To the Hermitage (45 page)

‘Please, no, put it away,’ she says. ‘If you pay it will be ten times what I pay. This is for me, I am allowed to pay in roubles. You see they know me here,
mon ami
. Here and everywhere. Now, drink it quickly. Are you resurrected yet,
mon ami
? Eau de vie.’

I drink, get my breath back. ‘It’s okay, I’m fine now,’ I tell Galina.

‘This place, it is my oasis,’ she says, pleased, taking out a coloured cigarette and lighting it. ‘I come here, I read books, I speak in French. For me this is the real Saint Petersburg. Always such a civilized city, even if it had its dark side. Always so clever, so original, so beautiful. Now, don’t you agree?’

At this moment, the waiter comes back, and places two more glasses of cognac on the table in front of us. At the same time a youngish and roundish man comes to stand beside the table.

‘For you from me,’ he says, giving a small smile and sitting down.

I glance at Galina, who shakes her head.

‘Welcome to Russia, British I think,’ says the man, who wears a tweedish sort of jacket in an Englishy sort of cut. He has a clubby style of tie that goes with his somewhat Oxford shirt. His smile is brittle, his features heavily acne-ed, his hair firmly slicked down with grease. And he carries a worn leather briefcase which, with priestly veneration, he sets on his knee, and then clicks open with a hey-presto motion.

Galina looks at him dryly. ‘
Qui est vous
, who are you?’

‘I am Ruslan Chichikov,’ says the man, ignoring Galina, holding out his hand to me.

‘Chichikov, please, you are joking,’ says Galina.

‘I don’t think so. Now, sir, I know, you are an investor?’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘A real smart businessman, I think.’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘Good, I am a real smart businessman too. Entrepreneur. Joint venturer.’

‘I am sure you are,’ says Galina.

The youngish man takes no notice of her. ‘I understand very well how it is with you, my friend,’ he tells me. ‘You have a project.’

‘No.’

‘You have tried everything. You knock on all the doors, visit all the offices, all the time you get nowhere. You can’t get a single thing sewn up. Tell me, isn’t it right?’

‘No. Really, I’m not a businessman.’

‘They send you everywhere, this official to that one. You never find the people in top job, you never find the one with the real power. Isn’t it right?’

‘No.’

‘You can’t get official permission to import or export, to start a business, open an office. Trouble with currency restrictions. Laws about hiring people. Maybe they don’t let you have a Petersburg apartment.’

‘I’m not trying to—’

From his briefcase the youngish man is now unloading sheaf after sheaf of typed out paper, sorting the pages into sets, pushing them into my hands. ‘Every official you meet wants to have a share. A holiday, a portion of the company, seat on the board. Business here is a tricky business, right? Why pay bribes to people who have no influence? True?’

‘Well, true.’

‘Now then, how much do you really have to invest?’

‘I’m not in Russia to invest.’

‘See there. Letter from the mayor of Petersburg. Telling you who I am.’

‘Amazing,’ says Galina.

‘Letter from the chief of the Narodny Bank. Telling you who I am.’

‘But how do you know who you are?’ asks Galina. ‘Not Chichikov.’

‘
Da.
See? Statement of property ownership, with my name on it.’

‘It isn’t your name,’ says Galina.

‘My commercial name, I work in companies, partnerships. I know everyone in this city. Officials, bankers, business types, security teams. A stranger cannot just walk into Petersburg, you know. It’s the Wild West here.’

‘Ruslan Chichikov, really?’ says Galina.

‘Ignore her. Look, I can introduce you to everyone, find you property. Arrange your imports, ship your exports. I can fix your permits, provide your protection. A businessman who doesn’t understand how it works can end up in the forest with a little hole in the back of his head.’

‘You don’t have to talk to this man,’ says Galina.

‘Of course, you must, if you want to know Russia. You have capital, I have organization,’ says the youngish man. ‘We make it a joint venture? I take twenty per cent? Do we shake?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘there’s nothing to shake on. I’m not what you think. I’m not a businessman at all.’

‘Everyone in the west is a businessman. You read the MBA manual? Wherever you go there is always a good business opportunity somewhere. If you look for it.’

‘I’m not looking for it.’

‘You have plenty capital?’

‘No.’

‘But you do want to invest?’

‘I don’t want to invest. I’m a visitor, a tourist.’

‘So you go somewhere. Where do you want to go?’

‘I don’t want to go anywhere.’

‘A tourist who doesn’t want to go somewhere. Maybe there’s something you’d like to buy?’

‘No, there’s nothing at all I’d like to buy.’

‘A tourist who doesn’t like to buy. So you have something to sell?’

‘Nothing to sell.’

‘Pleasure, you are looking for pleasure. It’s all here if you ask me.’

‘I’m not into pleasure.’

‘A tourist who is not into pleasure. Who do you need to see?’

‘I don’t need to see anyone. And I’m very nicely looked after.’

‘Now thank you for this brandy,’ says Galina. ‘We go.’

The youngish man looks me in the eye. ‘Oh, please, sir, make some use of me, only ask my help. I can arrange travel. Make introductions. Find you beautiful hostesses. What do you do?’

‘I’m a writer.’

‘Okay, maybe you need a movie crew.’

‘I don’t need a movie crew.’

‘You like cafés, I’m sure. I show you a better café. Come with me.’

‘
Alors, mon brave
, time to leave,’ says Galina, taking up her handbag.

‘No, wait, please,’ the youngish man says very urgently. ‘You write books? I can sell them for you. Only a small discount. I know every bookstore in Petersburg. They love to do me favours.’

‘I didn’t bring any books with me.’

‘I can be very useful. I studied literature at the university. I take you to the Pushkin House.’

‘No, thank you.’

‘You collect books?’

‘Yes, some.’

‘Good. Now we do business. I can get you books. Wonderful books. Treasures, books from the imperial collections, the city library.’

‘This is bad, really, it’s time to go,’ says Galina.

The youngish man seizes hold of my jacket sleeve. ‘Give me a list, anything at all you want. I know just what to do. I’ve worked for Americans. I can find you anything. Tell me which is your hotel and I can bring anything there before you leave, so you don’t have to pay me now. Then you can slip it under your shirts, you will have no problem.’

‘Thanks, but no thanks.’

‘Listen, no time could be better. In Russia right now everything is for sale. Don’t go yet, listen to me, wait. There has to be something you want. Icons? Old cameras?’

‘Goodbye, Chichikov,’ says Galina, as we walk away from the table and head up the stairs.

‘That name, I heard it before,’ I say.

‘Of course, don’t you remember your Gogol? He’s the acquirer, the clever rogue who travels round the landowners and buys up all the dead souls.’

‘It’s a joke?’

‘In Russia even our crooks love our best writers.’

‘And every café has to have a nephew,’ I say.

‘Well, I am so sorry,’ says Galina, as we step out again on Nevsky Prospekt, ‘but I just don’t like you to see our bad new Russia. Not everything here is like this.’

‘I’m sure of it.’

‘Russia is full of good people, not like this ridiculous Chichikov.’

‘He was quite amusing.’

‘Then you are amused far too easily,’ she says. ‘When capitalism arrives, it produces only strange and morbid symptoms. You should have been here before, now you have come too late. You are visiting the ruins of a dying empire.’

‘Please, wait,’ says a voice behind us. The youngish man is there again, smiling. ‘You say you are a writer. Don’t you like to see the grave of Dostoyevsky? Not far away from here. Only the other end of Nevsky Prospekt.’

‘No, thanks.’

‘So let’s have a drink, yes? Give me a chance.’

‘Not now.’

‘Then sell me something that will cost you nothing,’ he says. ‘Sell me your name—’

‘My name?’

‘I will print here on my documents.’

‘Come,’ says Galina, taking me firmly by the arm. In her red dress and red pom-pommed hat, she dives right into the middle of the traffic. Horns hoot, tyres skid.

‘Where are we going?’ I ask.

‘I think I take you now to the Didro Library. You ought to see it in case our friend gets there first and it disappears completely.’

And thus, while the traffic honks and races around us, she drags me bodily to the other side of Nevsky Prospekt.

C
HRISTMAS
, grandest of all the European festivals, is nearly here. If he hadn’t known that already, the black nights have appeared to tell him: amazing nights that last nearly the whole day long. The Neva has become a silver, frozen-topped stream that flows and slithers through an almost continuous darkness. High in the vast arctic sky, northern lights flash down through an unrelieved veil of snow. Snow blankets all streets, squares, embankments. Icicles like swords crash from the cornices of the apartment houses above, taking a life or two every day. For several weeks now, the whole court has gone shivering about the Small Hermitage, as servants run through the corridors cradling huge log-piles to be stuffed whole into every steaming stove.

With the sea-harbour to the Baltic shut down for the winter, the Livonian routes to the south blocked to all traffic, except the lightest and fleetest of sleighs, everything – that is, all those social things we know there are in the world – has become amazingly distant, so distant that all letters, which never were easy to deliver, have practically ceased. So have the memories that went with them, so have the pleasures. New songs, new books no longer come up from Europe; now the ice-pack has closed, all is in a state of arrest, and everything waits for the spring. Cold, these deep minus temperatures, just doesn’t suit him. No one could be better housed than within the comforts of the Narishkin Palace, but his body still strains, rumbles, trembles, declares its bitter resentment. He begins to wonder – exactly as he wondered on the fevered night just before he left Paris – if he was brought for a purpose, if his fate has been settled, if the decision to grant his corpse to the worms of Saint Petersburg has already been taken, and is written down in firm letters in the invisible pages of the great Book of Destiny above.

And then, one day, and quite suddenly, the entire court is absent: gone. As if on a whim, the Empress has risen, upped sticks and tailed it, dragging the whole enormous decorated apparatus with her, the twelve
versts
up the snow-packed road to Moscow, out to the new palace at Tzarskoye Selo. The great house she has been rebuilding endlessly is really meant as a summer palace, but now she has chosen to call it into winter use. Teams of carts, lines of smart coaches, hundreds of sledges, have been massed in the freeze outside the Hermitage, respectfully serviced by hundreds of hussars and cossacks, thousands of servants. They have learned all the lessons, having often made such moves before. Out has come the china and the silver, the tables and the beds, the clothes panniers and the linen baskets, the imperial commode, the royal archive, the national mint. Everyone – chamberlains and generals, court-physicians and clockwinders, assayers and dressers, cooks and laundrymen, court jewellers and police spies, the fine riding horses and the royal greyhounds – has then trotted off out of the city, escorted in their coaches, wagons or sledges by entire bobbing battalions of the cavalry guard.

Now in the huge rooms and vast grounds of a palace that bids to be even bigger and more spacious than the Hermitage, they have already taken up a new way of life. Here it’s early to bed, and early to rise. There will be long snowy walks through the deep crisp winter, all contained within the boundaries of a six-mile perimeter. For exercise and amusement they will chop logs in the forest, drink hot tea in the English gardens, vodka in the hunting lodges, pursue seductions in the snowy arbours, hold their winter festivals in the belvederes. Snow has been smoothed flat for comfort, sledging slopes have been laid. Lake-surfaces have been brushed and skates have been prepared. They’ll skate, they’ll slide, they’ll ski on the frozen lakes and ponds. The truth is that once in a while the Empress truly loves to go tobogganing; and it’s this, it seems, that has shifted the entire court and administration.

They did, of course, ask him to go as well. Indeed it seems he was expected to, and possibly, by the rules of protocol, even required. But he’s been able to plead his ill-health, and truly. Fed by age and rank water, the bitter colic, malady of the Neva, has been biting at his stomach ever since he came to Russia, pushing its rough-edged knife deep into his guts, firmly refusing to go away. But truth to tell, he also welcomes it. He welcomes the sudden Petersburg silence, the death of almost everything in the streets. For more than a week now, the Hermitage has rested in silent neglect. Its windows are black, its candles and lamps stay unlit. Its doors are firm-closed, its sentries stand silent and never summoned. The entire spirit of the city has wandered. The arcades too are completely quiet. No officers or countesses or governesses parade the pavements, and the shopkeepers have all suddenly lowered their prices, and are begging the world to purchase. It’s all been a wonder; and he’s gloriously grateful for the chance to reflect, take stock, consider, think again, and write.

So as soon as the servants bring him the commode, at six in the morning, he’s up and out of bed. Soon he’s sitting at his desk in the bedroom, staring out. Snow-filled square, silvery river. Unfinished church, and golden spire. He writes, he writes . . . Soon he’s begun a refutation of M. Helvétius, his friend in Paris, who in all daring has claimed that man is no more than a superior animal, a creature of instinct, a greed machine, a body motored by survival and self-interest, no more. It reminds him of another voice he heard once: on a rainy day in Paris, at the chess tables of the Café Regence, when an angry idle nephew vents his rage.