I soaked in the bath for an hour and a half and felt almost ashamed about it. Our journey had ended up turning into a very serious game. The duty to pay tribute to the memory of these soldiers had pegged our souls so firmly that the slightest deviation from the rule of physical suffering seemed inappropriate.
Two pints of vodka in the hotel restaurant soon overcame these hang-ups.
“Guys,” I said, “do you remember when Napoleon’s Old Guard took something from a Vyazma warehouse that earned the city the name of ‘Schnapps City?’”
“And,” Gras said, “remember when, in Ghjat, Napoleon and his entourage discovered abandoned crates full of Chambertin and Clos Vougeot?”
“And remember,” Goisque said, “when the Emperor had carts of brandy taken from the Imperial Guard stock escorted to the troops at the rear?”
Vassily and Vitaly arrived at the restaurant at 11 P.M. The two hundred and fifty-mile stretch, covered in one breath at 10°F, had given them an appetite for soup. They were dressed in professional biker gear. Their helmets, jackets, and boots made our equipment looks like amateur rags. We had the strange feeling we were doing things “Russian-style,” in other words, we Westerners thought that’s how Russians did things, and so were looked at by Russians the way we Europeans usually look at Russians: like a rough boor who makes up for his lack of preparation for life by being indifferent to hazards.
Two more glasses and another bottle were placed on the Formica table. More toasts, there was never a shortage of those.
“Here’s to our reunion, guys,” I said.
“Smolensk is taken,” Vitaly said, using the ritual formula.
“Tomorrow,” Vassily said, “we’ll take Belarus.”
“Here’s to your leg of the journey!” I said. “You’ve beaten General Winter.”
For the first time since we’d known him, Vitaly’s face clouded over. “General Winter doesn’t exist. Russians vanquish their enemies on their own.”
In the evening, reading Caulaincourt, I came across these lines in which the general states that it was the cold that caused the disaster, “and not tiredness or attacks by the enemy.” I avoided going to wake up Vitaly and read him the passage.
DAY FOUR.
FROM SMOLENSK TO BARYSAV
On that morning, when the sun was perched above the Smolensk ramparts like a ceiling light in a Kruschchev-era bathroom, our situation would improve. From now on, we wouldn’t travel three on one Ural. Gras would stay in my sidecar, while Goisque would go into Vitaly’s, and Vassily would transport the baggage. The Russians had brought our bags, and we got back our sleeping bags, tights, and woolies that we’d neglected to take when we left for Borodino. We’d committed the same error as all the Western armies who take on Russia while underestimating the cold.
“So what’s the plan for today, guys?” I said.
“To visit the ramparts,” Vitaly said.
“Or what’s left of them,” Vitaly said, “since Napoleon destroyed quite a lot of them.”
“Then to Belarus,” Vitaly added.
We were excited by the prospect of entering Belarus territory. It was the only one of the fifteen former USSR republics—together with Turkmenistan—that I didn’t know. Two years earlier, Goisque and I had been at the Belarus Ambassador’s in France. On Boulevard Suchet. The man was an admirer of the Emperor. He kept a very “Empire” mustache and wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Cossack battalion. After telling us that Belarus was world famous for its production of bolts and space stations, he had entered into a strategic review of the Battle of Berezina, after which, two hours later, he’d exclaimed, “For you, Belarus will always have a green light and a red carpet!” Nevertheless, a few days later, our visa application had been denied because of some mysterious administrative misunderstanding. This year, we had obtained the precious blank signed papers and were planning on experiencing, in full, the green light and red carpet doctrine.
Vassily and Vitaly were very proud of their installation: they had decorated their engines with Russian imperial flags. The eagle with two heads flapped over their sidecars.
“People need to know who’s who,” Vitaly said.
Oh, how we loved these Russians. Back home, public opinion held them in contempt. The press, at most, took them for straight-haired brutes incapable of appreciating the amiable customs of Caucasus peoples, or the subtleties of social democracy and, at worse, a bunch of blue-eyed half-Asians who fully deserved the brutality and satraps under whose yoke they would get drunk on Armenian brandy while their women dreamed of strutting down the streets of Nice.
They were emerging from seventy years under the Soviet yoke. They had suffered ten years of Yeltsinian anarchy. Now, they were taking their revenge on the red century and returning to the world chessboard in large strides. They said things we considered dreadfuclass="underline" they were proud of their history, felt a surge of patriotic ideas, were overwhelmingly supportive of their president, wished to resist the hegemony of NATO, and opposed the idea of a Eurasianism that was close to Euro-Atlantism. Moreover, they didn’t think that the USA was yearning to take over the procedures of the former USSR. Heck! They’d become intolerable.
I’d been frequenting Russians since the failed coup by Gennady Yanayev in August 1991. They never seemed to be wracked with worry, calculation, rancor, or doubt: virtues of modernity. They looked like close cousins inhabiting a geographical belly bordering on the terribly windswept Tartary to the east and our crisis-ridden peninsula to the west. I felt tenderness for these plain and mountain Slavs whose handshakes crushed all desire to say hello to them again. I liked their fatalism, the way they announced tea with a whistle on a sunny afternoon, their taste for the tragic, their sense of the holy, their inability to get organized, their skill for throwing all their strength out of the window on the spot, their exhausting impulsiveness, their contempt for the future and anything resembling personal programs. Russians were the champions of the five-year plans because they were incapable of foreseeing what they themselves would be doing in the next five minutes. Even if they had known, “they would never reach their goals because they always went beyond them,” as Madame de Staël said. And then the first impression of roughness. A Russian never made an effort to charm you. “We’re not doormen at the Sheraton here,” they seemed to think while slamming the door in your face. In principle, they sulked, but I’ve known them to offer me their help as though I were their son and I preferred this kind of unpredictability to that of creatures who would clear off at the slightest sign of rain after patting your back with excessive familiarity.
Was it because History had let rip upon them with the rage of a swell against a tropical reef that they had developed a tragic view of life, a taste for permanently expressing sorrow, and a constant ability to proclaim the inconvenience of having been born?
We Latins, fed on stoicism, watered by Montaigne, inspired by Proust, we tried to enjoy what happened to us, to grab happiness anywhere it happened to shimmer, see it when it appeared, and give it a name whenever there was an opportunity. In other words, we tried to live as soon as the wind rose. Russians, on the other hand, were convinced that you had to have suffered beforehand in order to appreciate things. Happiness was no more than an interlude in the tragic game of existence. Once, in an elevator rising from a coal mine, a Donbas miner summed up the Slav “difficulty of being” perfectly: “How do you know the sun if you haven’t been down a mine?”