On the screen is a thoroughbred dog, with a long, haughty, nervous muzzle. Hands with varnished nails fastening a glittering collar about the animal’s neck. A figure appears: 14,500. Fourteen thousand five hundred dollars, the presenter confirms, and specifies the various precious stones that decorate this accoutrement. A sequence of other models: rubies, topazes, diamonds… The numbers lengthen to match the rarity of the gems. The next scene features a dog with clipped hair, whose body, sensitive to the cold, is to benefit from a distinctive garment. Fox fur, beaver, or sable capes… The same range of furs for its ankle boots… The program now moves on to a more difficult species to domesticate. A lynx, which must undergo a pedicure if you care about your carpets and furniture. A vet is seen filing down the animal’s claws… For a dwarf hippopotamus, whose well-being depends on a good level of humidity, the installation of a hygrometer is essential. The brightness of the colors on your python’s skin can be enhanced by a wide range of food supplements…
Shutov feels anger mounting within him, but the program is more subtle than he thought. This feature about the pets of the new rich is supplemented by a debate between two commentators (one for, one against) with interventions from the audience. “No one escapes us!” Shutov remembers. The less well-heeled members of the audience fulminate and one of the commentators sides with them. The affluent approve and the second commentator defends them. At the end a compromise emerges: if there are madmen willing to buy diamonds for their doggies let them go ahead, this is a democracy. Shutov realizes that he was not far off thinking this himself, so his fury did not make much sense. New wealth makes such extravagances possible, and it would be naive to invoke who knows what moral principle to condemn them.
What a fantastic device for lobotomizing us, he reflects, hopping from one channel to another. The mind is chloroformed, the rebellious spirit is tamed. Every opinion is present. A procession of Orthodox priests files into a cathedraclass="underline" the Greeks have brought the relics of Saint Andrei for the tercentenary. And on the very next channel two young lesbian rock singers are explaining that in London they had to “tone down” their concert because European audiences are too prudish. The “non-toned-down” version shows them sitting one on top of the other, massaging their crotches and howling into their mikes… A night scene: young men with shaved heads, Nazi salutes… An American sitcom: three idiots, two white, one black, saying stupid things to one another, intercut with canned laughter… More dogs, this time without diamonds; they are searching for explosives at the Kirov Theater, where the forty-five heads of state invited for the celebration will gather. A football match. An English great-nephew of Nicholas II arriving at Saint Petersburg in a vintage car. An erotic film-the cries of pleasure in Russian are reminiscent of the instructions for a domestic appliance. VIP guests in front of the equestrian statue of Peter the Great; it is raining, Blair shelters his wife under an umbrella, Putin is stoical, Chirac arrives on the double, having been held up at the Hermitage (the commentator explains) by his interest in antiques… Another football match. “To be on time, when every second…” Sequences in black and white: archives from the Second World War, Stalin on a platform, columns of soldiers setting off to defend Moscow. An interview with Madame Putin: “Women should choose personal dressmakers. This would save them from encountering guests at receptions wearing the same Yves Saint Laurent gown as themselves…” Reportage from the Summer Garden, where eighteenth-century courtiers are strolling, wigs, crinolines, lorgnettes…
Shutov gets up, he has just recognized the corner of a pathway in the park, a statue… Nothing has changed in thirty years. And everything has changed. The meaning of the transformation appears clear to him. Russia is attempting to erase the decades that came between her and her destiny: several of Vlad’s books spoke of this Russian destiny, interrupted by the disastrous Soviet digression. Yes, a beautiful river polluted by the sludge of massacres, intellectual slavery, fear. “And the truth is that young Vlad is closer to those crinolines than he is to the phantom of the USSR. He has more in common with Nicholas II’s English great-nephew than with a Soviet dinosaur like me…” Shutov smiles but the perception is painfuclass="underline" over his head history is returning to its course, becoming more limpid… while he remains mired in those accursed times everyone would prefer to forget.
“I was wrong to come…,” he tells himself. But has he really arrived anywhere? A journey from an attic in an apartment building in Paris, where he felt so little at home, to this luxury apartment, where he is even more of a stranger. “I came to see Yana again…” He glances at the clock on the television. Ten thirty p.m. At the restaurant, Yana had promised to call for him at about eight.
He goes down into the street, into that pale luminescence of northern nights, and begins to walk with a resolute tread, and a feeling that he is staking everything on one last throw of the dice.
The Hermitage is open all night, it was announced on television. He goes there, is glad to mingle with the throng crowding in at the entrance, laughs at the quip repeated by several voices: “So here we are, storming the Winter Palace again!” The memory of the carnival comes back to him, the tribal warmth, the hope of renewing links with that world on which he is twenty years in arrears. He will catch someone’s eye in front of a painting, strike up a conversation…
From his first steps inside he freezes, dumbfounded. The atmosphere is reminiscent of a train station. People sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, some of them asleep. Others, perched on the window ledges, are scanning the sky: a son et lumière above the Neva has been promised. Two adolescents stretched out behind a gigantic malachite vase are idly kissing. A tourist in shorts speaks very loudly in German to a female companion, clad in the same brand of shorts (but three times as wide), who nods as she bites into a thick sandwich. A group of Asians passes by, filming every picture in the room with highly disciplined synchronization. A husband explains to his wife: “The metro opens again at five. We might as well spend the night here.” Ladies in crinolines and mustached hussars materialize, like ghosts, in imitation of the ones who used to frequent the palace. But the crowd is too tired to pay them any attention.
Shutov walks on, observes, and his thoughts about Russia returning to the brilliant high road of her destiny seem to have been too hasty. For there is also a confusion of styles, the disappearance of a way of life and barely the first babblings of a new manner of being… In front of a glass case a little girl is laughing at the exhibits. He pricks up his ears and realizes that the chuckling of this child is, in fact, almost silent sobbing. She has lost her parents in a room where there’s a “big pot.” He is about to alert an attendant, then guesses that the big pot must be that malachite vase. They go to it and the child recognizes her parents: that young couple locked in an embrace whom Shutov took to be teenage sweethearts… As he leaves the child, he thinks he has surprised in her look the pained incomprehension he feels himself.
He walks out of the museum and allows himself to be sucked in by the throng. Thousands of people, like a sponge ever more tightly squeezed, are waiting for the sky to be set ablaze by the spotlights of a Japanese artist. New arrivals add to the pressure, the most agile climb trees. “Three million dollars, that’s what it’s going to cost us!” a voice proclaims, and a chorus responds with the sum total of the artist’s fees. The night is not dark enough for the luminous fantasies to materialize. The clouds light up but the wind from the Neva tears them apart instantly. The people rail wearily against the Japanese and begin to disperse.