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

A FEW DAYS BEFORE DEPARTURE. MOSCOW, NOVEMBER

The Moscow Book Fair was a success. Why did the organizers call it a round-table debate when it was a meeting of people who were all in agreement and around a square table? I sat next to Maylis de Kerangal and was intimidated by the beauty of this author of Tangente vers l’est. She spoke of her love for Russia with variety. She snatched away all I would have wanted to say. Her eyes were far apart, a sign of superior people. She was talking about her journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway. I wished I could have been on the train with her, serving her tea, carrying her bags, reading her Boris Godunov in the evening to help her fall asleep.

Gras and I were trying to persuade our audience of the necessity to recreate the itinerary of the Retreat from Moscow. Petrified by Maylis, not quite knowing our stuff, we kept passing the buck to each other. We must have looked like Flaubert’s characters Bouvard and Pécuchet.

“Napoleon may have been a bloodthirsty monster—” I began.

“—but we must admit that in terms of our administration, our land registry, our legal system—” Gras continued.

“—we owe him everything,” I concluded authoritatively.

“Not a day goes by in France when we don’t come across regulations sprung out of his brain,” Gras said.

“Was he a madman? Or a genius?” I said. “Or an insular prophet who was inspired by Corsican clan divisions to long for unity—”

“—and even a fusion between East and West?” Gras said.

“This isn’t really about our escapade, actually—”

“—Not at all,” Gras continued, “what we want—”

“—is to pay tribute to the memory of hundreds of thousands of poor soldiers, victims of having followed their leader, of having believed that a nation,” I said.

“—could write a collective novel with each and everyone’s blood—”

“—and touch glory with the tip of its finger—”

“—and blend in with Napoleon’s soul, as Léon Bloy put it.”

“We’ll travel by motorbike in memory of these men,” I said.

“We won’t celebrate anything,” Gras said.

“We’ll simply recreate the itinerary of the Retreat.”

“And measure, deep inside us—”

“—the burden of misery—”

“—the sum of suffering—”

“—what a dream of greatness costs in terms of sorrow—”

“—and the amount of tears needed to reform the world.”

“Why did these men agree to take part in a marriage of honor, folly, and death?” Gras concluded.

“They’re close to us, after all. Two hundred years is nothing,” I said.

The conference came to a close. Maylis ran away. We went back to our host, a network diplomat, in charge of literary events at the French Embassy.

We were all fired up by our contribution. We went up to her. “Do you think our speech made the Russians shudder?” I said.

“They like Napoleon, don’t they? Will they appreciate our journey?” Gras said.

The representative for the diffusion of the French language replied, “You have checked into your hotel, haven’t you?”

You soon get used to wearing a bicorn. It was late November. There were fifteen of us at the table that night, after the conference at the Moscow Book Fair. Fifteen friends in the apartment on Rue Petrovka, sitting under portraits of Lenin and Beria. The chandeliers held Slavonic candles: they melted at full speed, with translucent sobs. We spoke Russian the way polite Europeans do. There were French present, Slavs, a German, a Balte, two or three Ukrainians: all had been invited by our friend Jacques von Polier, an asthma sufferer, grand seigneur, Russophile, and businessman. I was wearing on my head a replica of the imperial hat, the one you find in lunatic asylums, and which I’d decided not to take off for the whole duration of our campaign. I’ve always been a great believer in the merits of headdress. In ancient times, the hat made the man. This is still the case in the East: you’re identified by what you wear on your head. One of the symptoms of modern times was to make us go out into the streets with our heads bare. Thanks to the bicorn, a mysterious alchemical percolation would perhaps instill into me some of the Emperor’s genius…

The bicorn I was wearing was a replica of the diminutive Corsican’s. The hat with the rosette had covered the head of an enigma more than a man. The Emperor was born on a granite island covered in chestnut trees, unaware that he carried within him a monstrous energy. How do we become what we are? It was what we were wondering about Napoleon’s fate. What mysterious string of events led the obscure officer all the way to the coronation in Notre Dame de Paris in 1804? What divinatory power propelled him to the command of half a million warriors feared by the whole of Europe? What star led him to triumph? What genius inspired his technique, worthy of a Greek god: lightning, daring, kairos.

He had persuaded his men that nothing would stand in the way of their glorious march. He had offered them the Pyramids in 1798, the Rhineland in 1805, the gates of Madrid in 1808, the plains of Holland in 1810. He had brought Britain to her knees in 1802, in Amiens, and forced the Tsar of all the Russias to purr softly in Tilsit in 1807. He had ruled the administration, reformed the State, overturned old models of civilization, and built a legend with Macedonian undertones.

Then, suddenly, the dream would come crashing down because of a march to the death across the Russian steppes. The year 1812 was a whirlwind of shadows, the first chapter of which would be played out by the River Neman and, three years later, end within the salt-corroded walls of Saint Helena.

And so we were drinking von Polier’s wines. Knocking back Crimean cabernet, eating herrings with dill, black pudding with cranberries, sweet gherkins. There were small carafes filled with that elixir of oblivion—that is, of forgiveness—and wicked joy: Belarus vodka, as limpid as Savoy spring water. Our host had moved to Moscow twenty years earlier, having gotten weary of France, of its regulations, its petit-bourgeois reactionaries, its bad-mannered socialists, its potted geraniums, and its rural traffic circles. France, a little paradise inhabited by people who think they’re in hell, administered by do-gooders busy keeping in check the residents of the human park, no longer suited his need for freedom.

He’d longed for adventure, for reality. He preferred dealing with businessmen who looked like thugs, rather than HEC[1]-qualified barracudas who never even thought of inviting him to get hammered in a sauna after negotiating a contract. Jacques felt closer to a fisherman on Lake Lagoda than to a guy rambling on about tax installments. As a matter of fact, he thought everybody in France seemed preoccupied with his own bank balance. So, ever since then, he’d been dragging his tall frame to the farthest corners of the former USSR, along with his generous gestures and a pair of dark, wild eyes hungry for an opportunity for not sleeping.

In 2008, he’d purchased the Raketa watch factory, founded in the 17th century by Tsar Peter the Great and taken over by the Soviets in order to establish the legend of the USSR. The Politburo ordered an edition of a watch for every event. There were models to glorify submariners, the 1980 Olympics, Gagarin’s first flight into space, and polar expeditions. The factory had escheated in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. Jacques was excited by bad business, and his spirit would get carried away by lost causes. Of the six million watches produced in 1990, the factory was manufacturing a mere thousand by the year 2000. The staff, whose salaries were six months in arrears, was down to a forgotten fifty, whereas it had amounted to thousands under Gorbachev.

And so Jacques slaved away at resurrecting the brand. He devoted his entire energy and his whole heart to it. Mocking at first, the Russians had ended up admiring this Parisian who wouldn’t let the only precision industry factory in the country of approximation die, and who fought for the Raketa pulse to keep beating on the wrists of the Moujiks.

Gras and I were as proud as tractor drivers of Farm Squad No. 12 receiving the work medal: Jacques had just given us two watches stamped with the Napoleonic eagle, which he’d issued for the bicentenary of the 1812 campaign. The profiles of Napoleon and Kutuzov were depicted on the back, facing each other on the battlefield of Borodino. With a watch like this you could head into winter and into the night with nothing to fear. Except delays, since the mechanism wasn’t automatic yet, and we children of the West had lost the habit of winding our watches.

Thomas Goisque was at the table, a friend of ten years, a photographer turned Russophile later than us, but with as much ardor. He’d come to join us. He’d felt demoralized by his landing at Sheremetyevo Airport, twenty-four miles from Moscow city center. Through the porthole, he’d discovered the true face of the Russian winter: a depressing landscape. The world had been forsaken by color. The forest looked dejected. The sky was a defeat, and the snow was the same tint as cement. Mud everywhere.

“We’ll never be able to drive through that, guys,” he’d said as he sat down at the table. “We’ll drown. And what kind of pictures am I going to take?”

We gave him a watch, he drank the contents of a small carafe, and his outlook on difficulties leveled off in his heart. Vodka is at least as effective as hope. And so much less vulgar. It was time for the toasts. Everybody took it in turn to stand up, raise their glass, say something, and trigger protests or enthusiasm on the part of the company. In Russia, the art of the toast allows you to avoid psychoanalysis. When you can get things off your chest in public, you no longer need to consult a silent Freudian while lying on a couch.

“To your Retreat from Russia! It’s 5°F in Minsk,” Jacques said. “I’m not sure whether I envy you or not.”

“To the proletarian king!” I said.

“To the Corsican villain!” a Muscovite friend yelled. “It’s thanks to him that the Russian people felt patriotic for the first time!”

“The Bonaparte Antichrist,” his girlfriend added. “He made Russians of us! He turned us into what we are!”

“To the Cossacks,” huge F., with his Falstaffian hands, blasted. He was born in the fields of Picardy but, prompted by the same disgust as von Polier, had exiled himself to the banks of the River Don. “To the Cossacks of my heart,” he added. “To their wonderful war cries! To their 1814 campaign, and to my little child who is in heaven!”

A tear trickled down his fat cheek. A reckless driver had killed his six-year-old son a few years earlier, and F. had the poor child’s face tattooed on his left forearm. He looked at it with intense pain and the little creature’s image on his skin seemed to come alive, perhaps because a muscle shuddered, or because some magic had taken place. And we watched this orphan-father in silence as he downed the fifty grams of poison.[2]

A female friend with a very dark complexion, whose lips were turning blue in contact with the Moldavian merlot, had invited the founder of an anti-Putin protest network. His name was Ilya. His skin was very white, and he looked more like a distinguished family nephew used to hunting in the forests of Sologne than someone about to blow up the Kremlin. Beware of the physiognomy of Russian anarchists. They look like altar boys, but something—a Rasputin-like glow deep in their eyes, a forehead that’s too receding, streaked with feverish locks—reveals mental agitation and a readiness to act. Look at the picture of Savinkov, author of The Pale Horse: it can’t be easy to live in that oversized skull. You can sense blizzards inside. Kropotkin, the easy-going-type anarchist prince, is no better: looks like Santa Claus, the face of a gingerbread producer, and yet with a thirst to blow up the whole world.

That year, 2012, some educated young Muscovites had sowed disorder in the center of the capital. The West, only too happy to destabilize Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, had relayed their claims, and given its support to these young, well-connected, middle-class people amply versed in the tools of communication. Since the explosion of the Internet, a revolution required marketing techniques. What mattered was no longer to take over the administration, overturn the army, and hang the ruler from a meat hook: all you had to do was keep hold of the media field, come out with speeches, fuel blogs, and prepare a stage for Western speakers, hired orators called upon if the cause turned out to be bankable on the ideals market of the EU. There had to be a unity of location (a large city square would capture the imagination), a team of tweeters, an appealing cause, rally signs, T-shirts, a symbolic color, and powerful slogans. You wanted to change the world? Then you had to promise a show!

Ilya was a pro at these urban springs. We discovered a pleasant young man with fine wrists and a large brain crammed with liberal ideas. I don’t know what he thought of our table strewn with bottles, with collapsing guests, guys with sabretaches waving period sabers, sporting Orthodox crosses and regimental insignia tattooed on their biceps, drinking Tokay wine like there was no tomorrow, bawling out military tunes from the First French Empire and Red Army anthems, bringing back the memory of Sergeant Bourgogne, drinking toasts to Prince Murat, and emitting war cries like Platov’s Cossacks.

F. started singing a parachutists’ song. Ilya realized there was nothing there worth posting on YouTube. He left.

At eight the following morning, we were in a garage behind Yaroslavsky station. It was dark, the air smelled of cold asphalt. Moscow was already roaring like a monstrous soul-washing machine. The streets, the sky, and the morale were sticky with mud. Motorists lunged into traffic jams. Snowdrifts bordered the sidewalks. There were sure to be bodies of drunks under the snow. They’d surface in the spring. They called them “snowdrops” in Russia, and they forecast fair weather as accurately as migratory birds. We’d had some difficulty reaching the place.

When we switched on the ceiling light of a lock-up garage, we found it, khaki-green and ready to launch us into a Belarus ditch: our motorbike with sidecar. It would be more aesthetically pleasing to describe this vehicle as a “motorcycle with adjacent basket.” These machines are robotics of the Soviet industry. They promise adventure. You can never tell if they’ll start and, once launched, no one knows if they’ll stop. The Soviets built them in the 1930s, modeling them on the BMWs of the German army. Ever since, they would cover the territory of the Union. The sight of a Ural driven by Oleg, a cap-wearing Moujik, with children at the back, and, in the sidecar, a peasant woman with a red headscarf—Tatyana or Lena—and a can of milk hanging on the spare wheel, is the Jungian epitome of Russian rurality. Even now, there’s not a village without three or four specimens rusting amid apiaceae. The Ural factory keeps churning out identical machines. They’re the only ones to resist modernity. They go up to fifty miles an hour. They travel through the countryside, devoid of electronic devices. Anybody could repair them with a pair of metal pliers. They date from a time when man was not slave to electronics, when the steel industry ruled by its simplicity. You need to get used to driving them, avoid turning right too quickly on pain of lifting the basket, and constantly adjust the profile toward the left. You must also possess an inner life, since the Ural is slow and Russia endless. For the past twenty years, driven by a blend of fascination and masochism, I’ve been buying these machines. As a matter of fact, I would have liked to die while on one of them.

One year, I drove one from Kiev through Southern Poland. We broke down near Frankfurt and ended up towing the motorbike with a rope used by a butcher to hang carcasses in his refrigerated storage area. The Germans were looking us up and down. The fall of the Berlin Wall had awakened the reunified Teutonic contempt for the Slav. I crossed the Kyzylkum desert in Uzbekistan on a 1966 vehicle. At night, you had to keep pressing the horn down to keep the headlights lit because of a short circuit. In Khiva, I had an accident with a police car and, having dented the right side of their vehicle, had to give up my boots as well as a nice leather jacket to these uniformed pieces of manure. On Olkhon Island, I decided to buy one from a peasant. The brakes weren’t working and the tank leaked. “Every motorbike has a life of its own,” the owner explained. In Cambodia, I returned to Angkor on a white Ural, the drive shaft of which broke by the West door where the Buddha kept watch. I took a blue specimen from Moscow, through Finland, in the middle of the summer: the Baltic smelled of humus, wild geese flew in an angular formation toward late-setting suns. On the outskirts of Paris, I missed a turn and drove into the corner of a detached burrstone house. The owner failed to appreciate the poetry of Soviet scrap iron. His wall had been demolished but the motorbike was unscathed. During a random check in Rungis, my machine was seized. It was not in order and my fake Russian papers had no effect on customs officers.

Goisque, on the other hand, had crossed the Mekong delta and the Kirgiz steppes on a Ural. Together, on the 1966 Ural, we had gone for a spin around Lake Baikal over bare ice. We had to get used to driving on the icy mirror and not suddenly brake whenever the crystal surface started to look like free water. Goisque shared my taste for driving Russian motorbikes with sidecars, for the feeling of riding while steering a trawler.

Gras, however, couldn’t drive, so would act as a counterbalance. We were offering him the role of the dead man in a zinc coffin. On Baffin Island, I had already lied to him by promising he could keep warm and read. In actual fact, the weather forecast intimated a terrible return. Of course, it wasn’t going to be the nightmare of 1812, but more energetic than a picnic in Tuscany. We attached our flag to the front of the basket. Against the tricolor background was written, in gold letters:

“Hey, guys!” I said. “Nothing will stop our Ural. Not even its brakes!”

It was the beginning of December. We decided to leave the following day, December 2nd, date of the Emperor’s coronation and of Austerlitz. Since our bike was going to be a shuttle on the smooth rail of time, since we were going to play, head down, the great game of memory and myth, we might as well have as many symbols and references as we could.

We had the bicorn, we had the date.

Now all we needed was to find the ghosts.

They were waiting by the side of the road.

With a gap of two hundred years, we were one and a half months behind History. On October 19th, 1812, the Grande Armée left Moscow. It was down to just one hundred thousand men. Under his black bicorn, for the first time, the Emperor had doubts. His army was about to climb one of the highest peaks of suffering and horror in the long thread of human History.

A hundred thousand soldiers. Behind them, thousands of civilians, horses, and wagons.

There would be five of us. Gras, Goisque, and I for France. As for our Russian friends, Vitaly and Vassily, they would drive their own Urals, black and white, respectively. They belonged to a club of suicidal motorcyclists. Every year, they would throw themselves into long-distance treks with no return. They would have to cover three hundred miles a day in the cold and the mud, toward icy stopping stages, cities that had been backdrops to terrible wars, washed by women’s tears, ancient capitals of sorrow with names that broke your heart: Kursk, Kharkiv, Kiev. They illustrated the Slav’s indifference toward the climate, the Russian mountaineer’s insolence before the blows from the sky. They called themselves “Radical-Uralists.” Vassily looked like a golden-haired Varangian, one of those bards who, during the 11th century, came down along the river Dnieper to sell Baltic amber to the Turks of the Pontic Empire. He was tall and his wild eyes only looked into those of his interlocutor if the latter was explaining an injection problem with the carburetor. A genius mechanic and an inventor, he had already deboned dozens of Urals. Did he have as much talent for putting them back together as for dissecting them?

Vitaly, a financier by trade, was the embodiment of the Muscovite: quick, intelligent, urban, lithe, and skillful with his hands. By day, he wore a tie in the air-conditioned office of his company, but, on a snowy night, could sleep in the middle of a forest, wrapped in a woolen coat. In Russia, Tolstoy was never far away. Modernity had not snatched its children away from a life outdoors.

They were our friends, and thought a memorial salute to hundreds of thousands of dead Russians and Frenchmen was a good enough reason to freeze their knees for two weeks in the nothingness of winter. They were delayed. The engines of their bikes were lying in oil.

“We won’t be ready tomorrow,” Vitaly said.

“Who cares?” Vassily said. “You three leave tomorrow on your Ural, and we’ll catch up with you in Borodino with your baggage…”

“We’ll be like Platov’s Cossacks harrying Ney’s rear-guard,” Vitaly said.

“The Cossacks harried but never caught up,” I said.

“You’ll see, we’ll catch up,” Vassily said.

“See you tomorrow then,” I said.