‘Wait a second,’ I say. But the man has gone, leaving me with all these wonders, but no sign at all of my own cases: seedy, yes, but my own, and containing everything I, a simple bookish man, ever live by: books, notebooks, memoirs, a packet of tobacco, Marks and Spencer’s socks.
There’s a tap at the door. Sven Sonnenberg enters, looks round.
‘My luggage, not here?’ he says, and goes at once.
Another tap at the door. Tatyana is back, carrying a glass filled with mysterious brown fluid freshly drawn from a handy neighbourhood samovar.
‘Tea,’ she says, as I look at it suspiciously. ‘Do you like something in it?’
‘I think so,’ I say.
Tatyana disappears again. A tap at the door, and Agnes Falkman stands there.
‘What has happened to Sven Sonnenberg?’ she demands.
‘He came here looking for his luggage.’
‘Where?’
‘He’s gone again.’
‘That one is impossible,’ says Agnes Falkman, and goes.
Another tap at the door; and Tatyana reappears, with a small unlabelled bottle in her hand.
‘I think you will like this,’ she says, pouring a generous measure into my tea.
‘Vodka?’ I ask.
‘Da, da,’ she says.
‘I’ll have some if you take some with me,’ I say.
Tatyana slips into my shower room, reappears with another glass, and sits down with me on the bunk.
‘You said you were from Pushkin, where’s that?’ I ask her, as we raise our glasses to each other.
‘Oh, don’t you know?’ asks Tatyana. ‘Pushkin is place.’
‘Where is the place?’
‘Very near Sankt Peterburg. A long time ago it was called Tsarskoye Selo.’
‘You mean where Catherine had her summer palace?’
‘A very great palace for the tzars. The Germans lived there and then bombed it, but we put it back again. It is still there.’
‘The palace with the Amber Room.’
‘Da, but the Germans took it away, in the war.’
‘Didn’t it come from Germany in the first place? A gift from Great to Great, Frederick to Catherine?’
‘Yes, but you know it is Russia’s. It was for the tzars. It belongs only in Pushkin.’
‘So how did the place come to be called Pushkin?’
‘You don’t know about Aleksandr Pushkin, our great poet?’
‘Yes, of course I know about him. He wrote The Bronze Horseman. And Eugene Onegin.’
‘Pushkin was born at Tsarkoye Selo. He went to the Lyceum. He was our best poet, also an enemy to Nicholas the Tzar. In Stalin times we liked better to call it Pushkin – because it is better to be an honest poet than a wicked tzar. You agree?’
‘Certainly I do.’
‘Good. You like more vodka?’
‘Please. But this time let’s not bother with the tea, shall we?’
Another tap on the door. The Swedish nightingale stands there – filling, no, more than filling, the doorway.
‘I think maybe I have your baggages,’ she says.
‘And I do believe I have yours,’ I say.
Birgitta steps in, and eyes my little tryst with interest. ‘Are you really drinking vodka?’ she asks.
‘Wait, I find you a glass,’ says Tatyana, diving into the loo.
‘Who is your friend, this charming little young person, your servant?’ asks the nightingale, sitting down heavily on my bunk.
‘That’s Tatyana from Pushkin,’ I explain.
‘No, no, it can’t be, I am Tatyana from Pushkin,’ says the nightingale.
‘You’re Birgitta Lindhorst from Sweden,’ I say. ‘It says so on your . . . on your lapel.’
‘Yes, but at Drottningholm opera just now I was Tatyana from Pushkin.’
Tatyana reappears and hands the nightingale a full glass. ‘Da? You sing in Tchaikovsky’s opera? Eugene Onegin?’
‘Ah, you understand, do you, my little darling,’ says the diva.
Tatyana sits down on the bunk, which trembles dangerously.
‘Don’t you know it, the opera Onegin?’ she asks me. ‘Perhaps you remember the wonderful song of the letter? –
‘“I’m writing you this declaration / What more can I in candour say? / It could be well your inclination / To scorn me now and turn away,”’ the Swedish nightingale suddenly trills, her voice booming off the metal walls.
‘Yes, Tatyana’s letter,’ I say. ‘“Tatyana’s letter lies besides me / And reverently I guard it still / I read it with an ache inside me / And cannot ever read my fill.”’
A tap on the door. ‘Would you guys just mind turning the volume down a little?’ says Jack-Paul Verso, standing there in his I LOVE DECONSTRUCTION cap. ‘I’m trying to finish a paper on my laptop next door.’
‘“Why ever did you come to call?”’ asks the Swedish nightingale, looking him in the eye and hitting full volume. ‘“In this forgotten country dwelling / I’d not have known you then at all / Or known this bitter heartache’s swelling.”’
‘God, I know that, Eugene Onegin,’ says Verso. ‘The greatest verse-novel ever written.’
‘And the greatest opera,’ says the diva.
‘The greatest everything,’ says Verso.
‘Are you people all teachers?’ asks Tatyana.
‘Oh no,’ says the diva. ‘What does it say in Onegin? “God save me from the apparition / On leaving some delightful ball / Of bonneted Academician / Or scholar in a yellow shawl.”’
‘What have all you guys been drinking, shampanski?’ asks Verso.
‘No, no, vodka,’ says Tatyana. ‘You like me to get another cup?’
‘From your hands, my Russian honey, I’d drink anything,’ says Verso, appreciatively. ‘Who’s this?’
‘I am Tatyana from Pushkin,’ says Tatyana, as she reappears with another shot.
‘No kidding?’ asks Verso, sitting down. ‘That’s weird. Because that’s the one thing I really want to do on this trip. Go to Pushkin and see that fantastic Summer Palace. The Chinese pavilion, the ice house. The trouble is I don’t know Russian. I need some really smart Russian guide to take me around.’
‘I can take you there,’ says Tatyana.
‘If there’s not a revolution,’ I say.
‘Life in Russia is always a revolution,’ says Tatyana. ‘Who cares? If you want to go, we can go.’
Another tap on the door. It’s Anders Manders, dapper, suave, every inch the counsellor. ‘I’m looking for our stewardess,’ he says. ‘There seems to be no towel in my cabin.’
‘Oh, pardon,’ says Tatyana, getting up.
‘You’re the stewardess?’
‘This is Tatyana from Pushkin,’ says Jack-Paul Verso. ‘Sit down, my friend.’
‘And this is just like an opera at the Kirov,’ says Birgitta.
‘I hope we’re all going to the Kirov,’ says Manders, sitting down on the bunk. ‘Excuse me, is that good Russian vodka I can smell?’
‘I get you another glass,’ says Tatyana.
Another tap on the door. And who else can it be now but Lars Person, still wearing his big floppy hat?
‘I thought on a Russian ship there would have to be a party,’ he says.
‘I get one glass,’ says Tatyana.
‘Stay right there, Tatyana from Pushkin, I’ll bring some from my cabin next door,’ says Verso.
Just then a siren blasts and sennets, high above us. The ship’s engines begin their classic bump and grind.
‘Hey, listen, we’re going to Russia,’ says Verso, raising a finger.
‘Russkaya,’ says Tatyana, lifting her glass to us.
‘Russkaya,’ says omnes, sitting in a long row on my creaking bunk.
You know: I’m starting to think there could be something in this Diderot Project after all.
EIGHT (THEN)
WHAT WITH MATCHMAKING, feasting, titivating, powdering, dressing up, ushering, bowing, scraping
, charming his way round the court, what with all these problems of menus and venues, and this whole strange business of human self-presentation and entertainment, in which he so delights, Melchior Grimm, maker of history, has really been most remarkably busy. Which is why it’s not until a week or so after the imperial wedding, his duties all accomplished so flamboyantly and so publicly and so much to the satisfaction of le monde entire, that he has the chance to call on his dear old friend at the Narishkin Palace. He still basks in the nuptial journey, the matrimonial glow. For just as our man has performed one arc of a great journey from Paris to the north, so he has performed another: riding from Paris through the Low Countries, taking in a court here and a court there, passing through Potsdam to flatter an emperor and collect up a little princess, and so ending up in front of the icons and archimandrites of the Orthodox altar as the wedding vows are exchanged.
‘My dear good fellow,’ he cries, proving himself just as warm a man as Falconet has shown himself cold. ‘My dear fellow,’ our man cries, as they fall all eager into each other’s arms again.
‘We remained a long time hugging each other, letting go and then hugging again,’ he will write home that night to the Particularist. Of course. They are two fond old brothers, French and German, who over the many long years in Paris and the countryside have been together to concerts, castles, galleries, salons, house parties, libraries, brothels and wine-shops. Over times almost too long to remember they have kissed each other’s mistresses, assisted each other’s finances, found each other commissions and other prospects, joined in each other’s conspiracies and mystifications, published in each other’s journals, written each other’s books. One is little, the other is big. One is fat, the other is tall. With his fine brocade surcoat, his silk stockings, his usual flush of rouge on, Melchior is total joy. Sankt Peterburg feels better already. Perhaps he did the right thing in coming here after all.
And Melchior – what are good friends for? – is as bitter in his indignation at Falconet’s manners as he is himself. The fellow, he has to acknowledge, is a sourpuss, a temperamental wretch, a cruel rogue. And yet, he wonders, with that courtly wisdom for which he’s famous, is it possible that this all has something to do with the strange matter of the, you know of course, the Horseman, the issue that has been pulling Sankt Peterburg apart for so long? We must never forget – or so says Melchior, sitting there in his frogged coat by the rancid stove, cleaning out his long fingernails with a silver pen-knife – that courts are strange fickle places, hard for an artist to live in. What suits everyone one day is suddenly, well, quite out of court the next. And Sankt Peterburg can be a dour discouraging city, even worse than Potsdam. Just the kind of place where even the strongest and sanest of men – and nobody ever accused Falconet of being that – could be driven to despair.
For, as Melchior reminds him, it’s a whole nine years since Falconet came to the city where life is always sink or swim. For nine years he’s been working, carving and shaping, casting and smelting, under the eyes of the world’s most imperious empress. For nine years strange crowds made up of sleek and well-dressed nobles and drab serfs and beggars have been pushing into his atelier uninvited, staring grimly at the mysterious maquette in the making. No one has ever expressed an opinion; not a soul has shown even the faintest smile of approval, the entire capital preferring to remain totally dumb on the matter until her serene imperiousness has declared herself ready to speak. Setback has followed setback. Thanks to incompetent workmen, the whole studio has burst into flames more than once. Foundries have imploded, and two statues at least have collapsed on themselves.
And, for all her western ways, the lady has proved a very hard taskmistress, as – Grimm adds grimly – only she can. In fact relations between patron and sculptor have deteriorated badly. Falconet’s studio stands in window-shot of the Winter Palace; but he’s no longer asked to court. Communication is now managed by chilly ukases on her side, irascible tirades on his. At first greatly charmed by her fine French artist, Sa Majesté has somehow cooled. Some blame this on the fact that she may have developed more ambiguous feelings about her great predecessor, now that (with whatever shows of reluctance) she has been asked to consider donning the mantle of Greatness herself. Whatever the reasons, she’s apparently been setting Falconet the most impossible of tasks. Take, for example, the awkward matter of the inscription. For reasons already cited, the original ‘For Peter the Great from Catherine the Second’ has begun to lose its appeal.
‘You mean, greater does not bow the knee to the merely great?’ suggests our man.
‘That’s it exactly,’ says Grimm. Happily some tricksy court diplomat has found the right form of language. ‘Peter the First and Catherine the Second’ is what the plinth will now pronounce.
And take the matter of that plinth itself. Her Splendidness has demanded the biggest granite base in existence – and this despite the fact that among the bogs of Petersburg any stone larger than a pebble is in seriously short supply. Finally she has decreed the choice herself: a large boulder of fifteen hundred tons she noticed once on her travels, stuck deep in the ground twenty miles away and across the Finnish border. Naturally, what a tzarina wants a tzarina gets. But the task of dragging half a Finnish mountain twenty miles across marsh and bog has not been simple. It’s taken a year, required the energies of hundreds of horses and thousands of human pushers, demanded the invention of an ingenious little railway made of logs and brass balls. Then, as if this were not enough, Voltaire has suddenly taken to writing grandly from Ferney, adding his sage’s mite of enlightened advice. It seems that in his view the statue shouldn’t be erected in Petersburg at all, but somewhere else – Constantinople. A journey to Byzantium is no easy project for a Finnish mountain, especially as there is another problem: Her Highness would have to invade Turkey and occupy it first.
‘That’s Voltaire, he turns up everywhere,’ murmurs our man, impressed.
There’s more. In fact all this is as nothing compared with the argument the statue has spawned at court over Peter’s physical appearance and character – of which, it seems, everyone has a totally different memory. Some recall him as under six feet tall, while others are quite certain he was over seven. Some claim he was always moustached and trim-bearded, but others pronounce him clean-shaven at all times. Should he have boots on (he generally did)? Should he wear a uniform? Maybe a boyar dress of Russian furs (but he did want them abolished), maybe a Roman toga (a fine form of dress, but rarely seen this far north)? Should he hold a sabre in his hand (he did make great use of one)? Better a legal scroll (he sometimes believed in the law)? The plan of his city (he did kill many people to create it)? And how should his facial expression be depicted? Should he be scowling fiendishly at Sweden, his old, defeated, yet still threatening enemy, always blocking off the other end of the Baltic? Should he be haughty, grand, triumphant, a soldier who was also a man of civilization, art and commerce? Should he be Peter the Absolutely Terrible, a Scythian scourge bringing fear and trembling to the entire world to the west? How about Thinking Pete, a reflective enquirer, asking for eternity, as he so often liked to do, What is dat?
No wonder Falconet has refused to dress the statue with a recognizable face, especially since Betskoi has demanded that the figure should be looking proudly at the Admiralty building, the Peter-Paul Fortress and the twelve colleges he founded on the opposite bank, something he could only manage by means of a very pronounced squint. Worst of all, there’s been the dreadful problem of the snake.
‘You surely don’t mean my snake?’ asks Our Philosopher, looking seriously worried at last.
For his snake it most definitely is. It was he, back in Paris, who first imagined an allegorical serpent lying beneath the hooves of Peter’s great horse: the pregnant image, the perfect symbol.
‘Symbol of what?’ asks Grimm, looking at him amused.
‘Good crushing evil. Humanity mastering nature. Reason triumphing over envy and ignorance,’ explains our man.
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‘Unfortunately the Tzarina feels it might be misread,’ says Grimm. ‘She thinks it might be seen as the Russian ruler crushing the Russian people. Such is the slippage of signs in this country. I rather think Her Highness is right.’
At any rate, the snake, it seems, has resulted in one of those imperial letters of instruction that, by the same slippage of signs, may not quite mean what they say.
‘There’s an old song that says, if it is necessary, it is necessary,’ the Empress has written to him, in her gnomic way, in her own fair hand. ‘Let that be your answer regarding the snake.’
So, by the time Grimm has picked up his tricorne and strolled off back to drinks and canapés at the Hermitage, the Falconet Mystification has grown considerably. In fact our man’s seriously alarmed. He can hardly wait to leap to his feet, grab up someone’s bearskin coat, and walk through Saint Isaac’s square to the log-built atelier on the Millionaya, to discover what’s become of his splendid nine-year-old dream. The atelier proves a most strange and remarkable place. In the snowy courtyard outside, a regiment of cavalry officers clatters and drills, each man taking turns to ride the Empress’s own horse, Brilliant, to the top of a vast sharp-angled stone plinth. The sculptor himself stands watching, evidently to see what daring positions a horse and rider can achieve before they tumble to disaster (as, it turns out, several have). The two friends embrace, but Falconet is still sullen. He leads our man inside the smoky den. Here, furnaces blast, smelters sizzle, plaster-moulds seethe. A large general wearing a crown of laurels struts about irritably – waiting, it seems, to perform the role of Peter the Great’s stand-in, impatient for principal photography to start.
In the centre of the studio stands a vast stage draped with a waterproof canvas. Sweet Marie-Anne Collot comes over and joins them, clad in great leather pinafores. Falconet nods an order to his ragged band of workmen. They scramble up the scaffolds; the cover flies off. Beneath it is a vast plaster maquette. A flying horseman, the man almost indistinguishable from the horse, rears up on the brink of a vast plaster cliff. The thing’s not finished, in fact, it’s nowhere near. But that’s Peter all right: crowned in laurels and three times lifesize, as if in real life the man wasn’t already big enough. Our man stares up. As a construction, it is amazing. The whole thing is unreal, pushed beyond all the rules of form, the laws of gravity. Horse and man are strangely backweighted, held to earth only by the horse’s hind legs and twisting tail. But whatever’s happened to the meaning, what has gone wrong with the sign?
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