Lydia Davis - The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

He was a good deal tossed and beaten about off the Skaw, before sailing up the river this morning. On board also were the Consul, Mr. Smith, and an iron merchant, Mr. Damm. Neither he nor his two servants have any common language with any inhabitant of the inn. Considerable parts of the town of Gotheberg were burned down, it being built almost entirely of wood, and they are rebuilding it with white brick.

He has completely satisfied his curiosity about the town.

On an excursion to Trolhatte, the harness breaks three or four times between every post. Here the traveler drives, and the peasant runs by the side of the carriage or gets up behind. He views with great interest the falls of Trolhatte. In an album at a small inn at Trolhatte, he inscribes some Greek anapests evoking his impressions of them.

He inspects the canal and the cataracts under the guidance of a fine old soldier. He sees several vessels loaded with iron and timber pass through the sluices. He receives great civilities from the English merchants, particularly from Mr. Smith, the Consul. He eats cheese and corn brandy, raw herrings and caviar, a joint, a roast, fish and soup, and can’t help thinking of Pope’s line, “greatly daring dined.”

Leaving Gotheborg, he passes through country uncommonly dreary, destitute of wood, covered with sand or rock, then country that is well wooded and watered, bearing crops chiefly of rye or barley, with a few fields of wheat and occasional hop grounds. Many of the wood bridges are quite rotten and scarcely bear the weight of a carriage. Crossing the Sound after reaching Helsinborg, he sees with great surprise a flock of geese swimming in the sea, tastes the water, and finds it merely brackish.

His knowledge of Copenhagen is so far limited to the streets he has driven through and the walls of the room he is sitting in, but there is no appearance of poverty, none of the wooden houses of Sweden, and the people are well dressed. He has reason to be satisfied with his servants, particularly Poole, who is active and intelligent.

The Danish nobility have mostly retired to their country houses.

Leaving Helsinborg, he has traveled through extensive forests of fir and birch: this is the barren Province of Smolang, so thinly inhabited that in two days he met only one solitary traveler.

Poole has contrived to get on by composing a language of English, Dutch, German, Swedish, and Danish in which euphony is not the most predominant feature.

For some time he has got nothing to eat but some rye bread — much too hard, black, and sour, he thinks, for any human being to eat. He might have had plenty of some raw salt goose if he had liked.

Stockholm is not so regular as Copenhagen, but more magnificent.

He has been to the Arsenal and seen the skin of the horse that carried Gustavus Adolphus at the battle of Lutzen, and the clothes in which Charles XII was shot.

He has sent his father two pieces of Swedish money, which is so heavy that when it was used as current coin, a public officer receiving a quarter’s allowance had to bring a cart to carry it away.

In Upsala he visited the Cathedral and found there a man who could speak Latin very fluently. The Rector Magnificus was not at home. He was detained some time in a forest of fir and birch by the axletree breaking. In general, he is annoyed by having to find separate lodgings for himself and his horses in each town.

His Swedish has made the most terrible havoc with the little German he knows.

He understands there is a gloom over the Russian court.

The immense forests of fir strike the imagination at first but then become tedious from their excessive uniformity. He has eaten partridges and a cock of the woods. As he advances in Russian Finland he finds everything getting more and more Russian: the churches begin to be ornamented with gilt domes and the number of persons wearing beards continues to increase. A postmaster addresses him in Latin but in spite of that is not very civil. The roads are so bad that eight horses will not draw him along and he is helped up the mountain by some peasants. He sees two wolves. He crosses the Neva over a wooden bridge. He is amused at finding his old friends the Irish jaunting cars.

The most striking objects here are certainly the common people.

He has a poor opinion of the honesty of the country when he finds in the Russian language a single word to express “the perversion of Justice by a Judge,” as in Arabic there is a word to express “a bribe offered to a Judge.”

In the Russian language they have only one word to express the ideas of red and beautiful, as the Romans used the word purple without any reference to color, as for instance “purple snow.”

He is bored by the society of the people of St. Petersburg, where he plays rubbers of whist without any amusing conversation. He considers card games even more dull and unentertaining than spitting over a bridge or tapping a tune with a walking stick on a pair of boots.

The general appearance of the city is magnificent, and he sees this as proof of what may be done with brick and plaster — though the surrounding country is very flat, dull, and marshy. The weather begins to be cold, and a stove within and a pelisse without doors are necessary.

He wishes to see the ice-hills and sledges, and the frozen markets.

He goes to a Russian tragedy in five acts by mistake, thinking it is a French opera. Yet he expects in course of time to be able to converse with his friends the Sclavonians. He sees the Tauride, now lapsed to the crown, behind which is a winter garden laid out in parterres and gravel walks, filled with orange trees and other exotics, and evenly heated by a great number of stoves. The Neva is now blocked by large pieces of ice floating down from the Ladoga. Though the temperature has been down to twenty degrees Fahrenheit below freezing, that is not considered to be much at all here.

The Empress gives birth to an Archduchess. When the Court assembles to pay their respects the person who most attracts attention is Prince Hypsilantes, the Hospodar of Wallachia, and the Greeks of his train.

There is not much variety in his mode of life. He studies Russian in the morning.

He begins to be very tired of this place and its inhabitants: their hospitality; the voracious gluttony on every side of him; their barefaced cheating; their conversation, with its miserable lack of information and ideas; their constant fear of Siberia; their coldness, dullness, and lack of energy. The Poles are infinitely the most gentlemanlike, and seem a superior order of men to their Russian masters.

He won’t remain here as long as he had intended, but will purchase two sledge kibitkas, and other supplies, and depart, not for Moscow but for Archangel.

He imagines there must be something curious in driving reindeer on the ice of the White Sea.

He buys two sledges covered with a tilt, furnishes them with a mattress, and lays in frozen beefsteaks, Madeira, brandy, and a large saucepan. For the trip he dresses in flannel, over that his ordinary clothes, over his boots fur shoes, over the fur shoes a pair of fur boots, covers his head with a cap of blue Astrachan wool, wraps himself in a sable pelisse, and over it all throws a bear skin.

On the road there are no accommodations, so he sees inside the houses of the peasantry. The whole family lives in one room in suffocating heat and smell and with a number of cockroaches, which swarm in the wooden huts. The dirt is excessive. But the people are civil, hospitable, cheerful, and intelligent, though addicted to spirits, quarrelsome among themselves, and inclined to cheat. They are more like the common Irish than anyone else he has seen. Peter the Great has by no means succeeded in forcing them to abandon their beards.