Berezina: From Moscow to Paris Following Napoleon's Epic Fail

DAY NINE. FROM PNIEWY TO BERLIN

I confess to the devil that I lied. I lied to you, Vassily, Vitaly, and you, too, my friend Goisque. After Poznań, Caulaincourt and Napoleon turned southwest, on the road to Dresden. At Głogów, the track left the Duchy of Warsaw and crossed a narrow band of Prussian Silesia before reaching Saxony, just before Bautzen. Besides, Napoleon dreaded this brief passage through Prussia and imagined being arrested. “The Prussians would hand me over to the British. […] Caulaincourt, what would you look like in an iron cage, in the middle of London?” And they killed themselves laughing for the entire stage of the journey.

Now after Poznań we left the imperial route and I suggested a quick detour through the northwest. I was thinking of going through Berlin. For good reason. First, Vassily was complaining about a problem with his generator, and we would find a specialist for these things more easily in the capital. Moreover, I wanted to drive my motorbike and sidecar at the foot of the Brandenburg Gate, where Napoleon paraded after kicking the Prussian asses at Jena in 1806. And then there was Lisa. I’d decided that a night of human warmth would do me no harm along this path of bones. So, in a nutshell, that morning, I was very vague about the Emperor and Caulaincourt’s itinerary, and refrained from telling my friends that the historical tracks did not pass through Berlin. After all, it was only a small detour: we would catch up with the official route around Leipzig the following day. I swallowed my remorse.

I had written to Lisa from Moscow, and asked if she was willing to put up four winter travelers. Unaware of the effect produced on an apartment parquet by the arrival of four bikers, she had agreed. She worked at a cultural institution, I’d known her for five years, she spoke perfect German, had eyes like Estonian ice, and, ever since our departure, I don’t know why, as soon as the cold bit at my knees, I had thought of her. In a nutshell, as Tolstoy advocates, I was reaching out for the promised land.

The stretch of journey wasn’t very nice until the German border. Small sleigh roads snaked through marshland. A gray forest. Between the woods and the anthracite sky rose houses hastily built by Polish plumbers who’d become wealthy in the West. In Frankfurt, we drove across the Oder, which was mainly sad: the river had witnessed too much human revenge fighting over its banks.

The border between Poland and Germany was made material by the change in landscape. The wealthy German hamlets were in contrast with Polish villages that had been strewn over the plain as blocks. Even the Teutonic forest seemed to grow straighter than on the other side. Twelve miles from the capital, trees lined the road. We entered Berlin through the East gate. Lisa was waiting for us in Alexanderplatz. It was snowing. She was wearing a woolen miniskirt, leather boots, and a super-severe coat. As beautiful as a Soviet policewoman. We handed her a sheepskin touloupe, sat her in my sidecar, and gave her a tour of the Brandenburg square. Snowflakes studded her black hair, which poured out of the helmet. After defeating William and the Prussians in 1806, Napoleon must have thought that his dream of a global state had almost come true. I’m sure that here in Berlin, as he passed beneath the quadriga, he thought he was on his way to the continental project: the peaceful fusion of powers into a universal empire.

Of course, Britain was still in the way.

We drove past the Reichstag and I remembered my trip back in December 1989. The Wall had just fallen. My parents had said, “Let’s go!” We’d gotten into a van with my sisters and a couscous steamer, driven all night, and the following day we were with Berliners who had just made the first dent in the outposts of the USSR and were breaking off little pebbles in order to keep a memento of one of the most brilliant socialist architectural achievements. Time had passed since then, the USSR had collapsed, and my mother had died.

Vitaly and Vassily were in a state. They kept pointing out the Reichstag to each other and yelling. They remembered the picture of the partisan sticking the red flag on the roof, over a Berlin in smoke. The photo had been retouched by order of the Kremlin because the guy playing the hero on the parapet was wearing watches on both wrists. It’s possible to be a liberator and to rob corpses… Today, on top of the building, wavered the flag with the Marian stars of the European Union. Such a long way and so many dead to change the color of the linen at the windows of government buildings.

The center of Berlin was paralyzed by a traffic jam. It took us an hour to reach Lisa’s digs. The engines were overheating. The bikes were suffering and we along with them, since the Ural, like its driver, is made to abandon itself calm and straight to the emptiness of the Slav plain.

Lisa took us to a stub where the Russians discovered the proportions of German cooking. The cooks seemed to think that all their customers were on their way to the country or the mountains for three weeks.

In the evening, Lisa said, “So, are there any ghosts on the way?”

“Sometimes I feel as though they climb into the sidecar.”

Then I forgot about it all, the cold in Poland, the Belarus mud, and the dead in the plain, in a bed warmer than a bivouac fire.