To the Hermitage (34 page)

‘Yes, thank you, doctor, I think I will,’ he says, entirely satisfied. ‘Thank you for coming. See you in the morning. Good night, doctor. Good night, ladies. Good night.’

A
ND YET
– despite the three days of nagging anxiety I’ve been suffering from ever since that night in Stockholm when I switched on the TV set and discovered Russia had returned to a state of crisis – the harbour we’ve just now sailed into has the appearance of being a pleasant, a normal, a perfectly unthreatening place. We’ve sailed the seaway past Kronstadt on Kotlin Island, its fortress buildings lost somewhere inside the mist. We’ve come down the estuary channel, lined with cranes and defences, where rusty-looking warships and submarines lie spliced together at moorings offshore. We’ve eased gently into the crane-spiked harbour, where the waters are thick, mud-marked and oil-stained. There, Anders tells me as we watch our landing from the bridge deck, is the passenger terminal that sits on the very tip of Vasilyevsky Island, and which is no distance at all from the heart of the great old capital. At first glance, seen over the water from a distance, it could not look more smart or hospitable, as good and gleaming a sample of late-modernist space-age architecture as you could wish for. Lit by cold crisp autumnal sunlight, its curves swing and surge in the hi-tech fashion, its aluminium claddings snatch at the sun. Its white cement gleams, its big windows glisten. It has all the appearance of being built at the peak of superpower assertion, when every big building was a symbol of the prevailing regime. Modernist emblems of sailing caravels mural its walls. On the building’s end a sign announces, in two different alphabets,
SANKT PETERBURG
/
SZENTPETERVAR
.

In fact it’s only when, siren blaring, the
Vladimir Ilich
begins to receive the embrace of shore – the dock-arms opening, the hawsers swinging over the closing gap, the shore stanchions starting to grip, the probing gangplanks swinging out over the side, the side-ramps dropping down – that some of the flaws and blemishes grow apparent. All is not quite as it seems; what can have happened here? The building is new, surely, its curved lines and modern materials belonging to recent times and the age of sixties heavy cementing. Indeed much of the city, especially this part of it, would have to be new, since most was rebuilt after the horrific 900-day siege, when German forces surrounded it through several winters and began a night bombardment, vowing to pulp the place to bits. Since then, despite the confrontations and stand-offs of the Cold War, the city’s buildings have never been under any further bombardment. Yet somehow the entire façade seems bullet-pocked, every cement pillar seems part-shattered, revealing the rusting metal core. No one ever tried to nuke it, so how is it that the vast roof of titanium or whatever seems to lie just off-tilt? No one set mines here, so how come the grand windows are not just grimy but cracked and half-shattered? No one ever torpedoed the place below the waterline – so why are all the pilings bent, rotted, sagging?

What’s happened? Baltic weather, vast overuse, structural imperfection, sheer neglect? Or perhaps the will to complete it just ran out, like a brilliant idea that exhausted those who had it. Whatever the reason, the grand edifice so clearly intended to welcome the impressed foreign traveller into the international joys of socialism, looks half-shattered, a little like the Moscow White House after the events of yesterday. It has the look of being utterly worn and wasted, like a raddled old whore: past it, pocked, seedy, unstable, quietly crumbling on itself from within. Whatever rises, it seems to say, also falls. Yet apart from this overwhelming sense of neglect or dereliction, there are no further signs of menace: nothing to show we’re trying to set foot in Russia at the wrong time, some instant of crisis when the whole nation has again divided and dreadful events are in train. No: somnolence, rather, seems the mood; there’s no heavy presence, no note of military readiness. Just this vague air of attrition, weariness, wear, of everything being dusty and defective.

‘Problem?’

‘No problem,’ says Manders, smiling at me, and heading for his cabin; he seems to be quite right.

Music is sounding. On an elevated deck of the terminal building, which is plainly intended to have a ship-like appearance, a bemedalled band in military uniforms is performing, serenading us as we all begin to line the rails and watch the ship come into dock. But what is it they’re playing: march, mazurka, anthem, waltz? It’s strangely hard to tell; what is evident is that, like the building, something is just not quite right. These bandsman lack precision, if not some form of agreed musical policy. They’ve clearly not managed to come to terms on the length of a note or the run of a harmony. In fact, seen from a little closer, they’re a rag tag and bobtail bunch altogether. They’re all remarkably elderly: some must be seventy years of age, some a little nearer eighty. Those uniforms come from all the regiments, all the services: some are wearing tank grey, others cavalry green, others submarine white and blue. In fact, when you consider, they’re not really a band at all. They’re an imitation or an illusion of one.

And much the same applies to the soldiers we can now see down there on the dock. The usual conscript types: young, pubescent, short-haired. But, despite the talk of crisis, they’re simply lolling carelessly, hanging around the stanchions, wearily smoking cigarettes, casually drinking from unlabelled bottles, their weapons lying carelessly at their sides or at their feet. Some are holding their hands up in supplication, apparently begging for gifts thrown down from the decks of the ship. And, as for the port itself, Russia’s busiest, surely, Peter’s outlet to the North Sea and the Atlantic, well, it has a great appearance of trade and traffic, but here too there seems to be just a touch of illusion. Tankers run down the seaway, great fishing vessels, the mother-ships of herring convoys, sit in the harbour, container ships load at the cranes. And yet most of the dockyard cranes are unmoving, the traffic doing very little. We’re moored, now, in a line of ferries and cruise-ships. Yet many of these are not going anywhere at all. They’re docked up for the season, and now they’ve turned into a row of floating hotels. Under the logos of Swiss, Swedish, German hotel chains, they lie fixed at permanent moorings, with all the familiar hotel complement on offer: doormen, porters, whores, casino girls, fronted off with a row of bouncers and armed guards.

Now shore has locked tight to ship, ship bonded firmly to shore. The gangplanks rest in place. The universal port officials, wearing huge hats and carrying worn plastic briefcases, march aboard to do their duties. The ship has suddenly become strangely full of itself, with every deck and gangway packed tight with crowds of decanting passengers. A great many none of us have ever seen before, suggesting they have spent the entire voyage in some form of hibernation, carefully avoiding all bars, dining rooms and duty-free shops. Now they’re out in huge numbers: pressing, surging, swarming, yelling to be let off. They drag along babies and dependents, carry huge packages, toss parcels over each others’ heads. They heft cardboard suitcases and old boxes; they drop packages over the ship’s side to waiting hands below. From both ship and shore, tannoys are blaring, filled with overwhelming Russian instructions. The gangway chains are removed; the returning Russians swarm down the ramps and into the terminal, where their own world awaits.

The travelling Baltic tourists descend rather more slowly. Off march the neat Japanese tour-teams, led by their guides, the American backpackers, all waving their maps, the blustering German execs, all looking out for pre-booked Zil limousines. But, as before, amid the noise and confusion there stands a small oasis of sanity, a little island of calm. In the ship’s main lobby, where the crowds push and shove, a simple banner has been raised over a small table.
DIDEROT PROJECT
, it says. Beneath it stand Bo and Alma Luneberg, he having added a black woollen snow-hat to his Burberry, she in her northern furs. Our conflicts and problems have all been forgotten; Bo and Alma have re-acquired, and without the least sign of any resentment or bitterness, their traditional authority. Once more they’re the good shepherds of our naughty flock. They’re smiling, handing out documents, answering all our questions, reminding us about the charms of the Petersburg palaces and opera houses, the dangers of dark streets at nights, the quality of the caviar and the infinite ambiguity of the rouble.

The Diderot Pilgrims themselves – that once seriously mutinous but now totally compliant band – are also slowly emerging again from each little corner of the ship. Here come Agnes Falkman and Sven Sonnenberg. Each day of the journey we’ve seen less and less of them; but of each other they have clearly come to see more and more. Now they appear a quite inseparable couple. They talk to no one else, they say everything to each other. He smokes a huge self-crafted pipe, she has donned ever more radical denim and folkwear. Now decked in identical shore-gear, bobble hats, anoraks and walking boots, they’re plainly longing for the rugged outdoors: a mountain to go up, a moor to stride. While they have dressed down for labour and the country, Anders Manders reappears, quite evidently dressed for town. In elegant loden coat and fine fur hat, he’s ripe for the metropolis, a capital city where taste is everything and daily life is art. Yet more impressive is Birgitta Lindhorst, our splendid red-headed Swedish Nightingale. Descending amongst us from her noble eyrie up on the bridge deck, she looks quite glorious in a great golden topcoat, ready to take centre stage in whatever operatic roles this famously operatic city can offer.

Meantime over by the blini bar our funky professor Jack-Paul Verso is apparently saying very fond farewells to a whole glorious bevy of red-cheeked Tatyanas: Tatyana from Pushkin, Tatyana from Gorky, Tatyana from Novgorod, and a couple more from heaven knows where. They’re laughing happily, delighting in his word-play, clutching hold of their natty little philosopher, tugging at his hands, kissing his cheeks, pulling at his Deconstructionist’s hat. The demonstration of farewell is, I now gather, completely redundant. For, according to Bo and Alma, who are now giving us instructions, we are not really leaving the ship at all. Instead the
Vladimir Ilich
itself is going to become our Petersburg hotel, serve as our residence for the next few nights, until we make our return voyage. Never mind; Verso is clearly enjoying it. So, for that matter, are the laughing Tatyanas. And ah, here comes Lars Person, wearing his big hat. It looks as if we’re all ready to step ashore . . .

And it’s then we hear it. It comes swooping towards us over the water, like the cry of a great diving sea-bird. ‘
Ah, mes amis!
’ comes the sound. ‘
Ah, mes chers confrères!
’ Then we see her: standing high on an upper deck of the terminal, an extraordinary, a wonderful, a truly amazing sight. She’s wearing a longish blue-and-white dress, but what a dress: light, crêpey-silky, clinging, it’s in the fashion of the haute couture twenties, the style of Paul Poiret or Coco Chanel. A big red flower is tucked provocatively into the declivities of her
décolletage;
a white fur-wrap with animal tails hangs sweetly round her shoulders. Her big face is white-powdered; across it her mouth is slashed in lipstick, vermilion red. Her hair, large and bouffant, is white as snow, and then is topped off with a straw hat decorated with false cherries. A sharp harbour wind is blowing round her, whipping the silk dress round her full figure, threatening the white straw hat. And, though she must be well over seventy for sure, she’s waving and calling, waving and calling, just like a delighted happy young child. She’s even unfurling, down the side of the building, a banner of welcome: to us.
GRANDS PÈLERINS DE DENIS DIDRO
! it reads.
SOYEZ LES BIENVENUS
!

Who on earth can the lady be? But no time to think about it now: we’re off.

‘Let us go,’ says Bo, and we’re all sheepishly following our leader again, walking down the gangplank. Our feet press the hard and crumbling cement of the great Motherland, where the land seems vast and the recent troubles of history seem, for the moment, to mean little. The usual arrowed signs direct us into the terminal. Outside the doors, the row of tattered bandsmen waits, surrounded by their instruments. They look older than ever, grey-bristled, sad, yet weighed with entire chestfuls of medals. They’re holding out hats, helmets, kepis, asking, like beggars, for the gift of a rouble or two. They’re not alone; the young conscript soldiers are at the same game, stopping the incoming passengers, evidently asking, with an odd mixture of threat and pleading, for cheap goods and gifts. The same tattered informality prevails inside the grim and cavernous terminal, where everything seems dented, battered, defective, out of true. As at the bar on shipboard, this is a world where anything goes. Rules don’t work like rules; they’re obstructions, inconveniences, that invite either resignation or strange devices. At the passport booths, each passport handed to the officials seems to contain a little wad of roubles. At the customs benches, every suitcase and package presented seems to need supporting by the giving of a small gift. Bo presents our papers to the soldiers in the passport booths. Manders in his diplomatic fashion talks in Russian to the port officials, evidently telling our story. Alma is digging in her purse for a pourboire or two. An odorous scent, the smell of the harbour mingled with the smell of ancient cigarette smoke and the dampness of crumbling plaster, dominates everything.

Then, suddenly, we’re through, ushered by uniformed guards past the barrier, Bo and Manders having exercised their political magic. So here we are: in Russia, no, in Petersburg, which is also several other cities, Pieter, Petervar, Petrograd, Leningrad. We’re in the city of writers, the capital of intense and troubled souls. My unfinished Finnish enterprise can be finished off at last. And it’s a bright cold day in early October 1993 – just 220 years (as near as exactly) since Denis Diderot came to the city to offer his clever political wisdoms to a grand-fronted Empress. Russia then as now was in trouble, tugged as it ever has been between west and east, the mystic promises of bourgeois dreams and the amazing passions of the Old Believers, the strange tzars and the incredible impostors, by grand utopian dreams and the burden of those endless dead souls. Here extremity is the speciality, mysticism the rule, history the principle, a grand sense of history that can engulf continents, nature and desert, but still has trouble in struggling into humanity.