‘Yes, I will,’ I say. ‘I suppose what I don’t understand, then, is if you’re so anti-reason why did you come on this Diderot Project?’
‘The same reason we all came on the Diderot Project. Free airticket, free food and drink, free visit to Russia. What’s the first rule of academic scholarship? Never, never look a gift grant in the mouth.’
‘I came to sail on a ship called the Anna Karenina.’
‘And you didn’t. That’s what comes of high intentions.’
‘And I came to visit the Hermitage and look at the Diderot papers.’
‘You could have done that on any package tour.’
‘And to find out more about Diderot.’
‘And why do you think Diderot himself went to Russia in the first place?’
‘To perform the task of the philosopher. Enlighten the despot, spread the rule of reason.’
‘And did he? No, he came for just the same reason we do. Free ticket, free trip to Russia, free food and drink.’
‘I don’t think so. I think he was looking for the one great patron who’d understand him.’
‘Catherine, you mean? She understood him fine. She knew he’d flatter her and prostrate himself before the spectacle of power.’
‘But he didn’t.’
‘He did. The lady bought philosophers just like she bought shoes and paintings. He was one more possession to add to her glory. And he went along with that. Skal!’
Verso raises a fresh glass of bourbon to me.
‘So you think. It’s not how I understood it,’ I say.
‘It’s true. Or as true as any truth is true, which it isn’t, of course. No, the main reason I’m here is I needed to be out of the States a while. I happen to be between marriages.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No need. They weren’t my marriages I was between. Besides, every philosopher has to go to Russia. Remember Isaiah Berlin?’
‘Yes. I know he was in the British Embassy in Moscow after the war.’
‘And he came to Petersburg, Leningrad in those days, to meet Anna Akhmatova.’
‘And they took to each other.’
‘That’s right. They spent a whole night together in her apartment off the Fontanka. They found they spoke the same language.’
‘Amazing. I didn’t think anyone spoke Isaiah’s language. Except Isaiah.’
‘Anyway he talked ceaselessly.’
‘He always did.’
‘The next morning a friend asked Akhmatova if they’d reached the great fulfilment. “I didn’t,” she said, “but I think he probably did.”’
‘Didn’t Stalin put a trace on them?’
‘It was a disaster for her. They say Stalin was so angry he started the Cold War. Which means there’s some unfinished business left between Russian womanhood and Western philosophers.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh, sure. What do you think of Tatyana from Pushkin?’
‘Delightful.’
‘Sure, and that’s just one of them. This whole ship is filled with Tatyanas, did you know that? Tatyana from Pushkin does the cabins, Tatyana from Smolensk’s in the blini bar, and take a look in the duty free. Tatyana from Novgorod—’
‘Do you imagine they would take my Swedish kronor here?’ asks Lars Person just then, coming into the bar in his huge bohemian hat and sitting down wearily at our table.
‘Anything,’ says Verso. ‘Your shoes if you could spare them. So, what did they decide up there at the Age of Reason Club?’
‘Swedish democracy worked as it usually does. We had a discussion. We took several votes.’
‘So, papers or no papers?’
‘Well, Agnes voted for papers. But Sven, Birgitta and I were all against.’
‘Manders?’
‘He abstained, but then he is a diplomat.’
‘So, no papers,’ says Verso. ‘Thank God for that.’
‘Nej, nej,’ says Person, ‘you don’t understand. I told you, this was Swedish democracy.’
‘Yes? Go on?’
‘Bo was chair. That meant he had two votes and the right to appoint an ombudsman. He appointed Alma, who re-assessed the voting, decided there were various procedural errors, and was given the casting vote. Now we have papers.’
‘How boring,’ I say.
‘They will be,’ says Person, ‘since at nine in the morning you are giving the very first one.’
‘I haven’t even given my consent,’ I say. ‘I like to decide these things for myself.’
‘I’m afraid that is not a proper attitude,’ says Person. ‘This is Swedish democracy. It’s a system to decide what’s best for other people.’
‘And where are they all now?’
‘Probably taking some more votes over dinner in the dining room. We can go and join them. Or alternatively we could go down to the Balaklava Nightclub and watch the floorshow. How do we decide? Should we take a vote?’
‘My friends, I really don’t think that’s going to be necessary, do you?’ says Jack-Paul Verso.
Which explains why now we’re sitting at a table in the dark Balaklava Nightclub. It’s smoky, fetid, somewhere deep in the lower bowels of the ship. It’s later: quite a while later, in fact several big bottles of champagne later. At the dim-lit tables men are shouting and quarrelling, red-cheeked women are giggling very loudly. A small bright-clad orchestra sits onstage: guitar, harmonica, the universal balalaika. We’ve already been treated to a tenor whom I’d seen swabbing the deck earlier, rendering songs from The Volga Boatman. Then a bass stoker has offered us a sample of the many agonies of Boris Godunov. Between the acts the lights go up, then go down again. Each time they dip and a new sailor-performer appears, false papers, identity cards, small consumables and various banned substances rapidly pass round the tables from hand to hand. Now, once again, they dip, and a long row of leggy girls appears, bouncing on from stage left, arms on each others’ shoulders, legs tossing into the air, clad in skimpy silver costumes, gold top hats, bright spangles corruscating at every nipple and crotch.
‘Hey,’ says Jack-Paul Verso, looking up from pouring a bottle of shampanski into our glasses, ‘am I going crazy? Or can that be Tatyana from Pushkin?’
He’s not, for it is. There on the end of the sparkling row is Tatyana, decked in gold and silver, happy-faced, tossing her fine healthy legs high in the air with the rest of them.
Rising to his feet, Verso claps furiously. ‘Hey, Tatyana, you’re wonderful! My little quick-change artist!’
Tatyana, looking bewildered, falters momentarily; then her fine legs pick up the beat again. A waiter with a dagger in his belt walks over, and Verso subsides into his chair. ‘Tatyanas by the score,’ he reflects in exotic delirium. ‘Every single one of them a stunner. And every single one of them longing to meet an advanced deconstructionist from the West.’
‘I hardly think so,’ says Lars Person. ‘This girl has bunks to make and cabins to clean.’
‘Sure,’ says Verso, ‘but it’s party time, and the night is but young.’
The high-stepping, all-dancing routine comes to an end. Tatyana, smiling fixedly, bounces last off the stage. Then the lights dip completely. The entire place grows silent, watching the daggered waiter step on to the stage and switch on a TV set in the corner.
What comes on is the evening news from Moscow. There it isn’t party time, and there’s definitely no Age of Reason in Russia right now. An excited commentator fronts to camera; behind him is a row of soldiers and weaponed and shielded police. Marching towards them, as in the old days, comes a large, disciplined, excited crowd. They’re waving the red banners of old communism, even the banners of the old Tzars; they’re marching up from the Moskba river and heading for the wide open space in front of the White House. From the huge building more flags and banners wave them on. The crowd meets the rows of soldiers, who offer what seems no more than a token resistance. Paving stones start flying; the police lines keep falling back, some of the officers throwing
away their riot shields and running. The crowd excitedly surges forward, breaking loose in every direction, filling the space outside the parliament building. From the square, from the window, megaphones blare, and there is a sudden surge of triumphant singing. A flight of doves is released from inside the building, to flutter high into the air. ‘We’ve won,’ cries Rutskoi joyously from the balcony. ‘I call on all troops to capture the Kremlin and take the usurping traitor Yeltsin,’ blares Khasbulatov. ‘Victory is hours away.’ The crowds turn and, driving the police before them, begin to march back into the city.
Here in the Balaklava Nightclub, all traffic and noise has stopped; we watch in total silence. Then a loud shouting erupts, and violent quarrels begin. A table is knocked over in a crash of glass. The waiter quickly switches off the TV set. At once the houselights dim, the stage lights go up. In a disordered line – they must have been summoned back quickly – the tattered band of showgirls bounces on again. Tatyana’s first in the line. She and the team have done a quick costume change; now they’re dressed in Russian commissar uniforms, wearing big official caps. The crowd boos, then cheers as they strip off to show they are wearing nothing underneath. It’s a famous old truth, as Lars Person thoughtfully observes, that when the garments fly politics usually goes out of the window.
‘But the crunch has come,’ I say.
‘The crunch is soon coming,’ agrees Person. ‘The usurper and the demagogues. It’s truly Shakespearean, don’t you think?’
‘God, I love that girl, and all her kind,’ Verso is saying meantime, staring at Tatyana, who is smiling fixedly, stripping and gyrating with the best of them, and seeing off history.
‘You mean Tatyana from Pushkin?’
‘Yes, let’s ask her over. Maybe she can collect up a couple of her friends.’
‘Not for me, I’ve just heard I have a paper to write.’
‘Oh, come on, professor, our evening’s just beginning. There are more important things than papers. Shampanski, sex, history.’
‘Sorry, professor, I know if I don’t go and write it now, I never will.’
A buzz of unease and political anger is passing round the nightclub; yet, somehow, the pleasures of the evening still seem to have many more hours to run. In fact, by the time I’ve finished paying my own share of the drinks tab to the cossack of a waiter (I have some spare Irish punts he seems absolutely delighted to take), Verso has Tatyana sitting cheerfully on his knee at the table, dressed in some quaint bird-like costume.
I set off alone through the ship. In the bars and public rooms everything is throbbing, as if an adrenalin of anxiety is passing through the whole vessel. Outside them, though, everything is quiet. In fact it’s strangely quiet. Maybe the entire ship’s crew have gone down below, stripped themselves to the buff in the nightclub to keep history at its distance. I can find small sign of the other Enlightenment Pilgrims either: although I do think I briefly glimpse Agnes Falkman and Sven Sonnenberg entering a cabin together, but I could be mistaken, of course. As for my own cabin, it’s a silent little prison, unwindowed and gun-metalled. And the moment I enter it I regret my sudden sense of duty: fuelled, to be frank, more by a sense of sexual unease or even jealousy about Tatyana’s easy compliance with Jack-Paul Verso than by a true academic passion. It’s not, though, till I start to look round for my work-stuff – my briefcase, books, notes and notebooks – that I spot the huge flaw in my virtue. For the luggage that crowds out my cabin space isn’t, I now remember, my luggage at all. This is soft-leather crown-emblazoned Via Veneto ware, sophisticated international-traveller finery coated with the very grandest of labels: La Scala, La Fenice, Stadtsoper, Metropolitan, Covent Garden. The luggage I need to have is somewhere else entirely. In fact it’s locked away in the cabin of a very great diva.
Which explains why, minutes later, I’m marching through the ship like some burdened bellboy, toting five suitcases that seem to contain the heavy costumes of an entire opera. A few members of the crew appear and look at me suspiciously. But they say nothing, and why should they? Every single thing on this ship is suspicious. How to find her cabin? I make my way by the companion-ways: C deck, B deck, A deck. And A deck proves to be another world: there are wood-walled passages, carpeted floors. I must have found the ancient preserve of the old Russian elite and the party members. Then, from far down the passageway, I hear a noise. It’s the sound of Brünnhilde in Valhalla, declaring the end of the world. As I move closer, the booming yet clear-noted song changes to something more familiar. ‘“To me, Onegin, all these splendours, / This weary tinselled life of mine, / This homage that the great world tenders, / My stylish house where princes dine / Is empty,”’ trills a high firm voice behind a mahagony door. I rather think I’ve found what I’m looking for.
I tap on the door. The Swedish nightingale throws it open. Her long red hair is down now. She’s looking quite grandly magnificent, wearing a soft, white dressing gown over her splendidly capacious person, and holding up a whole gold-foil wrapped magnum of pink shampanski. As for her stylish house, it isn’t empty at all. A figure in a white uniform, wearing a huge cap, sits on the bed. He rises, slips past me (but after all I’m no more than another bellboy), and disappears along the passageway.
‘The captain,’ says the diva. ‘He must go away now to drive the ship. He just came to bring me this champagne. They are such wonderful lovers of opera in Russia.’
‘They’re such wonderful lovers of everything,’ I say. ‘Sorry to interrupt. I just thought we ought to exchange our things.’
‘Exchange our things?’
‘Your luggage,’ I say, ‘you remember they left it in my cabin?’
‘Oh, you have brought it? Wasn’t it very heavy?’
‘Very.’
‘Come in, put those cases down, anywhere you like. I hope you took care of them. Do you realize there is a quarter of a million pounds of jewellery in there?’
‘No, I didn’t. Good lord.’
‘Oh, yes, my darling, I always take it with me. And now I suppose you are expecting a little tip. Do you like a drink? Now, tell me what you think about my little cabin?’
Well . . . as little cabins go, it’s certainly a nice little cabin. For one thing it’s extremely big. No small cell, no windowless metal box, for the prima donna. As fits her greater fame and her larger frame, she has been given the imperial, or perhaps more accurately the Party Official suite, the ultimate or maxi-cabin. No narrow bunk bed here: instead a huge silk-sheeted double bed, luxuriously scattered with her clothing. No little metal cupboard: a vast dressing table with glinting mirrors and coloured light-bulbs, its top scattered with her jewellery. No prison-sized shower; a great bathroom off, filled with her underwear. Great wardrobes. Cushioned sofa. Flower-filled vases. Large easy chairs. A great silver ice-bucket for that magnum she’s waving. Curtained portholes – and beyond them, bright in the glitter cast down by the lights of the ship, the Baltic waves gently billow and rock. A crest or two rolls by. Amid the crests, the grey granite islands of the archipelago glint in a ghostly moonlight, like the jewels on the dressing table.
‘Now do you see my archipelago?’ says the diva, triumphantly, bringing me a glass. ‘Have some shampanski.’
In her silk dressing gown, of a kind presumably provided by the management for its most important and honoured guests, the diva, it has to be said, looks grander and more glorious than ever. There’s something palatial, something imperial, in fact there’s something truly transcendental, about the sheer scale and presence of her being, the bosomyness of her bosom, the booming boomingness of her sonic boom.
‘By the way, I had the maid unpack all your luggage,’ she says, sitting down on the bed and gesturing to me to join her.
‘Yes, did you?’
‘You will find your clothes hanging in the wardrobe.’
‘I see, but why—?’
‘I wanted to look in your things for that book you told me. About Monsieur Rameau and his nephew.’
‘
Oh yes, did you have the chance to read it?’
‘A little. Till the captain came to visit me. But what a nasty book.’
‘Is it?’
‘It’s so sad, listen to what it says,’ she says, taking out her spectacles and picking up the volume. ‘“In Rameau we get great operas, in which we find harmony, choruses, spears, great victories, glorious ballets, grand ideas. But Rameau will simply be eliminated in his turn. And who – not even a very beautiful woman who has a nasty pimple on her nose – can ever feel as tragic as a great artist who has completely outlasted his age.”’
‘Yes. By his death everyone was attacking him.’
‘Of course. Paris was split in two. It was the age of Gluck and Pergolesi and everyone was turning to Italian opera. Of course now he’s back in fashion again.’
‘Maybe you remember it was Rousseau who led the attack, in the Encyclopedia.’
‘I know. The orchestra of the Paris opera was so furious they tried to have him assassinated. I just wish we had orchestras like that now. Musicians who care about something.’
‘Postmodern times,’ I say. ‘Everything goes.’
‘Yes, everything goes. Here, have some more shampanski, my darling. And explain me: this nephew, this fat miserable boy with no talents, why does he hate his uncle so much?’
‘Why does a young person want to get rid of an old one?’
‘Jealousy? You tell me.’
‘The uncle was famous, one of the most famous, flattered old men of the age. And his nephew’s a total failure, scraping a living off his wits. He has no reputation, no proper work. He scrapes a life by pimping and flattering, fawning on the great and then mocking them behind his back. He steals from their tables, tries to seduce their daughters. He borrows their silver and betrays them any way he can. I suppose it’s what happens in a sophisticated and corrupt society, where the worst people learn how to make a parasitic living off the best.’
She pours a flowing, bubbling stream of shampanski into my glass. ‘I see what you mean. The nephew’s a critic.’
‘I suppose that is what I mean. Rameau stood for harmony, absolute form, classical order; he stands for total discord. Rameau stands for reason; he automatically distrusts wise men and philosophers. Rameau creates a musical Utopia. He says he despises a perfect world, because it doesn’t have room for utter shits like him. The only sufficient world is a corrupt one, because it allows someone like him to exist, he says.’
To the Hermitage Page 15
