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. Soon 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.
The problem is, I gather, that opera singers have been taught so many: poisoning, hanging, beheading, boiling in oil, knife, aspbite, it’s all much the same to them.
‘I know, I know.’
‘First, though, we must find him.’
‘I know, I know. Where do you think he is now?’
‘Of course, with his whore in Milan, the nasty little rat.’
‘What is she like?’
‘Just a contralto. Poison is far better than either of them deserve.’
‘I know, I know. I know just what you mean.’
‘But ask me all you like, my dear little darling, I could never really use a knife on him. It’s just too horrible.’
‘I know. I know.’
‘What do you two think you are doing?’ asks a sharp, policing voice from behind. Luckily it’s not Lenin; there is Alma Luneberg, rabbit-hatted, looking angry as only a Snow Queen can.
‘We are enjoying ourselves,’ explains the diva. ‘And I am trying to explain to this poor English man about our true Swedish soul.’
‘And don’t you know the Diderot people are asking what has become of you?’
‘No, my darling. I wanted him to see the archipelago.’
‘You didn’t examine the programmes I gave you in your wallet? Don’t you realize the Diderot Project is already starting to begin?’
For once even the great diva is silenced. We turn away from the grey rocks and the even greyer water, and follow the Snow Queen down the companion way and below.
Strange. During our brief absence the entire ship has changed. What was once a lobby or a half-empty arrival platform has somehow become a total way of life. It teems with tourists, bursts with noise and shouting. Glasses clink, casino wheels spin. We pass the busy Duty Free, the crowded Beauty Expensive. We pass the Blini Bar, the Caviar Cavern, the Vodka Den, the Russian Bathhouse, the Turkish Massage Parlour, the Lubianka Fitness Centre, the Odessa Casino. But modern life is not all pleasure and shopping; it’s commercial, corporate, and capitalist. Somewhere on the promenade deck behind the Fitness Centre is the Conference Centre – silent space filled with telephone links, photocopiers, faxmachines. In glass-walled seminar rooms corporation executives are already down to business. In a room labelled SIEMENS, a band of German and Russian businessmen, many of them ladies, all in suits, are already head to head: flipping flip-charts, showing pie-diagrams, faxing faxes, fixing floppies. And a few steps more beyond capitalism and commerce lie intellect and reason. The seminar room beyond is clearly marked DIDEROT PROJECT.
Here a small welcome reception seems to be taking place, and all for our little band of pilgrims. In a quicksilver change of role – for she’s now adorned in a short black dress and white frilly apron, just like a servant from a Noel Coward comedy – Tatyana from Pushkin stands in the entrance, holding out a large tray of canapés, another of fluted glasses of pink Russian shampanski. Jack-Paul Verso is energetically chatting her up, in his sharp Manhattan here’s-how-to-work-a-room fashion. In the middle of the space is Anders Manders, with his clipped blond beard, talking to Lars Person, wearing his diabolical black one. There’s Sven Sonnenberg in his torn, stained worker’s denims talking sombrely about some deep matter of existence with Agnes Falkman, who wears a cK designer version of the same thing. As we enter, both looking a touch shamefaced, Bo Luneberg looks up crossly. But what, his expression seems to say, can you expect of a flamboyant and narcissistic diva, and a writer-type who falls asleep at a postmodern concert?
Tatyana comes over to us with pink champagne, plates for the canapés. Now that his party’s complete, Bo goes to the middle of the chamber, claps his hands, calls, ‘Now may we please to begin?’ The Diderot Pilgrims fall silent. Bo raises up his glass.
‘Welcome. We all have a glass of this fine Russian champagne, jo? Let me make a small toast, then. To the Diderot Project.’
Our glasses all go up; ‘Skal!’ ‘Diderot,’ ‘To old Denis,’ cry the pilgrims.
Then, as Bo seems unwilling to say any more, we look around at each other. It’s Jack-Paul Verso who frames the collective question. ‘Bo, someone has to ask this, so let it be me,’ he says. ‘Why have you invited us? What the hell is this Diderot Project?’
Bo looks us over with polite compassion. ‘Ah, you are wondering why you are here? Why you are chosen, and so on?’
‘Yes, Bo.’
‘A singer, an actor, a carpenter, a diplomat, a writer, a philosopher and so on?’ Bo removes a little card from his jacket pocket. ‘I can best answer by quoting some words Diderot wrote in his famous Encyclopedia – in fact in the entry called “Encyclopedia”. Maybe you remember how he explained the task. It is, he tells us, to bring knowledge together, expose all superstition and error, demonstrate truth, use only the evidence of our senses, assign a proper cause to everything, and take each thing only for what it is.’
‘And that’s all?’ says Lars Person.
‘However, at the end of the essay,’ Bo goes on regardless, ‘he utters a solemn and beautiful warning.’
‘A very beautiful warning,’ adds Alma. ‘The day will finally come – our philosopher goes on to observe – when knowledge will have grown so extremely fast no one individual or system would ever be able to grasp it. So he explains.’
‘It’s here already,’ says Verso. ‘It’s called the World Wide Web.’
‘Allow me to quote his words. “If we banish from the earth the thinking entity, man—”’
‘Bo, I think you mean person,’ says Agnes Falkman.
‘Jo, jo, I think I do mean person. “If we banish from the earth the thinking entity, person, the sublime and beautiful spectacle of nature will become a sad and vacant scene. The universe will be hushed. All will be a vast solitude, an empty desert where events and phenomena make their way unseen, unheard. That is why we must put ma—, put person at the centre of our encyclopedia, and give him her true place at the centre of the universe.’
‘A beautiful warning,’ says Alma. ‘And this explains it, the Enlightenment Project.’
‘We will again put person at the centre of the universe.’
‘Sounds great,’ says Verso. ‘Now may we have some more champagne?’
‘Help yourself, please,’ says Bo. ‘Within reason, of course.’
While Tatyana goes round refilling our glasses, I can see Sven looking at Bo as if confused. ‘This is why we are here? On this boat?’
‘Jo, jo, Sven.’
‘Why we are going to Russia?’
‘Just trying to make the universe human again,’ says Alma encouragingly.
‘I see,’ says Verso. ‘You aim to bring back the Age of Reason and hoped we’d help in some way?’
‘Jo, jo.’
‘But I am only a simple craftsman,’ says Sven. ‘I make tables.’
‘Don’t think for a moment that is simple, Sven,’ says Bo. ‘Diderot never thought that. He believed in tables.’
‘I work with my hands,’ says Sven.
‘And I with my voice,’ says Birgitta.
‘We’re bringing all human knowledge together?’ asks Manders. ‘In how many days?’
‘Six,’ says Alma. ‘Three going and three coming back. Remember, God made the universe in seven.’
‘But he must have planned it out pretty carefully beforehand,’ says Lars Person.
‘How do we do it?’ asks Sven.
‘We talk together, we share our crafts and our professions and philosophies, just like the Encyclopedia. We give papers,’ explains Bo.
‘Papers!’ cries the Swedish nightingale.
‘Then the papers will make a book, and the government will print the book, and give us a grant for it,’ says Alma.
‘Oh, those beautiful words,’ says Verso. ‘A government grant!’
‘I understood we were visiting the Hermitage to see the Voltaire library,’ says Anders Manders.
‘I thought we were making a visit to the Maryinsky Opera,’ says Birgitta Lindhorst.
‘I thought we were going to collective farms to meet workers’ representatives,’ says Agnes Falkman.
‘I was told our trip was something to do with furniture, we were going to Russia to look at tables,’ says Sven Sonnenberg.
‘And all in good time,’ says Bo. ‘But first we give papers. That is why we have this very nice conference room to ourselves.’
Lars Person is looking at me with his amused and diabolical expression. ‘Only really boring professors give papers,’ he says. ‘Don’t you agree, professor?’
‘Moi?’ I ask.
‘Yes. I know you’re sometimes a boring professor, but you also write novels and plays, I think. So which do you prefer? Giving papers or telling stories?’
‘If I tell the truth, I much prefer telling stories.’
‘I don’t see why,’ says Agnes. ‘Papers are useful and stories tell lies.’
‘But lies that help us find our way to truth.’
‘I love it,’ says Birgitta Lindhorst. ‘Why don’t we all do it?’
‘Tell lies?’
‘Nej, nej, Sven, tell each other stories,’ says the Swedish nightingale.
‘Nej, nej, nej, we are here to do something useful, Birgitta,’ says Agnes. ‘As Diderot once observed, “To know how to bake, we must first put our hands in the dough.”’
‘In the dough?’
‘Didn’t he also observe, “We present things as if they were facts to show there are things we think we know. But we also present them as stories to show how it is we find out.”’
‘What, Diderot said this?’ asks Alma.
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘Where?’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘I am sure we all agree we want papers,’ says Agnes. ‘I think there is a consensus.’
‘I don’t think you are right, Agnes,’ says Lars Person.
‘Of course there is a consensus,’ says Alma.
‘No, because some of us want papers and some of us would rather have stories . . .’
‘In that case we must take a vote,’ says Agnes.
‘Nej, nej, it is not necessary,’ says Alma, ‘I am sure we have a consensus. Do we have a consensus?’
‘Jo, jo,’ says Agnes.
‘Nej, nej,’ says Lars Person.
‘Then I think we must have a meeting to find out how to find a consensus,’ says Bo . . .
Jack-Paul Verso turns quietly to me as the argument rages. ‘Great, I think that’s quite enough Swedish democracy for one evening, don’t you?’ he murmurs. ‘What say to a Jim Beam in the Muscovy Bar? Is it a consensus?’
‘Jo, jo,’ I say.
Strange how the life of ships can alter so suddenly, how many different little worlds one single vessel can contain. Up aloft we’ve left the gallant band of Swedish pilgrims, discussing reason and trying to resolve the difficult problems of a liberal democracy. Two decks down in the Muscovy Bar minds are turned to other matters entirely. The Vladimir Ilich is well on its way now, its engines thumping and surging noisily as, driven by some wild homesick appetite, it drives on through the archipelago toward the wider Baltic and home. The noise onboard is just as vigorous, as the ship’s returning Russians take charge of the bar. Balalaika music twings merrily from the loudspeakers; bottles and glasses smash their way along the bar. Chatter, shouting, singing, laughter surge from every table. Small gaming machines have somehow appeared, and goods and chattels are passing quickly every which way and that: Barbie dolls, Western CDs, mobile organizers, mobile phones, whole hams, entire cheeses, silk scarves, old socks, strangely shaped brown-paper parcels, sinister black plastic sacks, passports, stamped documents and, for all I know, lists of dead souls are trafficking from hand to hand.
To make sure the mood of Slav euphoria never for an instant diminishes, big-necked waiters in their Russian ruffles are shuttling at speed between the tables and the bar, bearing life-giving doses of shampanski or vodka. The rest of us travellers watch bemused. In the further corner the Japanese tour-groups all sit huddled together, wearing their little backpacks, looking at the spectacle buddhistically and aiding their contemplations with glasses of iced Suntory scotch. Huge and Hanseatic, the German businessmen are exchanging thrilling tales of massage and sauna and soaking down vital cognac. The Swedish businessmen, discussing welfare reform, are drinking small glasses of Ukrainian sauterne. Hats still on backwards in the most senseless of all human gestures, the American backpackers are working their way through the educational pages of the Rough Guide to Novi Zembla as they tip back can after can of Bud, crushing the containers flat in their huge mitts when they’ve done. As for the American widows, they look happier than they must have been in the rest of their entire lives, as they flirt unashamedly with these same big Russian waiters.
As for me, how crazy I was to spend all that time in Stockholm trying to traffick rates of exchange with that nice blonde teller in that nice blonde bank. Because here we’re right in the world of funny money. What was I thinking of? This is a Russian ship, after all. The waiters, rushing round the tables, are happy to pocket anything that vaguely resembles currency, valuta, at all. Russian roubles, Ukrainian hryvnia, Hungarian forints, Swedish kronor, German Deutschmarks, it’s all the same to them. Chinese rinimbi, Thai bahts, Slakan vloskan, Cambodian wong; if it clinks or crackles, it pours straight into their wallets.
‘Skal!’ says Verso, raising the huge glass of Jim Beam on the rocks his dollar has bought. ‘You know, there’s just one thing that worries me about you, professor.’
‘Oh, what’s that, professor?’
‘This Diderot quote of yours just now. Papers and stories. I haven’t read every single word the guy wrote in a far too productive lifetime, I have to admit. But I don’t remember him saying that.’
‘All right,’ I admit, ‘maybe he never did actually say it. But it’s the kind of thing he would have said. I mean, surely?’
Verso eyes me appreciatively. ‘Okay, my friend, now I understand you. You’re able to quote our man perfectly, even down to the things he never said at all.’
‘That’s it. I’m a writer. I compose falsehoods. How about you? You’re a truth-teller? A philosopher? An expert on Diderot?’
‘No, not quite. I’m a modern philosopher. Or maybe a postmodern philosopher, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. I can lie better than you. And I’m an expert in refuting Diderot.’
‘I see.’
‘I deconstruct, you see. That’s how I keep my cat in pet food. And I especially deconstruct the Grand Narratives of the great Age of Reason project.’
I take a glance at my confrère, stuffing down a bowl of cashews. He looks pleasant enough, in his designer T-shirt and his Gucci loafers, but I know him for what he is. Somewhere in there I sense the Paglia Syndrome, a big show-off’s desire for celebrity thinking and intellectual trouble.
‘You’re an enemy of reason, is that right?’
‘Sure I am,’ says Verso, tapping his I LOVE DECONSTRUCTION cap. ‘Just like any reasonable person. Aren’t you?’
‘No, I’m not. I’m afraid I’m just another old liberal humanist.’
‘Tough,’ says Verso, ‘but let me convince you, if I may.’
‘If you must.’
‘I never lose the chance to deconstruct a little as I go along on my happy little way. So let’s just see how we hammered all the nails into the Enlightenment coffin, shall we? First of all, reason turned out not to be reasonable, right? In fact it led straight into the French Revolution, the first encounter with the historical bloodbath and the great wasteland we call modernity. So we get Vico and his dispute with the idea of rational progress, Kant and the critique of pure reason, showing we never know anything with pure objectivity, Schopenhauer proving it’s not mind but will we think with. Then comes Kierkegaard and the leap in the dark – no way of knowing being from nothingness, or the either from the or. Followed by Nietzsche and the complete triumph of the irrational. Worried yet?’
‘Very.’
‘Great. And you’ve still seen nothing yet. Soon comes Heidegger and the collapse of all metaphysics. Then Wittgenstein and the whereof we cannot speak let us be silent. Which leads by way of existential absurdity and futility to where we’ve managed to reach right now.’
‘Which is where?’
‘With Michel Foucault and the total loss of the subject. Remember what he wrote in the last paragraph of The Order of Things?’
‘No, I don’t think I do.’
‘Well, this is not quite word for word, but with your approach to quotation you won’t mind that. Something like: “Ideas of reason disappeared from the world as fast as they appeared. Today the figure of thinking man is just a face drawn in the sand on the very edge of the waves. Next moment the tide will surge in and everything will be erased.”’
‘Diderot’s vast and tragic solitude?’
‘Right. Our man spoke wiser than he knew.’
‘And you’re for it, are you?’
‘Naturally I’m for it,’ says Verso. ‘Reason’s gone the same way as religion. We’re way beyond the end of the Cartesian project. We no longer believe in a single continuous self. We no longer believe in thought as the way the brain works, any more than we think we live in a cosmos made by a magnificent watchmaker. All we know is the cosmos is chaos, moving sideways at fantastic speed toward an explosive and senseless destination no one can understand. When it gets there it blows up or gets turned into some anti-matter. Doesn’t it give you pause? It should do. It gave Einstein pause.’
‘Okay, it gives me pause too. But if the thinking subject has disappeared, the mind is finished, why do we need philosophers?’
‘Ah. We don’t.’
‘How come you are one then?’
‘I just preferred it to football.’
‘And you still find a job to do?’
‘Sure. We still need philosophers. Look at France. They really respect those Death of the Subject guys there. You know they let them ride free on the trains?’
‘They do?’
‘Sure. Beaudrillard gets to ride free on all the railroads. Lyotard was presented with his own personal box at the opera. Have another Jim Beam, my son.’
‘Yes, I will,’ I say. ‘I suppose what I don’t understand, then, is if you’re so anti-reason why did you come on this Diderot Project?’
‘The same reason we all came on the Diderot Project. Free airticket, free food and drink, free visit to Russia. What’s the first rule of academic scholarship? Never, never look a gift grant in the mouth.’
‘I came to sail on a ship called the Anna Karenina.’
‘And you didn’t. That’s what comes of high intentions.’
‘And I came to visit the Hermitage and look at the Diderot papers.’
‘You could have done that on any package tour.’
‘And to find out more about Diderot.’
‘And why do you think Diderot himself went to Russia in the first place?’
‘To perform the task of the philosopher. Enlighten the despot, spread the rule of reason.’
‘And did he? No, he came for just the same reason we do. Free ticket, free trip to Russia, free food and drink.’
‘I don’t think so. I think he was looking for the one great patron who’d understand him.’
‘Catherine, you mean? She understood him fine. She knew he’d flatter her and prostrate himself before the spectacle of power.’
‘But he didn’t.’
‘He did. The lady bought philosophers just like she bought shoes and paintings. He was one more possession to add to her glory. And he went along with that. Skal!’
Verso raises a fresh glass of bourbon to me.
‘So you think. It’s not how I understood it,’ I say.
‘It’s true. Or as true as any truth is true, which it isn’t, of course. No, the main reason I’m here is I needed to be out of the States a while. I happen to be between marriages.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No need. They weren’t my marriages I was between. Besides, every philosopher has to go to Russia. Remember Isaiah Berlin?’
‘Yes. I know he was in the British Embassy in Moscow after the war.’
‘And he came to Petersburg, Leningrad in those days, to meet Anna Akhmatova.’
‘And they took to each other.’
‘That’s right. They spent a whole night together in her apartment off the Fontanka. They found they spoke the same language.’
‘Amazing. I didn’t think anyone spoke Isaiah’s language. Except Isaiah.’
‘Anyway he talked ceaselessly.’
‘He always did.’
‘The next morning a friend asked Akhmatova if they’d reached the great fulfilment. “I didn’t,” she said, “but I think he probably did.”’
‘Didn’t Stalin put a trace on them?’
‘It was a disaster for her. They say Stalin was so angry he started the Cold War. Which means there’s some unfinished business left between Russian womanhood and Western philosophers.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh, sure. What do you think of Tatyana from Pushkin?’
‘Delightful.’
‘Sure, and that’s just one of them. This whole ship is filled with Tatyanas, did you know that? Tatyana from Pushkin does the cabins, Tatyana from Smolensk’s in the blini bar, and take a look in the duty free. Tatyana from Novgorod—’
‘Do you imagine they would take my Swedish kronor here?’ asks Lars Person just then, coming into the bar in his huge bohemian hat and sitting down wearily at our table.
‘Anything,’ says Verso. ‘Your shoes if you could spare them. So, what did they decide up there at the Age of Reason Club?’
‘Swedish democracy worked as it usually does. We had a discussion. We took several votes.’
‘So, papers or no papers?’
‘Well, Agnes voted for papers. But Sven, Birgitta and I were all against.’
‘Manders?’
‘He abstained, but then he is a diplomat.’
‘So, no papers,’ says Verso. ‘Thank God for that.’
‘Nej, nej,’ says Person, ‘you don’t understand. I told you, this was Swedish democracy.’
‘Yes? Go on?’
‘Bo was chair. That meant he had two votes and the right to appoint an ombudsman. He appointed Alma, who re-assessed the voting, decided there were various procedural errors, and was given the casting vote. Now we have papers.’
‘How boring,’ I say.
‘They will be,’ says Person, ‘since at nine in the morning you are giving the very first one.’
‘I haven’t even given my consent,’ I say. ‘I like to decide these things for myself.’
‘I’m afraid that is not a proper attitude,’ says Person. ‘This is Swedish democracy. It’s a system to decide what’s best for other people.’
‘And where are they all now?’
‘Probably taking some more votes over dinner in the dining room. We can go and join them. Or alternatively we could go down to the Balaklava Nightclub and watch the floorshow. How do we decide? Should we take a vote?’
‘My friends, I really don’t think that’s going to be necessary, do you?’ says Jack-Paul Verso.
Which explains why now we’re sitting at a table in the dark Balaklava Nightclub. It’s smoky, fetid, somewhere deep in the lower bowels of the ship. It’s later: quite a while later, in fact several big bottles of champagne later. At the dim-lit tables men are shouting and quarrelling, red-cheeked women are giggling very loudly. A small bright-clad orchestra sits onstage: guitar, harmonica, the universal balalaika. We’ve already been treated to a tenor whom I’d seen swabbing the deck earlier, rendering songs from The Volga Boatman. Then a bass stoker has offered us a sample of the many agonies of Boris Godunov. Between the acts the lights go up, then go down again. Each time they dip and a new sailor-performer appears, false papers, identity cards, small consumables and various banned substances rapidly pass round the tables from hand to hand. Now, once again, they dip, and a long row of leggy girls appears, bouncing on from stage left, arms on each others’ shoulders, legs tossing into the air, clad in skimpy silver costumes, gold top hats, bright spangles corruscating at every nipple and crotch.
‘Hey,’ says Jack-Paul Verso, looking up from pouring a bottle of shampanski into our glasses, ‘am I going crazy? Or can that be Tatyana from Pushkin?’
He’s not, for it is. There on the end of the sparkling row is Tatyana, decked in gold and silver, happy-faced, tossing her fine healthy legs high in the air with the rest of them.
Rising to his feet, Verso claps furiously. ‘Hey, Tatyana, you’re wonderful! My little quick-change artist!’
Tatyana, looking bewildered, falters momentarily; then her fine legs pick up the beat again. A waiter with a dagger in his belt walks over, and Verso subsides into his chair. ‘Tatyanas by the score,’ he reflects in exotic delirium. ‘Every single one of them a stunner. And every single one of them longing to meet an advanced deconstructionist from the West.’
‘I hardly think so,’ says Lars Person. ‘This girl has bunks to make and cabins to clean.’
‘Sure,’ says Verso, ‘but it’s party time, and the night is but young.’
The high-stepping, all-dancing routine comes to an end. Tatyana, smiling fixedly, bounces last off the stage. Then the lights dip completely. The entire place grows silent, watching the daggered waiter step on to the stage and switch on a TV set in the corner.
What comes on is the evening news from Moscow. There it isn’t party time, and there’s definitely no Age of Reason in Russia right now. An excited commentator fronts to camera; behind him is a row of soldiers and weaponed and shielded police. Marching towards them, as in the old days, comes a large, disciplined, excited crowd. They’re waving the red banners of old communism, even the banners of the old Tzars; they’re marching up from the Moskba river and heading for the wide open space in front of the White House. From the huge building more flags and banners wave them on. The crowd meets the rows of soldiers, who offer what seems no more than a token resistance. Paving stones start flying; the police lines keep falling back, some of the officers throwing away their riot shields and running. The crowd excitedly surges forward, breaking loose in every direction, filling the space outside the parliament building. From the square, from the window, megaphones blare, and there is a sudden surge of triumphant singing. A flight of doves is released from inside the building, to flutter high into the air. ‘We’ve won,’ cries Rutskoi joyously from the balcony. ‘I call on all troops to capture the Kremlin and take the usurping traitor Yeltsin,’ blares Khasbulatov. ‘Victory is hours away.’ The crowds turn and, driving the police before them, begin to march back into the city.
Here in the Balaklava Nightclub, all traffic and noise has stopped; we watch in total silence. Then a loud shouting erupts, and violent quarrels begin. A table is knocked over in a crash of glass. The waiter quickly switches off the TV set. At once the houselights dim, the stage lights go up. In a disordered line – they must have been summoned back quickly – the tattered band of showgirls bounces on again. Tatyana’s first in the line. She and the team have done a quick costume change; now they’re dressed in Russian commissar uniforms, wearing big official caps. The crowd boos, then cheers as they strip off to show they are wearing nothing underneath. It’s a famous old truth, as Lars Person thoughtfully observes, that when the garments fly politics usually goes out of the window.
‘But the crunch has come,’ I say.
‘The crunch is soon coming,’ agrees Person. ‘The usurper and the demagogues. It’s truly Shakespearean, don’t you think?’
‘God, I love that girl, and all her kind,’ Verso is saying meantime, staring at Tatyana, who is smiling fixedly, stripping and gyrating with the best of them, and seeing off history.
‘You mean Tatyana from Pushkin?’
‘Yes, let’s ask her over. Maybe she can collect up a couple of her friends.’
‘Not for me, I’ve just heard I have a paper to write.’
‘Oh, come on, professor, our evening’s just beginning. There are more important things than papers. Shampanski, sex, history.’
‘Sorry, professor, I know if I don’t go and write it now, I never will.’
A buzz of unease and political anger is passing round the nightclub; yet, somehow, the pleasures of the evening still seem to have many more hours to run. In fact, by the time I’ve finished paying my own share of the drinks tab to the cossack of a waiter (I have some spare Irish punts he seems absolutely delighted to take), Verso has Tatyana sitting cheerfully on his knee at the table, dressed in some quaint bird-like costume.
I set off alone through the ship. In the bars and public rooms everything is throbbing, as if an adrenalin of anxiety is passing through the whole vessel. Outside them, though, everything is quiet. In fact it’s strangely quiet. Maybe the entire ship’s crew have gone down below, stripped themselves to the buff in the nightclub to keep history at its distance. I can find small sign of the other Enlightenment Pilgrims either: although I do think I briefly glimpse Agnes Falkman and Sven Sonnenberg entering a cabin together, but I could be mistaken, of course. As for my own cabin, it’s a silent little prison, unwindowed and gun-metalled. And the moment I enter it I regret my sudden sense of duty: fuelled, to be frank, more by a sense of sexual unease or even jealousy about Tatyana’s easy compliance with Jack-Paul Verso than by a true academic passion. It’s not, though, till I start to look round for my work-stuff – my briefcase, books, notes and notebooks – that I spot the huge flaw in my virtue. For the luggage that crowds out my cabin space isn’t, I now remember, my luggage at all. This is soft-leather crown-emblazoned Via Veneto ware, sophisticated international-traveller finery coated with the very grandest of labels: La Scala, La Fenice, Stadtsoper, Metropolitan, Covent Garden. The luggage I need to have is somewhere else entirely. In fact it’s locked away in the cabin of a very great diva.
Which explains why, minutes later, I’m marching through the ship like some burdened bellboy, toting five suitcases that seem to contain the heavy costumes of an entire opera. A few members of the crew appear and look at me suspiciously. But they say nothing, and why should they? Every single thing on this ship is suspicious. How to find her cabin? I make my way by the companion-ways: C deck, B deck, A deck. And A deck proves to be another world: there are wood-walled passages, carpeted floors. I must have found the ancient preserve of the old Russian elite and the party members. Then, from far down the passageway, I hear a noise. It’s the sound of Brünnhilde in Valhalla, declaring the end of the world. As I move closer, the booming yet clear-noted song changes to something more familiar. ‘“To me, Onegin, all these splendours, / This weary tinselled life of mine, / This homage that the great world tenders, / My stylish house where princes dine / Is empty,”’ trills a high firm voice behind a mahagony door. I rather think I’ve found what I’m looking for.
I tap on the door. The Swedish nightingale throws it open. Her long red hair is down now. She’s looking quite grandly magnificent, wearing a soft, white dressing gown over her splendidly capacious person, and holding up a whole gold-foil wrapped magnum of pink shampanski. As for her stylish house, it isn’t empty at all. A figure in a white uniform, wearing a huge cap, sits on the bed. He rises, slips past me (but after all I’m no more than another bellboy), and disappears along the passageway.
‘The captain,’ says the diva. ‘He must go away now to drive the ship. He just came to bring me this champagne. They are such wonderful lovers of opera in Russia.’
‘They’re such wonderful lovers of everything,’ I say. ‘Sorry to interrupt. I just thought we ought to exchange our things.’
‘Exchange our things?’
‘Your luggage,’ I say, ‘you remember they left it in my cabin?’
‘Oh, you have brought it? Wasn’t it very heavy?’
‘Very.’
‘Come in, put those cases down, anywhere you like. I hope you took care of them. Do you realize there is a quarter of a million pounds of jewellery in there?’
‘No, I didn’t. Good lord.’
‘Oh, yes, my darling, I always take it with me. And now I suppose you are expecting a little tip. Do you like a drink? Now, tell me what you think about my little cabin?’
Well . . . as little cabins go, it’s certainly a nice little cabin. For one thing it’s extremely big. No small cell, no windowless metal box, for the prima donna. As fits her greater fame and her larger frame, she has been given the imperial, or perhaps more accurately the Party Official suite, the ultimate or maxi-cabin. No narrow bunk bed here: instead a huge silk-sheeted double bed, luxuriously scattered with her clothing. No little metal cupboard: a vast dressing table with glinting mirrors and coloured light-bulbs, its top scattered with her jewellery. No prison-sized shower; a great bathroom off, filled with her underwear. Great wardrobes. Cushioned sofa. Flower-filled vases. Large easy chairs. A great silver ice-bucket for that magnum she’s waving. Curtained portholes – and beyond them, bright in the glitter cast down by the lights of the ship, the Baltic waves gently billow and rock. A crest or two rolls by. Amid the crests, the grey granite islands of the archipelago glint in a ghostly moonlight, like the jewels on the dressing table.
‘Now do you see my archipelago?’ says the diva, triumphantly, bringing me a glass. ‘Have some shampanski.’
In her silk dressing gown, of a kind presumably provided by the management for its most important and honoured guests, the diva, it has to be said, looks grander and more glorious than ever. There’s something palatial, something imperial, in fact there’s something truly transcendental, about the sheer scale and presence of her being, the bosomyness of her bosom, the booming boomingness of her sonic boom.
‘By the way, I had the maid unpack all your luggage,’ she says, sitting down on the bed and gesturing to me to join her.
‘Yes, did you?’
‘You will find your clothes hanging in the wardrobe.’
‘I see, but why—?’
‘I wanted to look in your things for that book you told me. About Monsieur Rameau and his nephew.’
‘Oh yes, did you have the chance to read it?’
‘A little. Till the captain came to visit me. But what a nasty book.’
‘Is it?’
‘It’s so sad, listen to what it says,’ she says, taking out her spectacles and picking up the volume. ‘“In Rameau we get great operas, in which we find harmony, choruses, spears, great victories, glorious ballets, grand ideas. But Rameau will simply be eliminated in his turn. And who – not even a very beautiful woman who has a nasty pimple on her nose – can ever feel as tragic as a great artist who has completely outlasted his age.”’
‘Yes. By his death everyone was attacking him.’
‘Of course. Paris was split in two. It was the age of Gluck and Pergolesi and everyone was turning to Italian opera. Of course now he’s back in fashion again.’
‘Maybe you remember it was Rousseau who led the attack, in the Encyclopedia.’
‘I know. The orchestra of the Paris opera was so furious they tried to have him assassinated. I just wish we had orchestras like that now. Musicians who care about something.’
‘Postmodern times,’ I say. ‘Everything goes.’
‘Yes, everything goes. Here, have some more shampanski, my darling. And explain me: this nephew, this fat miserable boy with no talents, why does he hate his uncle so much?’
‘Why does a young person want to get rid of an old one?’
‘Jealousy? You tell me.’
‘The uncle was famous, one of the most famous, flattered old men of the age. And his nephew’s a total failure, scraping a living off his wits. He has no reputation, no proper work. He scrapes a life by pimping and flattering, fawning on the great and then mocking them behind his back. He steals from their tables, tries to seduce their daughters. He borrows their silver and betrays them any way he can. I suppose it’s what happens in a sophisticated and corrupt society, where the worst people learn how to make a parasitic living off the best.’
She pours a flowing, bubbling stream of shampanski into my glass. ‘I see what you mean. The nephew’s a critic.’
‘I suppose that is what I mean. Rameau stood for harmony, absolute form, classical order; he stands for total discord. Rameau stands for reason; he automatically distrusts wise men and philosophers. Rameau creates a musical Utopia. He says he despises a perfect world, because it doesn’t have room for utter shits like him. The only sufficient world is a corrupt one, because it allows someone like him to exist, he says.’
‘But why, my darling, does Diderot like him so much?’
‘I suppose because every Moi needs a Lui. He can use him to reveal the rival standpoint. Find the opposite to himself. Discover his double, his alter ego, his secret self. I’m sure our good Professor Verso would explain that Diderot was deconstructing the idea of the philosophe.’
‘You wouldn’t?’
‘I think nephew Rameau was probably just the sort of rundown hack Diderot would have been himself, if he hadn’t managed to live by his ideas and sell his library to Catherine the Great.’
‘This is very interesting, my darling,’ says the nightingale, looking at me thoughtfully.
‘Sigmund Freud certainly thought so.’
‘Sigmund thought some very odd things. Anyway, let me tell you something. I don’t like that book one little bit. I liked the other one much better. The one about the servant and the master.’
‘The other book?’
‘In your bag.’
She’s waving another volume at me, pouring me another fizzy glassful. And, you know, I have to admit it: for all her high-diva style I’m somehow beginning to feel a really warm and sentimental fondness for our dear red-haired nightingale.
‘Ah, Jacques the Fatalist, so you found that too.’
‘I found everything in the world you possess. There’s nothing I don’t know about you.’
‘Then you’re way ahead of me.’
‘This Jacques, you know who he is, of course.’
‘He’s a man who believes in providence, and the servant of his master.’
‘No, he’s the great factotum. You remember the great factotum?’
‘Oh, you mean the Barber of Seville.’
‘Did Diderot know Beaumarchais?’
‘Yes, he did. They were acquaintances, maybe friends.’
‘Well, there in this book there is already Figaro. He must have passed him on to Beaumarchais.’
‘Who gave him to Mozart and Rossini.’
‘Which shows that your book can turn into my music. And that is why I decide I can like your Diderot.’
‘Because you can sing him, you mean?’
‘Of course. Here, have some more shampanski. Lie down here on the pillow and help me to drink it.’
‘Well,’ I say, ‘I really ought to slip away.’
‘Not to drive the ship?’
‘To write my paper. I gather you all voted to make me speak first thing tomorrow morning.’
‘But it means nothing, my darling,’ says the diva, regarding me with a truly tragic air of surprise. ‘Don’t you know that? You are far too serious, you might as well be Swedish. Let me remind you what happened to Eugene Onegin.’
‘He had to give a paper?’
‘He was offered a hard choice, between solitude and love. That is how he made his truly terrible mistake.’
‘Which was?’
‘Don’t you remember Tatyana’s complaint?’
‘Her complaint?’
My red-haired diva lies back on the pillow, takes a short breath, and starts again on her trilling.
‘“And there beneath a Finnish sky / Amid the mournful crags on high / Alone upon his way he goes / And does not heed my present woes.” You remember now?’
‘Yes, I do. Wonderful.’
‘And so sad. Just so terribly sad. He rejects her when in her innocence she loves him. Of course she goes and marries a very rich man. Then when he meets her again he knows how much he longs for her love. She loves him still, but now she has a terrible choice.’
‘Between love and duty.’
‘She struggles with herself, but she rejects him. He pleads for his cause, he confesses his errors. It’s terrible.’
‘A good ending though.’
‘My darling, it’s a truly terrible ending. She goes off to her empty fate as a wife. He remains the forlorn tragic hero. “Oh, my pitiful destiny,” he cries. And on that sad sight the curtain falls.’
‘Yes.’
‘Now, please, have some more shampanski,’ says the diva. ‘See, in the bucket, there is another bottle.’
Well now: as for what happened next, if you’ll excuse me, I intend to leave this whole matter right there, because, as Aleksandr Pushkin put it himself in the fine rolling verse of Eugene Onegin: ‘Just now I’m feeling far too tired / To tell you how that meeting went/ Or what transpired from this event . . .’
It’s really been a long hard day on the Enlightenment Trial: a day of meetings, a day of journeys. The Vladimir Ilich is beating onward through the whale-backed floating islands. Somewhere down there in the dining room, Bo and his pilgrims are probably discussing important matters of democratic procedure. Verso and Person are in the Balaklava Nightclub; heaven knows what Agnes and Sven are up to. There are mobs, guns, tanks and a curfew in the Moscow squares and boulevards, and all the evidence is the terrible war has begun. Who knows what we on the Vladimir Ilich will find in Russia when we finally arrive? Then the tide’s erasing the faces on the beach, there’s no Cartesian ego, and we live in a totally random universe of cosmic confusion inexorably tracking toward its own extinction. And, as if that wasn’t enough, we’ve a whole day of dull papers tomorrow . . .
Still, for the moment, it’s a half-chilly, half-balmy Baltic autumn night. The islands of the archipelago glitter coldly beyond the portholes. In the diva’s cabin everything is made for a pinkish fleshly comfort. There’s a soft silky bed, a couple of magna of champagne, a musical score on the counterpane. What could have happened next? What might have been said next? What would have been done next? I shall simply leave you to speculate as freely as you wish, only offering by way of literary assistance the one small fact that (as I think I already told you) I am one of those amiable types who, when asked, normally says yes. So I perfectly well could have said yes to this, or even that.
However it hardly matters, because the one important point, and the chief reason why this is all worth recording, is that, for the second night in a row, and for reasons that have very little to do with reason, I once again fail to write my paper . . .