To the Hermitage (5 page)

Soon he’s able to diagnose the cause of her problems. Evidently some objects in the room are emanating ‘simulacra’, dangerous rays – or, as we say back in dear Byzantine old Turkey, bad feng shui. Probably it’s the portraits on the wall. The only way the poor girl will be back in perfect shape is if the offending pictures are restored to their owner at once. Our dancer buys the therapy wholesale; only one thing goes wrong. Desbrosses goes home and promptly commits suicide, over some quite unconnected matter. The scheme fails, the simulacra cause no more trouble, the dancer is soon restored to health and doing her dance with a new partner. Golitsyn has lost, this time. But our man has what he wanted. Surely there’s a wonderful plot here, for a play, an opera, a book – to be called, let’s say, ‘The Mystification’. He sits down and writes it, as he writes down everything. The fact is the whole world is a mystification, a place of plots and conspiracies, all of them seeking to be written. Indeed if you’re just a little superstitious and fatalistic – like, let’s say, that fat postilion in his yellow tabard, sitting cursing his horses up there on the box – you could even imagine that all of life itself has been written down or is being written by a divine providence up there in heaven above, and our human problem is to figure out the mystifying plot devised around us . . .

Oh, see: here we are in the Hague. A sea-blown town of trotting carriages, big-windowed embassies, sombre bankers, sober merchants, neat well-appointed brothels. Its trades trade with the Indies, the East, the Baltic; its diplomats sit sadly in little square houses, seared by the sands of the blustery coast. When our man arrives in the post-chaise, Prince Dmitry is on his doorstoop, ready and waiting. Beside him’s the pretty, witty German wife the Philosopher has found for him, not as wild and risqué as the dancer from the opera, but with better social connections. They take him indoors and offer him everything: comfortable room, writing desk, personal servant, a bottle of Dutch spirits. But spirits are what the Prince is lacking, as he frankly confesses at dinner that night. He’s missing Paris, missing his friend, missing their pleasures and one of their favourite pastimes, purchasing vast and expensive works for the Tzarina. This mystifies Our Philosopher, who justly observes that these Flemish lands are exactly where most of the boodle they bought in Paris was painted to start with.

True, admits the Ambassador, but since he came to Holland nothing has gone well. He’s lately made the most wonderful and expensive acquisition: the glorious Braamkamp collection of great Flemish Old Masters. Unfortunately, up in the inhospitable Gulf of Finland, which all good men should avoid, the vessel carrying the treasures north to Her Sublimity has foundered, while the ship’s pious captain was diverting his attention into praying to the good Lord above. The whole boatload of wondrous paintings now lies at the bottom of the Baltic. Dmitry has destroyed the pride of the Renaissance, won the eternal contempt of art historians everywhere and the contempt of Posterity, emptied the Russian treasury, earned the clear disdain of his Tzarina. ‘Well, I shall just have to get on without them,’ she has bitterly announced to her court at the Hermitage.

Our Philosopher does his best to be cheery: what else are good friends for? ‘It might be worse,’ he says, as the German Princess plays pleasantly on the spinet in the corner. ‘There are plenty more Venuses and Bathshebas where that lot came from. Here in the Lowland they all paint like crazy. Anyone will do you an Annunciation. Apart from growing tulips, it’s all they ever do.’

‘I don’t know why, it’s not a cultured country. Not a bit like Paris.’

‘For one thing it isn’t run by kings and venal priests.’

‘It’s run by bankers.’

‘And publishers, printers. A land of learning and freedom, my friend. A land for philosophers. Descartes, Locke, Spinoza.’

‘But you haven’t even stepped outside and looked at it yet.’

‘I don’t need to. I know it has learning, liberalism, art and banking – the four most necessary things in the world. And I notice the women all seem fat and cheerful.’

‘If you like fat.’

‘I do.’

‘I prefer thin.’

‘Why did Her Mightiness send you here?’

‘You know why. Because without these stinking Dutch canals and these stinking Dutch bankers our city on the Neva just wouldn’t exist at all.’

How true. How very true.

For didn’t the whole thing start as a dream here, when the young Peter the Great (great already, for he rose up six feet eight in his boots) arrived on his Great Embassy for youthful rest and recreation? A boisterous young man who broke windows, turfed friends, acquaintances, even total strangers into hedges, he drank and whored with the best. He came incognito and in disguise, even though he stood higher than anyone and had a pronounced facial tic, and his retinue of a hundred servants, six trumpeters, two clockmakers, four dwarves and a monkey, suggested to the shrewder observer he might be a person of consequence. In Amsterdam he studied astronomy and anatomy, found out how to dissect a corpse, was taught how to cast metal, shave a face, pull teeth (the teeth, indeed, of anyone unlucky enough to be to hand). He acquired the trades of carpenter, boat-builder, sail-maker, became noted for his vast and indiscriminate curiosity (‘What is dat?’).

When he returned to Russia, became Tzar, defeated the Swedes, retook the eastern Baltic, and decided to build a triumphal capital on the Neva, staring dangerously out through storm, ice and foggy winters at the tempting riches of the West, it was Amsterdam he tried to build. Peter’s city would not be another Scythian hotchpotch: mud-based buildings, leaking hovels, bearded boyars, rooting pigs and starving serfs. It would have not just cathedrals and monasteries, fortresses, prisons and arsenals, but canals, palaces, academies, museums, and stock exchanges, the glories of trade and war. He summoned Dutchmen to dig out his canals and embankments. When these seemed smaller than the ones in Holland, he had them filled and dug again. Meantime as the new city began to rise, Dutch ships carried the bricks, Dutch painters decorated the salons, Dutch bankers provided the ready. Swedish slaves and gulaged Russian serfs might have dug the foundations, raised the roofbeams, perished in the Finnish swamplands in their hundreds of thousands. But the peerless new city, which some began to name the city of bones, was raised not just on drowned skeletons but jolly Dutch guilders.

‘Which is why I’m here, stuck in the windy Hague,’ explains Golitsyn. ‘The game’s started all over again.’ Our man grasps the point at once. What did for huge, big-booted Peter can never please Her Empress Autocratrix. If Peter built in timber, she’ll build in stone. He dug out ditches, she’ll raise up palaces and promenades. He borrowed guilders in thousands, she’ll borrow in millions. He was Great, she’ll be Greater. He bought Dutch paintings, she’ll buy collections, art by the shipload. And everything has to be backed by those same Dutch bankers, with their black suits, white ruffs, Lutheran hats, warted faces. For the Tzarina shops – shops as only a great tzarina with compliant bankers can. She’ll shop till Golitsyn drops. There’s no doubt about it: if the car boot sale, the garage sale, had already been invented, the Sublime Mother would have been among its first and warmest devotees. Even when the great shopaholic future unfolds, in days and stores yet only vaguely plotted in the Book of Destiny above, Imelda Marcos will still prove stingy, our Duchess of York a crass collector of airmiles, in the grand comparison. Here it’s shoes and shawls, there it’s amethyst and gold. It’s clothes and cosmetics, gems and gewgaws, porcelain and pewter, buttons and bows.

But above all things it’s the higher arts. ‘It’s not really love of art,’ the lady honestly admits. ‘It’s pure and unvarnished greed. In truth I’m more of a glutton than a taster.’ Which is why, when a collection – of anything at all, discovered anywhere at all – comes to market, she has it purchased, gift-wrapped, crated, shipped home. The Tzarina follows, as only she can, the first and only true law of shopping: value comes from who buys, not what’s sold. The stuff may be bricolage, bric-a-brac, no worth at all to start with. Her mere act of patronage, the simple fact of possession, turns vulgarity into grandeur, debris into dream, dreck into collectable, dross into gold. Her emissaries buy everywhere; we’re looking at two of them now. Twenty years into her reign, three truly enormous palaces have grown too small to hold the boodle. Which means more new commissions: palaces, museums, academies, libraries, theatres and opera houses. Which means the Queen has long been collecting not just things but people: architects and sculptors, shapers of silver and setters of stones, mathematicians and marquetry-makers, singers and dancers, writers and thinkers, tragedians and comedians, craftsmen and castrati, milliners and cutters of clothes, not to say the generals, military engineers and shipbuilders needed to defend them. And, like the painters and the furniture, when she calls they come: north, far north, to that strangest of all cities, up there on the inhospitable Neva on the edge of the swamps of Karelia, to a vast imperial building site less than fifty years old.

She’s a cunning clever queen, without any question. As she shops and builds, she calculates and thinks. Like an earlier queen, Christina, at the further end of the Baltic, she’s an honest bluestocking: a splendid learned lady with a fine European education. She’s arrived in the winter snows from one of the back courts of German Europe, a small-ranking Russian princess who, still only fat and fourteen, has married a prince: the mad little soldier who will in time become Peter the Third. Once enthroned as his tzarina in dirty old Moscow, it has taken her no time at all to deal with this plodding marital encumbrance. Finding, as only a clever and ambitious princess can, sponsors and conspirators, guardsmen and lovers, she manages a grand palace coup, displacing her unpopular husband to prison and becoming sole mistress of the Russias. Not much later comes Tzar Peter’s strange and fortunate death, from a sudden attack of the haemorrhoids. Now she’s Empress Autocratrix of All the Russias, Tzarina of Kazan, Astrakhan and Siberia, Princess of Estonia, Livonia, Karelia, Dame of goodness knows where. When rival Romanovs appear (as they do so often) they are perfectly likely to suffer the same fate as her spouse, and probably in the same prison. There is, for instance, the mysterious ‘Prisoner Number One’, clearly a perfectly valid pretender, an entirely genuine impostor, for whose strange maddened end she expresses deep surprise and accepts no responsibility, none at all.

But in a woman of such huge charms and splendid talents these little tricks and contrivances can always be excused. True, she seems to have adapted quite easily to some of the harsh Russian ways, but she still preserves the high European graces. She’s a popular princess, an enlightened empress, especially when seen from a distance. She has Enlightenment tastes, she listens to the messages of reason, she’s in tune with the newest thought of the age. She’s a creature of destiny, dream and desire: a true queen of hearts. She takes lovers from everywhere, her Night-Emperors: burly brute-lovers for the body, more aesthetic lovers for the mind. Meantime, along the ever improving banks of the Neva, rotting Petrine wood turns magically into long-lasting stone, and once mean streets open out into the most inviting
prospekts
. Soon there’s a university, an Academy of Arts, another of sciences; an Italian theatre, a great observatory, a Temple of Minerva, a library, even a mysterious astronomical clock whose interior can be entered to disclose the inner workings of the unmistakably rational universe. She more than reads; she thinks, studies, argues. She’s drawn to grand ideas and learning; she looks to Paris and the great
Encyclopedia
itself. No sooner has she taken power than she writes warm letters to the makers and shakers: Voltaire and Rousseau, d’Holbach and d’Alembert, the people who think new thoughts not just for Paris – where court, church and censor are all too ready to burn their books or stack their authors in prison – but for the self-redeeming progressive cosmos itself.

And, truth to tell, in the course of her great Enlightenment shopping spree she has purchased our Thinker himself. ‘Which is why I too am stuck now in the windy Hague,’ he thinks: as Dmitry drinks, the German princess clangs away on her spinet in the corner, playing a bit of Lully, a bit of Rameau; and the east wind blows, and the northern sea-waves crash incessantly outside . . .

A
NYWAY
, now I’m properly bankrolled (with all this geld I could probably buy myself one whole Russian hamburger), I shall start to enjoy what I’m really here for: the Nordic charms of Stockholm itself. As I walk away through the tree-filled and now completely gridlocked square, ripe scents in the air soon tell me I’ve found what I’m looking for. On the far corner is the city’s ancient food and fish market, smelling richly, wonderfully of a plenitude and plurality of aromatic full-bodied things: what fish, what olives, what coffee, what caviar, what cheese! The whiffs draw me at once. I walk inside, past lighted stalls, gleaming with dead-eyed silver fish, blood-reddened with country meat, twinkling with fresh ripe vegetables. At a neat little food counter I repose myself atop a mushroom of a stool and eat the local speciality, Baltic herring. I scoff the crisp fresh bread, I drink a (non-alcoholic) beer. Then I look round with interest at another local speciality: those tall, leggy, lithe, blonde and wonderfully well-dressed girls who sit further along the counter – sexually serious, light-skinned like pure cream, summer-bronzed.

I have, let me tell you, perfect credentials for my curiosity. That’s to say, I’m a writer: a professionally observant person, one of those collectors of life’s little data, an avid thinker of thoughts and a watcher of things, not least big well-dressed blonde Viking girls. I’m sitting there watching with all the manners of a person with an idle and uncertain temperament and a day or so to waste. For the thing is: I’ve set off on this voyage to Russia a day or so earlier than I need to, and I’m not even quite sure why. But the truth is, I’ve been feeling pretty gloomy lately: not sure about my life’s direction, not clear whether I’ve been doing things right or wrong. I seem suddenly to be growing much older than I ever meant to be, leaving everyone around me looking foolishly young. Time idles for them; for me it seems to pass strangely quickly. Summers grow more precious, winter seems a terrible curse. A world that used to be solid and sensible, well planned and properly run, feels strangely sick with childishness, decadence, pointless unrealities.