Eastbound

by Maylis de Kerangal

She has a tragic and patchy image of Russia, a jumbled montage involving the fatal fall of a baby carriage down a monumental staircase in Odessa, the firebrand in the eyes of Michel Strogoff, the gymnast Elena Mukhina spinning on the uneven bars, the fevered face of Lenin as he addresses the crowd, the Soviet Union flag at the top of the Reichstag, doctored photos, Brezhnev’s eyebrows and Solzhenitsyn’s beard, La Mouette at the Odéon cinema one spring night, thousands of prisoners digging a canal between the Baltic and the White Sea, Nureyev leaping across the border in an airport, a parade of tanks on the Red Square and decorated tunics glimpsed between flakes of snow, the dusha, the invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, queues in front of stores seen on the news, large women swathed in scarves, the Sakharovs back to Moscow after years of internal exile in Gorki, spies traded on bridges at night, the birthmark on Gorbachev’s forehead, Soyuz, Yeltsin drunk, the smile of a young billionaire as he buys the Chelsea Football Club, top models, the mafia, murders, the hold-up of the entire country, the Chechen nightmare, Putin’s face, the lobby of the building where Anna Politkovskaya lived, the verdigris skin tone of Viktor Yushchenko, the war again, Ossetia and Georgia, the family of old believers found on the taiga after seventy years; she has never seen the Red Square, the bulbous domes of Saint Basil’s Cathedral or the frozen Volga, doesn’t speak a word of Russian, but ...