To the Hermitage

by Malcolm Bradbury

  ‘Ignore her. Look, I can introduce you to everyone, find you property. Arrange your imports, ship your exports. I can fix your permits, provide your protection. A businessman who doesn’t understand how it works can end up in the forest with a little hole in the back of his head.’

  ‘You don’t have to talk to this man,’ says Galina.

  ‘Of course, you must, if you want to know Russia. You have capital, I have organization,’ says the youngish man. ‘We make it a joint venture? I take twenty per cent? Do we shake?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘there’s nothing to shake on. I’m not what you think. I’m not a businessman at all.’

  ‘Everyone in the west is a businessman. You read the MBA manual? Wherever you go there is always a good business opportunity somewhere. If you look for it.’

  ‘I’m not looking for it.’

  ‘You have plenty capital?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you do want to invest?’

  ‘I don’t want to invest. I’m a visitor, a tourist.’

  ‘So you go somewhere. Where do you want to go?’

  ‘I don’t want to go anywhere.’

  ‘A tourist who doesn’t want to go somewhere. Maybe there’s something you’d like to buy?’

  ‘No, there’s nothing at all I’d like to buy.’

  ‘A tourist who doesn’t like to buy. So you have something to sell?’

  ‘Nothing to sell.’

  ‘Pleasure, you are looking for pleasure. It’s all here if you ask me.’

  ‘I’m not into pleasure.’

  ‘A tourist who is not into pleasure. Who do you need to see?’

  ‘I don’t need to see anyone. And I’m very nicely looked after.’

  ‘Now thank you for this brandy,’ says Galina. ‘We go.’

  The youngish man looks me in the eye. ‘Oh, please, sir, make some use of me, only ask my help. I can arrange travel. Make introductions. Find you beautiful hostesses. What do you do?’

  ‘I’m a writer.’

  ‘Okay, maybe you need a movie crew.’

  ‘I don’t need a movie crew.’

  ‘You like cafés, I’m sure. I show you a better café. Come with me.’

  ‘Alors, mon brave, time to leave,’ says Galina, taking up her handbag.

  ‘No, wait, please,’ the youngish man says very urgently. ‘You write books? I can sell them for you. Only a small discount. I know every bookstore in Petersburg. They love to do me favours.’

  ‘I didn’t bring any books with me.’

  ‘I can be very useful. I studied literature at the university. I take you to the Pushkin House.’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘You collect books?’

  ‘Yes, some.’

  ‘Good. Now we do business. I can get you books. Wonderful books. Treasures, books from the imperial collections, the city library.’

  ‘This is bad, really, it’s time to go,’ says Galina.

  The youngish man seizes hold of my jacket sleeve. ‘Give me a list, anything at all you want. I know just what to do. I’ve worked for Americans. I can find you anything. Tell me which is your hotel and I can bring anything there before you leave, so you don’t have to pay me now. Then you can slip it under your shirts, you will have no problem.’

  ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’

  ‘Listen, no time could be better. In Russia right now everything is for sale. Don’t go yet, listen to me, wait. There has to be something you want. Icons? Old cameras?’

  ‘Goodbye, Chichikov,’ says Galina, as we walk away from the table and head up the stairs.

  ‘That name, I heard it before,’ I say.

  ‘Of course, don’t you remember your Gogol? He’s the acquirer, the clever rogue who travels round the landowners and buys up all the dead souls.’

  ‘It’s a joke?’

  ‘In Russia even our crooks love our best writers.’

  ‘And every café has to have a nephew,’ I say.

  ‘Well, I am so sorry,’ says Galina, as we step out again on Nevsky Prospekt, ‘but I just don’t like you to see our bad new Russia. Not everything here is like this.’

  ‘I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Russia is full of good people, not like this ridiculous Chichikov.’

  ‘He was quite amusing.’

  ‘Then you are amused far too easily,’ she says. ‘When capitalism arrives, it produces only strange and morbid symptoms. You should have been here before, now you have come too late. You are visiting the ruins of a dying empire.’

  ‘Please, wait,’ says a voice behind us. The youngish man is there again, smiling. ‘You say you are a writer. Don’t you like to see the grave of Dostoyevsky? Not far away from here. Only the other end of Nevsky Prospekt.’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘So let’s have a drink, yes? Give me a chance.’

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘Then sell me something that will cost you nothing,’ he says. ‘Sell me your name—’

  ‘My name?’

  ‘I will print here on my documents.’

  ‘Come,’ says Galina, taking me firmly by the arm. In her red dress and red pom-pommed hat, she dives right into the middle of the traffic. Horns hoot, tyres skid.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I ask.

  ‘I think I take you now to the Didro Library. You ought to see it in case our friend gets there first and it disappears completely.’

  And thus, while the traffic honks and races around us, she drags me bodily to the other side of Nevsky Prospekt.

  TWENTY-EIGHT (THEN)

  CHRISTMAS, grandest of all the European festivals, is nearly here. If he hadn’t known that already, the black nights have appeared to tell him: amazing nights that last nearly the whole day long. The Neva has become a silver, frozen-topped stream that flows and slithers through an almost continuous darkness. High in the vast arctic sky, northern lights flash down through an unrelieved veil of snow. Snow blankets all streets, squares, embankments. Icicles like swords crash from the cornices of the apartment houses above, taking a life or two every day. For several weeks now, the whole court has gone shivering about the Small Hermitage, as servants run through the corridors cradling huge log-piles to be stuffed whole into every steaming stove.

  With the sea-harbour to the Baltic shut down for the winter, the Livonian routes to the south blocked to all traffic, except the lightest and fleetest of sleighs, everything – that is, all those social things we know there are in the world – has become amazingly distant, so distant that all letters, which never were easy to deliver, have practically ceased. So have the memories that went with them, so have the pleasures. New songs, new books no longer come up from Europe; now the ice-pack has closed, all is in a state of arrest, and everything waits for the spring. Cold, these deep minus temperatures, just doesn’t suit him. No one could be better housed than within the comforts of the Narishkin Palace, but his body still strains, rumbles, trembles, declares its bitter resentment. He begins to wonder – exactly as he wondered on the fevered night just before he left Paris – if he was brought for a purpose, if his fate has been settled, if the decision to grant his corpse to the worms of Saint Petersburg has already been taken, and is written down in firm letters in the invisible pages of the great Book of Destiny above.

  And then, one day, and quite suddenly, the entire court is absent: gone. As if on a whim, the Empress has risen, upped sticks and tailed it, dragging the whole enormous decorated apparatus with her, the twelve versts up the snow-packed road to Moscow, out to the new palace at Tzarskoye Selo. The great house she has been rebuilding endlessly is really meant as a summer palace, but now she has chosen to call it into winter use. Teams of carts, lines of smart coaches, hundreds of sledges, have been massed in the freeze outside the Hermitage, respectfully serviced by hundreds of hussars and cossacks, thousands of servants. They have learned all the lessons, having often made such moves before. Out has come the china and the silver, the tables and the beds, the cl
othes panniers and the linen baskets, the imperial commode, the royal archive, the national mint. Everyone – chamberlains and generals, court-physicians and clockwinders, assayers and dressers, cooks and laundrymen, court jewellers and police spies, the fine riding horses and the royal greyhounds – has then trotted off out of the city, escorted in their coaches, wagons or sledges by entire bobbing battalions of the cavalry guard.

  Now in the huge rooms and vast grounds of a palace that bids to be even bigger and more spacious than the Hermitage, they have already taken up a new way of life. Here it’s early to bed, and early to rise. There will be long snowy walks through the deep crisp winter, all contained within the boundaries of a six-mile perimeter. For exercise and amusement they will chop logs in the forest, drink hot tea in the English gardens, vodka in the hunting lodges, pursue seductions in the snowy arbours, hold their winter festivals in the belvederes. Snow has been smoothed flat for comfort, sledging slopes have been laid. Lake-surfaces have been brushed and skates have been prepared. They’ll skate, they’ll slide, they’ll ski on the frozen lakes and ponds. The truth is that once in a while the Empress truly loves to go tobogganing; and it’s this, it seems, that has shifted the entire court and administration.

  They did, of course, ask him to go as well. Indeed it seems he was expected to, and possibly, by the rules of protocol, even required. But he’s been able to plead his ill-health, and truly. Fed by age and rank water, the bitter colic, malady of the Neva, has been biting at his stomach ever since he came to Russia, pushing its rough-edged knife deep into his guts, firmly refusing to go away. But truth to tell, he also welcomes it. He welcomes the sudden Petersburg silence, the death of almost everything in the streets. For more than a week now, the Hermitage has rested in silent neglect. Its windows are black, its candles and lamps stay unlit. Its doors are firm-closed, its sentries stand silent and never summoned. The entire spirit of the city has wandered. The arcades too are completely quiet. No officers or countesses or governesses parade the pavements, and the shopkeepers have all suddenly lowered their prices, and are begging the world to purchase. It’s all been a wonder; and he’s gloriously grateful for the chance to reflect, take stock, consider, think again, and write.

  So as soon as the servants bring him the commode, at six in the morning, he’s up and out of bed. Soon he’s sitting at his desk in the bedroom, staring out. Snow-filled square, silvery river. Unfinished church, and golden spire. He writes, he writes . . . Soon he’s begun a refutation of M. Helvétius, his friend in Paris, who in all daring has claimed that man is no more than a superior animal, a creature of instinct, a greed machine, a body motored by survival and self-interest, no more. It reminds him of another voice he heard once: on a rainy day in Paris, at the chess tables of the Café Regence, when an angry idle nephew vents his rage.

  ‘You know me perfectly well,’ the composer’s fat-faced, dolled-up, lank-haired relative has said to him, sitting down. ‘I’m a fool, an idiot, a glutton, a madman and perhaps a bit of a thief. A real old cuss, as the Burgundians say. But why should you expect me to be humble, starve or beg, my dear sir, when the world’s filled with rich fools and spendthrifts at whose expense I can live? All right, I’m a parasite. But I do have one virtue: I do by the light of reason what the stupid rogue only does by instinct. And if only I could be rich, famous, powerful, be fawned on, stroked and tended and flattered by all the pretty women, I’d be just as clever, charming and pleasant as you. No, I wouldn’t, I’d be better. Much more elegant, far more clever. I’d develop the most advanced of ideas, the most sophisticated of vices, the most refined of corruptions. I’d be a true philosopher, I’d take advantage of everyone and everything. Wouldn’t it be delightful?’

  What should he tell them all: Helvétius, the lank-haired nephew, the police spies, the fawning courtiers who hang around only to please? That reason says that human beings, though animals first of all, do have their own special powers and splendid passions: sentiments of taste, feelings of charity, instincts of altruism, a warm admiration for virtue, the capacity to feel the most sublime and profound forms of love. And what’s more they have reason itself: wise, calming, illuminating, civilizing reason. Is all that no more than nature, brute cunning, survival, self-interest, struggle, the selfish genes? No, it’s only human to be a little human for once. Persons can do good, and what’s more they can love good. It’s not just the cunning of reason. The great Leibniz didn’t think the way the great Leibniz thought simply in order to win food and shelter and mate with the prettiest of women. And surely, surely, something far more than a desire for fame, reputation, rank or profit brought his own elderly self, groaning yet bright and energetic, a thousand miles through the wasted tracts of Europe to share his highest thoughts and warmest feelings with a great empress, the shining Minerva of the North? Or is he wrong, and is reason his delusion, the folly he travels across the world to promote?

  Which somehow takes him back to the pages of that other tale he’s been writing: the story he worked on in the Hague, the story of the clever servant, barber, postilion, valet, and his dull master, which started when he first read the Shandyisms of Doctor Sterne. Sterne’s book is there in his baggage, its covers stained and tattered from the many rains and soakings that penetrated the fabric of Narishkin’s grand carriage. He picks up the manuscript again; nothing is quite right.

  ‘Reader, excuse me,’ he writes apologetically, ‘I see I’ve totally failed to describe the exact positions of the three characters we happen to have standing here: Jacques, his master, the mistress of the inn. This means you’ll be perfectly well able to hear them speak, but you won’t be able to picture them. Just give me a moment, and I’ll put that right.’ He puts it right . . .

  And so he finds himself staring at the last lap of the book, and the awful business of ending. He’s thought of several already, put in a number, including one that’s been lifted right out of Sterne. It still doesn’t seem right. Stories don’t close in life, or not till death; so a conclusion is an evasion. How should the story conclude? He looks at the river, the winter; he picks up his pen and tries all over again. There is Jacques, putting his master on his horse so he can tip him off again; there is the past, there is the future. There are many more stories to tell, but who should tell them?

  ‘Come on now, master, admit it,’ he writes:

  MASTER

  Admit what, you little rat, you dirty dog, you total scoundrel? Admit you’re the most awful of servants, and I’m the unluckiest of masters?

  JACQUES

  Admit I proved my point. That for most of the time we act and do things without even meaning to.

  MASTER

  Nonsense.

  JACQUES

  Well, just think of the things you’ve done in the last half hour. Weren’t you just my toy, my little puppet? Couldn’t I have gone on playing with you for the next month of Sundays if I’d really wanted to?

  MASTER

  You mean this is all a game? All these troubles you got me into? You deliberately made me fall off my horse?

  JACQUES

  Naturally. I’ve been sitting waiting all day for those girths to come undone.

  MASTER

  You untied them, didn’t you? Just to make me fall off.

  JACQUES

  I might well have done.

  MASTER

  You realize what you are, don’t you? A rogue. A dangerous, troubling, impious rogue.

  JACQUES

  Or alternatively you could call me a serious thinker, trying to make a philosophical point.

  MASTER

  What point? Servants don’t think.

  JACQUES

  So masters think. But it’s not what I think. I think I think. And I think you really think I think too.

  MASTER

  Suppose I’d tumbled off my horse just then and injured myself seriously?

  JACQUES

  I was most careful. When you went arse over tip I jumped down and caught you, didn’t I? Besid
es, I knew there was nothing dreadful on the cards. It wasn’t written in the big Book of Destiny above.

  MASTER

  I’m sick and tired of this. I’ve told you, there is no Book of Destiny up above.

  JACQUES

  You’re bound to say that. Once you realize what’s written in it for you.

  MASTER

  The Book of Destiny has nothing to do with it. You fix everything, don’t you?

  JACQUES

  Everything?

  MASTER

  Yes. You talk to everyone, interfere in everyone’s life. Arrange their love affairs, flirt with their mistress, fix up their marriages—

  JACQUES

  And cuckold them afterwards? That’s what you’re really afraid of, isn’t it? But if that’s what’s written in the Book of Destiny above—

  MASTER

  Am I never going to be free of the Book of Destiny above?

  JACQUES

  No, master. Because that’s where it’s written that you’re my master, and I’m your servant. So where are we going next?

  MASTER

  Don’t you know where we’re going next?

  JACQUES

  How does anyone ever really know where they’re going? No one in the world, as I told you at first. So you’re my master. You lead me.

  MASTER

  How can I, if you won’t tell me where we are and where we’re going?

  JACQUES

  Just do what’s written in the—

  MASTER

  I have no idea what’s written in the—

  JACQUES

  Maybe that’s because no one’s really got around to writing it yet.

  MASTER

  Who does write it, then? You?

  JACQUES

  I can’t do everything, can I? You’re the master, it’s your duty to lead me. I’m your factotum, so it’s my duty to follow you. However ridiculous your instructions are.

  MASTER

  No, that’s not what it says in the book at all. It says the master gives the orders, and the servant thinks he can choose whether or not he’ll obey them, and insists on giving his own opinion whether it’s wanted or not. So what is your opinion?