To the Hermitage (28 page)
Authors: Malcolm Bradbury
‘I was hoping to see the diva,’ I say.
‘I’m so sorry, but Madame Lindhorst is really very busy right now. She needs to arrange the details of her Russian schedule. Also I think she has to write her paper.’
‘Oh, she’s writing a paper? On Diderot?’
‘I think something about the rogue servant in theatre and opera. Figaro, Cherubino. And since I’m a theatre expert she’s asked me to join her this evening and help her to write it.’
‘I thought we wouldn’t be going on with the programme? I thought Bo had decided we’re not having any more papers?’
‘Then maybe her paper isn’t really a paper. At any rate she wants you to know she is busy. Definitely very busy. I hope you understand. Your luggage is out there.’
‘Yes, I think I understand,’ I say. And, picking up my luggage, I leave the huge magic cabin and make my way to my own windowless metal cell down below.
DAY THREE
SHE sits on her throne-sofa looking at a sheaf of papers through little spectacles. HE comes in, shivering and rubbing his hands hard. SHE looks up.
SHE
What’s the matter, Mr Librarian?
HE
It’s freezing hard out there. The Neva seems to be icing over.
SHE
Exactly as I told you it would. Now then, sir, this paper. I take it this is your first memorandum?
HE
Indeed, Your Imp—
SHE
Entitled ‘The Daydream of Denis the Philosopher’?
HE
Yes, Your Maj—
SHE
One half of it flattering me quite disgustingly. And the other half shamelessly abusing Frederick of Prussia.
HE
It’s an expression of my homage. As you can see, the improvement of Saint Petersburg has become my waking dream.
SHE
But not just Petersburg. The whole of Russia. You’re the new Gustav Adolf. You seem to want to occupy my entire nation.
HE
To set it free and make it foremost among nations. But not with my troops. Only with my mind.
SHE
I’m beginning to see the imperial nature of your mind.
HE
It’s only a mind, Your Highness. It’s right here in my head, open to your constant inspection.
SHE fingers the memorandum.
SHE
I’ve always found dreams – even daydreams – very hard to inspect.
HE
I couldn’t agree with you more. And that’s why I’ve made such a study of them.
SHE
Ah. Now you’re a student of dreams. And you also believe in sybils, do you? Witches? Divination by animal intestines?
HE
No. I have no interest in what dreams say, or how they prophesy. I’m concerned with what they tell us about mind and consciousness itself.
SHE
And naturally you’ve written an important article on the topic—
HE
A little book, marm.
The Dream of d’Alembert.
You know d’Alembert? My friend and fellow, a founder of—
SHE stares at him angrily.
SHE
Everyone in Russia knows d’Alembert. I offered him the post of tutor to the Archduke. He didn’t just refuse me, he made an obscene joke to Voltaire. Who told me at once.
HE
About the piles? D’Alembert’s a man of the greatest sensibility. He’s always worrying about his arse.
SHE
Then he had the gall to ask me to free some French prisoners I’d taken. That man is never to be mentioned in this court. Never. What did you write about him?
HE
If I told you, I’d have to speak of him.
SHE
I know that, sir. I’m demanding that you speak.
HE
Well then . . . I decided to
become
his dreams. I simply entered his mind and put my ideas into it. Then he very kindly dreamt my own ideas when he slept.
SHE
You put his dreams into his head? How?
HE
I pointed out the contradictions in his philosophy. Then I sent him to bed. I placed his mistress there, a clever girl called Mam’selle de l’Espinasse, and his doctor, Doctor Bordeu.
SHE
Well?
HE
When he began to talk his thoughts in his sleep, and did various instinctive and revealing things with his unconscious body, she made notes of his words and Bordeu examined his thoughts and explained them—
SHE
But, monsieur, you couldn’t possibly
know
what he dreamt.
HE
I knew his dreams would answer my thoughts. But it didn’t matter. The main thing is to show thoughts work like dreams, and dreams are sleeping thoughts—
SHE
I don’t see the point at all.
HE
A dream’s the result of sensory stimulation. It responds to the stimuli we’re usually aware of, but it’s an involuntary response. That shows the self has a conscious and an unconscious or involuntary form—
SHE
Yesterday you said everything depends on reason. Now you’re saying just the same about unreason.
HE leans forward in enormous excitement, slapping her thigh heartily. The COURTIERS observe.
HE
Clever of you, Your Highness. Which is why wisdom must often take on the appearance of folly or delirium if it’s to be properly understood.
SHE
Yesterday you arrived with a sackful of reason. Today you come with a cartload of madness.
HE
Reason and delirium, dream and fantasy, Your Highness. In all of them one thing seeks to connect with another. Imagine the mind as a spider, spinning filaments. If we master them, keep them in shape, we are thinkers. If we let them spin and weave, then we are dreamers—
SHE holds up her hand.
SHE
Mr Diderot, tell me. Do you really intend to behave like a madman in my court?
HE
Whenever it might be helpful or instructive.
SHE
Very well. You trespassed into the dreams of d’Alembert.
What did you learn?
HE
I learned to disprove Descartes. Descartes thought mind mastered the universe. D’Alembert rambled from thought to thought, and learned thoughts come unbidden.
SHE
He learned that? Or you told him that’s what he thought?
HE (
smiles quietly
)
It’s true. I wrote it down. I made it into a story.
SHE
So that’s it. You didn’t create his dream at all. You simply invented it.
HE
I’m a maker of stories, Your Highness. But I did prove there is a wild flux of human consciousness. And no one thing we possess and can call our self—
SHE looks at him, very displeased.
SHE
Mr Philosopher. I am myself. In fact I’m more than myself, I’m the state. The sovereign person.
HE
Who authorizes this person?
SHE
I do. I am the author of myself.
HE
In that case you’re a despot.
SHE
Now, sir, be very careful—
HE
We are all despots, or try to be. We try to dominate our own existence, to claim the right to a self. Yet surely we know our real existence is different – a world of shifting cells, jangling nerves, fermenting, growing and dying? Of course we attempt to spin some sovereign self from within, just like little spiders. And then we construct a spider king and a spider god—
The COURTIERS laughing and jeering.
SHE
And this is reason?
HE
My kind of it.
SHE
You contradict yourself. You say there’s no self. Yet you firmly insist on your own opinions.
HE
Wisdom lies in contradiction.
SHE
You’d contradict me?
HE
If you permit it, as a wise monarch would. Otherwise I shall contradict the one person who always permits it. Myself.
SHE
I think that’s enough for one day. Indeed I wonder if it’s not too much.
HE (
rising
)
So, tomorrow, may I send you another memorandum? A small one? How to create an honest police force?
SHE
Yes, sir, now just go—
END OF DAY THREE
A
BRISK FRESH NEW SEA
-
DAY
. And here I am, strewn out on an ugly canvas deckchair, wrapped up in a thick anorak, shrouded tight in a hired rug, up on the bridge deck of the
Vladimir Ilich
. Vladimir’s bronzy face squints inquiringly out from the bulkhead behind me as I recline, overlooking the book I’m trying to read. The ship itself has grown curiously quiet, even a little mournful. On this our third day out, the weather is cold, dampish, briny, sharpened with a definite, wintry Baltic chill. Vague mist wanders over the water, appearing and then dispersing, as if unsure of its real intentions. The sea beyond the ship-rail has a moderate but unmistakably stomach-churning swell. No coastline is now visible on any side; the Baltic is big, after all. The wide seaway we’re sailing is busy with big-bellied Russian factory ships, their funnels tricoloured in pre- or post-Marxist livery. All of them seem to be running westward toward the world’s richer economies. Meanwhile we’re beating eastward, to political turmoil, economic crisis, maybe a new civil war. To the south are the Baltic Republics, those lively and likeable nations Stalin required, with his usual Georgian charm, to ‘request admission’ into his union of socialist republics, and which have now managed to break loose from the cruel contract in a fresh northern configuration. And somewhere off to the north, shrouded inside a long low fogline that makes everything invisible, must be Finland and the port of Helsinki. For me it’s another of the world’s great cities, and another place of which I’ve come to grow very fond.
Shrouded and shivering in my deckchair, I try to read. I’m reading, again,
Rameau’s Nephew
, the book which our splendid diva dumped in the passage outside her cabin, having firmly dismissed it as annoying and unpleasant. But is it really? Not a bit of it, not to me. In fact I’m hooked as soon as I take up again that familiar opening: ‘Rain or shine, it’s my usual habit each day around five to take a walk round the arcades of the Palais Royal. Meantime I discuss with myself questions of politics and love, taste and philosophy. I let my mind rove promiscuously, setting it free to take in whatever idea happens to settle first, however wise or stupid. My ideas are my trollops. I chase them just the way the rogues and roués pursue the over-dressed and bright-painted whores in these Paris arcades – following every single one of them, finally lying down with none. And when the weather becomes a little too cold or rainy, I resort to the splendid Café de la Régence, and sit down to watch the experts playing their games of chess.’ Next thing there arrives the egregious nephew who makes the story: ‘One day I was there after dinner, watching hard, saying nothing, when I was accosted by one of the oddest fellows in our country, which has never been short of oddities: a man who has no greater opposite, no better double than himself.’
‘Hello there,’ says a voice. I look up from the fluttering pages of the book to see someone swaying toward me along the rail, his body blown violently this way and that by the sudden variable gusts of wind. It’s Anders Manders, fine and dapper, an expensive woollen raincoat blowing all around him, his ears capped with a hat of real fox fur. Thus far on this voyage Manders has been no kind of oddity at all. He’s been one of the stronger and more silent members of our party, charming, reassuring, the perfect gentleman diplomat, another man who watches hard and says nothing. Even the dour Sven Sonnenberg – a man who seems to think of nothing else in the world but tables, whose mind itself seems a perfect tabula rasa – has, over the group meals we’ve started taking together in the ship’s huge dining room, proved fierce and alive in defence of his craftsman’s passions. He’s criticized my imitation leather watch-strap, looked contemptuously at my plasticated shoes, dismissively examined my imperfectly crafted pipe. Lately, though, he’s been talking only to Agnes Falkman, our reforming feminist and union organizer, who seems to share with him some deep Swedish love of working with the hands.
Today, though, our party seems to have disintegrated completely. Thus far (and it’s almost lunchtime) Manders is the only member of the group to emerge into the light. The fact is, an unfortunate Baltic chill has fallen over the whole Diderot Project. What’s more, it’s presumably been caused by the two papers Verso and I gave (or more truthfully failed to give) yesterday. Yet I still can’t convince myself that’s the true or only explanation for the note of moratorium that’s now fallen over our entire adventure. Our fine conference room two decks below now stands locked, empty, unlit. There’s been no further talk of papers. The philosophical pilgrims themselves have all somehow disappeared, just to be spotted now and then at the end of some long passageway in our perfectly comfortable floating hotel. The Swedish diva seems to have retreated for good to her elegant cabin on the captain’s deck, no doubt unaware of my odd fits of jealousy, with or without the company of Lars Person, who has become almost invisible too. Jack-Paul Verso can be glimpsed occasionally, though he seems to have given up lap-tapping his laptop and devoted himself to chasing an endless tribe of laughing Tatyanas all over the ship. Today I’ve seen Agnes Falkman only once, emerging suddenly like a drowned creature from a very thick coating of mud in a chair in the Beauty Salon. Umbrage presumably taken, Bo and Alma Luneberg are just nowhere to be found. Out of the group of nine we began with, Manders is all the society there is left.
‘Very fine book, I know it well,’ he says, smiling affably, wiping off the next deckchair with an old Russian newspaper, and glancing over my shoulder at my reading as he sits down.
‘I’m glad you think so,’ I say. ‘Tell me something, have you seen our grand diva this morning?’
‘No, but I shall see her tonight,’ says Manders. ‘We’ve made a little appointment to have dinner together, alone.’
‘So she’s not with Lars Person then?’
‘No, I saw him drinking alone just now in the bar. She’s surely not been with that boring fellow, has she?’
‘Yes, last night, I thought.’