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…So they bought it. For 10 million dollars or something. The name of the lucky owner is Shinsuke Sakimoto, a Japanese collector and head of Valuence Japan. In the near future, he promised to put together a press conference and talk about what he is going to do with the legendary Jane Birkin Birkin Hermes bag. In the meantime, a little story that happened exactly twenty years ago.
– Will you help me sell my bag? – Jane Birkin approached me during her press conference.
It was in a restaurant on Patriarch’s Ponds, where we were called to talk to the French star on the eve of her concert at the BI-2 club.
I don’t know why, of all the journalists present, Jane suggested it to me. I guess I have the look of a man who trades in expensive handbags in his spare time.
Birkin Hermes stood on the table, shabby, with stickers from Amnisty International and other human rights organizations.
– Do you want to have an auction now? – I asked confusedly.
– Yes, yes! I’d love to sell it, and all the money would go to the Soldiers’ Mothers Fund or the victims of the Chechen war.
– How can you be without a bag? – The reporters were disturbed.
– It’s very simple. I’ll throw my belongings into two paper bags and go to St. Petersburg on tour. I don’t really need that bag myself.
When you encounter people like Jane Birkin, you can’t help but feel an inferiority complex. She was, of course, a rare creature. A fragile but resilient flower. And she didn’t know much about our lives back then. But she didn’t have to explain pain, injustice, cruelty. She knew that you can’t keep silent when evil happens. That’s why she protested, denounced, and gathered journalists. She was even ready to give away her bag just to get money for those who obviously needed it more than she did. And it did not matter where she sang: she could sing in a club, or on a theater stage, or in an underpass. It didn’t matter! In the old days they called them “blessed”. No age at all, no makeup at all. Flexible as a reed. A timeless “girl on a balloon”. And the balloon was the whole world to her. Until she fell ill, she was touring it non-stop: America, Japan, Israel, Ukraine… If you can not fly on Air France, will get there by tank. This was the case when she went to Kosovo at the height of hostilities. And the tank turned out to be the only and most reliable way of transportation.
In 2005, she was eager to go to Chechnya, but they wouldn’t give her a visa. They wouldn’t let her in. And she couldn’t even go to Ingushetia either. Thank you to the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers – they helped organize a concert in Moscow, which was held without much publicity and pomp. But everyone came then. I remember that the BI-2 club on Sadovoye Street was cramped, dark, and smelled of beer. For 2000 rubles you could stand on the dance floor near the stage. They say that even the French ambassador was going to trample along with everyone. However, it turned out later that he didn’t come.
But even without him, the contingent was appropriate: adults well into their 40s. For most of them, Jane is their youth, the forgotten tenderness that comes up to their throats every time you hear a trembling, thin voice diligently chanting: “Baby Alone in Babylon.”
Her repertoire changed, but at the core were always Serge Gainsbourg’s songs. Later in her life there would be other arrangements, other musicians, another love and another daughter. But Serge remained somewhere nearby all the time. He emerged in the second minute of the conversation and from the first moments of the concert. She utters: “mon mari,” and you realize that it could only be about Gainsbourg, she sang “Elisa,” and you realize that she is singing about lost happiness.
These old Gainsbourg hits played by Jane were like worn men’s shirts, keeping their native smell, warmth and tenderness, in which she, as a woman in love, wrapped herself, trying to prolong the illusion of intimacy, which did not break with their breakup or with his death – “Haine Pour Aime”, “Comment Te Dire Adieu”, “La Javanaise”.
She sang to him, she sang for him. And for us, I guess? And when there were no more words or songs left, a rain of hairpins spilling onto the stage – she unraveled her hair and began to dance. The Red Valkyrie, the eternally youthful veteran of the 60s who defied age, time and her unhappy circumstances. Many more sorrows awaited her: the suicide of her eldest daughter Kate, after which she was silent for five years, an illness she fought valiantly, concert cancelations and the inevitable losses that came with it… She died alone.
Then, in the fall of 2005, Jane donated all the proceeds from her concert in BI-2 to the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers. But sensible and unselfish Chechen mothers dissuaded her from selling the legendary bag. Hermes Birkin will come in handy. Well, it did! But not to Jane, but to her daughters Charlotte and Lou.
