To the Hermitage

by Malcolm Bradbury

  ‘But why, my darling, does Diderot like him so much?’

  ‘I suppose because every Moi needs a Lui. He can use him to reveal the rival standpoint. Find the opposite to himself. Discover his double, his alter ego, his secret self. I’m sure our good Professor Verso would explain that Diderot was deconstructing the idea of the philosophe.’

  ‘You wouldn’t?’

  ‘I think nephew Rameau was probably just the sort of rundown hack Diderot would have been himself, if he hadn’t managed to live by his ideas and sell his library to Catherine the Great.’

  ‘This is very interesting, my darling,’ says the nightingale, looking at me thoughtfully.

  ‘Sigmund Freud certainly thought so.’

  ‘Sigmund thought some very odd things. Anyway, let me tell you something. I don’t like that book one little bit. I liked the other one much better. The one about the servant and the master.’

  ‘The other book?’

  ‘In your bag.’

  She’s waving another volume at me, pouring me another fizzy glassful. And, you know, I have to admit it: for all her high-diva style I’m somehow beginning to feel a really warm and sentimental fondness for our dear red-haired nightingale.

  ‘Ah, Jacques the Fatalist, so you found that too.’

  ‘I found everything in the world you possess. There’s nothing I don’t know about you.’

  ‘Then you’re way ahead of me.’

  ‘This Jacques, you know who he is, of course.’

  ‘He’s a man who believes in providence, and the servant of his master.’

  ‘No, he’s the great factotum. You remember the great factotum?’

  ‘Oh, you mean the Barber of Seville.’

  ‘Did Diderot know Beaumarchais?’

  ‘Yes, he did. They were acquaintances, maybe friends.’

  ‘Well, there in this book there is already Figaro. He must have passed him on to Beaumarchais.’

  ‘Who gave him to Mozart and Rossini.’

  ‘Which shows that your book can turn into my music. And that is why I decide I can like your Diderot.’

  ‘Because you can sing him, you mean?’

  ‘Of course. Here, have some more shampanski. Lie down here on the pillow and help me to drink it.’

  ‘Well,’ I say, ‘I really ought to slip away.’

  ‘Not to drive the ship?’

  ‘To write my paper. I gather you all voted to make me speak first thing tomorrow morning.’

  ‘But it means nothing, my darling,’ says the diva, regarding me with a truly tragic air of surprise. ‘Don’t you know that? You are far too serious, you might as well be Swedish. Let me remind you what happened to Eugene Onegin.’

  ‘He had to give a paper?’

  ‘He was offered a hard choice, between solitude and love. That is how he made his truly terrible mistake.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Don’t you remember Tatyana’s complaint?’

  ‘Her complaint?’

  My red-haired diva lies back on the pillow, takes a short breath, and starts again on her trilling.

  ‘“And there beneath a Finnish sky / Amid the mournful crags on high / Alone upon his way he goes / And does not heed my present woes.” You remember now?’

  ‘Yes, I do. Wonderful.’

  ‘And so sad. Just so terribly sad. He rejects her when in her innocence she loves him. Of course she goes and marries a very rich man. Then when he meets her again he knows how much he longs for her love. She loves him still, but now she has a terrible choice.’

  ‘Between love and duty.’

  ‘She struggles with herself, but she rejects him. He pleads for his cause, he confesses his errors. It’s terrible.’

  ‘A good ending though.’

  ‘My darling, it’s a truly terrible ending. She goes off to her empty fate as a wife. He remains the forlorn tragic hero. “Oh, my pitiful destiny,” he cries. And on that sad sight the curtain falls.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now, please, have some more shampanski,’ says the diva. ‘See, in the bucket, there is another bottle.’

  Well now: as for what happened next, if you’ll excuse me, I intend to leave this whole matter right there, because, as Aleksandr Pushkin put it himself in the fine rolling verse of Eugene Onegin: ‘Just now I’m feeling far too tired / To tell you how that meeting went/ Or what transpired from this event . . .’

  It’s really been a long hard day on the Enlightenment Trial: a day of meetings, a day of journeys. The Vladimir Ilich is beating onward through the whale-backed floating islands. Somewhere down there in the dining room, Bo and his pilgrims are probably discussing important matters of democratic procedure. Verso and Person are in the Balaklava Nightclub; heaven knows what Agnes and Sven are up to. There are mobs, guns, tanks and a curfew in the Moscow squares and boulevards, and all the evidence is the terrible war has begun. Who knows what we on the Vladimir Ilich will find in Russia when we finally arrive? Then the tide’s erasing the faces on the beach, there’s no Cartesian ego, and we live in a totally random universe of cosmic confusion inexorably tracking toward its own extinction. And, as if that wasn’t enough, we’ve a whole day of dull papers tomorrow . . .

  Still, for the moment, it’s a half-chilly, half-balmy Baltic autumn night. The islands of the archipelago glitter coldly beyond the portholes. In the diva’s cabin everything is made for a pinkish fleshly comfort. There’s a soft silky bed, a couple of magna of champagne, a musical score on the counterpane. What could have happened next? What might have been said next? What would have been done next? I shall simply leave you to speculate as freely as you wish, only offering by way of literary assistance the one small fact that (as I think I already told you) I am one of those amiable types who, when asked, normally says yes. So I perfectly well could have said yes to this, or even that.

  However it hardly matters, because the one important point, and the chief reason why this is all worth recording, is that, for the second night in a row, and for reasons that have very little to do with reason, I once again fail to write my paper . . .

  TEN (THEN)

  NAKAZ: THESE ARE THE RULES FOR VISITORS ENTERING THE LITTLE HERMITAGE

  Rule one

  All ranks and titles shall be surrendered on entering, along with all hats and swords.

  Rule two

  All ambitions and pretensions, based on prerogatives of birth, rank, hierarchy or any other claim to precedence, shall also be discarded at the door.

  Rule three

  Please enjoy yourself, but try not to break anything, spoil anything, or chew anything.

  Rule four

  Sit, stand, wander about, or do anything you please, without worrying about anyone.

  Rule five

  Speak with moderation, and not too often, so that you never make yourself a nuisance to others, or give anyone a headache.

  Rule six

  Argue if you have to, but always without rage or heat.

  Rule seven

  Avoid making sighs, yawns, or other clear displays of boredom.

  Rule eight

  Innocent games and entertainments proposed by current members of the court should always be accepted by others.

  Rule nine

  Eat slowly, and arrive with a good appetite. Drink with pleasure and moderation, so that when you leave you can walk from the room steadily and without assistance.

  Rule ten

  Leave all quarrels, dirty linen, political arguments, ideologies and conspiracies at the door. Above all, remember that, before you leave, what’s gone in at one ear should already have gone out of the other.

  If any member of the court or a court visitor should break any of the above rules, for each offence witnessed by two others he – and this does not exclude ladies – must drink a glass of fresh water and read aloud an entire page of the Telemachiad by Trediakovsky.

  Anyone failing three of these rules shall be compelled to learn by heart at least six lines of the p
oem.

  Anyone breaking the tenth rule will never again be admitted to the Little Hermitage. Welcome.

  It quite soon becomes a matter of habit and custom that, on nearly every non-religious non-state day of the week starting in the middle of the Russian October (which is already displaying an odd similarity to the French December), and continuing indefinitely until told otherwise, our man makes his way across the large well-ordered Petersburg streets and squares, along the canals and embankments, to the shining Winter Palace. As day follows day, it grows clearer and clearer the beautiful bright-painted building has been very well named. He’s reached the northern city just in time: winter, that brisk and vengeful northern speciality, is starting its annual siege of the city with great expedition. A daily dusting of half-hearted snowflakes flutters daily around him as – in borrowed bearskin topcoat, tidy black suit beneath, wig on askew, notebooks on anything if not everything stuffed into pockets and panniers – he goes teetering off over the surface of ice, mud, human urine and rank horseshit that passes for paving in the great square before Saint Isaac’s. The cathedral church itself is chaos. It’s being constructed, deconstructed, moved. Ragged frozen men work all over it, displaying that classic weary near-inertia that’s the trademark of the worldwide craft of building.

  Yet it must be said that Senate Square is a very fine square. It’s a noble square, the very square where – one day still very far ahead, when it is faced and completed – the Imperial Mother, in homage to her great predecessor, will raise up the huge bronze statue our man had such a hand in. The day will come: but not as quickly as many, not least himself, might have expected. But who of us can possibly know what is being written in the great big Book of Destiny above? By now, of course, what was written is very clear. As the big book has it, the statue will go up nine years on from now. The year will be 1782, the day will be 7 August Old Style. Our man will certainly not be there, though he’ll still be alive and well. The guards will march with lowered banners. Military bands will play. From the great podium underneath the cloth-covered statue, the Imperial Mother will bless her people, declare a general amnesty for criminals and debtors.

  Across the Neva, over there in the Peter and Paul Cathedral-Fortress, the Great Metropolitan will strike Peter’s tomb hard with his staff. ‘Arise, great monarch,’ he’ll say, ‘and look out over your pleasing and noble invention. For nothing you did has ever faded, nor has its glory dimmed.’ Back over the sunlit water, the Empress will gesture, and the curtains hung round the statue will drop. There will be Big Peter, incredibly raised up on the back of his rearing horse, serpent between his legs, all tied to the ground only by two little hooves and the sheet-anchor of the horse’s tail. His grand face, still with toolmarks on it, will come into view. He’ll be looking out possessively, first across the river, toward his own bones over there in the Peter and Paul, then, more grandly, out at the Baltic and the still un-Russianized world that lies temptingly out there to the West.

  All Petersburg will be there to hear the shouting. But, besides our man, it’s written that another person will be absent: Étienne-Maurice Falconet, back in Paris in a rage. The big book tells us there will be a nasty argument with the Great Mother over payment of fees; it will be left to Marie-Anne Collot to complete the work. That isn’t all the great book can tell us. The statue itself will prosper, become a prince among statues. Blood will dedicate it, risings and rebellions surround it. Poets will write of its potent menace, its strange power to pass through the streets by night. More and more stories and myths will surround it. The most surreal dreams will be filled by it. But who now can know such things? Our Man, in his own state of being, can’t. It’s enough to walk through the huge cold square, brooding on Posterity and the big Book of Destiny above. For the present here-and-now is quite full enough for the asking.

  Flags, buntings and banners from the recent nuptials still wave in the bitter critical wind that comes flailing off the Neva. The Neva is a strange sluggish river, bearing down fetid burdens from elsewhere, washing them up and down, here and there, suddenly falling and then dangerously rising, as if to threaten the city (as it has several times already). Its secret character, our man begins to suspect, is sinister, vengeful, pestilential; yet sometimes it glows like a magic mirror, as the big red sun, lying low, lights on it, reflects, strangely lights the imperial palaces. In front of him stands the Anna Ivanova Tower; beyond it the fine gold flèche atop the beautiful new Admiralty Building. In the city’s great game of architectural chess, this matches and mates with the flèche over at the Peter and Paul Fortress, where Peter’s bones lie waiting to be called. Out on the river frigates and merchantmen bob at their moorings, loading and unloading, gunports pointing this way and that. Foreign sailors already brush frost off the riggings, longing to set sail before the Baltic freeze. The carriages of foreign dignitaries and delegates clatter through the square, their noble contents sitting stiff behind fur-clad coachmen and pissing horses. But they too will soon be gone, the visitors themselves departed, the coaches replaced by sleighs, once winter properly settles in.

  Our Man is walking where he walked yesterday, where he will walk tomorrow. He crosses the noble end of Nevsky Prospekt. Its fine fresh stores and new arcades are already busy, with wandering colonels, big-wigged bureaucrats, minor officers of the court, wives, mistresses, courtesans. Its great straight line points heroically to the distance, toward the marsh, sedge, lake and snowdrift of mysterious, infinitely extensive, positively illimitable Russia, spreading off beyond the senses. For all the glory of its name, that frosted open world – in these strange days of black-red sky and snow-flurried gloom – seems a less than inviting prospect. He prefers the city. He crosses the Moyka Canal, where he sees unpleasant ice-lumps from upstream tumbling furiously together before they burst into the harbour. Luckily, given this weather, it’s but a bird-flight from Narishkin’s mansion to Palace Square and the entrance to the Hermitage. He stares up at Rastrelli’s lush façade: such a Viennese torte, a marzipaned cake, of a building. Huge guardsmen in green and red and grey-faced watchmen protect the residence, eternally standing in ground-sweeping raincoats against autumn rain and growing cold. Now, starting to know him, they step back to let him pass.

  He’s coming. His notebooks on Russia – begun back in the Dutch republic, worked on in the rattling confines of Narishkin’s shaking Berliner, filled out by candlelight in his fine bedroom in the palace across the square – have grown fatter day by day, filled like the crops of Burgundy geese with more and more refined and intellectual fodder. Each time he walks out, the muddy Russian reality he observes serves as a fresh provocation. His real Russia, the Russia of the mind, is growing all the time. And he’s coming well-prepared. For Petersburg is full of good friends and useful warnings, so he already thinks he knows what he can expect, and what he might fear, from the Great Imperial Mother who has welcomed him so grandly, and now awaits her enlightenment within . . .

  Lui, for instance, young Narishkin. Night after night, over his well-stocked table in the dining room of the huge Narishkin Palace, he’s been a bubbling fount of useful wisdom. He gaily recalls past times: times when this stout and noble Empress was simply just another of those slim German archduchesses, married to just another of those snub-nosed imperial heirs. She was unhappy, bullied. She was clever, sprightly, restive, never quite sure what was expected of her from the last formidable empress, Elizabeth. She was supposed to produce an heir, yet her marriage was known to be white. Lui recalls how his own father, himself a court chamberlain (Narishkins always were), realized something had to be done. He would have obliged himself; in the end the chosen solution was another of the chamberlains, the charming Sergei Saltikov, always willing to risk Siberia for a sexual intrigue. So Papa Narishkin would smuggle the archduchess in heavy disguise across Senate Square into this self-same mansion, where she could enjoy emotional rest and recreation in private. Saltikov would then come from court disguised as a woman, risking strange assaults from t
he ever-sparky Imperial Guards. Thus noble families have their uses. Since those days Narishkins claim special intimacy with the most private ways of the bedchamber, the unbuttoned, the so frequently unbuttoned, closet manners of the court.

  ‘So how do I behave then?’ our man asks. Lui, a courtier to his fingertips, is warm in his advice. Be as simple and natural as I am (really? – sometimes, to be honest, the man seems just another holy fool). Remember: though the outer court is grand, formal and ceremonial, the inner one is the opposite. Pomp lapses, ceremonial fades as you pass deeper into the building, until in her private rooms, where the queen bee hides, it goes altogether. Here, in the centre of the hive, a courtier pleases not by bluster or flattery but pleasantness or simplicity, not least because these are not usual Russian qualities. Never flatter – or not obviously. Never bully – she knows her own mind, a good one. Never compete for attention, or it will compete with you. Never gossip meanly; everyone else will do that for nothing. Never conspire; there are too many conspiracies already. Never presume.

  You’d do best, suggests Lui on further reflection, to treat her as a mental equal, address her as one civilized and high-minded thinker to another. Remember that when she was still a newly married pubescent she loved to call herself the Little Philosopher, and sat for hours in the gardens reading the works of Voltaire – while, in his own militarized quarters, her little husband, trained as a Prussian soldier, sat interrogating rats that had strayed into the palace and sentencing their leaders to death by hanging. Take her no presents; the woman has everything except things beyond your purchase. Admit, if you like, you are an atheist (she has read your work, must know it already), but remember she’s chosen to be matriarch of the Orthodox Church, and considers God Herself chose to anoint her to the throne. Laugh with her, amuse her, delight her, tell her stories: just do what you always do. But whatever you do, he warns, don’t let her make you court adjutant. That means you could be in line for the post of Night Emperor. The next thing you’ll find yourself having a venereal inspection with Dr Rogerson, who will provide the stiffening aphrodisiacs, before your talents are tested in the boudoirs of the two éprouveuses, Countess Bruce and the Princess Protassov. Then you would be delegated in the Night Emperor apartments, just along the passage from the suite of her serene majesty, and thereafter enjoy a mixture of energetic night exercise and futile daily boredom which has already finished off several younger men.