To the Hermitage (56 page)

Then Alma the great Snow Queen comes over and seizes me hard by the arm.

‘What now?’ she says.

‘What now? I’m going home.’

‘No, don’t leave us, don’t go.’

‘I have to.’

‘Stay in Stockholm tonight. Now I know you a bit better I can take you somewhere really bohemian. Not that awful place we went the first night. And you still didn’t try our crayfish—’

‘I’d really love to, Alma. But I’ve already confirmed my plane flight and called home.’

‘If you must. But remember, when you take your taxi out to Arlanda, don’t let them charge you too much money. In Sweden our taxi drivers are very honest, but they often go round by the long way.’

In his fine Burberry sports jacket Bo comes over. He wipes his glasses and shakes my hand earnestly.

‘My dear fellow, what a really excellent paper it was you gave us,’ he says.

‘Was it? I thought you really didn’t like it.’

‘Of course I liked it. I gave you that impression? How did I do that?’

‘You said you didn’t like it.’

‘
Nej, nej
, your paper was perfect. If you just leave me the text I will publish it in the proceedings.’

‘No, the whole point was it never had a text. I didn’t write it down.’

‘But I know you. You will.’

‘If I can remember it.’

‘How could you forget it? It was one of your stories. Don’t fail us, please. It was so much in the spirit of Diderot.’

‘The perfect spirit of Diderot,’ says Alma, looking me in the eye. There’s something about her look that makes me think I just might have been wrong, and this lady isn’t quite such a Snow Queen after all. Meantime Bo is writing something on a slip of paper, which he then slides into my jacket pocket.

‘Your invitation to next year’s conference,’ he says warmly.

‘You’ve planned next year already?’

‘Of course, one must always think ahead. It’s on the top of a mountain in Norway. Very beautiful.’

‘Exceedingly beautiful,’ says Alma meaningfully.

‘So why discuss Diderot on top of a mountain?’

‘
Nej, nej
,’ says Bo. ‘Next year the conference is on Ludwig Wittgenstein.’

‘The Wittgenstein Project?’

‘
Jo, jo
,’ says Bo.

‘I’m afraid I don’t know too much about Wittgenstein,’ I say. ‘Except he had a nephew.’

‘All in the aid of reason,’ says Bo.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ I say.

‘Oh, tell us you will come!’ cries Alma. ‘How can we possibly have a conference without you?’

‘But I really don’t think I could manage a paper on the subject of Wittgenstein,’ I murmur.

‘Good, do you hear that, he is saying yes,’ says Bo. ‘Whenever he says no he always really means yes. Isn’t it true?’

‘Of course.’

And Alma grabs me and gives me an extremely splendid kiss. No, I’ve been wrong about the lady. She’s not a Snow Queen after all.

So, as the critical bronze gaze of Vladimir Ilich surveys me to the last, I walk down the gangplank, and into the drab wooden customs hall on Strandsgardeskajan. A neatly dressed customs officer eyes me thoughtfully, and begins a polite but efficient search through my luggage. From beneath my shirts he draws an old leatherbound book.

‘It’s valuable?’ he asks.

‘Not really,’ I say cunningly. ‘It’s not usually the books that are valuable, it’s the words that are written inside them. And we can hardly charge a duty on those.’

Faced with this stirringly liberal thought, he gives me another glance and begins to scour through the pages. Finally he comes across the wad of ancient paper stuck into the end-papers. He looks at the faded handwritten sheets, the words in French that seem to tell some tale or other about a servant and a master.

‘Papers?’ he says.

‘Yes, but they’re not important. Just someone’s notes on the story.’

‘No, your papers,’ he says.

I show him.

‘
Tack, tack
,’ he says.

‘No duty?’

‘
Nej, nej
,’ he says, smiling at me.

All is well: I have papers, therefore I exist. I repack my shirts and strap up my case.

Feeling richer by the instant, as travellers sometimes (but not often) do, I walk out to the terminal exit. I stop a moment, turn and look back. Behind me, in the long rows that are still waiting for passport control, I can see them all – my fellow Enlightenment Pilgrims, standing in the dark but waiting to get into the light. There’s red-haired Birgitta the nightingale, and dapper Anders Manders; there’s saturnine Lars and bright folkish Agnes, serious Bo and unfrozen Alma. Except somehow, subtly, they seem to have changed around. For isn’t that Bo with Birgitta, Agnes with Lars, Alma with Lars Person? Never mind. Such are the mysteries of conferences. I walk outside and into the light. Over there is the taxi rank. A long line of Volvos stands waiting; I head for the first, and the big blonde driver helps me to put my luggage inside.

‘Arlanda,’ I say.

‘
Tack, tack
,’ says the driver, full of gratitude, and switches on his most enormous meter. Slowly, considerately, with the greatest respect toward all pedestrians, we drive away from the great white vessel and the Man of History, away through the container port, out into the pleasant, decent civic streets of Stockholm . . .

Now it just so happens that – according to what, as it will all so clearly turn out, has already been written in the great Book of Destiny up above – in just two years on from this time I shall visit Saint Petersburg once again. On that occasion that still sits waiting for me in the future it will be slightly later in the year: in fact in the last days of November, when the final crisp sunshine has gone, the days have grown short, the statues in the Summer Garden have all been shuttered, and the snow, bitter and hard, has already begun to fall. The skies at that time will be as dark as lead. The streets will be an ice-rink or a skid-pan, and on the Nevsky Prospekt, outside my guard-protected hotel, it will be almost too dangerous to walk out. Times will be no better and probably quite a good deal worse. Women will still stand on squares of cardboard in the street, selling their old dresses or a household pet. Beggars will lie drunk and dying in the subways, wrapped passive bundles will sit outside on doorsteps, more armed men will guard even more shuttered banks.

This time I shall be not sailing but flying, and I shall be travelling with a small group of British writers, who have come to open a library in a charming room of old books that doesn’t exist yet. The library is a writers’ library, a library with a purpose, a library with a strong literary idea: it’s the Mayakovsky Library, housed in the centre of Petersburg, in a charming old Golitsyn Palace which overlooks the black Fontanka. In its charming rooms private and public collections will come together, helped by the British Council, which also resides in this building, and the Petersburg Public Library, which I shall recall as the Saltykov-Shcherdrin, but which by then will be called the Russian National Library. I will come because, as you now know quite well, I love travel and libraries; but also because I hope to see, again, Galina. When I arrive, my very first question will be about her. And I shall be told at once that Galina is dead: that she died, in fact, just after our Diderot pilgrimage which right now is ending; that she never managed to do the thing she most wished to do, make a trip to Paris; that the Voltaire collection is still being re-assembled, but perhaps not in the old wonderful way . . .

But all this is a matter for the future, and who now can possibly know any of these things? In any case the present is all too present, and busy and demanding enough. I’m checking my flight time, and riding in a taxi through the heart of Stockholm, most pleasant and decent of cities. ‘No smoking, no drinking, no eating. Airbag provided, side-impact protected, air-conditioned, safety locks. Fasten seat belt, do not speak to the driver. Special supplement to the airport,’ it tells me on the dash. Inside this safe and highly informative cage I sit, surrounded on each side by slow-floating Saabs and considerate Volvos, all of them with their lights warningly on. We’re navigating the great motorway web that links the city and ties together some of its many islands. Now we’re passing the gardening centres, the furniture warehouses, the automobile franchises, the fast food palaces, the Ikea superstores and all those smart-looking out-of-town sheds that mobile phone and personal computer companies need these days to keep us in touch with the global traffic in signals and signs. All around me there’s the triumph of the bourgeois, the reign of the decent, the tedium of the commonplace, the lure of the expensively commercial, the grand if faded wonder of social democracy, the waste and redundancy of the age of shopping, overload and far too much. Then we pass on into pleasant lakeland, pine-and-birch forest. And now, suddenly, all the motorway signs up there are pointing the right way: Arlanda, Arlanda. I’m riding home . . .

But why, oh why, do I have the feeling this trip is going to cost me a bomb?

N
ATURALLY
, for all his years and for all his weariness, our man is quite incapable of staying idle very long. Soon he’s again taking his five o’clock walks through the streets of Paris, wandering through the elegant and erotic refurbishments that have been done to the fine Palais Royal, where everything is on offer. Here the newspapers and periodicals are sold, the banned books are eagerly distributed and taken home, the city’s finest whores in their most elegant and teasing costumes flit through the arcades in front of the shouting merchants and the wandering beaux. In the old way he discusses with himself questions of politics and love, taste and philosophy, letting his mind rove wantonly. By night he dines as he always used to with the city’s great men of learning, who are also beginning to show their years: d’Alembert, d’Holbach, Helvétius. He hears of the strange solitary doings of Rousseau, the sharpest new barbs of Voltaire. He returns to the salons of the great married ladies – so many of them now, all offering their services as players of music, writers of books, grand Semiramises, mistresses to philosophers and men of true wit. But the grand ladies are younger now; so are the men of true wit. When the weather is wet, he strolls to the cafés, sitting down, as ever at the tables of the Café Procope, or wandering into the Café de la Régence, watching the clever men shift the pieces across the chequerboards while he digests the latest scandals, reads the latest broadsheets, scans the latest fops.

And as usual Grimm’s political instincts have proved entirely right. Paris has changed. It’s changed completely, entirely, epochally, epistemically. For the moment at least there’s a quite new spirit to this relaxed, youthful, louche new reign, with its pastoral dreams and its panderous court at the Hermitage. Everything feels just a bit more tolerant, a bit more permitted, though somehow also more anxious, more volatile, for this is a world where freedom is taken almost too freely, to the point where it dissolves in all directions. Decadences multiply, sex is grosser. Women tease men in a great claim of power. It’s grown more difficult to enrage the censor, though his Jesuitical friend the Abbé Raynal has already done it, and his own turn will surely come (as indeed it does, for it’s already written there will be one more grand brush with the book-burners before his days on earth are done). At his age it gets harder, ever harder, to sound like a fiery torch or a radical young man – especially when there are so many much younger men doing just the same kind of thing.

In fact a whole grand gallery of young philosophers is now beginning to fill the clubs and cafés, as if these days there were simply no occupation other than thought. There they sit, drinking their wines, supping their rich Arabian coffees, dressed up in their fashionable silks and brocades and their large Voltairean turbans: having their shoes cleaned, flaunting their wit, pronouncing their atheism, confessing their humour, dissecting the universe, chattering like monkeys about whatever it is – life, or liberty, or the pursuit of happiness – that happens to be the vogue of the week. When do they think? When do they find time to write?

Certainly there’s no shortage of their scribblings, and our man knows exactly whom to blame. It’s Panckoucke, of course, the great media mogul, who has been buying up everything: grabbing newspapers, book-titles, imprints, novelists, thinkers and journalists by the score. Now he’s publicly rebuked our man for failing to update his own encyclopedia, and is announcing the need for a mega new one, the biggest and grandest multimedia project the world has ever seen. Where our man has invested wisdom, intelligence, risk and exile, he simply invests money; for in the new Paris everything is for purchase. And yet the whole greedy thing has the King’s blessing, it seems: as long as the game is commerce and not criticism, nobody minds at all. Now Panckoucke and his agents are running round all the cafés and clubs, tempting the philosophers, hiring the researchers and the copyists, hunting down hacks. Money is no object; he’s paying absurd fees for absurd thoughts, and inveigling the investments of any kind of subscriber, not simply the wise and learned readers his own grand volumes were meant for. Critique has become commodity, light has become power. As for our man: truth is he’s famous, he’s fashionable, he’s failing, and he’s finished.

Yes, Paris now is exactly as young Beaumarchais – another of the many men he’s invented and set off on his profitable way – describes it in his newest play at the Comédie-Française, the one about the barber-factotum, another tale of a servant and a master: ‘Such a barbaric age we live in. I can’t see it’s produced a single thing we should be grateful for. Only every kind of stupidity and trash: atheism, magnetism, electricity, religious freedom, inoculation, quinine, terrible plays and modern rubbish, Diderot’s
Encyclopedia
. . .’ Yes, times have certainly changed – but it all goes so far and no further. There are political reforms and new freedoms. Sex is coarser, passions are cruder, appearances are crasser, violent actions win more approval. Science prospers, invention flourishes. Thought has grown far more instrumental, far less abstract. There’s a great flurry of discovery: inoculation, the flowings of the blood, the marine chronometer, the wily ways of mad Dr Mesmer who stares into everyone’s eyes, magnetism, electricity. Distant islands are set foot on. People are trying to travel on rivers by the aid of paddles and steam. In the parks outside Paris, in front of the most enormous crowds, others are tying themselves or their animals to huge floating bladders and trying to ascend high in the sky.