“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.
2
In Russia, you count the amount of alcohol you drink in grams. A small glass: 50 grams. A large glass: 100 grams. A wreck of a morning: 500 grams.