To the Hermitage (51 page)

Yet the fine-plastered walls created for the old building are high and grand, the cornices splendid, a chandelier still hangs from the living-room ceiling. Galina has filled up the flat, covering the walls with shelves, wardrobes, cupboards, between which hang icons and paintings. Everywhere there are books, everywhere bindings and bibelots, snuffboxes and pomanders, vases and photographs, a mass of small things grandly displayed. A sewing machine sits on the table, a vast row of dresses in the wardrobe, and rich French perfumes scent and savour the flat. There are posters of Paris on the walls, and Delaunay drawings of the Eiffel Tower. There are bottles of French brandy, one or two of wine. Galina sits me down in comfort. She lays out bread and olives; she pours me a glass of brandy; we begin to talk.

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 up:

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.