To the Hermitage by Malcolm Bradbury

Author:Malcolm Bradbury [Bradbury, Malcolm]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447205678
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

‘I know just what you’re going to say,’ says Manders. ‘This is why you never managed to get to Leningrad. For some strange reason you were delayed that night and you missed your train back to Helsinki.’

‘Oh no, I did catch the train all right,’ I said. ‘The mayoress kindly saw me on board.’

‘The town band too?’

‘No, just the mayoress. She took excellent care of me.’

‘So this is the famous Finnish Friday night,’ says Manders admiringly. ‘We know all about that in Sweden.’

‘Yes, and then it was a Finnish Friday night on the Helsinki express too,’ I say. ‘I swear to you every single person on board, man or woman, beautiful or ugly, first class or third, from one end of that train to the other, was blind drunk as well.’

‘I believe you.’

‘There was this beautiful blonde woman sitting opposite me all the way, wearing long black furs and a splendid ermine hat. She spent the entire journey having a loud quarrel with her own reflection in the window. Then, when we rolled into Helsinki station in the early hours of the morning, the porters were all on the platform with their barrows parked outside all the coach doors, waiting to stack the recumbent passengers in large piles on the trolleys and wheel them out to the taxi rank.’

‘Does that mean you did make it to the sealed train to Leningrad, after all?’

‘Well, not exactly. My translator went, but he went on his own. They arrested him the moment he stepped off at the Finland Station. He spent the next three weeks in a Russian jail. Unpleasant, I believe, though he did say he was able to pass the time translating my book. Finally the Finns protested, or the Russians got tired of him. At any rate, they bundled him in a truck and dumped him over the Finnish border, in the snow.’

‘Did the translation ever appear?’

‘Yes, it did, the following year. It was very successful. The Finns read a lot of books. It’s the winter, you know, when there’s hardly anything else to do. The critics were very kind, and I had met most of them in the Kafé Kosmos. Some of them even called me the youthful heir of Gogol.’

‘Well, you were probably wise not to go. The Russians wouldn’t have let you out that easily. You were heading for real trouble.’

‘I expect so, but I didn’t know that then.’

‘Why didn’t you go?’

‘Oh, didn’t I say? After I got off the train from O—, I went right back to the Hotel Gurki—’

‘Gestapo headquarters in the war?’

‘That’s the one, and the next morning I woke up delirious, with swollen glands and a raging fever.’

‘Tonsillitis, no doubt. You had probably over-exerted yourself on your travels.’

‘Quite. My kind publishers got a doctor who said I wasn’t fit to travel anywhere and shot me full of antibiotics. After a couple of days they drove me out to the airport, and I returned to my family and my normal life. Except it took three weeks for my voice to come back.

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