To the Hermitage (44 page)

‘So another bloodbath?’

‘Not at first. They drove the demonstrators out on to the ice over the Neva. They didn’t even need to fire the guns. The ice cracked and they were drowned. But today the square cannot be used for revolutions.’

‘It can’t?’

‘Don’t you see how neat it is, wide lawns and big gardens? Why do you think it is made like that?’

‘Ah, I see. Revolutionaries never walk on the grass and the flowerbeds?’

‘In Russia, they do not,’ says Galina firmly. ‘And now you can see him. There he is.’

I look upward. There he is indeed. Big Peter, high-hatted, trapped on his rock-pedestal, rises up high above us on his horse. He’s a flowing figure, as big as can be, big as bronze and Falconet can make him, dwarfing the squat Intourist buses parked all around him, and shrinking to nothing all these dressed-up Russian wedding parties that have gathered round his pediment, to have their photos taken, somehow hoping to link their Posterity with his.

‘You remember the poem of Pushkin, we all learn it at school?’ asks Galina. ‘“Where lonely waters strive to reach the sea, he stood / And gazed before him, mind filled with the greatest thoughts.”’

He’s not what I’ve expected; in fact he looks perfectly pleasant as he sits up there, staring out at the Baltic as if he’s expecting a fresh load of pictures, rising up out of his flowing rock pedestal, more civilized in looks than I imagined, more gallant, more – how can I put it? – French. The whole ensemble is so flowing and mobile it’s not hard to see why Pushkin imagined the horse leaping down from the pedestal, and Peter and his mount thundering through the streets and squares of the city, chasing the guilty, the unhappy, the anxious to their dooms.

The marching demonstrators are themselves heading for the Neva, though on this occasion they are wisely making the safer crossing by the bridge. But when I’m curious and make a move to follow the parade, Galina seizes my arm and steers me on my way.

‘Take no notice, it’s so tasteless. Those are two kinds of people who can never be happy. It’s not important. This is our new civil war. Now this enormous building in front, with the golden dome, don’t you think we really must go in?’

‘Why must we go in?’

‘It’s Saint Isaac’s Cathedral. It’s the highest place. From the top you can have the very best view of Petersburg. Let’s take a look. Or maybe you don’t like it?’

‘It’s just I prefer the churches with the onion domes.’

‘The Orthodox styles, of course. But this one is designed by another Frenchman. And oh, by the way, for a little fact Didro lived at the Narishkin Palace over there.’

I look across the square, but Galina is already steering me toward the church ahead.

‘What other Frenchman? Was he a friend of Didro?’

‘Not a bit, he lived much later. His name was Auguste Montferrand. He rebuilt the cathedral for our tzars. He wanted to be buried here, but Tzar Alexander refused him. He died as soon as the cathedral was finished, but his body went back to Paris.’

‘Why did the tzar refuse him?’

‘Because the cathedral finally took forty years to finish. The plans were wrong. Nothing fitted. He wasn’t a true architect, but even so he built the greatest dome in all the north of Europe. You can see him still, he is carved up there on the façade.’

On the huge marble steps leading up to the cathedral there stands a long line of wrapped beggars, their hands outstretched: old men on homemade crutches, babushkas in black dresses and headscarves. Galina halts and opens up her handbag.

‘I always give five kopecks, it brings us good luck,’ she says.

We walk inside, hand over an entrance fee to someone, and find ourselves in a vast cathedral that feels much too big for itself. It’s a great dark monster of rational baroque, a place of huge sculptures and mosaics, less a place of true worship than an opulent museum. High in the centre, above the crossing, there rises up Montferrand’s vast open dome, the third largest after St Peter’s and St Paul’s.

‘It’s a pity. Until two years ago you could have seen the Foucault Pendulum. It swung here to show the axis of the earth.’

‘Here? But I thought it was in Paris. Didn’t they hang it first in Soufflot’s Pantheon?’

‘Of course there was one in Paris. But the other was here. Didn’t you know Petersburg is supposed to lie on the true meridian, the heartline of the world?’

‘I thought that was Greenwich in London.’

‘No, this is the English, who are always cheating. Here is the real line that runs through the centre of the world.’

‘What happened to the pendulum? Why take it down?’

‘Perhaps because we don’t believe Russia is at the middle of things any more. But you can still go up on the roof and from the top of Petersburg look out at the entire world.’

So we go up and up, by the spiral staircase through the layers of the cold rational cathedral, across the iron ladder to the balconies of the roof. I look out onto the endless rooftops of copper and tin, the broken chimney stacks, the domes of the Smolny Convent, the fingers of big buildings; then, beyond that, spreading out to the wide horizon and the still wider world, the factory chimney stacks, the grim slabs of endless apartment blocks, the thick dirty smoke-plumes rising from distant power stations, the hint of far palaces and fortresses, the grey glint of the Baltic sea.

This is what I see. It’s somehow not quite what Galina sees. She sees a great city made of form and symmetry. For, as she carefully tries to show me, each part of this cunning and intricate city exactly balances some other. So two golden flèches, carefully matching each other on either bank of the Neva: one the Admiralty, the other the Peter and Paul Fortress. Two tzars on horseback, one on either side of the cathedral. One of them is Big Peter, pointing like a projectile out to sea on the surge of his great pedestal; the other is Tzar Nicholas, who slaughtered the Decembrists just on the other side of this building, a stiff straight autocrat set erectile on his highly high horse. In front of the Admiralty, a full-length Nikolay Gogol stares across at his stone opposite, Mikhail Lermontov. Down there in front of the Smolny Convent, where Tzarina Catherine Veliko took care of her noble girls, the figure of Karl Marx is exchanging glances with his old collaborator Friedrich Engels. There, glittering upside down and mirrored in the luminous water of the Neva, is a second Admiralty, a second Hermitage. On the Neva bridge, there marches one procession with waving flags, and then another procession.

‘You see, we are a city of doubles,’ says Galina. ‘Even our most famous books are books all about doubles. Of course so was Didro’s.’

True. When I really think about it, Galina is probably right after all.

And then, as we’re leaving the cathedral, coming down the steps into the square, heading towards the second statue – Tzar Nicholas of the bloodbath, high on his erectile pedestal – something rather unfortunate occurs. A swarm of gipsies in bright dresses appears and surrounds me, holding out their hands. All of them are female: two adult women, and maybe six or seven girls, of all ages from four to seventeen. My hand moves toward my pocket to give them something; I’m thinking of Galina’s superstition about good luck. Suddenly, screaming, shouting, they swarm all over me, the women trying to push me down, the children’s hands pulling at my clothes and pushing into my pockets. The children shove and tug; as I manage to pull loose from one, I’m grabbed by the others, or hit at by their many flailing hands. Passers-by stop, tourists halt, but nobody reacts.

Or nobody but Galina. Suddenly she’s in the middle of the fray: hitting, punching, slapping hard with her handbag and the guidebook she carries. Her red dress flies, her hat comes off, her hands grab. People start to come running toward us, and the gipsies give up. They run away across the square and down the gardens, in their long bright skirts, a dangerous squad. Galina helps me to my feet again.

‘Truly we are a friendly city,’ she feels obliged to say. ‘But so many criminals now. You must try hard to be careful,
mon cher
. And watch out for those people, the police don’t bother to stop them. Maybe they pay them a very good bribe. Did they take anything, your wallet, your passport? Have a look.’

I stare at the grey-haired lady in surprise, then check through my pockets. My wallet, fortunately, is still there, and so is my passport.

‘No, they took nothing. Thanks to you.’

‘You see! I told you if we gave to the beggars you would have very good luck.’

I don’t dispute this analysis. ‘You were completely amazing, Galina, I don’t know how you did that.’

‘You think I am too old to fight? Well, now you see, I am not.’

‘I think you’re the heroine of the occasion. Thank you, really.’

‘Come,’ she says, taking my by the arm, ‘I think you need a cognac. I will take you to a very nice place on Nevsky Prospekt. You have heard of the Nevsky Prospekt, I hope?’

Yes, indeed, I’ve heard of Nevsky Prospekt. Writer after writer, over the years, has introduced me to it. Pushkin has told me about its elegant parade of human lives and its imperial style, Gogol has created for me its strolling absurdities: those preening clerks in their well-brushed morning coats, those chancellory clerks with their magnificent briefcases, those persons of serious consequence; those elegant women with their leg of mutton sleeves, those cavalry officers, those protective watchmen, and the proud foreign governesses, who only come out, walking their noble charges, somewhere around lunchtime. I know from writer after writer about the men with their well-trimmed whiskers and their favourite barbers, the women with their red ankles showing under white petticoats, about the topknots and the elevated noses, the fine canes, the magnificent epaulettes, the splendid overcoats, worth saving a fortune to buy. And I know, thanks to the saddened Dostoyevsky, about the many others too: the drunkards and the gamblers, the noisy rakes and plaintive whores, the superfluous, the hidden, the insulted and injured.

We walk across the square, beside a canal, past the busy Aeroflot building. The traffic noise and the human chatter promise everything: except that the boulevard Galina brings me to bears no relation at all to the scene I’ve imagined. True, it’s broad, it’s grand, but not like Nevsky Prospekt. A long straight perspective, seemingly endless, runs the length of it, from the Neva end to the distant Moscow station. High façades interspersed with churches, bridges, theatres, narrow and fade off into the blurry faint snowfall. A great surge of traffic sweeps along it; trolley-buses swish under networks of sparking wires. But there’s no spirit of elegance, no touch of style, no social parade; the pedestrians trundle past us in blank solitude, blundering into each other, heads down, faces cramped, white, featureless, tight and anxious. A wet crowd smell comes off them. The shops and arcades of the imagination have gone; instead more ill-dressed crowds gather in queues and clumps outside drab storefronts that display almost no goods in their windows. Women stand impassively in doorways holding some single small possession – an aluminium kettle, a dress, a white kitten – for sale. Outside the long and rational façade of the Kazan Cathedral more beggars are waiting with their hands outstretched. Weeds are growing through the pavements outside the war-battered frontage of the Gostinny Dvor department store, the city’s grand arcade where once the world’s traders used to come and barter.

And when here and there you see a brighter spot, a more brilliant façade, it’s nearly always a western store: maybe Benetton or Gucci or Prada. These are not shops for the passing people: armed men, the civilian troops of some private army, stand outside in suede jackets, cradling Kalashnikovs. Just like in the old days, observes Galina; then it was dollar shops for the nomenklatura, now it’s western stores for the new rich, many of them the same people. We stand and watch as the shop assistants lock and unlock the shop doors to the new glitterati, whose frank flamboyant hints of wealth and fortune – a Rolex watch, a gold necklace, Nike trainers – are to be briefly glimpsed for just a few seconds as, like the old aristocrats, they flit quickly across the pavements and disappear into a slow-moving chauffeured Mercedes, coasting down the curb. And beside the stores are the Russian banks, doors closed, protected by yet more hard-headed, thick-jacketed armed attendants.

Close to the metro station there’s another angry but contained Communist protest. More crackling loudspeakers declaim, more red flags wave, more pamphlets are thrust out at the shrouded passers-by. We cross the road by the metro subway. Here, out of the blowing wind, the crowds push and jostle, stalls sell food in a stink of frying onions. There are bloodstains on the concrete, we stumble between the feet of drunks and oddly submissive children begging by the walls. We ascend to the pavement, then somehow dive downward again, into a quite different subterranean world. Galina opens a small doorway, then leads the way down a very long set of stairs. Down at the bottom it’s
belle époque
Paris – unless it’s turn-of-the-century Vienna or old Saint Petersburg. There’s a long zinc bar, with posters from Pernod and Byrrh and Vladivar Vodka. There are Turkish wall-hangings, art nouveau lamps, plenty of chinoiserie, drawings all done in the manner of the Secessionists and the Futurists: Bakst and Klimt and Schiele. There are waiters in white linen aprons; there is warmth and noise and money. There’s a flavour of taste. The people at the tables are young and laughing, a confident sure bourgeoisie of some sort, wearing western clothes, quite unlike the dismayed drab figures we’ve just seen on Nevsky Prospekt.

‘Garçon, ici,’
cries Galina, a little grey-haired empress, as we sit at a table to ourselves in the corner. The waiter comes at once, and quickly returns with two cognacs. Plainly this is Galina’s place. The waiters know her, many of the customers too. It’s evidently where she dresses for, and where she often comes. And now she’s explaining that in such splendid cafés, in this very best part of the Prospekt, the very best people of Petrograd (it’s not hard to see who she means) came, just as the Bolshevik Revolution, began to drink the last of the great champagnes. The dark days were about to start: the persecutions, executions, exterminations were already expected. But there was still time to buy expensive drinks at the most inflated prices, and maybe pick up a girl. Now to come here you should really have dollars, she says. At this I pick up the tab and take out the wallet Galina has saved for me.