To the Hermitage (17 page)

‘They could be in Petersburg?’

‘Very likely.’

‘Don’t expect me to read thirty books.’

‘Oh, nobody ever reads the whole
Encyclopedia
. Except maybe a few experts on the Enlightenment, like our funky Professor Verso. It’s a random mixture, filled with articles on everything. Love and windmills. Liberty and the prophets. Priests and prostitution. How to build a cheese factory. How to design a chair.’

The nightingale looks at me very doubtfully. ‘You mean he wrote about all of those things?’

‘Not all of them. Voltaire and Rousseau and d’Alembert wrote some of it. It was a team thing, a lot of other people were hired too. But he gave the whole thing the impress of his mind. It was always Diderot’s
Encyclopedia
.’

‘I don’t want to read that,’ says the nightingale decisively. ‘Can’t you find me something easy I can read?’

‘The novel in dialogue,
Rameau’s Nephew
,’ I say. ‘One of the finest books ever written. Goethe said so. And Marx and Freud. A book written against itself, about a character who speaks against himself.’

‘Rameau was bitter, mean and dull,’ says the nightingale. ‘They said he had legs like corkscrews and thought only of himself. But he was very clever. Have you seen his opera-ballets? They’re all about the four winds talking to each other. All serpents and kettle drums, no big roles.’

‘Rameau may have been mean and dull. But his nephew wasn’t.’

She looks at me. ‘Did he really have a nephew?’

‘Yes, he did. Another musician, but a very bad one. An inspector of Dancing Masters. He even wrote a piano piece called “The Encyclopedia”.’

‘Maybe that is why Diderot liked him.’

‘Diderot didn’t like him. He was fascinated by him, as a disturbing human specimen. I suppose he must have seemed his perfect opposite. A confidence man, a deceiver, a transgressor.’

‘Like Sade?’

‘Yes, a kind of friendly Sade. Manipulation, mystification, fancy footwork – those were his tactics. The book’s in my luggage, if you want to read it.’

‘Very well, my darling, if you say so,’ says the diva, completely losing interest. She pulls her wrap round her shoulders and looks out over the rail.

I gaze over her ripe and formidable proportions. ‘You know Bo very well?’ I ask.

‘No, do you?’

‘Just the way professors know professors. We meet at conferences and send each other papers. Then we disagree, which gives a reason to hold more conferences.’

‘I don’t know him at all,’ says the diva, ‘but in Sweden he is very important. Of course in Sweden all professors are important.’

‘So I gather. Not in my country.’

‘But Bo is more important than most. He is an academician, a man of power, a trustee of the Royal Opera. I think he is a trustee of everything. He visited my dressing room at Drottningholm and told me I should be on this voyage. He knows the people at the Kirov, the Maryinsky. But now he tells me I should give a paper.’

‘He said that to all of us.’

‘Very well for you, you are a teacher, you know how to. Maybe you even like it.’

‘Not that much. It’s what we do.’

‘I don’t like it at all. I don’t speak thoughts. I sing them.’

‘Good, I long to hear them.’

‘But look out there. This is not a place to be thinking about papers.’

It’s not. Now we’re really sailing on. Weather’s changing, landscape’s changing. Nice autumn evening, still with a touch of summer. Wind up harder now, sun starting to dip down. The seas have widened, the water turned soft and pearly grey. Little islands, tiny windswept bays, are appearing. Suddenly, from just above us, a blast of hideous noise. She seizes my arm, I grab her shoulder; the ship’s siren is sounding off. From over the water, it’s answered, answered again. Like a convention of echoes, siren after siren is sounding. The diva runs to the rail.

‘See, they are coming, the great floating coffins,’ she says.

I go to the rail, lean out at her side. There down the sea-lane, between the channel markers, a row, a fleet, of high-sided, steel-jawed monster vessels sails toward us.

‘What?’ I ask.

‘The evening ferries into Stockholm,’ she says. ‘They come in every night from all over the Baltic. Helsinki, Visby, Kiel, Oulu, Riga, Gdynia, Tallinn. Oh, and Sankt Peterburg, of course.’

The first of the ferries is abreast of us now. They sail by one by one, monster floating hotels: the
Sibelius
, the
Kalevala
, the
Constanin Simonov
, the
Estonia
, the
Baltic Clipper
. They rise up deck after deck to strange-angled funnels, passing close enough for us to see the last drinkers toping in the bars, the last gamblers risking a final chance in the casinos, the late duty-free shoppers gathering up their final bottle of Givenchy, an extra Famous Grouse. People are waving from the rails. Up on open-boat decks people in topcoats and parkas lie in stupefied rows: these must be the last drunks from Finland, staring up into blood-red sunset and mystical oblivion. Then the flotilla sails on toward the smoke-plumes of Stockholm. The quiet sea is ours again.

Half an hour later. We’re still on the high boat deck. She’s pulled her wrap tight round her, I puff at my Danish pipe, a small philosophical tool I rather like to carry. Red sun dropping away now, water pearly grey, bird-whitened rocks and islands everywhere in the water pearly grey too.

‘And now this is the archipelago, my darling,’ says the red-haired diva. ‘A hundred thousand drowned islands. This is where comes the true Swedish soul. It’s a terrible and wonderful place.’

The islands spread everywhere: some wind-worn, barren, white with guano, others with piers and ochre-painted chalets. Here and there nets hang on gantries, black smoke-houses steam away on wooden docks. Juniper, bilberry, dwarf pine grow in the crevices, small funnelled ferries punt about. To me this is the stuff of old Ingmar Bergman movies, the ones where cowled, creased-faced priests wander the shoreline, wrecks litter the rocks, middle-aged men are wracked with violent lust, young summer love affairs are a prelude to winter pain.

The diva, staring out at the grey naked islands, is suddenly telling me everything about them. They’re where she spent the summers of childhood. Here’s where her destiny was written, here was born her complex Swedish soul. Somewhere out there Strindberg had gloomy imaginings in a cottage by the water. Painters of grim naturalism painted dark fisher paintings on the rocks. Soon we’re getting in further: naked swims in the cold cleansing Baltic; crayfish feasts on the rocks; fishermen sailing out by night in their lamped boats for herring and sea-pike; most of all the unforgettable bitter-sweet affairs of young love.

‘I have only to think about it, and it makes me oh so happy and oh so sad,’ cries the diva.

‘I know, I know,’ I say sympathetically, looking out over the rail as the rocky archipelago flows by. I have of course been here before. I know from old these wonderful, grandly expressive nightingales, with their boom, their bosoms, their bravura. I know these depthless, spirit-searching Northern souls. I know this school of grim-sentimental Bergman-ish reminiscence. And I know very well it’s just one short step from here to dead lost loves, deflowered virgins, singing skeletons, ghostly drowned sailors emerging dripping from the sea, Father Time on a dark forest path, bearing his hourglass and his fatal scythe.

‘Let me tell you my sensations of despair,’ she’s saying. And now she’s explaining success is a strange delusion, her international fame a mere toy. She’s confessing how truly unhappy her life is, how worthless the life of a great diva is, how unfulfilled her destiny. Then, for some reason she puts down to her fiery temperament, we find ourselves discussing together the best way to go about murdering her husband.

‘If only we can decide on the perfect way,’ she says.

The problem is, I gather, that opera singers have been taught so many: poisoning, hanging, beheading, boiling in oil, knife, aspbite, it’s all much the same to them.

‘I know, I know.’

‘First, though, we must find him.’

‘I know, I know. Where do you think he is now?’

‘Of course, with his whore in Milan, the nasty little rat.’

‘What is she like?’

‘Just a contralto. Poison is far better than either of them deserve.’

‘I know, I know. I know just what you mean.’

‘But ask me all you like, my dear little darling, I could never really use a knife on him. It’s just too horrible.’

‘I know. I know.’

‘What do you two think you are doing?’ asks a sharp, policing voice from behind. Luckily it’s not Lenin; there is Alma Luneberg, rabbit-hatted, looking angry as only a Snow Queen can.

‘We are enjoying ourselves,’ explains the diva. ‘And I am trying to explain to this poor English man about our true Swedish soul.’

‘And don’t you know the Diderot people are asking what has become of you?’

‘No, my darling. I wanted him to see the archipelago.’

‘You didn’t examine the programmes I gave you in your wallet? Don’t you realize the Diderot Project is already starting to begin?’

For once even the great diva is silenced. We turn away from the grey rocks and the even greyer water, and follow the Snow Queen down the companion way and below.

Strange. During our brief absence the entire ship has changed. What was once a lobby or a half-empty arrival platform has somehow become a total way of life. It teems with tourists, bursts with noise and shouting. Glasses clink, casino wheels spin. We pass the busy Duty Free, the crowded Beauty Expensive. We pass the Blini Bar, the Caviar Cavern, the Vodka Den, the Russian Bathhouse, the Turkish Massage Parlour, the Lubianka Fitness Centre, the Odessa Casino. But modern life is not all pleasure and shopping; it’s commercial, corporate, and capitalist. Somewhere on the promenade deck behind the Fitness Centre is the Conference Centre – silent space filled with telephone links, photocopiers, faxmachines. In glass-walled seminar rooms corporation executives are already down to business. In a room labelled
SIEMENS
, a band of German and Russian businessmen, many of them ladies, all in suits, are already head to head: flipping flip-charts, showing pie-diagrams, faxing faxes, fixing floppies. And a few steps more beyond capitalism and commerce lie intellect and reason. The seminar room beyond is clearly marked
DIDEROT PROJECT
.

Here a small welcome reception seems to be taking place, and all for our little band of pilgrims. In a quicksilver change of role – for she’s now adorned in a short black dress and white frilly apron, just like a servant from a Noel Coward comedy – Tatyana from Pushkin stands in the entrance, holding out a large tray of canapés, another of fluted glasses of pink Russian shampanski. Jack-Paul Verso is energetically chatting her up, in his sharp Manhattan here’s-how-to-work-a-room fashion. In the middle of the space is Anders Manders, with his clipped blond beard, talking to Lars Person, wearing his diabolical black one. There’s Sven Sonnenberg in his torn, stained worker’s denims talking sombrely about some deep matter of existence with Agnes Falkman, who wears a cK designer version of the same thing. As we enter, both looking a touch shamefaced, Bo Luneberg looks up crossly. But what, his expression seems to say, can you expect of a flamboyant and narcissistic diva, and a writer-type who falls asleep at a postmodern concert?

Tatyana comes over to us with pink champagne, plates for the canapés. Now that his party’s complete, Bo goes to the middle of the chamber, claps his hands, calls, ‘Now may we please to begin?’ The Diderot Pilgrims fall silent. Bo raises up his glass.

‘Welcome. We all have a glass of this fine Russian champagne,
jo
? Let me make a small toast, then. To the Diderot Project.’

Our glasses all go up; ‘
Skal!
’ ‘Diderot,’ ‘To old Denis,’ cry the pilgrims.

Then, as Bo seems unwilling to say any more, we look around at each other. It’s Jack-Paul Verso who frames the collective question. ‘Bo, someone has to ask this, so let it be me,’ he says. ‘Why have you invited us? What the hell is this Diderot Project?’

Bo looks us over with polite compassion. ‘Ah, you are wondering why you are here? Why you are chosen, and so on?’

‘Yes, Bo.’

‘A singer, an actor, a carpenter, a diplomat, a writer, a philosopher and so on?’ Bo removes a little card from his jacket pocket. ‘I can best answer by quoting some words Diderot wrote in his famous
Encyclopedia
– in fact in the entry called “Encyclopedia”. Maybe you remember how he explained the task. It is, he tells us, to bring knowledge together, expose all superstition and error, demonstrate truth, use only the evidence of our senses, assign a proper cause to everything, and take each thing only for what it is.’

‘And that’s all?’ says Lars Person.

‘However, at the end of the essay,’ Bo goes on regardless, ‘he utters a solemn and beautiful warning.’

‘A very beautiful warning,’ adds Alma. ‘The day will finally come – our philosopher goes on to observe – when knowledge will have grown so extremely fast no one individual or system would ever be able to grasp it. So he explains.’

‘It’s here already,’ says Verso. ‘It’s called the World Wide Web.’

‘Allow me to quote his words. “If we banish from the earth the thinking entity, man—”’

‘Bo, I think you mean person,’ says Agnes Falkman.

‘
Jo, jo
, I think I do mean person. “If we banish from the earth the thinking entity, person, the sublime and beautiful spectacle of nature will become a sad and vacant scene. The universe will be hushed. All will be a vast solitude, an empty desert where events and phenomena make their way unseen, unheard. That is why we must put ma—, put person at the centre of our encyclopedia, and give him her true place at the centre of the universe.’

‘A beautiful warning,’ says Alma. ‘And this explains it, the Enlightenment Project.’

‘We will again put person at the centre of the universe.’

‘Sounds great,’ says Verso. ‘Now may we have some more champagne?’

‘Help yourself, please,’ says Bo. ‘Within reason, of course.’