DIARY SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE
ere I am in the noble but forgotten capital of the Ottoman principality of Mol- davia, searching for the unravelled intestines of my giant, one-eyed hero. I am on a ghoul- ish international treasure hunt for his scat- tered body parts — and still I have not found the heart. Apart from the viscera, I have to find the spot where Prince Potemkin, Catherine the Great's lover, expired on the steppes. Great men were then embalmed straight after death so Potemkin's giblets remained in Iasi (his body is buried in Ukraine). So first I set off from Bucharest with my companions, a won- derful professor, an Old Harrovian Romani- an tycoon, and his driver, a former presiden- tial bodyguard, who is a living lexicon of security customs in Ruritanian Europe. My guess is that Potemkin died just inside Romania and not in the neighbouring chaos of the ex-Soviet republic of Moldova. Disas- ter strikes when the professor tells me there Is no trace of Potemkin's deathplace in ,Romania so that I am in the wrong country. In Romania,' he apologises, 'villages rill. grate!' After eight hours' drive, we arrive in Iasi, once the cosmopolitan, decadent seat of the Greek princes of Moldavia, mer- chants from Constantinople's Phanar, some descended from Byzantine emperors. Iasi was a potpourri of Byzantine, Slav, Parisian and Ottoman culture that delighted the Prince de Ligne. Potemkin wanted to estab- lish his own kingdom here. It was once famous for its Jewish culture and anti- Semitism. (My ancestor, Sir Moses Monte- bore, came to Romania, backed by Queen Victoria and Napoleon III, in 1867 to per- suade Prince Carol to defend the Jews of Iasi. But there are few left now.) We stay in the. local Ceausescu-Gothic hotel. Syrian mafiosi play draughts in the foyer. Another Professor guides me through the ancient Portals of the Golia monastery to the desic- cated viscera of Potemkin, cosily decaying beneath the throne of Basil the Wolf. Dear Basil promulgated a lupine penal code that burnt rapists alive — the same old-fashioned Conservative instincts as a certain breed of London cabbie, and Spectator columnist.
B. ut now we are in the wrong country: a third luminous geography professor of Iasi University had discovered the place of Potemkin's demise in Moldova, celebrated ft.3r its wine, poverty, lawlessness and folk- singing. We try to explain our mission to Moldovan border guards who misunder- stand. 'You have killed a Russian and hurled him in Moldova?' the strutting imbe- cll. es ask, presuming this is a recent Mafia We must call ICishnev for instructions!' „1.11allY, we cross the Pruth into Bessarabia, lined with horse-drawn carts, where houses still have the shape of Turkish domes from its Ottoman past. Peasants in smocks exclaim, 'Potemkin's deathbed? This way!' until in a little lane on a hill on the open steppe we find two monuments. In this cen- tury alone, Bessarabia was taken from the Romanian kingdom by Stalin in 1940 as a dividend of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, conquered by the Nazis in 1941, returned to Marshal Antonescu, recoriquered by the Red Army, kept in the Soviet imperium in 1945, and is now independent. These memorials have survived all this.
There is another part of Potemkin that I am searching for. His phallus became a gay icon among 19th-century aesthetes, such as Diaghilev and his friends, who bor- rowed from the Hermitage a plaster cast of it, supposedly made by Catherine from life, like an 18th-century version of those Sixties groupies, the Plaster Casters. The story is probably nonsense. The Hermitage cannot find it. But in writing a biography one must search high and low.
Iwas once offered a football bung by a Russian as was Manchester United's Alex Ferguson. The difference is I know nothing about football and was unacquainted with the vernacular 'bung' even after being offered one. After spending too much time with post-Soviet tyrants, a Russian adven- turess, friendly with the politico-sporting nomenklatura in Moscow, asked if I would introduce a Persian football lottery nabob to a Caucasian tyrant to fix a game in his fief- dom. I refused the proffered lucre. My adventuress friend, Alexandra, warned me that I was missing the chance to make a for- tune but, since I barely know the rules of soc- cer, I was unlikely to understand the bungs. And the bungler who took the bung was killed. 'Why?' I asked. 'Own goal,' Alexandra laughed, slipping on a new Chanel dress for a date with her robber-baron boyfriend.
When I saw the film Austin Powers this week, I felt déjà vu: wherever I travel in the world, I encounter failed British mounte- banks who believe they are indeed groovy 'men of mystery', and have succeeded in convincing the locals. My best was a soi-dis- ant 'Earl of Cavendish', aged about 50, a 'defrocked' prep-school teacher, usually with bits of polystyrene cup stuck on to wads of snuff on his face, who had convinced an entire town of 20,000 in Lithuania that he was a polo-playing, chick-pulling member of Mrs Thatcher's Cabinet and MI6 spycatcher. They spoke of him with hushed tones. When I arrived, he cleverly tried to co-opt me, telling everyone I was the PM's private sec- retary. When I denied it, he explained, 'Wit- ness the splendours of old-fashioned English modesty. How is Margaret? Steely as ever?' She resigned three years ago,' I replied.
Ivisit my Israeli brother, Adam, who works in the Winery on the Golan Heights. He takes me round the vineyards, just inch- es away from Syrian howitzers. The vine- yards themselves are peppered with burnt- out tanks, monuments to heroic battles in 1973. The Israeli army took me on patrol along the border. At night up there, you hear wolves howling. But though they will lose the vineyards if the Heights go back, Adam believes peace is worth any price. Luckily the Winery has insured itself by planting new vineyards in Galilee.
Here is a social dilemma: what do you do if you meet an old girlfriend working in a brothel? A friend rings me from New York to confess and confide that he visited an expensive Wall Street 'house'. When the girls were brought in, he recognised two as friends. I knew them when I lived in New York as the glamorous respectable girl- friends of a parade of rich bankers. What is fallen-woman etiquette these days? The three were overcome with shame and embar- rassment. The two girls ran for the door and asked the madame, like schoolgirls, 'Ma'am, may I be dismissed? He's an old friend.' My friend admitted that he blushed. The remain- ing Paphians laughed at him. And the perma-tanned abbess of this libidinous nun- nery snapped in gravelly Brooldynese, 'A girl needs old friends like bubonic plague.'
The author's series of interviews Sebag will be shown on Channel 4 in the autumn.
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