I’m not sure why I’m here, but we’ve certainly done our proper literary duties: been to the Pushkin House, the Nevsky monastery-graveyard, the huge marble tomb of Dostoyevsky, laying a flower on the grave of the writer who best caught this city in its misery. We’ve then walked the streets in this neighbourhood, the area where he lived once and where he set the urban miseries of Crime and Punishment. A persistent sombreness of the kind he depicts still lies over everything in this city, and even seeps into this flat. Galina talks at first about the library, the past, the city’s writers: Pushkin and Lermontov and Bakhtin and Bitov. I look at the photographs, ask her questions, but it’s a long time before I can get her to talk about herself. Then slowly she admits to the life I can’t see: a husband, a painter, who was arrested in the 1950s in the time of Stalin and disappeared in the Siberian camps. There are two children who grew up and went to Moscow. They were turned against her, and don’t come back any more. She’s always been different, always under suspicion. But she’s been lucky; she’s always managed to survive.
We go round the corner, to a tiny Russian restaurant, and at a small table eat a cabbagy Petersburg meal, drinking a bitter bad wine. I ask her about Paris, and now it turns out, though she loves it so much, she’s never been there. She wanted to travel, but was never allowed to; her interests were far too western to permit her to go to the west. She still longs to go to Paris, knows all there is to know about it, can imagine everything of it in her mind. But she’s lucky, so lucky, because these days all such things are permitted, and in any case so many westerners come to see her. It’s amazing how many are interested, how many care about Voltaire–Didro, how their books are still read. The French scholars come often, hoping for new treasures. But it’s really surprising, how little they understand Russia, and how very Russian Didro really is. And as for what Russia needs, Catherine herself would have understood it: not more hard labour, more brutality, more cruel or stupid tyrants, whom the land breeds like cabbages, but more bright light and civilization.
We walk back to the apartment, go inside again. Galina insists on lighting coloured candles all around her room. And soon she’s opening cupboards and boxes, showing me papers, letters, photographs, old documents. There are prints of eighteenth-century Petersburg, cautious letters from French academics who wrote to her back in the fifties. There are photographs of picnics, people she’s worked with at the library, programmes of the many operas she has been to, poems she has written. Mementos like this always remind me of how fragile a life is, how we try to hold on to a shape and meaning for it, and yet always finding it’s drifted away. We feel real and whole, but nothing else about life does, not even the buildings or monuments we set up to spare us this sense of exile, the pain inside modernity. She opens books, showing me plates and engravings: Russian cities, great festivals, river picnics, processions, parades. She produces fine fashion magazines: ancient copies of Paris Vogue, where turning the folded down pages I can see the dresses she has so painstakingly copied on the sewing machine in the corner.
The night is passing away, and we keep on talking. Only when there’s a touch of morning light in the sky out beyond the half-draped windows does it seem time to go. On the cold empty street beyond the gates of her apartment, she stands in her red dress, holds me tight, and kisses me very hard. The world seems sombre and very menacing at this hour. Cats and dogs prowl through the rubbish, walkers clatter in a nearby street, the black canals are sucking noisily at their own banks. Perhaps there’s a curfew; she doesn’t know. But somehow she finds me a night taxi, stopping me just as I’m about to get inside.
‘Remember, now those Reds are gone, Russia will only get better. It’s true, mon cher, believe me.’
‘Yes, Galina, of course I believe you.’
‘And why do you believe me?’
‘Because I hardly know Russia, and I want to believe you, that’s all.’
‘I wish I could believe myself. I’ll call you when I get to Paris, oui ?’
‘I very much hope you do. I’d like to see you again.’
‘You don’t think I will go? Of course I will. Nice people invite me there all the time. Your friend Bo has promised to help me.’
‘I’m sure he will.’
‘I just cannot tell you, I have so many beautiful friends who never forget me. I don’t go far, but all over the world people know me.’
‘Of course. You’re wonderful. Goodbye then, my dear Galina.’
‘Goodbye, mon cher ami,’ she says, holding me tight. ‘Listen, I’m glad. I’m glad you like books.’
‘Of course I do.’
‘And to make you remember me, a little present. Don’t look yet. Perhaps it will make you come back to Russia.’
‘I hope so.’
She kisses me again, sweetly, and slips something into my overcoat pocket: a packet of some kind, thin and hard, and wrapped in a light tissue paper. The taxi drives me away. I can still see her back there through the rear window: in the middle of the cobbled street, standing by an arched bridge over a black canal, her fine grey hair blowing, and the wind swinging and swaying through the silk of her red dress.
We’re sailing at noon tomorrow; I shall not get out into Petersburg again. I look through the window at the grim gloomy quarter, the area of struggling cobblers, pawnbrokers and saddened clockmakers Dostoyevsky wrote about. We cross the black Neva, riding by the dark Hermitage. A blue dawn is just beginning to rise coldly out of the darkness from the harbour waters of Vasilyevsky Island as the taxi deposits me by the dockyard, not far from the ship. Arc-lights illuminate the metal rails and show the lapping tidal water; everything creaks silently, all the cranes are still. Faint decklights illuminate the floating hotels, and the Vladimir Ilich at its moorings. The terminal building is locked and nearly dark, but somewhere in there a few conscript soldiers are talking and smoking. They unlock the doors, take the handful of roubles I offer them, accept a packet of cigarettes. I walk through the gaunt strange reception hall, with its shattered windows, its empty passport booths, bare customs benches.
Beyond it, on the waterfront, a sailor with an automatic in his waistband stands at the foot of the gangplank. He’s seen me before; he quickly checks my boat-pass and waves me aboard. I walk aboard the big silent hulk, and through the sleeping, creaking slip to my small metal cabin. The packet Galina gave me still sits in my pocket. So far I’ve really not cared to inspect it. Now, before I go to sleep, I take it out and strip off the wrappings. What emerges is an old leather-bound book, faintly scented with Galina’s Chanel. Its spine is damaged and cracked, but it’s two double volumes of a work by my favourite writer: Tristram Shandy, Volumes 5 and 6. This is the end of the book’s first part, the part Sterne completed and published before he went to Paris and met Diderot. I look inside: Sterne’s signature is on the title-page, and someone’s spiky handwriting decorates the margins.
This is the volume that does come to a famous ending. It concludes, more or less, with Sterne’s famous squiggles, his way of explaining to us what a story is and how a good plot works, by going in a straight line from here to there, the way you plant a row of cabbages. Then he gives a little chart of the hopeless baroque mess he has made of his own plot, his story turning off course, turning back on itself, tripping up, missing a fragment, starting up again. He’s left a blank page for the reader to put things right, but surely things are getting better. Soon he’ll be writing in a straight line: the line of rectitude, as the Christians say; the best line, say the cabbage planters; the line that’s often confused with the line of gravitation; the line that, when the next volume starts in the future, will have taken him over the sea to France.
The text ends, and then the spiky handwriting picks up, scribbling furiously on the rest of the leaf: ‘How did they meet? By chance, like everyone else. What were their names? What’s that got to do with you? . . .’ I turn the remaining pages and there, in the end-papers, is a slip of old paper, yellowed, foxed and faded. I take it out and carefully open it u
p:
JACQUES [I read]
Oh, come on now, master, just admit it.
MASTER
Admit what, you little rat, you dirty dog, you utter scoundrel? That you’re the most wicked of servants, and I’m the most unlucky of masters?
JACQUES
Admit I’ve proved my point. That for most of the time we act and do things without meaning it—
MASTER
Nonsense.
I know what this is, of course. Books breed books. The end of one is often the beginning of another. Which then ends itself, no doubt then to become the start of yet another. But, perhaps because nothing ever ends in the way it was originally meant to, the author sometimes goes back into it again, begins to rewrite it, starts to revise the story, or even begins to tell the whole thing over again . . .
I refold the paper, and shut it back up in the book. Then I open up my suitcase and, lifting my shirts, I push the book down as far as I can into my luggage, thinking that perhaps I now know what has been happening to the great Library of Reason.
THIRTY-TWO (THEN)
DAY SIXTY
A bright sun is shining through the windows of the Hermitage, casting a liquid light over the waters of the Neva below. The birds in the arbours outside the state rooms are full of song. SHE sits on the sofa, beneath the big portrait of an earlier self. Her English whippets are beside her. The COURTIERS are quiet, the room almost empty apart from DASHKOVA. HE comes in. His hands are behind his back.
HE
My dear lady. The last time. The very last time.
SHE
The last time, my dear dear Didro. So today there is no paper.
HE
But there is. I’ve just finished writing it.
HE takes his hands from behind his back and presents her with a paper. SHE looks.
SHE
‘Peace Treaty of Sankt Peterburg, between a Great Sovereign and a Poor Philosopher.’ And just why do we need a peace, when we never were at war?
HE
It’s true, we never were, dear lady. I don’t think two people of opposite parties ever got on better. But there are my demands.
SHE
Your demands? Who allowed you to have demands?
HE
I allowed myself. I must tell you they’re exceedingly small demands.
SHE
Yes. Tell me what I can do for you?
HE
Nothing. You’ve done everything already.
SHE
Then I shall sign it at once, without even reading it.
HE
No, that won’t do at all. Even though I now understand very well how your fellow-monarchs managed to sign and then break treaties without ever reading them. You read my other papers, please read this—
SHE
What does it say, Didro?
HE
First, it explains I have no wish for gold. I should hate it if all the eulogies and flatteries I intend to press on the Empress when I return to Paris should appear to be paid for. I prefer to be believed.
SHE laughs.
SHE
Very well, dear friend. But are you rich?
HE
No, madame. Content, which is better. But I have made certain requests. Your Majesty will surely remember how I struggled to arrive here, and how hard I worked when I came.
SHE
Sir, you were quite extraordinary. There is no one in the world quite like you. You will never be forgotten.
HE
So I am sure Your Majesty would not wish me to go home with nothing. I simply ask you pay me the costs of my journey, coming and return. They are not extensive, a philosopher shouldn’t travel like a lord.
SHE
Can you tell me how much?
HE
Fifteen thousand roubles would cover it, I believe.
SHE
Then you shall have double. Dashkova, get it from the exchequer.
DASHKOVA takes a key and goes.
HE
Second, I request no expensive personal gift, but there is one small thing I would welcome. A tiny thing, something that’s yours and I would value because I know you have used it every day—
SHE looks at him with amusement.
SHE
What is that, sir?
HE
Your breakfast cup and saucer, that is all.
SHE
Nonsense, it would smash on the journey—
HE
You will see it is already in the treaty, if you read—
SHE
I have something better for you. Something I have already selected for you, my dear librarian—
SHE opens her bag and takes out an agate cameo ring. Her own portrait has been engraved onto it. SHE hands it to him.
HE
It’s beautiful, extraordinary, Your Highness. Third, I hope you would help me with my journey—
SHE
Where do you go now? Samarkand, the Great Wall of China, somewhere over the steppes?
HE
No, dear lady, home. By the fastest way possible.
SHE
Frederick of Prussia has sent for you again. So has the King of Sweden. And Voltaire wants to see you at Ferney, remember.
HE
They can’t have me, I’m sorry. I can’t tell you how sad I shall be to leave you. But I shall be even more happy to see my dear ones again.
SHE
Your wife, you mean?
HE
My dear dancing daughter. My sweet indifferent mistress. My friends, my talking circle. And yes, even my quarrelsome wife.
SHE
Very well. You shall have a coach, a splendid new English travelling coach I purchased only this week. And I shall provide you with a chamberlain to guide you on the journey and take you back to Prince Golitsyn there in the Hague. Anything more?
HE
Yes, Your Highness. If it should be when I return to Paris I must suffer for what I’ve done – a spell in the Bastille, for instance – I hope you’ll protect me. Look after my wife, who could starve without noticing. Protect my dear darling daughter, who has only just given birth—
SHE
It’s done, it’s all done. You have all of your treaty. So was it all really worth it? All those great versts? All that Neva colic?
HE
That’s not a question for the philosopher. That’s for the monarch to say.
SHE takes his hands.
SHE
Then of course it was worth it, dear Didro. Don’t you see how I’ve sat entranced by all your thoughts, the strange things that spring from your genius—
HE
Entranced by some things, enraged by others—
SHE
Yes, but, my dear man, you’ve done wonders. You’ve taught me everything. How to run a just society. How to create education, develop manners, encourage the great arts and crafts—
HE
How to run a police force. How to construct lighter cities. How to found banks and create improvement.
SHE
You’ve taught me about usury and luxury. God and the devil. Gambling and divorce. Life and liberty—
HE
The pursuit of happiness—
SHE
Mulberry trees and pig farms—
HE
And you have shown me what I never expected to see. The martial power of a Brutus, arrayed in all the charms of a Cleopatra—
SHE
You’ve written me those splendid papers, told me those wonderful stories—
HE
I shall never forget how Your Majesty chose to ignore the distance between us and brought herself to my level just so I might raise myself to hers—
SHE
No, I have been your pupil, you have been my master.
HE
I have been your servant, you have been my mistress— Such was the daydream of Denis the Philosopher.
SHE
You left your papers? My ne
w Russia?
HE
In your state papers. I know they contain foolishness and folly—
SHE
Yes, my dear dreamer. You know, there is just one difference between us. You’re a philosopher, and work on paper, which is supple, obedient, does just what it’s told. Where I, a poor empress, must work on human skin. Which is itchy, irritable, and grows raw to the touch.
HE
Yet, if you’d followed me, you would surely have created a great society, and made your nation the envy of all humankind.
SHE
Yes, and if I had listened to you thoughtlessly, every single institution in my empire would have been upturned. Monarchy, law, the church, the budget. The nation would have disintegrated, the borders would collapse. Perhaps if only your visit had come at some other time. When I wasn’t at war with the Turks, when I wasn’t resisting Pugachov—
HE
Yes, Pugachov. Well, now you have captured him, what will happen?
SHE
He sits in the middle of Moscow in an iron cage, so the people can see he’s really not the anointed of God. Just Emelyn Pugachov, a stupid farmer, who thought his fortune had been rewritten in the great Book of Destiny above. Of course, if I were the only one he had harmed, I should seek to forgive him. But no brute invader since Tamburlaine has killed so many of my people. He’s lived like a scoundrel. Let him die like a coward—
HE
What will happen, then?
SHE
He’ll be beheaded in front of the people. All his people will be exiled to the frontiers, and his village burned.
HE
And Countess Pimburg? Princess Tarakanova?
SHE
Dead, alas. It seems the poor creature all the time had tuberculosis. That is what killed her—
HE
But an underground cell in the Peter and Paul wouldn’t have helped. So, the truth is, I made no difference.
SHE looks at him.
SHE
But you made every difference, my dear Didro. You and Monsieur Voltaire can tell the world now that my ideals always reached higher than my deeds. I sometimes think we dreamed each other. I dreamt you, and you say you dreamt me. Take off your jacket!
HE
What?
SHE
To the Hermitage Page 43
