The snowfall got heavier as we approached Barysaw. I couldn’t see anything. The white strip was my Ariadne’s thread, and I was desperately staring at it, struggling not to skid. I automatically braked whenever the red lights of a truck entered my field of vision, and would narrowly miss crashing into the bike in front of me. I was driving in crisis management mode. And a voice inside me kept whispering, “But that’s how you’ve been living the past forty years, pal.” A sign caught by my headlights at the entrance to a bridge sent an electric shock through me: Berezina. We crossed the river without the slightest incident.
We found a small, Soviet-looking hotel outside which we lined up our vehicles. I collared Vitaly. “The new helmet you gave me in Smolensk this morning is dreadful! I drove the last few hours not seeing a thing.”
“I think I understand,” Vitaly said.
The helmet was new and I’d forgotten to pull off the smoky plastic film protecting the visor. I’d driven down sixty miles of Belarus night with a screen in front of my eyes.
Every evening, it would take twenty minutes to remove our layers of clothing. Once we’d turned our room into a Tangiers souk, we were directed to a tavern called The Emperor’s Bivouac. The door handle was shaped like a bicorn. An Olga with purple fingernails served beer to truck drivers, in a chalet decor. On the walls, there were battle maps of Berezina, a portrait of Kutuzov, a print of Napoleon: they cultivated memory of the event here. We downed gallons of cabbage soup and had to walk down the streets of Barysaw for a long time to get back home. The little town was a charming refrigerator, and Belarus quite a livable place. Decent people lived there slowly, diligently, in a modest, socialist wellbeing, while declining Europe was convinced they suffered martyrdom under the yoke of a satrap infused by the Kremlin. We collapsed into our beds instead of throwing ourselves into the encampment lights, like hundreds of Old Guard soldiers, who preferred death in the embers to frostbite…
DAY FIVE.
FROM BARYSAW TO VILNIUS
At 9 A.M. we were at the Barysaw Museum. Like in all the former Soviet Empire establishments, a dozen fat ladies in woolies were guarding empty rooms. The Napoleonic epic had at least created jobs. The museum was crammed with flags, uniforms, weapons, and wall maps streaked with red arrows. Every year, while ploughing, peasants would dig up cannon shafts, buttons, and rusty helmets. The museum had ended up declining the discoveries.
Goisque, who was a born archeologist, couldn’t pull himself away from the display of cannon balls. “Tesson, do you remember F.’s story?”
During our dinner in Moscow, our friend from Rostov-on-the-Don had told us about his adventure. He’d gotten used to going around the battlefields of the former USSR with a metal detector. One day, in the Berezina mudflats, his device started ringing. He parted the gorses, dug in the silt, and uncovered a ball. He had it identified and received confirmation of something he already knew: it was a piece of Napoleonic artillery. He drove back to the Saint Petersburg airport with his seven-pound treasure and showed up at boarding, with his ball in his hand baggage. No doubt his error was due to his naivety. No sooner had he gone through the security barrier than the arches began to ring, the authorities panicked, bags were searched, and the ball was discovered. Not bothering to explain how a plane could be destroyed with a 1812 cannon ball, the cops forbade him from boarding. Attached to his discovery, F. asked for ten minutes’ grace, left the airport terminal, saw a tree in the parking lot, glanced right and left, and dug a hole in the summer soil, and buried his treasure. Then, after writing down the exact location, he jumped on his plane, hoping to recover his possession some day. Several months later, our friend von Polier was taking some Russian businessmen very important to the survival of his business to Saint Petersburg airport. He had in his suit jacket pocket F.’s instructions and a map scribbled on a page from a school exercise book: “Two steps to the right after the parking meter, third birch from the barrier.” Von Polier asked the financiers to excuse him, “Just give me five minutes, gentlemen.” He ran out into the parking lot, found the cannon ball tree, and started digging. It was winter and the soil was frozen. And here’s this guy in a suit, crouching in a parking lot, busy digging the shoulder with his Montblanc pen. The cannonball brought back to Moscow by rail had place of honor on his piano, between a Golden Ring icon and a portrait of Lenin.
We had to wait for Nina, the museum historian, to arrive. A dog bit Vassily on the calf in the little garden where two-and-a-half inch Pak 40 cannons taken from the Germans in 1940 are on display. The blood drew a flower on the snow. When the Grande Armée passed through Berezina, the river was red with blood. Nina wore a blue acrylic suit from the Andropov era and large Coke-bottle glasses like Hillary Clinton when she was a student at Yale. Nina was touched that we should have traveled from Moscow on our machines. She devoted two hours to explanations from which it transpired that Napoleon arrived in Barysaw on November 25th, when all the elements had gathered to capture him. He was finally going to fall into the trap. Minsk was in Russian hands, and the Barysaw bridge had been destroyed. The warm spell prevented him from going over the ice, Kutuzov was hot on the Emperor’s heels, and Admiral Tchigatchev’s army held the west bank, while Wittgenstein had conquered Vitsberg and was advancing on the left bank, from the north. The Grande Armée was in a vise.
Kutuzov was so certain he would annihilate the French, Nina said, that he harangued his soldiers thus: “Napoleon’s end is irrevocably written, and it’s here, in the icy waters of the Berezina, that this meteor will be defused.” The trap, set on the day the French had crossed the Neman, was about to snap shut.
“Finally!” Vassily said.
“Poor you,” Vitaly said, looking at us.
“Shut up, man, listen to what happens next.”
“Napoleon used one more trick,” Nina said. “Two days earlier, on the 23rd, by chance, General Corbineau had found a ford on the Berezina, nine miles north of Barysaw, near the hamlet of Studianka. The passage was barely four-foot deep! It was a godsend for the Grande Armée. When he discovered this, Napoleon realized he could cheat the Russians, escape from them once more, and continue his ‘meteoric’ flight.”
Nina led us to the main room in the museum. Frescoes, prints, and reproductions of paintings traced the chronology of those feverish days.
On November 25th, Napoleon commanded General Éblé to build wooden bridges in Studianka. The Emperor stayed at the construction site all day, encouraging the sappers. And, on the afternoon of the 26th, there were two bridges going over the three hundred and thirty-foot waterway. The four hundred bridge builders had taken the little Russian village isbas apart in order to build their creation. They had worked with no hope of survival. The time spent in the water was fatal to them, and they were dying of hypothermia. In the meantime, Napoleon had had time to place his snares. As early as the evening of the 25th, he had organized two fake construction sites: one on the ruins of the Barysaw bridge, the other one seven miles downstream, near the village of Okhuloda. Cheated, Tchigatchev sent the bulk of his army to wait for the French—who had no intention of doing so—to cross the Berezina. On the evening of the 26th, Admiral Tchigatchev realized he had been duped. But his troops, exhausted by the forced march south, did not have the strength to immediately go back up eighteen miles to Studianka. And Napoleon, who did not like sailors, joked, “Gentlemen, I have duped the Admiral!”