To the Hermitage (9 page)

Our man rolls up there with Narishkin; they like the look of it too. They taste its Lutheran flavours, they trip round the same student taverns. They call upon the great professors, attend the lectures and the Bach recitals in the church. Soon, wig off, pen out, the Philosopher is writing, writing. Within days he’s become a local fixture – famous for wandering galleries, parks and
Aula
s wigless, in dressing gown, nightcap, yellow slippers, affably talking to students and professors about his newest special subject, atheism, and all that with Narishkin’s enthusiastic and drunken support. Strangely, by an odd little turn of fate’s wheel, up there in heaven above, Posterity is lying in wait here. One day, the posthumous text of the book our man’s now writing –
Rameau’s Nephew
, it’s called, the best thing he will ever write – will also make a journey to the Hermitage. Thanks to a venal rector at the university, or maybe a German soldier, the draft will then be smuggled out again, to Germany and the great writer Schiller. He will pass it on to Goethe, by now himself a court philosopher at none-too-distant Weimar. He’ll love the book, translate it into German, publish it here in Leipzig, and so secure its fame.

Then the manuscript will oddly disappear, and a forged French version will emerge. Hegel will admire the tale, for its invention of the nephew, the first ‘modern character’. Then so will Marx, and so will Freud – and thus it will go on. One day they will build Karl-Marx University here, and give the top of its skyscraper the appearance of a half-open book, in memory of all the books that have been opened here, and the many more that have been closed. But Our Man’s tale is eternal: the lovely dialogue between a peripatetic chess-watching Paris philosopher and his famous double, an idle, chimerical, flattering parasite, the useless nephew of the stiff-legged great composer Jean-Philippe Rameau. In fact it’s a debate between Moi and Lui. ‘I let my mind rove wantonly,’ the philosophical Moi of this most pleasing of tricky stories confesses. ‘My ideas are my trollops.’

In Leipzig, and later at the grand court of Elector of Saxony at Dresden (‘the Florence of the Elbe’ as Leipzig is ‘the Paris of the Elster’), our man’s current ideas prove to be the most glorious and alluring of trollops. Unfortunately they are so buxomly tempting, so seductive to the students, so radical and atheistical, they soon have him in serious trouble with the court authorities. Once again it’s time to move on.

Taking, of course, the longer route – how wise they are to avoid Berlin, for the Philosopher-King is raging wildly, and writing scurrilous articles about our man for all Europe’s magazines under a row of easily cracked pseudonyms – they roll onward. Here is Pomerania, here is Poland. Now and then they call on one of those small impoverished castles that litter the countryside, rural seed-beds that provide nubile princesses for the grand courts, ensuring the continuance (or otherwise) of monarchs, prince-palatines, tzars. But most of the time it’s flea-ridden taverns, terrible roads. There are plagues of mosquitos, hordes of special gnats only known in Poland. Problems with toothache, problems with brigands, problems with floods. Innumerable gastric colics, searing the gut – ‘Imagine if you can the state of a man tormented by violent colic travelling over the worst roads. A knife shoved in the intestines could not hurt more.’ For who will ever know just how much gut-wrenching diarrhoea has been traded in this world for the international traffic in learning, the world-movement of the higher thought?

For four days they do not eat. Pigs grovel. Dirt-caked peasants groan and labour. Groaning haycarts hung with tatty children trudge. Well-poles creak. Brats scream, dogs howl, donkeys brawl. Ducks croak, geese cackle, Prussian cavalry threaten and maraud. Meantime, careless with goods, ignorant of the little stuff of daily life, our man leaves belongings everywhere. He misses a nightshirt in Saxony, a wig in Pomerania, his slippers in Poland. Hats, notebooks, slippers and linen all have to be gone back for and retrieved by weary servants and postilions. Then somewhere, quite unnoticed, they cross a highly mysterious border. Europe becomes not Europe. The world subtly changes. The post-horses grow more scrawny. Now even time is different; somewhere or other eleven human days have disappeared from the western calendar and spiralled away into the strange wastes of the cosmos.

Never mind; they’re travelling in a crazy hurry now. It’s only days away from the young Archduke Paul’s wedding, about to take place in Petersburg. Narishkin, as court chamberlain, is commanded to be there. They ride on, day and night, forty-eight hours at a run. As the carriage jolts, as north and east get nearer, the wind gets colder, the winter comes down, the Sage and Narishkin talk furiously. Or not quite. It is the Sage who talks, Narishkin who listens. He talks a blue streak; this is a man who has been known to speak without stopping a whole day and night. He laughs and he weeps. He slaps his legs, and everyone else’s. He shouts loud, he whispers low. He reflects at length on . . . well, everything reason can reflect on, which is everything. On Michelangelo’s great dome for Saint Peter’s (never seen it, knows all about it), the best system of underground sanitation for a modern city, the role of the naïve in art, the means of deception in acting, the paradox of identity as proven by the existence of Siamese twins, the function of statues, the correct and elegant construction of reliable chairs, the perfect add-up or computing machine.

Glancing round, at mountain and flatland, bog and salt-marsh, pig-pen and well-pole, at the suffering lands of Poland, lusted over by just about everyone except the people who actually live there, at the rocky outcrops of Baltic coast at Konigsberg, he takes out his notebook – then another and another. He jots down plans, schemes, even the odd bad dream, the odd comic poem. In truth he’s now busily inventing Russia, whose border they will soon shortly reach at Riga. And he’s inventing it not as it is – huge
versts
, vast permafrosted steppes, white nights, fattened boyars, big-whiskered monks, fur-clad cossacks, life-weary serfs, onion-topped chapels, broken roads – but as it might be, a great moving Enlightenment dream. He plans buildings, draws whole cities, devises political constitutions, new dance academies and cadet schools. Brooding grimly on human wrongs, he invents human rights. He wonders whether big-boots Peter really put Petersburg, the new capital, in quite the right spot. Surely, he says, the heart is misplaced when it’s put on the end of a finger, a stomach is attached to a heel.

He starts to construct a vast and visionary memoir for the Empress who, in that same city, he will at last be seeing shortly, delineating the ideal rational nation, serving everybody’s interest, that an enlightened despot like Her Imperial and Autocratic Majesty might best have. ‘A society should first of all be happy,’ he sets down as golden rule number one. Seizing benevolent Narishkin’s arm till the blood-flow halts, he debates everything in the universe, past, present and future. He considers prince and state, reason and madness, order and flux, acting and genius, divinity and self-creation, male and female, marriage and divorce. He writes poems for postilions, and lyrics for pettable chambermaids. When Narishkin, tired of the jolting, sick with the toothache, stabbed by the colic, stops arguing, he simply argues with the next man to hand – who happens to be himself. On he rolls, and on. On he writes, and on.

Soon twenty, forty, then sixty notebooks are full. After six bumpy weeks of travel, toothache, lost wigs and nightshirts, painful flea-bites, gut-wrenching colic, pinched maids, castled cities, fresh duchies and margravates, crashed coaches, lost coachmen, broken carriage wheels, new and chilly seas, changed borders, occasional poems, he is still he, entirely
MOI
. It’s Narishkin who is no longer Narishkin. When at last they ride back into Russia alongside the bleak bay, cross the River Dwina, and enter the narrow streets of old Riga, he’s turned into someone or something else: Lui himself, Diderot’s Double.

A
NYWAY
, enough of my small Cartesian dilemma. Darkness is falling, and there’s an exciting night out in Stockholm to enjoy. I return to my hotel for a quick change of clothes; my evening has already been spoken for. Tonight I’m to be entertained to a fine Swedish slap-up by none other than Professor Bo Luneberg: the man who’s been kind enough to fly me out to Stockholm on this interesting Baltic junket, the precise details of which seem rather to have slipped my mind. Bo Luneberg, let me explain, is a very old academic friend of mine. Or perhaps it would be truer to say I’ve known him over many many years. I’ve met him time and again at various academic conferences, heard him speak, in his dry, edgy expert way, at a variety of sumptuous, well-catered and pretty high-level international seminars right across the world. We’ve kept in touch, exchanged our printed thoughts, traded our off-prints. What Bo and I are, to express it correctly, is colleagues.

Luneberg follows what’s nowadays become rather an uncommon trade, though it once used to be universal. He’s a grammarian – teaching scientific English, the structures of human grammar, the nature of artificial languages here at the Royal Technological University. This is important, because now computers need all this, if not human beings. But that isn’t all. Bo is also a sober-suited academician, and in Sweden this is a very important office indeed. For the Swedish Academy (which, confusingly, was started by Gustav III Adolf in 1786, meaning that René Descartes’ plans for it can’t after all have played much of a part in its founding) is one of the world’s most powerful institutions – and all on the basis of a simple activity. The academy awards prizes. It awards famous prizes. Prizes worth a million dollars, prizes that keep Sweden in the eye of the world. Yes, my old friend and colleague is one of those eighteen dark-suited highly secretive scholars who each year, in some literary vault full of books and busts above the Stockholm Stock Exchange, cast their careful eyes over all the imaginative writings of the whole world, considering who shall receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Occasionally he even calls me up to consult me on their choices – though, as far as I can remember, no recommendation I’ve made has ever been accepted, and no possible winner he has mentioned to me has ever actually been laurelled. He’s a man of very wide acquaintance, extensive travel, massive reading, curious learning, strange gossip, obscure discretions – in fact a little Melchior Grimm. And if anyone in the world knows the true story of what happened to Descartes, this would have to be the man.

Our rendezvous is fixed for seven, on the steps of the National Theatre, which faces out grandly over the now dark, wet, windy harbour. I arrive a little early, and stand waiting under the statues of the Swedish playwrights, looking out as bright-lit evening ferries glide by in the distance. Inside something by Strindberg is playing; but no doubt it always is. The City Hall clock strikes, its bells peeling across the water. Luneberg promptly appears, his grey hair neat, wearing his big-framed glasses and carrying a small black umbrella. He seems his usual sober self, except today he is clad in a Burberry sports jacket, which suggests either a strangely relaxed frame of mind or a gesture of politeness to a British visitor. He’s not alone. With him is a tall, leggy, handsome woman, blonde and middle-aged.

‘Hey, hey, my old friend,’ he says, shaking my hand, slapping my shoulder, tapping my chest, and introducing me to his companion, his wife Alma. She looks me over with haughty suspicion. I can understand why. The word ‘novelist’ must have been used in describing me, because it often has this effect. Then I see she is actually carrying a copy of one of my novels – which no doubt she will ask me to sign later if I prove to be an acceptable sort, and otherwise not. With the warmest apology, she explains that she would have liked to ask me to dinner, but unfortunately Swedes only entertain real friends in their houses. In any case, she understands, I am a writer, and will surely want to go somewhere very bohemian. Happily she knows the perfect place.

The perfect place is a café-restaurant a block or two round the corner. It’s one of those old-fashioned, panelled artistic cafés in the
vieux art nouveau
style. There are caricatures of writers and painters, portraits of actors and singers, framed on the walls, and many prints of eighteenth-century scholars, all of them looking weighty in their wigs. Several depict that low-cut Swedish nightingale, Jenny Lind, mouth open as usual. There are sepia photographs of a bearded Strindberg, showing him sitting in the café, bored and waiting for service – pretty much like ourselves. Neither the room, the cracked leather chairs, nor the waiters, who wear faded black suits and overwashed white aprons, have changed much either since the last century so creakingly turned. At the white-clothed tables a few gentlemen, nearly all middle-aged, suited, and trim-bearded, sit writing with biros over cups of cold coffee. With the benefit of the doubt, I imagine they are authors, journalists or scholars. Two elderly men play chess in a corner. The waiters, standing in a corner, go on chatting together idly.

‘So bohemian, yes?’ says Alma Luneberg joyfully, waving gaily at the extremely sombre scene.

‘Very,’ I admit.

‘Usually there are many writers here, but they must be indoors tonight,’ she says.

‘It is a little wet,’ I say.

‘They say Strindberg often came here to write about his fruitless search for attention,’ says Bo.

‘I can believe it,’ I say, as the waiters fade from sight.

‘And where Lagerkvist wrote his famous work,
The Hangman
.’

‘Yes, I can believe that too.’

Two noisy drunks appear suddenly in the entrance, suggesting the promise of a change of mood. However they are quickly cornered, counselled, then summarily ejected by a group of what appear to be freelance social workers.

‘Welcome to Stockholm,’ says Alma. ‘Now shall we try to enjoy ourselves?’

Meanwhile Bo takes out an asthmatic nasal spray and refreshes his nostrils before interrogating me on various academic matters, mostly to do with the recent divorces or the sudden gay outings of a number of common professorial friends. He seems oddly preoccupied; but then, as Alma explains, he should not really be wasting his time here in a café at all. October is the Nobel Prize season. Bo should really be reading a stack of foreign books, or feeding highly misleading disinformation to the world press.