Instead, I had stammered, “Er, well, actually…”
The rest of the journey, toward Lithuania, was a marvel. At times, we would glide through cream-colored woods. Suddenly, the road would penetrate citadel-forests with high peaks, and pine trees would erect walls of bronze, made faintly white by scattered patches of snow. Had a procession of elves crossed before our wheels, we wouldn’t have been in the least surprised. Goisque and I took it in turns driving and being a passenger. In the zinc coffin of the sidecar, one was free to think. Or rather to daydream. I remember the mountain climber Reinhold Messner as he was crossing the Antarctic. As he pulled his pulka, he confessed he killed entire hours with erotic fantasies. We were driving toward Smorgon and trying to cover as much road as possible before dark. Full bellies, Moldavian dancers, and rosy thighs were dancing before my eyes.
“Tesson, what are you thinking?”
“About top locations,” I replied.
Gras’s theory about top locations was a good one. Between the villages of Pleshnitzy and Viliejka, since I had a hour to kill lying in my cold room on wheels, I tried to picture a typology of top locations, and identified six types:
The top locations of tragedy: they had been the settings for battles. The whisperings of History resounded there like an echo. For me, these top locations were Confrécourt, the plowing fields of the Soissonnais region, Masada, and Stalingrad.
Spiritual top locations: these were places historian Maurice Barrès described as “where the spirit blows, locations that pull the soul out of its lethargy,” stelas where the Earth touched the Sky, and were, as magi used to say, consecrated. Gods roamed there. The Ancient Greeks would erect temples in these mythical settings. For me, these places were the heights of Lhasa, where the city opened up like a flow of gold at the bottom of the pan, the Ménez-Hom, which bolted the tricuspid point of the Crozon peninsula, the peak of the Drus, where a Blessed Virgin subject to lightning bolts kept watch.
Geographical top locations: these didn’t need any help from Man. Their natural architecture and formal beauty spoke for itself. For me, these peak locations were Lake Manasarovar, the Kailash mirror, the source of Syr Darya in the heights of the Heavenly Mountain, the cliffs of the Ustyurt Plateau, by the Aral.
The top locations of memory: these were the graves of our friends or heroes. You would stand on the exact spot where they had died. For me, these peak locations were the shoulder of a road in Afghanistan where companions I was fond of died in my arms, the building on an embankment of the Seine, where a Jewish philosopher with an exalted voice lived his final days, the plowing fields of Villeroy, where Péguy was killed with a shot in the head.
The top locations of creation: these were not spectacular places but gardens, houses, and even ruins. There, in the shade of the trees, in the silence of an office, artists had composed everlasting works. For me, these top locations were the walls of Nicolas de Staël’s country house, the silent rooms of Anna Akhmatova’s apartment in Saint Petersburg, and the cafés of Rue de la Huchette where the shadows of Huysmans and Jean Follain roamed.
The top Heraclitean locations: these were places with physical contrasts. Locations for the old Ephesian wise man. He believed that “everything is born from discord,” and that “any contrariety is beneficial.” In geographical terms, these had to be places where there’s a marriage of elements, where water meets rock, where light fertilizes the sea, where the wind hisses in the trees. The walls of Calanques de Cassis belonged to these top locations.
It was bitterly cold and we were soaked. Moreover, in his sidecar, Gras was beginning to find time a drag. In the Pleshnitzy service station, where we stuffed our machines with seventy-two octane gas, he started moaning. “Hey, guys, you sold me a picnic in a comfortable sidecar where I was supposed to be able to read and write.”
“Do you have any complaints?” I said.
“Are you becoming precious?” Goisque said.
“Buzz off,” Gras said.
After crossing the Berezina, Napoleon could consider himself lucky, since he had escaped annihilation, saved his own skin, his marshals, and what could be called his army, down to two thousand officers, less than twenty thousand men, and forty thousand survivors in no condition to fight. “You see how one can pass right under the enemy’s nose?” he kept telling his close entourage.
From a strictly numerical point of view, just like at Borodino, the Russians had lost more men than the French.
From a tactical point of view, Napoleon had duped the enemy. The trick had been a slap in the face, an insolent disavowal. It underlined flaws in the Russian command. If Kutuzov and Tchitchagov had delayed launching their assaults, it was because they still feared the proletarian king. Neither of them wanted a full-frontal conflict with him. Napoleon continued to advance, crowned with “the capital gathered for many years,” von Clausewitz writes. Russians still saw this man at bay, reduced to walking while leaning on a stick, as the unvanquished sovereign. Napoleon’s power lay in his reputation. His former glory was his caparison.
From a human point of view, the soldiers of the Empire had made a supernatural effort. Drained of blood, the Grande Armée had gained a victory. Nevertheless, collective French memory remembered only the horror of the carnage. The name of this geographically insignificant waterway passed into History and current French language usage and acquired the meaning we know. If we’d stuck to the pure reality of facts, “it’s a Berezina,” in French, should have meant, “we made it by a whisker, guys, we felt it fly right by us, we got our fingers burned, but life goes on and stuff the Queen of England.”
The ordeal of the Emperor, accompanied by his ghosts, continued toward Vilnius, through Zembin, Pleshnitzy and Ilya. A rear guard of three thousand men was formed under the command of Ney. “Two or three days later,” Labaume writes, “it was so reduced that we wondered where the rear guard was even when we were with it.” Kutuzov was still hot on French heels. And the French kept melting like butter in the sun. The shame of having allowed the enemy to escape the mousetrap hurt Russian pride. As Caulaincourt puts it, Platov’s Cossacks, “tired of killing,” harried the stragglers and robbed them before leaving them to die stark naked in the woods. Forests and swamps rolled by, larded with frozen streams. One day, the Grande Armée got involved in a system of footbridges that crossed ruts. Caulaincourt was surprised by the enemy’s lack of initiative. “Six Cossacks with torches would have been sufficient to deprive us of this means of retreat.” Kutuzov’s hesitation, Tchitchagov’s errors, Wittgenstein’s slowness: the Russians seemed to be laying pearls of incompetence at the feet of Napoleon. The French could burn candles for their enemy.
They had not finished descending into hell. For them, hell was paved with ice. They were yet to experience the harshest cold of the countryside. As the wind and the snow tormented us on the bikes and sidecars, I thought of these soldiers wandering about at -22°F. Flocks of crows were circling over their troops. Semi-wild dogs were fighting over corpses, getting braver as the men were growing more exhausted. The temperature was constantly dropping in this early December of 1812.