To the Hermitage Read online

  A brooding Nordic gloom wafts through the air. Euphoria is over, winter depression starting. Yet why? Everything here is so neat, so satisfying, so wealthyish, so burgherish. Civic, that surely has to be the word. Everything suggests a common social virtue, a universal sobriety of mind, a decent respect for order, an open-faced moral clarity. Just democracy, expensive simplicity – the things of which so many people have dreamed. You’ll find the same spirit everywhere you go. For instance, in the small clean efficiently modern bedroom of my nice little hotel on Storgatan, which looks out across the courtyard into the small clean efficiently modern rooms of innumerable well-fitted apartments. Both bedroom and bathroom are packed with gentle philosophical instructions – inspirations to citizenship and virtue, all couched in the liberal language of secular religiosity. ‘Please help us save the world. In Sweden we love our beautiful lakes and seas and wish to protect them. Use only official soaps, and use your towels for at least two days.’ ‘Condoms and the Holy Bible are provided in your bedside drawer, for your physical and spiritual content and protection. Please make use of them with the compliments of the management.’

  As I walk round, everything is like this. Liberal, simple, decent, without irony. The streets are clean, straight, neat, tidy. The food: crisp, clean, fresh, fishy. The coffee: dark, scented, thick, excellent. The air: brisk, sharp, pure, windy. Quality rules, yet not ostentation. It’s the middle way. Nothing is too pompous, or too tacky; too blatantly conservative, or too vulgarly radical. This exactly matches what the Swedes like to say about themselves: nothing too little, nothing too much. There is plenty of wealth, but how very quietly it’s spent. In the smart shopping streets the well-dressed shoppers stroll. Dark-coloured Saabs and leather-seated Volvos swish by. The cars have their lights on, the drivers have their belts on. The litres may be many, but the petrol’s lead-free and the pace is sober; in fact everyone drives at a blatantly considerate, a truly civic sort of speed. The elegant pedestrians – tall girls in their leather thigh-boots, healthy men in their loden topcoats, universal cyclists theatrical in their arrowed helmets and Day-Glo Lycra (always in Sweden there are these reminders that it is healthy to be healthy) – stop, with the same consideration, to let them pass. Then suddenly, thanks not to some officious red light but to justice, reason, fairness and decency, the vehicles all stop in their turn. Whereat, with just the same polite consideration, the pedestrians and the Lycra cyclists, carefully, appreciatively, cross the road to the other side.

  The crisp smart goods in the stores are just as well ordered, just as considerate. Don’t imagine it was some chic fifties Swedish modernist with a doctorate in design from Paris who invented all these bleached white woods, pure colours, honest straight lines that deck the smart lofts of the known world. Swedish style was born from the Swedish soul: nature, the outdoors, the woods, winds, sea, rocks, spray, all of it shaped into function by the piney, craft-loving, shipbuilding, homesteading old Nordic soul. Look at it. Those carpentered chairs – so straight-lined and thoughtful. Those handmade tables – so crafted, sturdy, square-edged, crisp-grained. Those woven fabrics – bright yet so restrained. Everything modest, homely, truthful, under-stated. Yet, lest some unfortunate misunderstanding occur, all this simplicity is expensive beyond belief – especially if you’re a wandering foreign tourist like myself.

  But, as I’m discovering, the most expensive thing in this decent, pleasant, unpretentious liberal country is money itself. I’m in a bank in a clean tree-filled square at Storgatan, just up the hill above the harbour. An exceedingly nice bank – plain, modern, open-plan, white, computerized, smelling of fresh coffee, filled with nice people. So nice I know something is missing: the demonic rage of money, the danger of coin, not to say the angled security cameras, bullet-proof screens and Kalashnikov-toting guards that modern banking needs. The Land of the Bears is, I recall, famous for its banking. It went with a central role in the Hanseatic League, the mastery of Baltic trade, the role of financier of European wars. If my imperfect memory is right, it was Sweden that devised the notion of the National Bank. Above all, it went with a decent supply of the things money is made of: minerals and paper. To use the mineral reserves of the Upplands, the Swedes dispensed with precious metals and invented the decent plain democratic copper coin: a great invention when you wanted a loaf of bread, though if you wanted to buy something really expensive – one of those Swedish tables, for example – you had to go out shopping not with a purse but a horse and cart.

  So why (I’m asking myself) am I having so much trouble in performing a normal economic transaction, a simple act of rates of exchange? I’ve come to this handsome blonde bank because I want to change English pounds for American dollars. In the world of money it’s a normal, rational request. At a handsome blonde desk a handsome blonde teller sits, tapping away at her handsome computer console. Like everyone I’ve met since I flew into Arlanda airport this morning, she’s serious, kind, courteous – civic, that has to be the word. That is the Swedish way. The Land of the Bears has always felt a bit like an enlightened Islington primary school, with tundra. First she asks me for my papers. Passport. Driving licence. Travel insurance. Health insurance. Social security number. Fine: I have paper, therefore I am. She enquires about the traffik, the devise, the curso, the cambio, the change I’m after. How will I pay? I hand her a splendid walletful: Visa, American Express, Diner’s, Barclaycard, Master Charge, British Airways Executive Club. I have plastic, therefore I shop. But not, it seems, in modern Sweden.

  ‘Nej, nej,’ she says.

  I offer bankcard, chargecard, Eurocard. I flash a gold this, wave a silver that. I lean forward against her scented blonde hair and murmur a splendid little secret: my pin number.

  ‘Nej, nej,’ she says, staring at me bemused, ‘if you would like money, you must give me some money first.’

  ‘But this is money,’ I say. ‘Money as we now know it.’

  ‘Nej, nej, not in Sweden,’ she says. ‘This is not money, it’s credit. I need good money. Don’t you have proper English pounds?’

  I look at her amazed. The year, as we’ve said, is 1993. This is a highly advanced nation. A glorious new millennium is to hand. Then, if computers don’t crash and planes fall from the sky in the great turnover of numbers, we will all become part of Euro-Europe; that will be the end of the old age of rates of exchange. Francs will fade, Deutschmarks dissolve, escudos expire, lire lapse, the krona will crash. Even the great British pound will pass away, as in their season all good things pass away.

  I for one will mourn its passing, shed a big wet fiscal tear. I madly love coin and currency, paper and print, guineas and guilders, sovereigns and sovereignties, ducats and crowns, farthings and forints, cambio and curso, cash and carry. True, here in 1993, Sweden has still not yet elected to join the European Community, but we all know it’s just a matter of time. And true, with all those fir trees in the forests, all that paper in the papermills, all that copper in the Upplands, it has a vested interest in money as it always was and should be. But Sweden is modern, paper money isn’t. Still, if that’s what she wants, that’s what she’ll have. Money, yes, I remember I had some once. I dig deep into my wallet, and there it is: a small wad of British notes for general circulation. George Stevenson – Mr Puffing Billy – in his stovepipe hat looks proudly out from the fives. Charles Dickens, creator of one of the world’s greatest fictional galleries of speculators and peculators, looks out from the twirls of the tens. Michael Faraday, who invented the electric lighthouse, guards the security of the twenties. The Queen is present. Nothing could be more reliable.

  ‘Will this do?’ I ask.

  ‘Jo, jo, tip top, tack, tack,’ says the teller, smiling, taking and counting them.

  There’s quite a long line of people standing behind me now. But this is decent liberal Sweden, so nobody murmurs, and no one complains. The teller tip-taps her computer; presently she hands me a fresh wad of notes.

  ‘Tack, tack,’ I say, and look. They’
re Swedish kronor, elegant and colourful, not what I wanted at all. ‘Nej, nej,’ I say. ‘It’s not right. I want American dollars.’

  ‘Jo, jo, dollars, tack, tack,’ says the teller, taking the notes back. She checks them carefully, to make sure I have not done them a mischief, returns them to the drawer, tip-taps her computer. The line behind me has grown longer, reaching into the street. Nobody utters, nobody shows the faintest impatience. The teller reaches into her drawer again, counts out a few crisp American greenbacks, and hands them to me.

  ‘Tack, tack,’ I say.

  I look. And I look again. This wad seems curiously small. In a matter of minutes, a hundred British pounds have traded into forty American dollars, a very remarkable rate of exchange.

  ‘I gave you a hundred, you gave me forty,’ I complain. The line of people waits.

  ‘Jo, jo,’ says the teller.

  ‘It can’t be right.’

  ‘Jo, jo, it’s right,’ she says. ‘Tax. You made three changes. Each time you pay a tax.’

  ‘I didn’t make three changes, you did.’

  ‘But in Sweden everything is changed through the krona.’

  ‘Why is it changed through the krona?’

  ‘Of course, so you can pay all the tax.’

  Now in Istanbul or Athens, even in London’s Edgware Road, this would look extremely suspicious. But this is Sweden: the higher society, the moral kingdom, the land of liberalism and utter honesty. I glance round. The line behind me reaches right across the street and is blocking the traffic; in fact this part of Stockholm has come to a total standstill. No horns bleep, nobody utters, no one even coughs.

  ‘I don’t want to pay the tax.’

  ‘Everyone likes to pay tax.’

  The teller smiles at me, the line of people behind me nod in agreement, all with that beautiful, open, Swedish reassurance that tells me money belongs to none of us, is granted on loan to us from the mother state. So don’t we feel that much more human and decent, that much more . . . civic, when we know we’re being swingeingly taxed?

  Now what, you could fairly ask, am I doing here, in the world’s most moral kingdom, trafficking British pounds for American greenbacks? Sweden lies on no familiar route from Britain to America. But America’s not where I’m going – or not for many pages yet. In any case America long ceased trading in greenbacks. Even plastic is nearly finished; money in America is already virtual money, post-money, non-specie; it’s plastic, smart chip, computer debit, electronic cash. But I’m on my way to the true land of the Almighty Dollar, the real nation of the greenback, at the far end of the Baltic: the CRS, what’s left of the Russian Union and the great empire of the tzars. To prepare my journey, I have carefully read, on the morning flight over from Stansted, a book by a famous eighteenth-century traveller there, the ubiquitous Comte de Segur, French ambassador to Catherine the Great just before the French Revolution – which to her eternal disgust and dismay he warmly supported, at least for a while.

  Even at that date, he was struck by the unusual nature of the Russian economy. ‘Here one must forget the rules of finance one learns in other countries,’ he noted. ‘The mass of banknotes, the realization that there are no reserves to back them, the use of strange and unusual coinages, the kind ofthing that in other lands would bring immediate collapse or revolution, here cause no surprise at all. The great Empress Catherine could, I’ve no doubt, turn leather into money should she wish.’ Well, plus ça change; as it was, so it is now. To this day the rouble is a strange, only part-convertible currency, a set of roguish numbers, a con man’s fancy that has never truly replaced barter in silks and camels, icons, part-worn dresses, Turkish drugs, old lampshades, surplus nuclear missiles, loaves and fishes, live or dead souls. In the hard heyday of Communism, the special shops for the nomenklatura traded, of course, in dollars – which then generally drifted westward to Switzerland or bought fine real estate in Nice. Now, in the fine new free-market era, when the nomenklatura prefers to see itself as the mafia, no smart Russian hotelier, sommelier, blackmailer, bribe-taker or capitalist oligarch would dream of trading in anything else. Avoid the rouble; it’s dollars or nothing. That’s what all the hardened travellers say.

  And, someone has carefully warned me, it’s best to carry your dollars into the country with you. These days nobody in Russia knows what money is worth; they just know it’s a mad and ridiculous invention no one can get enough of. That’s why it will be difficult to make a fair and reliable exchange in the grand and noble banks of Petersburg, and probably not even on the Russian ferry I’m booked on and which will be taking me there tomorrow night. Which is precisely why I’m standing here in the blonde bank at Storgatan, evidently rescuing without knowing it the entire Swedish tax system and its fine welfare economy. I take my tiny wad of dollars and stuff them in my pocket.

  ‘Tack, tack,’ says the blonde teller, looking at me ever so sweetly.

  ‘Tack, tack,’ I say just as sweetly back, and walk out: out of the nice blonde bank into the fine bourgeois air; past the patient unending line of stalled philosophical customers which now extends almost as far as the harbour; into the tree-filled square at Storgatan, now completely gridlocked with polite Volvos, feeling different, poorer, wiser on the instant, as, for some reason, foreign travellers often say they do . . .

  TWO (THEN)

  ON FRIDAY, 11 JUNE 1773, a big-browed grey-haired well-built man of nearly sixty, with a very mobile face, a wry amused expression, a bit of a cough and what he likes to call an amiable stoop, rides out of the rue Taranne, in the quarter of Saint-Germain-des-pres in Paris, in a hired four-horse coach with a yellow-coated postilion. Who is he? He’s been called, by everyone including himself, ‘The Philosopher’. Where’s he been? Everywhere in the world, in his own busy mind at least, and all of that without ever once leaving France. Where’s he going? By a less than direct route, to St Petersburg: the great new city on the Neva, often known (but what northern city with lots of water isn’t?) as the Venice of the North. After all, he’s the Philosopher. And he’s heading, as a great thinker should, for the greatest imperial court of the day: the court of Catherine the Second, Tzarina of the Russias, soon to be called the Great. For the moment at least, she’s resting – between lovers, they say. What better time to catch up on the newest, most advanced ideas of this thoughtful, reason-inspired, light-filled, positively electrical new age?

  Over the last few days he’s made the most meticulous preparations for his journey. It’s the greatest he’s ever taken: the greatest, given his annoyingly considerable age, he’s ever likely to take. He’s packed shirts and suppositories. He’s filled up his writing case, packed a shoulderbag tight with nice new notebooks. He’s written his will, left instructions for dealing with all his property. He’s made exact, detailed, cunning arrangements with his secretary, Posterity (also called M. Naigeon), about what it must do with his papers: those innumerable papers, philosophical reflections, medical meditations, poems and plays, stories that are not stories, essays that are not essays, reports on drains and sanitation, accounts of the great artistic salons, fantastic travel sketches, dreams of unknown lands and noble savages, those playful works of pure pornography set in brothels and convents that spin out of him in endless creative euphoria. Truth is, Posterity is quite as fickle as princes and as careless as secretaries, and it certainly won’t do what he’s asked it to promise. Such is the way things are written in the great Book of Destiny above. But at least Posterity doesn’t put you in jail. Under princes, he’s already served a term or two.

  The previous night he’s organized an emotional and deeply moving scene of farewell. He spent most of the evening weeping buckets with his ill-tempered, ever-sewing wife – the Great Particularist, he likes to call her – and his fond, dancing, piano-playing daughter, whose recent expensive marriage and huge dowry is the unspoken reason for his journey. With them he has contemplated to the point of extreme despair all the terrifying risks that lie ahead of him: shipwreck, coach
wreck, brigands, cholera, fleas, starvation, war, famine, getting arrested, getting lost, getting drunk. A couple of friends call by, and distress suddenly leaves him. Our Philosopher is a man who gets euphoric on sociability. Drink appears, the piano tinkles. The whole evening brightens. As the drink flows so does his famous talk: of life and death, mathematics and astronomy, destiny and drains. It flows like a torrent, for half the night. Meaning he’s almost omitted to pack, virtually neglected to sleep. Now the yellow-jacketed postilion has come: early, far too early, it’s still hardly dawn. He’s left the apartment with a frantic rush and hardly a connubial kiss – not knowing what he’s remembered to bring with him, what he’s forgotten to pick up, where exactly he’s headed, what’s happening next . . .

  Luckily the postilion is one of those sensible and well-organized modern servants, full of their own ideas, the kind he writes books and plays about. He knows: he’s going to the Hague, over the lowland borders, across the Austrian lands, a four-day post by way of Brussels. And there he knows he’ll be welcomed on arrival by one of the dearest of his various dear old friends, the Prince Dmitry Golitsyn. Dear Dmitry is Russian. In fact he has very lately been Her Imperial Highness’s ambassador in Paris – until the two courts quarrelled, his titles were rescinded, the Great Imperial Mother shifted her man to the Netherlands, into a more sober, comfortable and duller world. Now he sits in his ambassadorial house on the Kneuterdijk, surrounded by high winds and the stout burghers of the Hague. But, as his letters confess, he’s sadly missing Paris, and his dear old friend. For in Paris the Philosopher and ambassador have had the most wonderful times together: chasing women, buying art till it turns into a thriving business, becoming the best of friends, talking of grand rational dreams.