To the Hermitage

by Malcolm Bradbury

  That black coat. Everyone’s sick of it. We have a new one for you. Put it on.

  SHE holds up a bright-red jacket, heavily frogged, and helps him put it on.

  HE

  I really never cared for new clothes.

  SHE

  What do you say, Dashkova?

  DASHKOVA looks him up and down.

  DASHKOVA

  A dashing man. A true philosopher-king.

  SHE

  And with that goes a bearskin jacket. To keep you warm on the homeward journey.

  SHE holds his hands. They embrace each other.

  HE

  You remember Voltaire once wrote history was a trick the living play on the dead? Well, I have come to think Russian history is probably a trick a clever empress played upon Voltaire and me—

  SHE

  Nonsense. No, don’t go. Send for your wife and family. Build yourself a great palace here.

  HE weeps. SHE looks at him.

  HE

  No, my dear. My wife’s an old woman with sciatica. My sister-in-law is eighty. My mistress has probably forgotten me. My daughter has a baby at the breast. My son-in-law has high pretensions in the textiles trade. And where I used to count up the future in decades or years, now I count it in months and days—

  SHE

  Nonsense, Didro, you’ll live for ever.

  HE

  You’ll guarantee it? Is it in the treaty?

  SHE

  Yes, it’s in the treaty.

  A huge shaggy BEAR-LIKE MAN, having only one eye, and wearing a loose Turkish kaftan, has entered the room, eating something. SHE looks, hurries over, embraces him.

  SHE

  Oh my darling. My dear Potemkin—

  HE goes, unobserved.

  END OF DAY SIXTY

  THIRTY-THREE (NOW)

  SO AT LAST HE’S GOING, leaving Russia after all. And so, it seems, are we. The Vladimir Ilich might just as well never even have disembarked its swarm of passengers three days back. For here they all are again, or their kin: a swarming confused crowd just as noisy and pushing, just as hard to get on and convey in the other direction as the surging mob that, only a week back, crossed the Baltic in reverse, sailing from Swedish bourgeois civility to Scythian fantasy and confusion. The last passengers disappeared into the vast and evidently unconquerable world of Russia; these have emerged out of it to swarm the other way. Once again the dockyard below is full of business. Dirty buses decant lines of would-be voyagers; taxis deposit travellers for the better cabins. Cars in rows, cars of every kind from the smartest to the most futile, cars that are escaping Russia or returning west for service, are lining up to enter the ferry doors. Containers, pallets, packages of all kinds are swinging on the crane hooks and entering the vessel somewhere below. The traders and negotiators, touts and market people have reappeared in even vaster numbers. There on the dockyard concrete, or in sudden new kiosks that have appeared at will in the terminal building, they are selling everything, old and new, useful and useless, antique and bric-a-brac, licit and illicit, in a frenzy of transaction.

  And even more unusual transactions are taking place in the gaunt concrete customs hall and at the wooden passport booths, where the oddest kinds of person are lining up in rows. Back from a quick visit to the city to buy some last books and final CDs, I wait. Around me are Tartars who, strangely enough, are equipped with Swiss identities; Albanians who proudly sport brand-new Hong Kong British passports; Vietnamese who in all conviction claim to be of Norwegian stock. Here are remarkable families: parents have children who are far older than they are, brothers have sisters of completely different shades and nationalities. But that’s how it is now: we live in multicultural times. The world is a melting pot, the self is a transactable item; and if you have a wad of creased roubles that can stick up out of the top of your papers, then whatever your story it will be not so much believed (who believes stories?) but permitted, because nowadays every kind of story can go.

  So, with their stories accepted, their excuses allowed, our newest travellers swarm up the gangplanks, pushing and shouting, heaving and screaming. On their shoulders they carry some or all of the following: icons and gilt-framed paintings, altar rails, gilded Russian crosses, silver samovars, old cameras, car exhausts and other motor parts, opulent silvery pelts and other animal skins, whole fish wrapped in reeds, crates of glassware and pottery, clothing, jewels, cases of caviar, sacks of dresses, boxes filled with books. From the bridge deck Lenin watches, with an increasingly confused gaze. So do we, the regulars, the habitual travellers, those for whom this vessel has come to be a home and a way of life. We’re the ones who know the best deckchairs, the ones who have a favourite waiter, the ones who know the finest brands of vodka and which are the sweetest cakes. Now our several days of hotel quiet are over. The crew’s returned and they’re back in action. Once more they play their balalaikas in the lobby, do their Caucasian dances and their boyar leaps. Once more the samovars bubble and the seedcakes sizzle. It’s this way to the casino, that way to the duty free—

  Whatever may have been happening in Russia over the last few days – and if you are there you can never really quite see it – and however this might have been an autumn of tragedy, crisis or just brute misery, not that much seems to have truly changed. It’s as if in a restive struggle between apathy and Utopia, apathy has won again. Conflicting flags still fly round the harbour: the hammer and sickle here, the old–new tricolour there. Commerce and barter are thriving, not least among the traders down on the dock, who are just now grabbing the last dollars and krona, marks and roubles, and packing their cases to go home. Misery is thriving too: women wail in the streets, drunks lie in the courtyards. Opera plays, ballet prances. Crime prospers mightily, drunkenness is universal, poverty spreads, the beggars multiply in the streets. It’s an extraordinary world with extraordinary problems, and it would take many, many notebooks just to explain them all.

  The ship’s cutting loose. The band is playing again – with just as much confusion, but this time with a little less enthusiasm, perhaps because we are all not coming but going, not landing with full pockets but departing with half-empty ones – though, true, a few last grateful coins go flying over the rails, no doubt for a little good luck. We’re leaving with a sense of awe but perhaps too with that famous sudden surge of relief that many have felt on departing Russia. For the truth is that, though the self may be an anxious item, and we are all no more than a face drawn in the sand on the very edge of the waves in a collapsing cosmos, the self as we’ve invented and pampered it, the private self, the personal self, is a being worthy of treasure. We watch the shore’s embrace relax, the hawsers drop off into the harbour’s oily waters, the dockside pull suddenly backwards, so that the ferry terminal, disappearing into the fog of Baltic mist and urban pollution, at once begins to lose all its familiar flaws and imperfections, and looks whole, wonderful, gleamingly modernist again.

  Beyond there is a long view of the city skyline: the golden flèches of the Peter and Paul and the Admiralty, the golden dome of Saint Isaac’s Cathedral, from which, looking down, I have seen this same Baltic seaway shading off into the fog. Into that fog we sail. Now from the chilly bridge deck we can see the fortress of Kronstadt taking on shape in the seaway, and somewhere over there, on the southern shores of the wide estuary, we seem to see a huge hammer and sickle statue rising up. But then there are other things: apartment blocks, perhaps the great roofs of palaces, and then the sea is all. Tankers and mother ships plough through cold October water. Below our own ship is growing noisy, with that general sense of release, hope, expectation that passes through a vessel when it breaks loose from the landmass, and heads out for the open sea.

  ‘Really, did you?’ I’m saying to Birgitta Lindhorst, for the red-haired nightingale has kindly chosen to join me by the rail. ‘You mean, right there on the stage of the Maryinsky Theatre?’

  ‘Of course,’ she says. ‘And I am so sorry, because I expected you would
come along there to watch me.’

  ‘Which I certainly would have, if anyone had bothered to tell me about it.’

  ‘Bo says he told everyone about it. A special performance, my wicked little darling, and entirely in my honour.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I looked exactly like a queen, they all told me,’ Birgitta says.

  ‘I’m sure. A true apotheosis.’

  ‘Well, a gala, and of course finally they asked me to sing again from Onegin.’

  ‘I thought so. Tatyana’s letter?’

  ‘Of course. “Oh, was it you who seemed to hover / Over my bed, my gentle lover?” It was so sweet.’

  ‘I’m sure it brought down the house.’

  ‘A standing ovation, ten minutes.’

  ‘Wonderful.’

  ‘And guess how many bouquets?’

  ‘I can’t imagine.’

  ‘Forty, my darling. Really, it’s true. Twenty bottles of pink shampanksi. Crate after crate of caviar.’

  ‘I knew you were the greatest.’

  ‘But you didn’t come.’

  ‘I’m sure all the others did.’

  ‘All the others, and not you. Come to my cabin tonight. After dinner.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘Twenty bottles of shampanski, my darling. Crate after crate of caviar.’

  ‘I know. But the Russians do know and love their great singers.’

  ‘It’s true. That’s what I tell my husband.’

  ‘Your husband? I thought he was singing Scarpia in Bari, or something? And you wanted to kill him.’

  ‘You didn’t see my husband? He came for me with a Zil.’

  ‘Well, you were going to go for him with arsenic.’

  ‘He’s singing there in the Verdi season. Why did you think I came to Petersburg?’

  ‘Well, long ago, I thought it all had something to do with Diderot.’

  ‘So, here you are again,’ says Alma the Snow Queen, suddenly appearing behind us as Kronstadt slips from sight. ‘Always at it. Don’t you realize we are all down there waiting? Don’t you realize the project is beginning again?’

  ‘It’s not over?’ asks my red-haired nightingale.

  ‘Of course not,’ says Alma. ‘It’s never over. The Diderot project is everything . . .’

  Once again we follow our Snow Queen down below. Tatyana from Novgorod once more stands red-cheeked behind the till in the Blini Bar. Tatyana from Smolensk is frantically dusting off the bottles in the busy Duty Free. But when we get to the conference rooms the girl holding the tray of pink shampanksi out to us is someone quite different: not our dear, familiarTatyanafromPushkin, but, as the young lady tells us, Irini from Omsk. The Enlightenment Pilgrims are slowly gathering. Sven Sonnenberg has evidently acquired a big fur hat on his travels, which he wears like a pompom, and Agnes Falkman has found herself a bedraggled peasant dirndl. I ask them how their country journey has gone. Sven has evidently found the Russian countryside less neat and orderly than he expected, and the union officials Agnes was hoping to meet seem no longer to exist. Others arrive: Manders comes in, smiling politely, and Lars Person appears, giving us his dark and saturnine nod. The one person I don’t seem to see is Jack-Paul Verso. Then Bo steps into the middle of the room, claps his hand and raises his glass.

  ‘Skal! my friends!’ he says. ‘May I make a little toast. To our wonderful Diderot!’

  OMNES

  Skal! To Diderot! Denis! etc.

  BO

  May I welcome you all back to the ship. And I hope you all had a very excellent time in the glorious Venice of the North?

  OMNES

  Yes . . . We did . . . Jo, jo . . . It was wonderful, Bo . . . You did it marvellously. Galina too. Etc., etc.

  MOI

  Yes, Bo, we did, we had a really excellent time—

  BO

  Thank you, my friend.

  MOI

  . . . but you don’t mind if I ask you something?

  BO

  Not at all. Here we are all enquirers. Please.

  MOI

  I did really love your Diderot Project. But I just wondered if you knew what it was?

  Smiles and laughter appear all round at my innocence.

  BO

  You mean, you don’t know?

  MOI

  I’ve no idea. All I know is I came under the impression we were going to look at the Diderot archive in the public library.

  BO

  And what happened to you?

  MOI

  Well . . . I went to look at the Diderot archive in the public library.

  BO

  Exactly.

  MOI

  I see. You arranged all this so I could go and look at the Diderot papers—

  SVEN

  Nej, nej. I understood the purpose. We all came to Petersburg to look at tables.

  MOI

  Why at tables?

  SVEN

  This is what Bo told me. He said Diderot was the teacher of all craftsmen. It was thanks to his lessons that all the carpenters of Russia learned to create perfect templates, ideal designs, construct the best lathes, construct great monuments and palaces, and build very excellent tables.

  BO

  And wasn’t I right?

  SVEN

  Yes, of course you were right, Bo. They make the most excellent tables. I have brought one of them back with me—

  AGNES

  But it wasn’t only tables.

  MOI

  Ah. No?

  AGNES

  As Bo explained to us when he visited our union, it was Diderot who devised all the principles of techne, the plan of human work. How we relate skill to person, craft to idea. How workers acquire apprenticeship and dignity. It is in his notebooks. That is why he thought I would like to see farming co-operatives.

  BO

  You did, I hope.

  AGNES

  Well, not quite, they have all disappeared, but this is not the fault of Bo.

  MOI

  But you, Mr Manders? You didn’t come here to look at farming co-operatives, did you?

  ANDERS

  No. I came to meet the excellent mayor of Petersburg.

  MOI

  To talk about tables?

  ANDERS

  No, to talk round or over them. Bo arranged for us to get together on several matters of Baltic-wide cultural co-operation. Naturally at this stage I cannot divulge the results. But I can say that, assuming events in Russia ever become what most of us would call normal, there will be some very excellent consequences—

  MOI

  I’m delighted. And is that why you came too, Bo?

  ALMA

  Nej, nej. Bo was invited to attend an important congress at Petersburg University, where they awarded him an honorary degree—

  BO

  Merely to celebrate my recent work on A.I.

  MOI

  Well, I really am delighted, Bo. What a splendid honour. But who or what exactly is A.I.?

  BO

  You don’t know? Artificial intelligence, it’s what we all live by. The thinking machine. The computer. The simulation of cognition and the workings of the brain. Maybe you remember, it was Diderot who invented the first thinking machine. It was actually a kind of encoding and decoding device that was meant to keep the secrets of diplomats and politicians.

  ANDERS

  To save them the trouble of thinking.

  MOI

  What did it look like?

  BO

  We don’t know. It was probably a concept, entirely imaginary. Just like the Turing Machine.

  MOI

  But the Turing Machine wasn’t imaginary, was it? I thought Turing devised it to crack the Enigma code, and it became the first computer.

  BO

  Yes, but Turing wanted to keep it imaginary.

  MOI

  I don’t understand, why?

  BO

  So that it would remain like one of Einstein’s tho
ught experiments, he said. It would be an elegant system in our heads.

  MOI

  Turing wanted to invent the imaginary computer?

  BO

  Jo, he wanted to show we could create a machine with a set of functions that could reproduce all the processes of reason. But the machine would be an artificial intelligence that would always remain inferior to the real one.

  MOI

  But you, Lars—

  LARS

  Who, me?

  MOI

  Yes, you didn’t come to Petersburg to consider artificial and real intelligence, did you?

  LARS

  Yes, in a sense. You see, Bo arranged for me to give a master class at the Pushkin Drama Theatre. I was trying to explain the Diderot Paradox – the paradox of the actor, the paradox of the comedian. The peculiar fact that the actor must have another self to create the self he or she plays. It’s the problem of the face and the mask. How many masks do we take off till we come to a real face? And of course it’s not just the problem of the actor, it’s the problem of every human being. Are we a man or a mask?

  MOI

  But what’s the answer?

  LARS

  The answer is too difficult. But not for the actor. Because the actor is the person who always truly understands that every individual must acquire the power to become his own double.

  BIRGITTA

  And that life is a performance.

  LARS

  Sometimes a gala performance.

  BIRGITTA

  Yes, what an evening that was, Bo, my darling! A grande hommage. And it seems our darling Bo arranged it with the Maryinsky some time ago.

  LARS

  A truly glittering evening, diva.

  ANDERS

  And so wonderful to watch it from the royal box.

  MOI

  Ah, you were there too?

  SVEN

  We were all there.

  MOI

  I wasn’t.

  ALMA

  Nej, nej. Your seat was empty. When we tried to find you, you had occupied yourself with something or someone else. Is it possible?

  MOI

  Yes, it’s possible. But apart from the gala at the Maryinsky, each one of us was doing something different? So how was this a project?

  BO

  My dear professor, surely the answer is obvious. Put everything together and we were doing almost everything of interest there is to do. Within reason.