To the Hermitage (49 page)

Next I notice a set of books I’ve already been thinking about, Sterne’s
Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
. I’ve not forgotten the day of his modern funeral, and his little library in Yorkshire. If these are Diderot’s books, then the six-volume set Sterne shipped out to Diderot in advance of his visit to Paris could very well be here. I take down the set on the shelf, and look inside; on the title pages an inscription is written (though Sterne, like a modern novelist on a book-tour, did sign a great many copies). But something is wrong here too: the six-volume set lacks volumes 5 and 6. And so it goes on, from shelf to shelf all the way round the room. The entire library is riddled with these odd gaps: blanks, apertures, elisions, or (as the theoreticians now like to say) aporias. Everything’s in this same odd condition of incompleteness, of ‘almost’. When is a library not a library? When all the sets and sequences are fractured, as they are here. The alphabetical runs of the dictionaries are short of a few letters. Periodical works have broken calendars, with whole seasons, years, or decades gone astray.

High heels are sounding on the stone flooring; Galina is coming back. She comes and sits down at the desk by the window, and puts down two glasses of tea.

‘Did you find anything interesting?’ she asks me innocently.

‘I’m not sure what to say,’ I answer. ‘I presume these are the books of Voltaire and Diderot.’

‘Some of them.’

‘But I don’t understand what’s happened. Why is nothing complete?’

‘Not complete?’

‘Yes, all the gaps, the omissions—’

From across the desk Galina looks at me oddly, as if wondering whether she can trust me with some intimate truth or other. ‘I am sure you truly love books,
mon ami
.’

‘I do, I always have.’

‘You see, I told Bo it was not a good idea to bring any of you here at all. That he should arrange something different.’

‘It looks as if he has.’

‘It’s true, I thought he had told you all not to come here. I didn’t expect anyone at all. When I came to the boat this morning I thought he’d arranged a different tour. He didn’t say so?’

‘Not to me. That’s why I expected to see the Diderot Library. But what have I seen?’

For an answer, Galina goes over to the wall and takes down a nineteenth-century engraving, which she sets in front of me. The drawing depicts a large handsome room, furnished with desks, classical pillars, glass bookcases, obelisks, a statue. The inscription is in Cyrillic, but it’s evident enough what this must be: ‘The library of the Hermitage?’

‘Yes,’ says Galina. ‘A wonderful room. The Tzarina wanted to make it very beautiful. Remember, she thought she had brought Russia from nothing to something. Scythian barbarity to Athenian grandeur. So her library of reason had to be one of the finest libraries of the age.’

‘And what the Tzarina wanted she always got.’

‘Of course. It must have been perfect, you know. The seven thousand books that came from Ferney, the library of the world’s greatest philosopher. Then the almost three thousand more volumes that came from Didro, the library of the
Encyclopedia
. Ten thousand volumes altogether, a collection of books just as important as any of the great pictures she hung on the Hermitage walls.’

‘It must have been.’

‘I already told you what happened next. There was the revolution in France. And then at the end of her life the Empress herself changed greatly. It’s said her whole life disappointed her. She got old, fat, fearful. Also she became gross, decadent, superstitious.’

‘And her lovers got younger and younger.’

‘
Oui.
When King Louis was executed, she put on a black dress. I think it destroyed every hope she’d had in these things. Philosophy, learning, science, enlightenment.’

‘So she sent Voltaire up to the attic and locked the library doors?’

‘Yes. And from this time strange things started to happen in the Hermitage.’

‘Strange things?’

‘A locked library is a great temptation. And the place was filled with treasures. Didro’s papers. The police file Sartine kept on Voltaire. Many important things. So of course all the little Chichikovs came. The doors were locked but they were easily opened. Treasure is treasure, it is always plundered, officially, unofficially. When Stalin needed some more foreign currency, he just sold pictures from the Hermitage. When the Germans came, they looted everything they could.’

‘You mean they took the books from the library?’

‘Of course.’

‘But I don’t understand. No intelligent thief steals just part of a set. A couple of volumes from a collected edition? And who’d steal just three volumes of an entire encyclopedia?’

‘It depends who steals, for what. Some people like to possess, others to destroy.’

‘It just doesn’t seem right.’

‘Besides, if you want to lose a book, where do you put it?’

‘I don’t know. In a library?’

‘Of course. In a library books are found, but also they are lost. Sometimes they are taken away, sometimes brought back and put in the wrong place. We try to keep a catalogue, but even the best catalogues are wrong. And this library has been moved many times. When it came from the Hermitage, no proper list was kept. There was the Revolution, the Siege, when books were moved to the basements. When the time came to put them back, no one was sure where. Only one person really thought about the old library in the Hermitage. Only one person tried to restore it as it was.’

I look at her: an elegant grey-haired lady, in a fine flimsy French dress, fingering the brooch at her breast.

‘You mean you, Galina.’

‘
Oui, d’accord.
But imagine, here you are in one of the world’s greatest libraries, like the Berg, or the Bibliothèque Nationale. But it’s still a library with nothing: no complete catalogue, no full record on computers. We don’t have these clever shelvings they have in London or Paris, or teams of scholars to classify everything. Maybe there are five million books here, and maybe ten miles of shelves. Somewhere in all that there were once ten thousand special books, the library of Voltaire–Didro. It’s not hard to find some, the ones with Voltaire’s mark on. Some you can identify only by the annotations: Voltaire’s hand, Didro’s. For forty-five years I tried to go to every shelf and look at every eighteenth-century book. If I thought it belonged once to the Library of Reason, I bring it here. Every book in this room comes here for a purpose. Maybe it was once in the library, or maybe in some way it will lead me to the others.’

The room suddenly seems sad. I look around it, at the rough shelves, the incomplete sequences, the damaged spines, the volumes soaking with a leak of rain.

‘How many do you think you’ve identified by now?’

‘Five thousand, perhaps.’

‘What about the rest? Do you think they’re still there, somewhere in the library.’

‘How can I know that?’

‘Surely there’s a better way than checking every single book.’

‘Of course, if I could find Didro’s
Book of Books
. It’s said he kept a list of all his books.’

‘Is it here?’

‘Maybe. Maybe in his papers.’

‘His papers? So you don’t know everything that’s in his papers?’

‘The papers were confused too.’

‘There are still manuscripts that haven’t been published.’

‘I expect so. Yes, of course.’

‘But haven’t the scholars been through everything?’

‘Almost. Everything we have found so far.’

‘Have you read his papers?’

‘Not all. First I want to put back the library of the
Encyclopedia
. Restore it as it was before.’

‘You will, Galina. I feel sure.’

‘I am glad you are sure,
mon ami
. I tried already for forty-five years. I am not so sure any more.’

I get up, and look out through the dirty glass of the window. The square is filled with cold drab people, walking briskly through the hard-blowing wind; they all seem much more than a world away.

‘Surely you can get someone to help you? A foreign scholar?’

‘You can see how Russia is now. Now the bad times are over, the worse times come. Who knows what will happen, if we will go forward or back? We always call ourselves civilized, cultured. But our sufferings make us brutal and our poverty makes us weak and degraded. People still starve here like they did in wartime, and wages don’t get paid. There’s no true state, no real order. The people who survive are those who have learned to be cunning or how to commit crimes. In times like that, why would anyone care?’

‘You care.’

‘
Moi?
But I am nobody. No, it’s not true. I am a ridiculous old woman, who for years has tried to be elegant and Parisian, be the way Petersburg was. I wanted a life among pictures and books. In other words, I am a silly woman who ignored the truth, and does not understand the world.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Please. You see with your own eyes what is happening. Each day I dress and I walk through the city to come here. Each day I try to build my Library of Reason. Each day someone, some little Chichikov, walks in off the street. We don’t have proper guards, he can go anywhere, do anything. If a door is locked, it only takes five roubles to get someone to turn a key. Those people come and they know exactly what to look for. They get their commissions from collectors, in Italy, America. He finds the book or the manuscript, and ships it abroad for a profit. Now it gets worse. Young children walk in off the Nevsky Prospekt, and pick up books to sell to the foreigners on the streets. As I put things together, someone takes them away. If I find a new book for the library, someone walks in and takes ten. One day, there will be nothing left. There will never be a library of reason. So you see I truly am a fool.’

‘No, truly, you’re not a fool.’ And then, to my surprise, I’m holding in my arms a handsome white-haired woman, scented by Chanel, dressed by Poiret, at least seventy years old. And I’m holding her tight and embracing her fondly, trying to kiss away the bright tears that suddenly fill her eyes . . .

T
HEN
,
SUDDENLY
, it’s a time of endings. Christmas has been and gone, in a great and Byzantine display of festivities, a New Year has dawned in the northern darkness, and everything changes. It’s as if the ornate celebrations that have lit the sky for a fleeting moment are the bringers of a greater darkness that descends, like night and snow, over everything. The last pages of the calendar, which turn differently here, have finally turned, and strange new creatures seem to appear over the horizon as the new book of pages dawns. Over the season, the snow has fallen steadily and thickly: turning streets into great white pads, creating the most incredible night spectacles as a million huge flakes sail down slowly past the thousand candle-lit windows of the Winter Hermitage. The Advent season has filled it with great festivities, crowds that are nearly mobs, drunken nobles, arrogant princelings, stumbling generals who have attended the spectacles, watched the sweet plays and operas, even danced in the public staterooms with a newly visible empress.

But here too things are changing, and now the new year darkness has begun to fall too. Plainly not all is well. The snow that began by cleansing the city has now captured it, blanketing all. Horses trot through the streets with frozen beards hanging from their mouths. The urine turns to yellow bricks on the ground beneath their feet. Carriages slide along on huge runners. Long toboggans dragged bodily across the ice of Lake Ladoga keep the city fed. The Baltic is solid-frozen, so nothing from the real Europe which the city mocks comes in. His error in not going deeper into Russia when the weather let him only becomes more apparent. For the snow blanket is so deep that no journey is made now unless entirely necessary; for a soft elderly fellow like himself it’s quite impossible. Only if he resolves to remain in Russia through another summer season will he see in detail the place he has described, his imagined Utopia.

Otherwise it will remain almost as it was before he came, a dream-like scene lit by the (as he now suspects) highly unreliable information that, in answer to his endless questions, has been so sedulously fed to him, by empress, courtiers, scholars and academicians, and which is now supposed to be the stuff of his next great project, so warmly promoted by dear old chancellor Betskoi: his Russian encyclopedia. But is it really true that all over Russia the serfs eat turkey daily, in the same way the unlucky peasants of poorer countries eat gruel or stale bread? Is it really the case that in this fine and decent land no one is ever tortured without excellent reason, ever detained without good cause? Is it really true that its gold reserves are the world’s greatest, and its emerald mines are beyond compare? Is it unquestionably so that the cossacks are all loyal and consenting subjects, or that the Tartars far to the east all read Voltaire and Bossuet and speak the most perfect French?

Yet if it now seems unlikely (for he truly does not want to stay another year) that he will ever move closer to deep Russia, something out there, something stirring in the deep vast nation, seems to be moving ever closer to him. The remarkable rebellion that began when a witless impostor emerged in the Cossack lands out beyond the Volga has turned into something different: something so serious, so strangely menacing, it affects every single thing that happens in the court. Pugachov is a strange impostor, but he matters. Now known through the nation as Emperor Peter Federovich, the wonderfully revived Peter the Third, true husband of she who has become the false usurper, he marches like some operatic hero through the southern towns and villages. He dresses in the grandest robes, goes everywhere bearing his sceptre and axe. His retinue is huge, dressed up as courtiers and priests. His wife has assumed the role of the true tzarina, a stout mockery of the Empress herself. His courtiers have adopted names like Orlov and Potemkin. All point to the marks of the scrofula that prove him to be the one true tzar.

Over the winter his army has grown vast. He attracts rabid Old Believers, wild nationalists, resentful military conscripts, disappointed generals, frontier cossacks, mounted and wandering tribesmen, defiant fleeing serfs. They have become an army like Kublai Khan’s, another eastern invasion. Everywhere the Old Faithful are turning against the false atheists, and the servants against their masters. The upstart tzar offers bounties for slaughter, prizes for genocide: landowners are slaughtered by the hundred, their wives raped, their children stolen and impressed into fighting service, their serfs released, their cattle killed, their houses and mansions torched. Captured officers are publicly tortured and mutilated, in barbarian atrocities answered by the loyal troops, who have set up torture-wheels in all the village squares. Ten thousand Yaik cossacks have set winter siege to Orienburg, and it now looks likely to fall, while another huge revolutionary army encircles Kazan, so well armed their artillery pieces are blasting down the walls.