To the Hermitage (52 page)

S
O 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!’