18

PLAGUED DAY AND NIGHT BY the Cossacks, we reached Zembin, a village surrounded by swamps, the icy surfaces of which broke under the weight of the cannons that were traveling off the main road. When we arrived, I recognized the treasury wagons and, hurrying toward them, I went to look for Alfred. But now Prince Eugène’s Italian Guard was in charge of the treasury, and no one could tell me where the Vistula cavalry was.

As we bivouacked that night, Larrey calculated that we’d have to march some fifty leagues to make it to Vilna, and eighty to reach the Niemen.

“We’re going to have to carry out this entire march in temperatures between fifteen and thirty degrees below zero, or perhaps even worse. The slightest carelessness, the smallest lack of vigilance, means death. We must combat the drowsiness produced by continual exposure to low temperatures; we must resist the temptation to lie down alongside the road. The only remedy is to walk and walk and walk,” he warned me and Petit, huddled near the already struggling fire we’d managed to make that afternoon with green wood, gunpowder, and sparks from our pistols. The snow melted from the heat, the flames and embers had been sinking until, half a meter down, they met the sand of the square. The smoke, thick and harsh, issued from down there, like a chimney burning wet rags.

Uncle Charles had gone in search of dry wood. The Guard had demolished several houses and we were waiting for him with a jar of sweetened cognac and melted snow. After a while we saw him coming, carrying several lengths of board and accompanied by two women. These turned out to be Madame Fusil and a young actress with her company. Both had lost their carriages in the Berezina and were traveling, insufficiently clothed, by foot. The fire stoked and our dinner finished off in two sips, we stayed up talking about our misfortunes. They slept next to us, wrapped in my green billiard cloth and in a wolfskin of Petit’s, who, imprudently, had begun flirting with the young woman, despite the fact that he knew that her father, along with several other French actors, had been sent to Siberia by the mayor of Moscow. When reveille sounded, the women went off in search of any vehicle that would take them and they didn’t return.

The next day, the Cossacks attacked the rearguard and made off with a large number of wagons. The following day, a Guard patrol found a hundred deserters who’d managed to cross the Berezina and had been hiding in the forest. They had two Intendance wagons filled with mounted Grenadier uniforms, caps, and boots, and another loaded with food and barrels of vodka. Since we were assigned to the General Staff, we were given boots. Mine were too big for me, but I cut my cashmere shawl in two and wrapped up my feet. Then we traded our old boots for pieces of boiled horsemeat. Even this foodstuff had become scarce, since the number of horses, alive or dead, was now so greatly reduced. We continued walking in the snow and the cold.

We came to a large village called Smogorni on December 5th. I remembered it well. We had stopped over there in July. The immense forests that surrounded it were full of bears. They were hunted for the high prices their skins fetched, and their paws were considered the finest of delicacies. They were also captured alive for the purpose of training them and selling them to gypsies and buyers from other countries. Seeing them dance in the square, our soldiers had spared them their lives, though they sacked every last storehouse of its furs or food. Now the village was deserted and encased in frozen crystal. Translucent icicles hung from the cornices and rooftops, and vapor escaped from under the doors as though the houses were breathing. In the adjacent forest, the tree branches were bowed under the weight of the ice; the heat from the campfires made them glimmer like garlands in an enchanted wood. Here and there were frozen birds, like alabaster statuettes. As campfires came to life, the birds began falling from the trees like ripe fruit. The sky was completely clear and, for some reason, the stars seemed to have multiplied, changing the configuration of the constellations. In the distance, wolves howled endlessly at the crescent moon. I thought of Hecate, the sorceress. I’d always felt like a foreigner in Russia, but never as I did in that small village. That night Napoleon, traveling with a retinue of three carriages and accompanied by a small entourage, abandoned the Grande Armée to its fate.

I heard the news while I was helping Uncle Charles probe a wound to a sergeant’s buttock. “The scoundrel left last night for his castle in Paris,” said the man, face down on a table. “He left us behind, just like he did in Egypt. Do you remember, doctor? You were there.” As the news spread, I found out that he had taken as an escort several Chasseurs of the Guard and two squadrons of the Vistula that had been bivouacking in the forest. Alfred commanded one of them. Once again, I’d come close to him; once again, I’d lost him.

I searched anxiously for him when we arrived in Viednicky two days later. There, Napoleon had changed escorts and horses and, after many inquiries, I arrived at the decimated stable where I’d been told some Polish lancers had made camp.

“Lubomirski? He’s still on the road, monsieur,” Captain Wonsowicz, a small man with a war-hardened face told me. “When we left, we were more than six hundred men, and when we arrived here there were thirty-six of us. The Emperor has fresh horses; we do not,” he explained with a strange smile.

My legs went weak and I began to tremble.

“Might he still be alive? We’re friends. I’d very much hoped to find him,” I said, breathing deeply and bracing myself against a beam.

The captain thought for a moment. Through the holes in the slats, I could see delicate snowflakes floating slowly through the air. “Good snow. Fine and dry,” he said, not looking at me. After a while, as I was getting ready to repeat the question, he turned his head toward me and added: “Men like Lubomirski don’t just die. Had I been in his place, I’d have tried to band the men without mounts together so they wouldn’t fall behind. I think it would be possible to unite four hundred or so, possibly more. They would form a battalion of men on foot, and they’d follow the forest in the direction of Lithuania. They would not die from hunger or cold. Of that I am certain. The spent horses would provide meat, and the forest, wood. I doubt that the Cossacks would dare to attack a battalion marching in formation and without wagons to steal.”

I sighed with relief, knowing that Alfred, whose knowledge of the life of the soldier went back to his adolescence, had managed to do everything that his friend had told me. “Where do you suppose he is now?” I asked.

“Probably marching a route parallel to Ney or Victor’s corps. . . . A day’s march ahead of us, a day and a half, at the most. Don’t worry, we shall see him in Vilna.”

I couldn’t sleep that night for thinking of Alfred. At dusk the day before, I had seen people camping off the road, alongside the forest. I’d had no reason to think that Alfred might have been among them. And suddenly the idea came to me that if I didn’t go in search of him, we’d never see one another again; that even if we both arrived in Vilna on the same day, something would happen to prevent us from meeting. Shortly before dawn, while my companions were still asleep, I shouldered my rucksack, wound my blanket about my head, and started down the road with a swift gait. I had thought of leaving a note for my uncle. But what could I have told him that would not have seemed an act of utter madness?

The wind began just after noon. At first it was only a frigid breeze on my cheek that was barely strong enough to stir the snow that had fallen the day before. In front of me, I could see how it swept the white powder, lifting it just below the level of my knees and creating a kind of mirage only visible six or seven meters in the distance. The stragglers approaching from the west came toward me with their feet sunk in that fine-spun cloud and, at times, seemed like ghosts suspended in the wind. “You’re going the wrong direction,” one said to me, passing to my left. Suddenly, the wind intensified and its gusts, clothed now in all the snow of the steppes, blew from one side of the road to the other, pausing on high, or down low, to describe spirals and odd shapes. I could now barely make out the forms of the stragglers and the wind began to howl. I was as cold as if I were walking naked. With my chin sunk into my chest and my arm protecting my face, through slanted eyes I saw a man, like a weak shadow, covered in a swath of window curtain. Almost directly in front of me, he stepped off the road and turned his back to the wind. I saw him walk quickly away until he faded into the clouds of snow. I decided to follow him. I took a few steps, but the force of the wind threw me face down. I managed to stand up, only to fall again, this time directly behind the straggler’s boots. I considered staying like that for a moment, stretched out on the snow, except that the gray bulk of the man became covered, within minutes, in a white blanket. Without yet standing up, I figured out how to turn around. I was able to get to my feet with the help of my walking stick, and I bent over at the waist so as to encounter less resistance from the windstorm. The blasts of pulverized snow choked me and I soon fell again. I groped blindly for my walking stick. In reality, it was of no use to me at all, but as I searched for it, patting the snow desperately, I felt the frigid bite of terror rise in my stomach. My heart began to pound in my chest and I started to scream, knowing full well that my cries were snatched away by the storm like wisps of smoke. I screamed until I could no longer hear my own voice. But, by means of those screams, and without meaning to, I managed to purge myself of fear. I threw myself face down and thought that I was going to die; I thought this with a sense of resignation, as though it were something unavoidable that no one could prevent from happening. I prepared to die in peace, and immediately I saw how Ney’s men would see me when they passed by this stretch of road: a low, rounded burial mound, scarcely a tiny wave in that vast sea of snow. That would be all they would see. I myself had seen, and even unintentionally stepped on, many of those imperceptible tombs. I knew how I would die. Larrey had explained to me the changes that occur in the human body when it’s exposed to low temperatures. First, the circulation to the capillaries is arrested; then to the small veins. My fingers, ears, nose, cheeks, and eyelids would go numb, and I’d discover that I could no longer close my eyes. The idea that, come spring, my cadaver would emerge with open eyes seemed intolerable to me, and I closed them. Now they wouldn’t find me ridiculously awake. Now I wouldn’t be a wooden doll with glass eyes. When they threw me on the bonfire to dispose of me, I would no longer seem to look on impassively as I was reduced to charcoal and ash. This certainty gave me peace of mind. And now it was only a question of letting go. Where would I go? To what place? Would I see Robert there, and Aunt Margot, as the Uhlan appeared to have seen them? Would I come to know my mother there, with her copper-colored hair, or my father, who had shown me my first rainbow? Who could say? Because now I could sense presences beyond my closed eyelids and the hours of my life swirled vertiginously like the roulette wheel in Baden-Baden, and, little by little, that snowy niche transformed into a forest clearing, ringed with mushrooms and yellow dandelions, and of course, I couldn’t see it but I could sense it, I was in the woods back in Foix and I heard the gardener’s daughters laughing as they folded up the tablecloth and put the leftovers from our picnic away in Aunt Margot’s big basket, the heel of bread, the chicken wings, the pâté, the blackberry tart, the bottle of lemonade, the clinking of the silverware and the glasses as they were settled into their places, and everything seemed perfectly fine to me and I was happy to be able to die in peace, and just when I was quite contentedly stretched out on the soft grass, Fairy Godmother held out a golden key, something like a fishhook that yanked powerfully on my consciousness, pulling it free, and I could feel how the cold and the whistling wind and the sound of my blood and my own will were returning me to my body. How many times had I awoken at the sound of reveille with two feet of snow piled on top of my cloak? The storm would soon pass and the most important thing, the truly important thing, was to cover myself well and curl into a little ball and allow myself to be entombed so as to hoard any heat my still living body could produce. Determined to survive, I fought off the drowsiness by moving my fingers and toes and thinking of the things I’d like to do one day. One by one, I went about accumulating wishes until, simply and diaphanously, the desire to have a child came to me. It was then I knew who had yanked on that fishhook: Maryse, ever determined to triumph, to always give her best possible performance; Nadezhda, suckling at my breast and revealing my capacity as a mother and, above all, the woman in my painting, the Woman, the sum of all women, whom I carried folded against my breast and who showed me the road I had yet to travel. What would my child be like, where and when would it be born, who would its father be, my second or third husband, as the gypsy woman had predicted? And so I passed the time until I realized that I could no longer hear the whistling of the wind above me.

I knew exactly what I needed to do. I knew that if I tried to stand all at once I’d fail and the fear would return and I’d be lost. I knew that I must first move my hands, rotate my wrists until I could feel my forearms again; then try to move my elbows using all the muscles in my arms and shoulders. I was soon able to draw my hands out of my cloak, and I began to dig. Luckily, it was a dry snow, as fine as corn meal. I dragged myself upward until I could stick my head out, and I took a few anxious breaths of the clean air left behind by the storm. The effort exhausted me so that I had to stop moving. My face was numb, but I could raise my eyelids and look toward the road. A few stragglers were already walking it, with that lead-footed, erratic gait that was so common among them; others, still buried, poked their hands up through the snow like pitiful tulips. It was still impossible for me to smile, but I did so internally, thinking that if any of those men were to look my way, they would see a face deposited on top of the snow like a discarded mask. And then I saw him. He was blind. A scrap torn from a shirt covered his eyes. The blood, dried on the bandage and on his cheeks, was the color of the red enamel often seen in Spanish depictions of Christ on the cross. The Cossacks or the peasants must have blinded him when they stole his clothes, for he was walking covered only by a tattered blanket and with his feet wrapped in rags. He walked alone. Someone must have helped him, guiding him to the road and dressing him in those pathetic garments; they had also given him the shaft of a broken lance to use as a walking stick. He bore his misery and pain with a poignant dignity. Testing the snow with his cane, he walked in a straight line with his head held high. When he passed in front of me, I could see that he was trembling and that his lips were moving, and for a second I heard him reciting one of those English poems he liked so much. I screamed and screamed his name, but they were mute cries. I tried to get out of my snow trap, to no avail. I watched him head west, mumbling stanzas that I couldn’t understand, his red hair extinguishing little by little, like the last flame in a candelabra. I saw him go, knowing that I’d lost him, that I’d never see him again and that it would be useless to look for him.

“Are you alive or dead?” a straggler asked me around sunset, without a doubt trying to ascertain whether or not he could rob me. I had managed to draw near to the road, but, my energy sapped, I’d sat down to wait for the sugared cognac to revive me. My clothes were completely covered in a dusting of snow and I must have looked like one of those who, exhausted, had resigned themselves to death, knowing that their bodies, as hard as stone, would serve as relics of that miserable war until spring came. I looked up. The man who’d spoken was Grenelle, the veteran artilleryman whom I’d met at the entrance to Viazma.

“I’m alive,” I replied. “Do you recognize me?”

“Yes.”

I gave him the last of the cognac I had left. Then we joined with two other artillerymen who had made a bonfire alongside an abandoned wagon. Like me, they all had frostbitten feet, and I advised them that, in order to avoid gangrene, they should not get too close to the fire. Then it started snowing and we all lay down to sleep under the wagon. I was so tired that it wasn’t until I awoke that I realized I’d been robbed. My cloak was open and my pockets empty. Seeing Aunt Margot’s locket on the edge of my blanket, I realized that I was no longer wearing the gold chain that had held it around my neck. I said nothing to Grenelle and his friends. I’d decided that it would be best if I acted none the wiser. We warmed our hands over the embers that remained of the fire and, despite the fact that it was still snowing, we began to walk. We were all limping, and I was trying not to step on the burial mounds that had arisen in the fresh snow and the silence.

As you’ll have no doubt noted, I prefer not to speak of my feelings of sorrow, of those desolate pilgrimages among cathedrals of grief. What purpose could it serve to illuminate with words that which ought to remain dark, secluded; that which ought to remain a requiem, the concern of darkness, of the ashes within? Nevertheless, it’s obvious that I don’t shrink from speaking of my dead. I couldn’t do so, for with them, I made love or marched to war; they were—they remain—the salt of my life. I evoke them, my dearly beloved, and they come to me, ever reliable and accommodating, regardless of my mood or the time of day. At other times it is they who seek me out, who find me and, transparently, superimpose themselves on another’s face or gesture. And for a moment, Robert’s eyes become confused with those of the corner barber, a man with long eyelashes whose gaze seems to spread across one’s skin; or I see a perfect replica of Claudette diligently filling a parcel with peaches for a man with an umbrella tucked under his arm; or I pause to watch Alfred, slightly overweight, as he tries on a hat in front of the mirror in a shop on Broadway while Aunt Margot, at twenty, the living image of the portrait I wear around my neck, looks on, enchanted. It’s true what they say. It’s true that, in old age, the body likes to drink from the pools of its own memory. And it’s not just that it hopes to recapture the time swept away by gray hairs and wrinkles; it’s that we find it difficult to forget those we so loved. It is they who impose themselves over time, who invite us, insistently, to join them in their houses of mirrors. And what else can I do but sink my pen into the inkwell, as one crossing a threshold, and meet them there? What better proof of fidelity can I offer them but to request their company on my firefly’s flight?

Nearly dragging one another, we arrived in Vilna. There were no longer battle corps or battalions or regiments. With the exception of a few hundred men with the Old Guard, almost all of us had descended to the sad condition of straggler. The lighthearted and elegant retinue of officers, nobles, and diplomats we’d left there in the summer had fled, terrified at the news of our approach. When we entered through the long, narrow gateway to the city—where a situation similar to the one created by the bridges across the Berezina had arisen—we discovered that the hospitals were already full to overflowing, as many of the ambulances dispatched from Moscow, Borodino, Smolensk, and countless other places we’d waged battles, had come here. It was necessary to force the monks, under threat of death, to abandon their monasteries in order to make room for the wounded and ill. Like a plague of rats, we dispersed across the squares and streets in search of a café or an inn, where we might buy a plate of food and drink a glass of wine by the fire. Then we went to the storehouses of the Intendance, as we’d been told that we were to be reprovisioned. But the lines were so long and the bureaucratic administration so slow and, upon seeing that the provisions were muskets, cartridge cases, and two kilos of bread, the majority went off to find lodging anywhere they could. The locals wanted nothing to do with us; they had locked themselves in their houses and precious few offered us shelter. Only the merchants, the tavern keepers, the Jews, and the civil servants paid us any heed, and this thanks only to the gold we brought in our saddlebags. We were a louse-ridden, starving, limping, sick, dirty, and foul-smelling herd if there ever was one. Suffice to say that the rooms we occupied had to be fumigated after we left.

It had been easy for me to find Uncle Charles and Larrey. It had not been a joyful reunion. The first was suspicious of my motive for desertion and was hurt that I’d left without telling him; the latter thought that I’d straggled on purpose, neglecting my duties as assistant surgeon. His voice took on an acidic tone when he told me that Petit had been captured by the Cossacks as he was driving the medicine wagon. I made my apologies, but did not offer any explanation as to my departure for the rearguard. Although I could barely stand, I willingly helped them the best I could. There were fourteen hospitals and very few doctors. More than taking care of patients, we became heralds of death, pointing to the lifeless bodies that could be tossed into the patio, or indicating which were sick with typhus so that they could be transferred to the largest of the monasteries. When we learned that the Russians were on their way, we abandoned thousands of those poor devils to their good graces.

Despite the fact that spring has already begun to color the streets of New York, the physiological mechanism that drives my body has not yet taken note of the new season; for the first time ever, I’m aware that the calendar is moving in one direction, and I in another. Have I been permanently trapped in winter? I fear so. “It’s been days since you’ve left the hotel, madame,” Milly said just a while ago. “It worries me to see you working so much, writing since dawn.” A good girl, Milly, only she doesn’t understand that I resent every hour I spend away from my papers. But no, she must understand. Aside from being the only witness to my struggle with the pen, she copies, in her flawless hand, each and every completed page I hand over to her. She’s witnessed how what was, at first, the bittersweet labor of converting memories into paragraphs, has now become a dangerous obsession. So dangerous, in fact, that lately I’ve been asking myself if I’ll survive it—I work with the feverish steadfastness of a machine, stopping only when, exhausted, my eyes close over the paper. And when I think of everything I have yet to tell, of the years I’ve yet to grind out, I’m struck by the fear of leaving my work unfinished. Today I realized that, in my race against the inevitable, I’m scarcely gaining ground. As my past becomes ink, I’m proportionally losing my fire, my internal combustion. It may be that what has kept me active and healthy was the accumulated heat of all my summers; one might say that I was bursting with hot air, like a balloon heading toward the clouds. But now, after I’ve burned up so many memories, I have the impression that I’m getting colder and that I’ll end up a poor exhausted skin, deflated, hanging uselessly from a flagpole or laid out, full of wrinkles, on a rooftop spattered with pigeon shit. What I gain through my writing, I lose in life force, something like the race between Achilles and the Tortoise. No doubt about it, this is not going well; I scarcely sleep, my digestion is poor, and my left leg is worse than ever—I can no longer do without my cane. Another symptom: I’ve always been curious about what’s happening in the world or I’ve had a plan or two up my sleeve; a trip, a new way of increasing my fortune, or even the search for trustworthy inheritors to whom to leave it. But now I don’t even follow the war in Cuba in the newspaper, or what’s happening in France, which is saying something, and if I heard about the Suez Canal it was only thanks to Milly. As for traveling, I get tired just thinking of more boats, more hotels and cities, more trunks to pack and unpack. It also seems pointless to acquire more properties or stocks—what for? After making out five, no, six wills, I’ve found no better beneficiary than the Red Cross in Geneva. If only I were visited by a hopeful dream or some vision that would ignite my spirit, I’d have something to delay my fall, a pair of wings or a providential influx of hot air that would allow me to float until I finish my narrative. But I no longer dream and, no mater how I search, I don’t see anything beyond the page I’m writing. What’s worse, a few minutes ago, as I was thinking about all of this, I felt tempted to set down the pen and simply be quiet and alone; to send Milly back to her Yorkshire of moors and stone fences and lie down to die in this sumptuous mausoleum of marble, wall-hangings, and hydraulic elevators. Except that, reluctant to surrender, my memory has called up Larrey’s words in Russia: “We must combat the drowsiness produced by continual exposure to low temperatures; we must resist the temptation to lie down alongside the road. The only remedy is to walk and walk and walk,” words that Maryse surely would have applauded. Very well, Doctor Larrey, I’ll set my pessimism to walking. Something will come to me; something will happen. I’ll start by reading the newspaper from cover to cover. I’ll go to the theater with Milly, and to dinner at Delmonico’s now and then. For the time being, although I’m feeling wintry, I must admit that I’m still sparking like a dry wick. Who knows? Maybe, in two or three weeks’ time, I’ll manage to catch up with spring.

Walking as best we could, we took the road to Kovno, the first city we’d occupied back in the summer, now the final leg of our retreat. Of the hundred thousand of us that left Moscow on October 19th, there were now only five thousand, almost all of us lame. It was then that a black musician, the horn player with a regiment of mounted Chasseurs, composed the song that suited us precisely. He didn’t give it a name, but it immediately became known as La Boiteuse. Never had a military march so perfectly described the gait of the soldier at the point of collapse. It was not even two minutes long, and it had no lyrics, but its simplicity was its greatest virtue. Otherwise, it never would have won us over. In the first few bars, orchestrated for brass, the notes seemed to drag along like a cripple’s leg; percussion dominated in the next bars, the clacking of drumsticks played the downbeat, the upbeat rounded out by the bass drum, as though limping along on a lame foot. We adjusted our step to its rhythm, limping and laughing at ourselves, making a joke out of the miserable spectacle we made. It was a march of life and of death. And while its spirit of parody helped a few of us make it through, its distant horns heralded the hour of death to many, the time to sit down, one final time, on the side of the road.

Of all the marches, I felt La Boiteuse to be the most mine, the ragged rhythm limping along with me and all the rest of us. Nevertheless, its gruesome brilliance was short-lived. Besieged by the Russian light cavalry and the bands of Cossacks, there were fewer and fewer of us every hour that went by. And so, the day came when La Boiteuse was nothing more than a distant horn and drum, somewhere back in the rearguard, where Ney was still battling. Somewhere near Kovno, I ceased to hear it altogether. (Count Dumas, the Quartermaster General, was drinking with some friends in a café when he saw a peasant dressed in a shabby beige overcoat, and a black man with a bugle approaching. The peasant had a huge red beard and frostbite on his forehead and eye-sockets. “I’ve finally made it to Kovno,” he said. “But Dumas, don’t you recognize me?” he added. “Well, no. Who are you?” he replied. “We’re the rearguard of the Grande Armée, and I’m Field Marshall Ney.”)

Years later, under the title La Boiteuse-March des Eclopés, the score was published in Paris. The date given for its composition was correct: 1812. It was unattributed. It said, in parenthesis, that it was anonymous, and I thought that was as it should be. That march had belonged to everyone, to the few of us who had survived, and to the last of our dead.