To the Hermitage

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To the Hermitage Page 10

by Malcolm Bradbury


  I know exactly what this means. Of course I know all about Sweden’s puritanical permissiveness. Still, why not? Already I can see those oiled naked bodies, the healthy Nordic frankness, the glut of glistening firm bronzed blond frames. Except, as it turns out, not quite. Stockholm’s hottest ticket in town proves to be a concert by a bunch of student musicians in the Aula of the University. Here I can encounter the work of a new generation of Nordic composers: wild postmodern conceptualists who have determined minimalism has grown far too bulky, random improvization far too regimented. Tonight at nine they mean to go probing further, to the wildest shores of silence.

  ‘We knew you would want to go, of course,’ says Alma.

  ‘Unless perhaps your Cartesian dilemma has made you just a little bit sleepy?’ asks Bo, with the air of a playful joker.

  I say yes, of course – yes is what I nearly always say. To be honest, I should have known better. Years of wandering the frontiers of the transgressive postmodern imagination have taught me what its key words mean. ‘Conceptual’ means: we haven’t thought about it much, but we’re cool, we’ll stay cool, and something will happen to which we can add the name of art. ‘Postmodern’ means: guess what, we managed to get a corporate sponsor to pay for it.

  Which is why you find me, half an hour later, sitting on a hard wooden bench in a vast panelled academic hall. Given the avant-garde occasion, the audience is not quite what I would expect. It consists almost entirely of very elderly gentlemen with dark black suits, neat white beards, small state decorations in their buttonholes, and severe elderly ladies with corsages in their handsome but definitely period frontages. I shake frozen hands with a Doctor Gregorius This. I chat with a zimmer-framed Professor That. I am mostly invited to express my love of Grieg and Sibelius, though some daring soul speaks of Stockhausen. I stare up above at portraits of yet older professors and thinkers: wigged botanists, perukified classicists, grim black-clad Lutheran theologians who must have been hanging there on these academic walls for an eternity or longer. Then a small orchestra of pubescents, in evening dress, white student caps over their blonde crops, file on to the stage, bearing the usual array of musical instruments. An equally pubescent conductor makes a Swedish microphone announcement.

  ‘He explains this is a people’s creation. They have composed this work all of them together,’ murmurs Alma into my ear.

  ‘Fine,’ I whisper.

  ‘He says it is entirely conceptual and influenced by the nihilism of Kierkegaard,’ says Bo into my second ear. ‘The young are so clever, you must admit.’

  ‘I certainly do,’ I say.

  Silence falls; the first item commences. Holding tightly on to their instruments, our orchestra of tinies sits onstage in total silence. From Alma’s whispers, I learn that for conceptual reasons they mean to remain like this for as long as it takes for something random to happen. What? Well, maybe someone’s mobile phone will go off. I nod. It’s wonderful. I nod again. And again. Then – whether it’s due to a long day of travelling or an excess of Baltic herring I don’t know – at a point ten minutes or so into this adventure I nod right off, into the blessed universe of sleep. For a while vague images of blonde bronzed northern frames strangely run through my slipping mind. Then some comfortable, morphine bourgeois peace overwhelms me. When I awake, to the sound of sudden applause, I can no longer recall where I am (Arizona, perhaps?), or who I am (not me, surely?). Nor do I know what has brought the awesome artistic silence to an end. But my own loud snores do have to be a serious possibility.

  Now I know. I do know. There can be no excuse. This is just no way for an honoured foreign guest, guaranteed totally alkoholfri, to behave. It is our duty to be open at all hours to the cutting edge of art. We should all respect the seriousness of the avant-garde, even if it has been hanging around for ever, and honour the fresh creative impulses of the young, the radical and the new. Yes, it’s bad. It’s a cultural sin. Quite unforgivable. Yet nothing in the world could exceed the spirit of unspoken moral outrage which, at the interval, suddenly sweeps me out of the hall and into the foyer (‘Professor Erno Tikvist from the Nobel committee wanted so much to meet you, but clearly that will not now be possible’), and then fills the air-freshener-perfumed interior of the Lunebergs’ long, leathery and very informative Volvo (‘No smoking, no food, fasten seat belt, side impact bars, do not interfere in any way with the efforts of the driver’) as they drive me coldly back to my hotel through Stockholm’s silent, sober and no less rebuking streets. Bo is in the grimmest of moods, Alma even more the Snow Queen, as they decant me on the sidewalk outside the unlit lobby of my slumbering hotel.

  ‘Now you have had such a good sleep, I think you will be able to stay up all night, and write your paper for the Diderot Project,’ is Alma’s parting shot as – with many warning signals, and much flashing of the red and orange safety lights plastered on each surface of the car – they drive off, considerately, into Stockholm’s dark and chilly night.

  I try to enter my night-lodgings, which have lost their spirit of gracious hospitality and are now completely shuttered and barred. A little random sleet is now falling, a police car patrols critically around the other side of the square. It takes me ten minutes of nervous bell-buzzing before a pyjama-ed night clerk appears (but it is ten-thirty already) and ungraciously grants me the loan of my own room-key, warning me that I may already have forfeited my right to order breakfast. I mount the back stairs – the lift is considerately switched off at this late hour – and find the way to my neat little bedroom.

  ‘Try our elite Sex Channel!!’ screams a card atop the small TV set. ‘Fabulous girls! Erotic Adventures!! Brand New Positions!!! Please keep the sound low and try not to disturb your neighbour.’

  Sitting on the bed, I click the channel changer, surfing past blonde, bronzed frames, booby, brandished breasts, deep-furrowed buttocks, splayed limbs, erectile tissue, micro-camera trips through inner body tubing, an improbable cavorting of mass human and animal entanglements, in search of something that really turns me on.

  Then there it is at last: the real world. In a snowy square in a squat, grey, towered city, a grey-green tank elevates and lowers its gun-barrel. Finally it takes aim on a great white public building by the river, constructed according to the highest principles of Stalinesque bad taste. In the tank-hole sits an ear-flapped driver and a fur-capped captain; the tank itself looks both dangerous and decrepit. Cameras cut: to a wide urban boulevard: a parade of thick-coated peasants in various forms of remarkable headwear marches boldly onward, ever onward, holding high a very old red flag. They’re setting buses on fire, building barricades in the wide streets. Fabulous histories! Military adventures!! Brand New Ideologies!!! I sit on the bed and watch, in a state of truly shameful excitement. Though the commentator’s voice is Swedish, it is not hard to appreciate what is going on. Cut to: the interior of the Duma; the deputies banging their desks; speeches by Yeltsin’s recent vice president, Alexander Rutskoi, and Ruslan Khasbulatov, the black-shirted and ambitious speaker of the parliament, who had been Yeltsin’s aides in resisting the last coup, against Gorbachev. I know them well enough. For weeks they and their supporters in the Duma have been out-manoeuvring Yeltsin and his crony oligarchic government, in a great game of Russian political chess. In the last days he has reacted by trying to dissolve the parliament. They have replied by trying to dissolve the president.

  Now, evidently, the end game has begun. The Duma is no longer speaking in defence of parliamentary democracy: an ancient Russian package of nationalism, militarism, celebration of the glorious KGB and a return to the discipline of the Gulags is on offer again. A mixed, menacing band of soldiers and other armed men, a sudden army, is now strutting about the White House, and piles of automatic rifles are stacked for use. Cut to: Man in Lenin-like posture shouting into a megaphone from Lenin’s tomb in Red Square. Cut to: Tzar Boris, beaming strangely, and moving with that slow stately step that suggests he first learned to walk at some state funeral
, as he passes through the grand rooms of the Kremlin. Cut to: several Russian experts in a Moscow studio, all wearing entire chestfuls of ancient military medals, and apparently explaining that this time Yeltsin has miscalculated disastrously. Cut to: blazered American ex-Secretaries of State in a Washington studio, telling us the New World Order that began when the Berlin Wall came down and Russia collapsed is finally over. Time to get ready; we’re returning to the Old World, Cold World Order again.

  It’s all chaos, noisy confusion. History generally is. Yet from the confusion I grasp one sure and certain thing. To be quite frank, I have no real idea of what Bo Luneberg’s much-discussed Diderot Project is; many intellectual projects tend to end up like this. All I’ve grasped is that it involves a sponsored journey of homage to the life of a delightful writer-philosopher whose work I know and love, a free ferry-trip to the city of Saint Petersburg (Pushkin’s famous ‘shattered fragment of wanton power’, Gogol’s ‘cloudy city’ made out of straight lines, Anna Akhmatova’s ‘phantasmagora’), a visit to the glorious Hermitage and the library of the great Tzarina, a long serious look along the Nevsky Prospekt: in short, a solemn pilgrimage down the Enlightenment Trail to one of its prime sites. And I’m here because it is an enlightened intellectual project, because our admirable Bo can be – when he wishes – a wonderfully persuasive and learned fellow, and because I am, as I said earlier, one of those people who says yes to everything. But whatever our project is, one thing has surely now become luminously clear. This just ain’t going to happen. The chaos of history is busy, far too real and present, for that sort of high-minded academic junketing. Whatever our foray to the lost world of Russian Enlightenment was out to achieve, the great laws of reason tell me it’s definitely going to be cancelled.

  And sad as that may be for the advancement of learning, right now this feels perfectly all right by me. I’m feeling tired, really tired, completely worn out by the events of the day – the early-morning check-in at postmodern Stansted, the briny Stockholm air, the visit to the Vasa, the long and wearying quest for Descartes, the herring dinner in the midst of an alkoholfri bohemia, the silent Kierkegaardian postmodern concert. I’m soaked in shame over my earlier somnolence; now I just want to sleep without sin. I’m far too drained to write an academic paper, on a subject and for some seminar occasion whose membership and purpose no one has properly explained to me. In minutes I’m undressed and safe under a vast Nordic duvet as big as a classic Amsterdam whore. Stockholm lies as enigmatically silent as a postmodern concert beyond the triple-glazed windows. In minutes more, the television set still flickering, I’m deeply, gratefully asleep. And this time without any orchestral accompaniment at all.

  Morning. Here I am again. And this particular new morning announces itself with a clanging of trams, a bonging of public bells, a buzzing of planes, a honking of ships’ sirens resounding from some harbour not too far away. Plainly I’m in a foreign city. Through thin pastel blinds of a tasteful design, a faint and far from confident sun is trying to shine in and awake me, with not very much success. I am, after all, a well-known slugabed. I draw myself out of the usually reassuring world of sleep and into the far from reassuring one of regular daily consciousness. My dreams overnight have not been benign. Indeed, as I recall their traces, they’ve been truly terrible. There have been drowned corpses, huge ship-like churches with bleeding saints, silver coffins, skulls carved by glittering knives into the most mysterious shapes. There are soldiers in corridors, gun-barrels lifting into the air. I must presume conscience is paining me, and I wake anxious, guilty, sensing I’ve done something wrong. Have I? Of course I have, for God’s sake. Last night I slept in public in the presence of advanced creative art.

  Right, so just remind me: where am I then? Stockholm, Sweden’s fine watery capital. When? Early October 1993. Why? I’m travelling on the Enlightenment Pilgrimage . . . A noise disturbs me. Across the room, the TV set I’ve fallen asleep in front of still flickers; and I see at once that history has gone on being busy in my absence. I find the remote, flip up the sound, try to discover what’s been happening. The voices stay confusingly Swedish, but it’s quite clear things in Moscow have not improved. Tzar Yeltsin – there he is, a strange drunken doll-shaped automaton – has departed imperiously for his dacha outside the city, though not, it seems, before cutting off all heat, light, telephones and refreshments to the White House and leaving it in a state of siege. The deputies – there they all are – have slept on benches, lain huddled in sweaters. Bands of armed mercenaries and police guards stand waiting in every corridor, anticipating the great night-time attack. Priests, communists, old believers and eagle-waving monarchists have gathered protectively around the building. ‘A terrible war is coming,’ Khasbulatov has promised them.

  Now, as dawn comes to the barricaded, blocked-off White House, the legislators and soldiers are rising, feisty, ripe for action, gathering round microphones, intoning baritonal songs about freedom and glory, reading patriotic poems, announcing their wish to carry revolt through to a splendid and bloodstained end. The street parades – there they are – have multiplied, in scale, vehemence, rage, violence, zealotry. Down the street the red hammer-and-sickled banners of the old Russian communism march proudly this way, trying to call back the past. Up the street the red-blue-and-white banners of the CRS march just as proudly that way, trying to figure out the future. Here again come the Washington gurus, announcing in English that Yeltsin’s days are numbered, the free market era is over, and all sensible investors should start buying stock in Star Wars again.

  So. I climb out of bed and walk over to the window (‘WARNING. Do not open. This window is for your viewing convenience only’). Here in the moral kingdom there seems not a great deal to worry about. Beyond the reassuring triple-glazing, the ordinary life of a delightful, solid and wealthy bourgeois city is under way. Across the courtyard, in the window of a pleasant grey apartment block, a small girl practises the cello, as every decent small girl should. In another a short-haired small boy boots up his personal computer, and will no doubt soon be hacking into the Nikkei Index. Maids in neat black dresses dust perfectly clean windows. Gardeners in blue suits brush up perfectly neat lawns. I head for the neat sweet-smelling bathroom. I take a shower, reusing yesterday’s soaking towels to announce my most sincere respect for Sweden’s beautiful lakes and seas. By the time I’m done, a forbidding maid has come in with continental breakfast. It sits waiting for me on the table: rich coffee, steaming rolls, bacterially-active yoghurts, free-range salamis, bilberry juice. A note tells me that this is all organic produce, and all the animals involved were wonderfully happy until shortly before I chose to consume them.

  As big bear-like history rumbles on at the Baltic’s still distant other end, I sip my coffee, eat the animals, work out my own tinier, more tediously human plans. These involve changing my air-ticket, phoning my family to warn them their happy respite is over, packing, finding a taxi, heading for Arlanda and home. Plainly, no one possessed of logic and reason would be heading for Russia at this moment. But a scholar is a scholar, academic duty a serious matter. So first I pick up the telephone, dial 9, and call the Technological University to secure Bo’s personal confirmation that the Enlightenment Project has gone onto hold. The person I talk to is not our professor himself but one of his fluent and friendly secretaries. She tells me that (even while I’ve been waking, showering, snacking) the good professor has already been in, taught two classes, failed an incompetent student, marked a heap of essays and returned them, answered his correspondence, examined a doctoral thesis on Swedenborg, spread several false rumours to the press about the Nobel Prize, picked up his umbrella and gone off again. No one in the office seems to be quite sure whither, but gossip says that his steps lead eastward, and probably to Russia. No one is any surer when or if he will be back – though he is advertised in the corridor to deliver an important public lecture on the matter of the diphthong in just over two weeks’ time.

  What does it me
an? Could the Diderot Project truly be happening after all? Putting departure plans on temporary hold, I wander off into lovely Stockholm. The weather still stays nicely warm for the season; we may all expect a pleasant, crisp, sunny day. I do a little domestic shopping, and pick up a few high-priced Nordic artefacts to show frau and kinder I really have been away, and not just hiding in the attic upstairs. I go down to the waterfront, to inspect the busy ferry traffic. I watch the men play chess, and let my thoughts rove wantonly. For literary purposes, I revisit the food market: cold herring, non-alcoholic beer, leggy girls. I return to my hotel to check on my messages and then check out. There are no messages; no word has come from the battalions of the Enlightenment. I shall simply have to assume that, despite the bloody collapse of the state, the coming of a terrible war, and other such local difficulties, our Diderot trip to Russia is on after all. I summon a taxi, put my luggage into it, and ask for the ferry harbour. The driver of the Volvo (‘No smoking. No eating. Fasten seat belt. This driver never carries any change’), a voluble Turk, tells me that, even in this land of liberal decency, he and his kind are illiberally called ‘blacktops’, and constantly urged to go back to where they came from. This does not deter him from charging me a truly Swedish fare.

  I unload my luggage into the middle of a drab, noisy, crowded, arc-lit concrete plain. The Stadsgardeskajan terminal is a thriving commercial madhouse. Freight-wagons shunt, huge refrigerated trucks fume, sea-gulls scream, seeking a passage to the distant sea. Cranes heave, vast orange containers swing high above me, sheds of warehouses ingest and disgorge. Vodka from Novgorod and Ikea chairs from the Upplands meet sound-systems from Korea and hashish from Pakistan. The sea stinks vigorously of oil. Along the dockside, beyond the terminal buildings, stand the Baltic ferries: vast floating hotels, each one lit up like Christmas, huge metal jaws jammed wide open to consume the long lines of cars, buses and container trucks waiting in rows on the concrete. Foot passengers swarm from buses and taxis and head for the wooden terminals. Helsinki, Tallinn, Riga, say the signboards. Walking under the arc lights, I look for the Russian ferries. I doubt they will be sailing; and yet, it seems, they are. At the entrance of the terminal shed is a big destination board: SANKT PETERBURG, it confidently declares. And beyond the customs shed a huge white ferry lies at the dock, pulsing away at its moorings, all ready for afternoon boarding. Only one problem. That’s not the right ship, the Anna Karenina. It’s an older, sharper, more aggressive sister vessel, the Vladimir Ilich.

 

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