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.’
‘I really doubt it. They’re old Stockholm enemies. They never do get on.’
‘So is anything at all happening on the Enlightenment Trail?’
‘Not too much now. Professor Bo has locked himself away in his cabin with Alma.’
‘My fault. I feel extremely guilty about that.’
‘I assure you there is no need. Unless guilt gives you pleasure, as I know it often can. All this fuss he’s making is just a fine excuse. Professor Bo knows an opportunity when he has one. Now he can sit down and do what he likes to do best.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Becoming a factotum. Making arrangements. Bo is a true meddler, a trader, a mixer, a fixer.’
‘Really?’
‘Professor Bo knows everyone, and everyone knows him. He’s on the Nobel Prize Committee, the Olympic Committee of literature. That opens every door to him, and places him among the great councils of the world.’
‘What’s he up to in his cabin?’
‘I expect telegraphing and telephoning, sending his messages and his proposals and his fixes back and forth. Washington and Paris, Stockholm and Rome. And Petersburg, of course. He knows Petersburg very well, it’s quite clear. These international operators are the true salt of the earth, you know.’
‘What about the Diderot Project? Is it still on?’
‘Oh, I think so, even more so. Why not? A little row about papers, it happens at every conference.’
‘I mean the news,’ I say. ‘Did you watch the television news this morning?’
For today the world of Russia looks even more troubled. Cameras panned across a blackened, burnt out White House, its windows gone, its walls licked with smoke scars, its parliament silenced and done for. Now angry crowds are massed everywhere under their tricoloured or red banners, and tanks are still rolling heavily through the streets. Bodies are rushed away on stretchers. In Moscow overnight a night curfew has been declared. Only Tzar Yeltsin seems unconcerned. There he is on television, stiffer and scarier than ever, like a grand yet undoubtedly powerful automaton: Papa Russia.
‘Friends, I bow my head in warm appreciation to the Russian people,’ he says, solemnly bowing down his silvery nob to camera.
‘Yes, I saw it,’ says Manders, looking amazingly unconcerned, as diplomats often do. ‘Things are plainly getting very interesting. Don’t you want to go to Russia?’
‘With the country in such a crisis I’m honestly not too sure I do.’
‘But when could it be more exciting?’
‘The middle of a revolution doesn’t seem the ideal time for going on an Enlightenment Project,’ I remark.
‘A very bad attitude,’ says Manders. ‘For one thing, whenever you come to Russia it’s going to be in crisis. Because Russia always is a crisis. Then I thought the Enlightenment was a revolution in itself. Reason has always been a source of trouble and difficulty. It always was and it always will be. This is what your friend the nephew is telling you, there in your book. Philosophy and virtue are perfectly all right in their place, but they have nothing much to do with anything. Remember what the nephew says? It’s very nice and respectable to think and discuss ideas and go to pleasant salons, if you’re a fine philosopher. But if by occupation you’re a worm, then you have to spend most of your time crawling. And you also rear up in anger and revenge when you get stepped on.’
‘True, of course,’ I say. ‘You know, I remember going to a conference in the Canary Islands once.’
‘You academics, it’s always a conference,’ says Manders, amused. ‘It was pleasant, was it?’
‘Not exactly. This was back in Franco’s time, and there was a student rebellion, a militant campaign for Canarian independence. I knew there was something wrong when I landed at the airport and the professor wasn’t there to meet me. Instead there was a group of students who seemed to have their jackets pulled up over their faces. They said the professor sent his warmest apologies, but unfortunately he was hiding up in the hills with his wife. He hoped it wouldn’t interfere with my lectures, and I’d be able to give the conference without him. As I was the only outside speaker, this wasn’t too encouraging. Then when I got to the university I found myself in the middle of a big student demonstration. The Spanish authorities were responding in kind as usual. There were civil guards with bullet-proofed Land Rovers and machine guns all over the university steps.’
‘They let you in, I hope?’
‘Of course. I was a visiting foreign lecturer. They even let in a few students, or maybe they sneaked in through the back doors. At any rate I was able to present my opening lecture. If I remember rightly, it was a radical new reading of The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story about puritanism and adultery. The only thing was, right in the middle of the lecture, when the argument was getting interesting, some sort of gun battle started outside. Then a few bullets came in through the windows and flew across the room. The students were very good really, and kept on listening fairly patiently while I explicated the significance of Hester Prynne as a symbol of natural passion. But I frankly have to confess to you the lecture really wasn’t one of my best.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘Still, we had a very useful discussion period. Then when I left the students who were protesting outside had disappeared. Except a couple of them lay dead on the steps.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘That evening some of the professor’s students drove me up to some bar high up on a remote mountain top so I could meet him. He was in extremely heavy disguise: big hat, dark glasses, false moustache, you know. His wife was the same, actually. He was very apologetic and said he was sorry to miss my lecture, since as he was working on Hawthorne too he’d been looking forward to my thoughts with delicious anticipation for weeks. But he did want me to understand that, since he was from the peninsula and had been appointed to his job by the Franco government, he’d probably have been assassinated if he’d attended. A difficult choice, he was kind enough to say. We had a meal together and then I went back to the university residences and he pulled an overcoat over his head and went off to a safe house somewhere in the hills.’
‘That was the end of the conference?’
‘Not at all,’ I have to explain. ‘The second day was dedicated to Melville’s Moby Dick. The troops and the Land Rovers were back all over the campus. But a few students managed to turn up all the same.’
‘Naturally. For Moby Dick.’
‘Quite. We had a tolerably useful discussion on the nature of American tragedy and the significance of the White Whale. The students were all very kind, and seemed to accept my interpretation. Then after it was over they bundled me up in a blanket and took me to the airport, so I could escape on the next plane to Madrid. Strangely enough, the professor who invited me and his wife were also on the flight, dressed as a pair of Benedictine nuns.’
‘What happened to them all?’
‘Oh, a few weeks later Morocco, I think it was, claimed ownership of the Canary Islands, and the independence movement changed its mind. They preferred to be Spanish after all. The professor and his wife were supposed to be Franco spies, but when democracy came they got chairs in Madrid and became quite famous. And I changed my views on Moby Dick.’
‘Quite a conference, then.’
‘As I say, not one of the pleasantest I’ve been to.’
‘Yet at least you remember it. How many of the others do you remember?’
‘All right, I admit, the ones I remember are those where everything goes wrong. Although now I come to think of it, most times I’ve lectured abroad there’s been crisis, revolution, or something similar.’
‘Really? It must be the way you tell them. So why is it unusual this time?’
‘It isn’t, really. It’s just that as the world goes on you hope things will start to get better. We are at the end of history, after all. Anyway, maybe with all this trouble they won’t even let us land.’
‘True,’ says Manders, ‘in Russia you never, never know. They may not allow us off the ship. They may detain us in the terminal. They may admit us to the country and then refuse to let us leave. It’s always this way with the Russian authorities. One day they’re the nicest and friendliest people in the world. The next they’re the most oppressive.’
‘Depending on which party’s in charge?’
‘That really makes no difference. Whatever party’s in charge, it’s usually the same people. The most fervent former Communists now manage the free market. The people who toast international friendship and open democracy are the same ones who run the repression. The people who run the police force also organize most of the crime. It’s a very simple system. Darwinian. The management of the beast. The survival of the fittest. Otherwise called riding the tiger of history.’
‘I can see you know a lot about it.’
‘I know everything about it. I spent five years as a cultural attaché in the Swedish consulate. I’m sure that’s why Bo thought I was going to be useful on this trip. I know all those officials.’
‘You were in Saint Petersburg, you mean?’
‘Yes, only then it was called Leningrad. To be honest, being very ancient enemies, the Swedes have always got on very well with the Russians. One end of the Baltic always needs the other. That’s why although we were western we had a high-minded pacifist policy. We let them have free run of the sea-routes, because they could have controlled them in any case. We let them fix up their nuclear submarines in Swedish ports. And the Russian Embassy in Stockholm was a very famous nest of spies.’
‘I presume you got something back in return?’
‘Yes. We were permitted our virtue. We were allow to smuggle people in and out all the time. Also manuscripts, scientific papers, books. That’s how a lot of samizdat got to the west. And then we always had our glorious secret weapon.’
‘What was that?’
‘The Nobel Prize, of course. It was bigger than ten battleships. If we felt they were treating their best scientists and writers too terribly, then we could always award them the famous prize.’
‘Did it help?’
‘Sometimes, not always. It made them a little afraid of us. We could never threaten them, but at least we could exercise our moral opinions. And this, you see, is one reason why Bo has so much influence now in Russia.’
‘Has he?’
‘Yes, of course. He’s been there a good many times. People understand his influence. He knows everyone at the university.’
‘And at the Hermitage library?’
‘I’m not so sure Bo is very much interested in libraries. His ambitions reach a little higher. I expect he’s really coming to find out about the best Russian writers and do some work on the prize.’
‘It sounds as if you liked Leningrad?’
‘I loved it. In those days I was young and liked my life salted with a little danger.’
‘They really were interesting times.’
‘Remarkable, wonderful, conspiratorial, horrible times. Leningrad when it was Leningrad. Pushkin called it the city that lived underneath the water, and somehow it was. Did you never go there?’
‘No. I went to Moscow once. Leningrad, very nearly.’
‘Oh, Moscow was quite different. And what does that mean, very nearly?’
‘Simply that the chance came my way. But then things turned out to be a little more complicated than I expected . . .’
And, as we lie there on our deckchairs on the cold quiet bridge deck, I tell Manders my tiny story about a certain Small Finnish Interlude . . .