To the Hermitage

by Malcolm Bradbury

  The snake remains, true, twisted beneath the horse’s hooves – though now it seems to be removable. The face is faceless, blank, expressionless (and so it will remain until the very last minute, ten long years from now, when, as it is written, Marie-Anne will hastily sculpt the features on the night before the statue goes up). As for the cunning allegorical content (our man remembers every detail), that has quite dropped away. Barbarism is no longer present. Popular Love and the Spirit of the Nation – what has become of them? It seems they have been discarded: for something quite other, some raw and plastic simplicity wrested directly out of the sculptural materials themselves. Classicism has quite disappeared, along with the art of allegory. Everything’s replaced by something different: looser, stranger, more tempestuous, haunting even, weirdly sublime. Some strange power – can it be Russia? the Tzarina? the shifting soul of Falconet himself? – has altered everything. This is not at all what they meant in Paris. This is not the statue of their dreams . . .

  At once our philosopher comprehends everything. Nothing could be clearer: the ungrateful welcome, the friendless friendship, the already bagged bed, the faceful of sullen expressions and angry embarrassed looks. This man is afraid. Nine years’ work, and here comes Teacher; and Teacher ain’t going to like it, ain’t going to like it a bit. Teacher stands back. He reflects, considers. He turns in his mind the strange paradox of sculpture, which he’s spoken of many times, in fact to anyone who would listen. Sculpture is the highest art; it’s also the deepest craft. It does not embody realities, depict known myths. It finds itself within the objects of its own use. One should not (he has often said so) suppose that inanimate things lack living characteristics. The world is one. In wood, in stone, in clay, there are vital secrets; and art is craft, a skill in chiselling, shaping, working out the secret of the life within. That is the paradox of art: an imitation of reality that upturns the reality, finds the single pregnant instant, the coup de théâtre, the great découpage.

  He looks again. He thinks, like the critic he is, of the power of the patron, the hunger of the audience. But he’s not just a critic and a teacher, a creator of creators. He’s a creator himself, after all . . . He turns to the bulky, sour-faced sculptor. He takes him in his arms.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ he declares, ‘I always used to think you were a young man of the very highest talents. Didn’t I always say so, when I reviewed your work in the salons, all those years ago?’

  ‘You did say so, monsieur,’ says the sculptor. ‘How else do you think I ended up here in hell, doing this?’

  ‘Well, may I drop dead on the instant if I thought for a moment you ever had a conception in your head like this strange beast here.’

  ‘You don’t approve?’

  ‘Do you know, I could grind this up and eat it.’

  ‘It’s that bad?’

  ‘Not at all. There’s nothing I would love better than to be a statue just like this myself. Only without a horse, perhaps.’

  ‘So you do like—?’

  ‘I love it, my sweet young friend. It’s quite original, it’s quite sublime. It’s a wonder.’

  ‘You mean it?’

  ‘I’m a professional critic, remember. It’s not my way to say nice things often.’

  ‘My dear kind friend.’

  ‘My dear friend too,’ says our man. ‘You’re making a masterpiece. And you can quote me on that wherever you like, to whomever you like. Now then: I’ve said what I’ve said. And as soon as I meet the Empress I shall tell her what I think.’

  When at last they let go of each other, even sullen Falconet is smiling. As he usually does in the end, our man has found his way to the perfect flattery. He’s passed on a generous, a fraternal, a perfectly intended compliment to another. And he’s no less found the way to keep a big piece of the praise for his own splendid judgement and himself.

  ‘And how is my dear darling Marie-Anne?’ our man asks now, reaching out and hugging her too. Soon all three of them are in the most enormous tangle. ‘What became of my wonderful fond welcome to Sankt Peterburg?’ Our man booms, ‘Kiss kiss kiss.’

  ‘You’re truly welcome, maître,’ says Marie-Anne, giving him the kiss kiss kiss. ‘Do you know, one day I would like to make a bust of you myself?’

  ‘And so you shall, my dear one, you shall.’

  ‘In that case I would like to make one too,’ says Falconet, holding the Philosopher in his arms.

  ‘Both of you? A statue for me, then? Well, why not? I deserve it.’

  ‘These days everyone gets one,’ murmurs Falconet.

  ‘I know, we’ll make it a competition, master and pupil,’ our man says. ‘And then I shall decide which one’s best. Or maybe we’ll ask the Empress.’

  ‘You haven’t met her yet.’

  ‘Tomorrow night, at the great party at the Hermitage.’

  ‘You’re invited?’

  ‘Of course. Everyone is,’ says our man.

  ‘Except me,’ says Falconet.

  Meanwhile, up on the scaffold, faceless and unfinished, Peter astride his snorting house stares out over the talking heads at the big blank wall of the studio. One day he’ll have all the Baltic to look at with imperial menace. He’d better get this right . . .

  NINE (NOW)

  A LITTLE LATER. Pleasant civic Stockholm is gently slipping away behind us into the chilly clear late afternoon. There it goes: the copper-clad spires of Protestantism, the great granite halls of liberal democracy, the big-roofed palaces of a long-lived monarchy are all floating off in our rich oily haze. I can see the tall shaft of Storkyrkan Cathedral, where they tried but failed to bury Descartes; I can spot the modern brick pile of the City Hall, where they award the Nobel Prizes to the famous and the totally forgettable. A fine view of a web of urban motorways, a towered spectacle of welfare high-rises stacked on the hillsides above. The urban buildings go out of view. We’re looking at small rocky bays, threading between rocky and tree-fertile islands, with neat waterside houses, each with a boat dock, a white motor cruiser, a blue and white national flag flapping away on each separate pier-end, each a little free state on its own. Bright-sailed dinghies tack in the water, performing another regatta: back and forth, hither and thither, this way and that.

  ‘Now we’re in the archipelago?’ I ask. Beside me is the red-haired Swedish Nightingale, who has generously agreed to come with me up here, to the high empty bridge deck, to watch her native city slip from view.

  ‘Nej, nej, those are dangerous waters, wild and lonely and truly beautiful. Here you are still in Stockholm. Those houses were once summer cottages. Now they’re all thermalled and belong to commuters. In summer they go to work in their motor boats. In the winter when the ice comes they go on their skates, with a briefcase under the arm. You will know the real archipelago when you see it. It is very dark and strange, that is why we like it.’

  We stand together, staring over the side. The red sun’s sliding, the skies have cleared from Prussian to bright blue, the wind’s faintly rising, sweeping across our faces as we look out. Here on the bridge deck the cruise has scarcely started. The swimming pool is drained and empty, the scatter of wooden deckchairs lacks its cushions. A cossack swabs the deckboards with mop and bucket. Beneath the bridge-house where the captain stands in his huge white hat, staring out through formidable binoculars, there is foxy Lenin, impassively, emptily, bronzily brooding over us all.

  The red-haired diva seizes my arm. ‘Is it true you are quite clever?’ she asks.

  ‘No, you’re confusing me with someone else,’ I answer.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, at least you are a professor. Quickly – tell me something about this Diderot. So I will not look all the time like a silly fool.’

  ‘Well, in a word: French philosophe, the son of a knife-maker in Langres in Burgundy. He was going to be a priest, but he married a sempstress. Went to Paris, worked as a hack and teacher, wrote a funny dirty little novel called The Indiscreet Jewels. Travelled to Petersburg in 1773.
Which is why we’re here, I presume. Died suddenly of an apoplexy while eating an apricot at his own dinner table, 31 July 1784. Wrote the big book that changed the world.’

  ‘Surely not another book that changed the world?’

  ‘Yes, the Encyclopedia. It ran to twenty-eight volumes, something like that, with hundreds of articles and plates. It was supposed to sum up the knowledge and the progress of the age.’

  ‘Did it?’

  ‘Oh yes. It was the Bible of the Age of Reason. You read it and the whole meaning of the world changed. It was the spirit of knowledge, the power of philosophy. The authorities tried to suppress it. That just made it more famous.’

  ‘Why was it so important?’

  ‘In the old world you consulted the priests. In the world of new science you consulted the philosophers. Philosophy became a great occupation, there were philosophes everywhere, remember. Voltaire, Hume, d’Alembert, Condorcet, Rousseau.’

  ‘So why are we following Diderot?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Maybe because Diderot was the most interesting and engaging of all of them. At least that’s my opinion. Wilder and more generous than Voltaire. Much much wittier than Rousseau.’

  ‘That can’t have been hard. Why don’t I know him?’

  ‘In his day he was mostly famous for talking. His finest books weren’t printed until many years after his death. They turned up all over the place. Maybe there are still some that haven’t been found. I seem to remember that’s why I thought I’d like to come on this trip in the first place.’

  ‘They could be in Petersburg?’

  ‘Very likely.’

  ‘Don’t expect me to read thirty books.’

  ‘Oh, nobody ever reads the whole Encyclopedia. Except maybe a few experts on the Enlightenment, like our funky Professor Verso. It’s a random mixture, filled with articles on everything. Love and windmills. Liberty and the prophets. Priests and prostitution. How to build a cheese factory. How to design a chair.’

  The nightingale looks at me very doubtfully. ‘You mean he wrote about all of those things?’

  ‘Not all of them. Voltaire and Rousseau and d’Alembert wrote some of it. It was a team thing, a lot of other people were hired too. But he gave the whole thing the impress of his mind. It was always Diderot’s Encyclopedia.’

  ‘I don’t want to read that,’ says the nightingale decisively. ‘Can’t you find me something easy I can read?’

  ‘The novel in dialogue, Rameau’s Nephew,’ I say. ‘One of the finest books ever written. Goethe said so. And Marx and Freud. A book written against itself, about a character who speaks against himself.’

  ‘Rameau was bitter, mean and dull,’ says the nightingale. ‘They said he had legs like corkscrews and thought only of himself. But he was very clever. Have you seen his opera-ballets? They’re all about the four winds talking to each other. All serpents and kettle drums, no big roles.’

  ‘Rameau may have been mean and dull. But his nephew wasn’t.’

  She looks at me. ‘Did he really have a nephew?’

  ‘Yes, he did. Another musician, but a very bad one. An inspector of Dancing Masters. He even wrote a piano piece called “The Encyclopedia”.’

  ‘Maybe that is why Diderot liked him.’

  ‘Diderot didn’t like him. He was fascinated by him, as a disturbing human specimen. I suppose he must have seemed his perfect opposite. A confidence man, a deceiver, a transgressor.’

  ‘Like Sade?’

  ‘Yes, a kind of friendly Sade. Manipulation, mystification, fancy footwork – those were his tactics. The book’s in my luggage, if you want to read it.’

  ‘Very well, my darling, if you say so,’ says the diva, completely losing interest. She pulls her wrap round her shoulders and looks out over the rail.

  I gaze over her ripe and formidable proportions. ‘You know Bo very well?’ I ask.

  ‘No, do you?’

  ‘Just the way professors know professors. We meet at conferences and send each other papers. Then we disagree, which gives a reason to hold more conferences.’

  ‘I don’t know him at all,’ says the diva, ‘but in Sweden he is very important. Of course in Sweden all professors are important.’

  ‘So I gather. Not in my country.’

  ‘But Bo is more important than most. He is an academician, a man of power, a trustee of the Royal Opera. I think he is a trustee of everything. He visited my dressing room at Drottningholm and told me I should be on this voyage. He knows the people at the Kirov, the Maryinsky. But now he tells me I should give a paper.’

  ‘He said that to all of us.’

  ‘Very well for you, you are a teacher, you know how to. Maybe you even like it.’

  ‘Not that much. It’s what we do.’

  ‘I don’t like it at all. I don’t speak thoughts. I sing them.’

  ‘Good, I long to hear them.’

  ‘But look out there. This is not a place to be thinking about papers.’

  It’s not. Now we’re really sailing on. Weather’s changing, landscape’s changing. Nice autumn evening, still with a touch of summer. Wind up harder now, sun starting to dip down. The seas have widened, the water turned soft and pearly grey. Little islands, tiny windswept bays, are appearing. Suddenly, from just above us, a blast of hideous noise. She seizes my arm, I grab her shoulder; the ship’s siren is sounding off. From over the water, it’s answered, answered again. Like a convention of echoes, siren after siren is sounding. The diva runs to the rail.

  ‘See, they are coming, the great floating coffins,’ she says.

  I go to the rail, lean out at her side. There down the sea-lane, between the channel markers, a row, a fleet, of high-sided, steel-jawed monster vessels sails toward us.

  ‘What?’ I ask.

  ‘The evening ferries into Stockholm,’ she says. ‘They come in every night from all over the Baltic. Helsinki, Visby, Kiel, Oulu, Riga, Gdynia, Tallinn. Oh, and Sankt Peterburg, of course.’

  The first of the ferries is abreast of us now. They sail by one by one, monster floating hotels: the Sibelius, the Kalevala, the Constanin Simonov, the Estonia, the Baltic Clipper. They rise up deck after deck to strange-angled funnels, passing close enough for us to see the last drinkers toping in the bars, the last gamblers risking a final chance in the casinos, the late duty-free shoppers gathering up their final bottle of Givenchy, an extra Famous Grouse. People are waving from the rails. Up on open-boat decks people in topcoats and parkas lie in stupefied rows: these must be the last drunks from Finland, staring up into blood-red sunset and mystical oblivion. Then the flotilla sails on toward the smoke-plumes of Stockholm. The quiet sea is ours again.

  Half an hour later. We’re still on the high boat deck. She’s pulled her wrap tight round her, I puff at my Danish pipe, a small philosophical tool I rather like to carry. Red sun dropping away now, water pearly grey, bird-whitened rocks and islands everywhere in the water pearly grey too.

  ‘And now this is the archipelago, my darling,’ says the red-haired diva. ‘A hundred thousand drowned islands. This is where comes the true Swedish soul. It’s a terrible and wonderful place.’

  The islands spread everywhere: some wind-worn, barren, white with guano, others with piers and ochre-painted chalets. Here and there nets hang on gantries, black smoke-houses steam away on wooden docks. Juniper, bilberry, dwarf pine grow in the crevices, small funnelled ferries punt about. To me this is the stuff of old Ingmar Bergman movies, the ones where cowled, creased-faced priests wander the shoreline, wrecks litter the rocks, middle-aged men are wracked with violent lust, young summer love affairs are a prelude to winter pain.

  The diva, staring out at the grey naked islands, is suddenly telling me everything about them. They’re where she spent the summers of childhood. Here’s where her destiny was written, here was born her complex Swedish soul. Somewhere out there Strindberg had gloomy imaginings in a cottage by the water. Painters of grim naturalism painted dark fisher paintings on the rocks. Soo
n we’re getting in further: naked swims in the cold cleansing Baltic; crayfish feasts on the rocks; fishermen sailing out by night in their lamped boats for herring and sea-pike; most of all the unforgettable bitter-sweet affairs of young love.

  ‘I have only to think about it, and it makes me oh so happy and oh so sad,’ cries the diva.

  ‘I know, I know,’ I say sympathetically, looking out over the rail as the rocky archipelago flows by. I have of course been here before. I know from old these wonderful, grandly expressive nightingales, with their boom, their bosoms, their bravura. I know these depthless, spirit-searching Northern souls. I know this school of grim-sentimental Bergman-ish reminiscence. And I know very well it’s just one short step from here to dead lost loves, deflowered virgins, singing skeletons, ghostly drowned sailors emerging dripping from the sea, Father Time on a dark forest path, bearing his hourglass and his fatal scythe.

  ‘Let me tell you my sensations of despair,’ she’s saying. And now she’s explaining success is a strange delusion, her international fame a mere toy. She’s confessing how truly unhappy her life is, how worthless the life of a great diva is, how unfulfilled her destiny. Then, for some reason she puts down to her fiery temperament, we find ourselves discussing together the best way to go about murdering her husband.

  ‘If only we can decide on the perfect way,’ she says.