me to observe that with what he’s charged you for five hundred watches you never asked for you could have built a battleship. Or bought half a dozen Rubens from the next impoverished English milord.
SHE
I sometimes think you’re growing a little jealous of our great Monsieur Voltaire.
HE
Not at all. So what does he advise you to do with these knick-knacks he’s sent you? Apart from honouring your darling Denis, of course?
SHE
He thinks they’d make excellent gifts for distinguished foreign visitors. And he tells me I could easily sell them for twice the price he’s charging me—
HE
If you take his other advice and invade Turkey, you could sell his watches to the Turks.
SHE
I’ve heard he’s already doing that himself. I hope he’s charging them a good deal more than he is me.
HE
Indeed, it would be only fair. Still, now when your two armies go into battle, they should both arrive at more or less the same hour of day. But I’m sure the money’s well spent—
SHE
Of course it’s well spent. I owe a great deal to Monsieur Voltaire. When many in Europe were calling me an assassin, he established my reputation with the world.
HE
Not alone, of course.
SHE
I admit it. There was yourself, and others too—
HE
And this is why I’m here then, is it, Your Highness? To establish your reputation with the world?
SHE
Like anyone else, I merely wish to be understood by everyone. And how better to do it than have some wise men understand me?
HE
Wise men who are foolish enough to believe whatever you choose to tell them? Who dismiss invasion as a trifle, hanging as an incident, and write eulogies like hacks?
SHE looks at him.
SHE
Now I know you are jealous, sir.
HE
Do you? Jealous of whom, then?
SHE
Of Monsieur Voltaire. Because he loves me to distraction, and doesn’t care who knows it. Because your mind’s so dull and your passions so thin you wouldn’t even know how to come near to him. Because every word of praise that comes from him means more to me than ten words of yours. Because his generosity and kindness are so much freer and franker than yours—
HE looks at her in surprise.
HE
You’re wrong. I’m not jealous of Voltaire.
SHE
Well, he’s certainly jealous of you.
HE
Is he really? The great Voltaire jealous of me?
SHE
Of course. He’s at Ferney, you’re in my chamber. You’re younger than he is. More amusing.
HE
How would you know all this?
SHE takes out a letter from her bosom.
SHE
Here is his letter, today. Listen. ‘I hear with regret that your Diderot fell ill at the Dutch frontier. But I reassure myself he must now be at your feet, and you will know you have more than one French devotee. If there are some who will always vote for Mustapha the Turk, I venture to say there are many more who worship only Saint Catherine. Indeed our small church is becoming quite universal . . .’ But this is just flattery—
HE
Yes. Go on.
SHE
‘I imagine you daily, conquering the new sultan. Yet still, burdened with the responsibility of war against a vast empire, and ruling your own vaster empire . . . seeing everything, doing everything . . . somehow you find time to converse with Diderot, as if you had nothing else in the world to do.’
HE
What style the man has. How very wonderfully put.
SHE
Indeed. ‘I long to converse with him myself,’ he says, ‘merely so I can learn all I can of Your Glorious Majesty. In fact majesty is hardly the word I mean. I would rather say “Your Glorious Superiority”, which lifts you above all thinking beings.’ Excuse me, then more and more flattery. But I think you see how delightfully he writes to me.
HE reaches a hand out for the letter. SHE smiles, moves away from him.
HE
But do go on, Your Glorious Superiority. What else does the wise man have to say about me? Anything?
SHE
Oh, yes. ‘I ask you, intercede with Diderot for me. Surely he could make a small detour of fifty
versts
and prolong my bitter existence by coming here to tell me all he has seen and heard in Sankt Peterburg? Or, if he will not attend me here on the shores of Lake Geneva, I only beg I might come and be buried near you, on the shores of your own Lake Ladoga. As you know, I love you to folly, yet I fear I’m in disgrace in your court. Your Majesty has abandoned me, for Diderot, Grimm, some other favourite. This would be understandable if Your Highness were a French coquette. But can a great empress be so fickle? Truly I shall never love another empress as long as I live . . .’
HE
Eighty and sick with jealousy. It’s wonderful.
SHE
So if one day you leave me, you will go and visit him? And tell him that even though his Catou thinks so well of you, it doesn’t mean I love him any less?
HE
Unfortunately Geneva is nowhere near Paris.
SHE
I think now he’s an old man he fears you’re taking his place.
HE
Yes, Your Majesty? And exactly what place is that?
SHE
I have no idea what he thinks about me, though he’s known for a lusty man. But I shall write at once and say he’s foolish to feel jealous, since thus far you’ve not given him even the slightest occasion—
HE
And assure him that as long as I’m in your court I shall strive to do everything he would desire to do himself, if only he could be here.
SHE
But you do admire Monsieur Voltaire?
HE
Admire him, I adore him. The greatest man in the world. He has genius, merit, nobility, urbanity, sexual charm—
SHE
Then what could make him so jealous, I wonder?
HE
My dear lady, sometimes I imagine the entire world must be envious of me. Here I enjoy your company, three hours a day. I think your thoughts with you, dream your dreams with you—
SHE
You’re like Voltaire, monsieur, you’re flattering me. It’s all I get, flattery. Never an honest opinion, a proper judgement, a truthful feeling—
HE
Naturally everyone flatters the woman who is Russia, the most important woman in the world. They’ll pretend to anything. Say her witches are virgins, her hags are princesses, even her cabbages are fit to eat—
SHE
They are fit to eat.
HE
Where I, my lady, am an honest man and speak only the sober truth. Why shouldn’t I? I sit with you every day, I hear the wisdom of your thoughts, the sharpness of your wit. I take in the seriousness of your countenance, the purity of your soul. I sit across the table looking at your face. I gently touch your hand—
SHE
It happens to be my leg, sir. So you refuse to flatter me?
HE
I do indeed.
SHE
Then I hope you like the watch I gave you. Even though it came from Monsieur Voltaire.
HE
I like it the better, knowing that what once belonged to Voltaire now belongs to me.
SHE
And what does the watch say, sir? Doesn’t it tell you it’s time to go?
HE
It speaks Swiss, dear lady, well-known as an obscure language. I think it advises me to stay—
SHE
No, my dear friend, because I have the Swedish ambassador arriving. But bring it with you in the future and we shall listen to it again. You will send me another paper? Something I can read in my bed tonight?
HE
Indeed, dear lady.
HE rises, kisses her hand.
END OF DAY SIXTEEN
GALINA’S TALE
‘
Mes amis
, thank you for listening to me while we made our little tour. But I know you are not like these other people, you have not come to be tourists. I know you are proper pilgrims, come all the way across the Baltic Sea to follow in the path of our great philosopher, the one in Russia we call Dionysius Didro. I understand some of you are interested in one thing and some another; I am sure the Hermitage can please all of you. When Bo telephoned me from his office and asked my help to arrange his little journey, I realized your tour would really have to start just here, and for an excellent reason. Where you are standing now, as you know, is in the Small Hermitage, just one little part of the great Winter Palace. And you are here because a long time ago, in the winter of 1773, when these buildings were new and most of them did not exist yet, our dear Philosopher used to come by these halls and passages to share his ideas with the grand tzarina in the private apartments down the corridor.
‘Can you imagine it? Because, please remember, nothing you see is quite as it was then, and yet Didro is everywhere. At that time this was a private palace, the palace of a great tzarina, made open to the people only when a tzar or a tzarina said so. Once these rooms went from public to private, from state to household, and the better the court knew or respected you the deeper you went. Today anyone can go anywhere, without bother, unless you touch the objects and set off the alarms. Once everything in the building was arranged quite differently, as the palace of a tzarina, her workplace and her home. Then one winter night in 1837, when one of our worst tzars, Nicholas First, was in the royal box at the opera, a great fire started in the buildings, and they burned for three days. Everything inside had to be carried out there, into the snows of Palace Square. The windows blew out, the chandeliers fell, but most of the objects were saved at a cost in human lives. After this, the Hermitage was rebuilt, the plan was altered, many things were changed. Again after 1917, when the tzars had been assassinated, the rooms were taken over by the people and the commissars, and the collections moved. Nothing is the same, yet perhaps nothing at all we see would be here at all, if there hadn’t been that old friendship between the Empress and the Philosopher.
Da?
‘So,
mes amis
, that is one reason why I brought you here and ask you to look around. But there is another. As I told you already on the bus, I am a librarian. If you have a mind, a curiosity, an imagination, a librarian is a good thing to be. But I started work when I was a young girl and it was the very end of the war. In Leningrad this was, if you remember, a terrible time. The Germans had been driven away at last, but the city was left with many ruins. The Germans are called civilized but they were also barbarians. They occupied the Summer Palace, Tzarskoye Selo, and stripped it of almost everything, signing their names in the ruins so we could hate them. Whatever they couldn’t take as plunder they were happy to burn or flatten or destroy. Every night they bombed the city with their guns: the Winter Palace, the Tauride, the Duma, all the factories and apartments. If they couldn’t take Leningrad they would just eliminate it. So when it was all over, we were like Dostoyevsky’s underground men. We lived under the floorboards, in the cellars, starving and struggling to keep alive.
‘Even so, we tried to re-create the city as it had been, and bring its culture back to life again. Because Leningrad was always Russia’s culture city, the writers’ city, the place they wrote of most often and knew best. Pushkin and Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Then Bely and Mandelshtam, Akhmatova and Brodsky, Bitov, they all wrote of Petersburg-Leningrad. This doesn’t mean they always loved the city. Often it depressed them, defeated them, sent them to despair. It persecuted them, starved them, exiled them, left them in pain with no money and no hope. So it was the city with the darkest fears, the oldest dreams, the biggest terrors, the strangest illusions – a place of fictions and deceptions, where nothing seemed exactly real and everything was shaped by stories, books, illusions and dreams.
