The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme

by Andrei Makine

  I saw their two figures at the end of the alleyway, the big one and the little one, silhouetted against the lights of the “beer bar.” I should have caught up with them. Given them all the money I had. Warned the police. Carried off the child . . . But could all this really be a figment of my imagination? All along the alleyway the shutters of the booths were already closed, rays of light filtered out from inside. One could sense the silent presence of the stallholders. The fairground in darkness, these little wooden huts, each with its own secret, the child in her makeup, who had given me a smile . . . I preferred to believe it was a misunderstanding . . .

  The only places where I truly felt at home once more were the subway passages and the pedestrian tunnels, now transformed into bazaars of poverty. Old men were offering objects for sale that shouted out their rupture from apartments or rooms where their absence now left gaps impossible to fill. This was not the cheerful jumble of a flea market, but the debris of lives destroyed by the new times. I recognized the worn china of a cup, the shape of the heels on a pair of shoes, the trademark on a transistor radio . . . These relics dated from my childhood. A whole era on sale in these old hands, blue with cold.

  More than all the other changes, more even than the obscene flaunting of the new wealth, it was this dispersal of a human past that struck me. The feverish speed with which it was being made to disappear. This dispersal and also the beauty of the child in her makeup. And my ignorance of what ought to be done in these new times to protect that child.

  Siberia made me forget my botched homecoming. Here nothing had changed as of yet. The handful of new republics, arisen from the collapse of the empire, had done no more than add colors to the geographers’ maps. The earth remained the same: endless, white, indifferent to the rare appearances of men. Here, in the torpor of winter, they were watching out not for the latest upheavals in world news, but for the russet streak of sunlight that would graze the horizon in a few days’ time, after a long polar night.

  Listening to the two geologists in the izba at the Edge, I told myself that they came from the same era as those objects being sold by the old men in the subway passages. They lived as if the five thousand miles of snow that lay between them and Moscow had slowed the passage of time. The sixties? The seventies? Everything in the way they lived, the way they talked, was twenty or thirty years out of date. That joke about the new arrival having sex with a bear — I had heard it more than once in my youth. Time here was twenty years slow. No, it was more like a time apart from time, a flow of days that took its tempo from the hissing of snow squalls against the window, the wheezing of the fire, the breathing of these three sleeping people, each so different and all so close. The two men, their faces burned by the Arctic, the huge woman with slanted eyes, asleep in the room next door. (What are her dreams? Dreams where all is snow? Or on the contrary, filled with southern sunlight?) A nocturnal time, its rhythm derived from the throb of our blood in the arm crooked beneath the head, a warm pulse, adrift in the endless white, in the depths of this cosmic darkness, turned iridescent by the Arctic phosphorescence.

  Morning did not come. I was awakened by a storm hurling flurries of snowflakes against the windows and filling the house with a dull vibration. It took me several seconds to grasp that this was due to a helicopter landing close beside the Edge. I saw light behind the kitchen door and heard the clatter of aluminum plates and mugs. The geologists got up in a hurry and even, it seemed to me, in a kind of panic. Big Lev scrubbed his face furiously under the faucet. Little Lev hastily geared up the spring of his wind-up razor . . .

  The door yielded with a noisy crunch of shattered ice, and now I believed I could guess the reason for their disarray The man had to stoop as he made his way into the house, and when he paused at the center of the room, his face was level with the glowing lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. He wore a black jacket of reversed sheepskin, and boots of reindeer hide. From his great height he studied the room, noting the disorder left by the previous night’s bender, but said nothing, waiting for the two Levs to come to him. This they did, greeting him with assumed nonchalance, but with shifty eyes. “Hi there, Chief!” “Just five minutes, Captain, and we’re ready!” Big Lev almost looked small. Little Lev had to reach up with his arm to shake the pilots hand. The man eyed them in silence, then picked up the empty brandy bottle. “I see you’ve been ready since yesterday,” he said in a deep voice that sounded like the clutch being let in on an army four-wheel drive on a bitterly cold day. “I’m warning you, if I hear the slightest hiccup during the flight, I’ll throw you out, along with your firecrackers . . .”

  The kitchen door opened, and Valya came in carrying a huge kettle from which a wisp of steam emerged. I recalled my earlier astonishment: “What man could make love to her?” Now her body seemed to take on normal proportions, the pilot’s presence made her feminine, even seductive. “Would you like a bite to eat?” she asked him. Smiling, he replied rather gruffly: “No, we don’t have time. They’ve forecast heavy winds late in the day. . . Just dose these two boozers with a bit of brine, otherwise they’ll foul up the plane and half the Arctic . . .” He waved the brandy bottle and growled, still smiling: “Look at this. They get themselves drunk on imported hooch these days. Goddamn aristocrats. . .”

  Then Little Lev intervened, trying to be conciliatory, and indicating me with one hand: “This bottle, Chief. You see, it’s our comrade from Moscow who brought it for us. But it’s not strong, no way! The thing is, if he could come with us this morning? He’s a journalist. . .” The last sentence was uttered in ever fainter tones and disappeared into a concluding stammer.

  The pilot turned to me and took me in with a hard look, though without hostility. “The comrade from Moscow. . .” he murmured. “First you get them drinking and now they’re going to blow their own asses sky-high instead of dynamiting the mountain.” He bent his head to go into the kitchen and added over his shoulder, as if the matter were settled, “As for coming with us, very sorry. I don’t do guided tours.”

  Big Lev followed close behind him, avoiding my eye. Little Lev made a contrite face at me, spreading his arms in a gesture of helplessness.

  I went out. The day was just beginning to dawn: an ashen gray light enabled one to make out the line of the mountains, and at my feet a dwarf tree reached up toward the sky, its delicate, twisted branches reminiscent of barbed wire. In the half-light the helicopter was stirring up a slow flurry of flakes. I was an hour’s flight away from my long journey’s goal. Since leaving Paris I had traveled more than seven thousand miles. Up there was the spot where Jacques Dorme’s aircraft lay, somewhere at the heart of that icy mountain chain. I could feel the cold (minus thirty-five? minus forty? the same as yesterday . . .) raking my face, breaking up my vision through the facets of tears. I suddenly grasped that it was essential to see that spot, that a writers curiosity had nothing to do with it, that life had been secretly leading me toward this place, and if I did not see it now my own life would be totally different.

  The door creaked. The two Levs emerged, laden with crates, and made for the helicopter. I heard Valya’s voice. The pilot paused on the threshold. I accosted him awkwardly, standing in his path: “Listen, perhaps I could . . .” I saw the expression in his eyes, did not finish my sentence (“pay you?”). He gave me a pat on the shoulder and advised me, in more friendly tones: “If I were you, I’d head straight for the village. There won’t be another tractor until this evening . . .”

  It was then that, in a lackluster voice, reconciled to the setback and no longer asking for anything, I talked about Jacques Dorme. I managed to tell the story of his life in a few brief, spare sentences. I was in such a state of dejection that I scarcely heard what I was saying. And it was only in the state I was in that I was able to convey all the grievous truth of that life. A pilot from a remote country meets a woman from the same country and for a very few days, in a city that will soon be reduced to ruins, they are lovers; then he goes off to the ends of th
e earth to fly airplanes destined for the front and dies, crashing into an icy hillside under the pale sky of the Arctic Circle.

  I told it differently. Not better but still more briefly, closer to the essence of their love.

  The pilot took his hand off the door handle and murmured, as if in an effort of memory: “Yes, I recall it now . . . It was that air bridge between Alaska and Siberia. The Alsib . . . They were real aces. They’ve almost been forgotten these days. That plane, it’s not the one you can see on the Trident?” I nodded. The Trident, a mountain with three peaks. . .

  “This is the last one, Chief. We’re ready to go!” Little Lev was coming down the front steps, a crate balanced on his shoulder.

  The pilot gave a slight cough. “And this woman. She was your . . . ? Did you know her?” I spoke very softly, as if there were no one listening to me in this white desert. “To me she was like a kind of. . . Yes, like a mother . . .”

  “We’re O.K., Captain!” Big Levs voice was cut off by the slamming of a door.

  “Do you have any papers on you?” asked the pilot, rubbing his nose. I thought about my passport written in a language he would not be able to read, and the note on it: “To any country except the USSR.”

  “No, I’m . . . No. No papers . . .” He shook his head, and spread his hands wide, as if to say: “In that case, there’s nothing I can do for you.” Then suddenly he indicated his helicopter with a jerk of his chin, sighed, and smiled: “All right, come on, then. Get in!”

  As it took off, the aircraft banked and for the space of a second I saw the house on the Edge, the light in the kitchen window. It seemed to me as if the pilot had his eye on that window too.

  TWO AND A HALF YEARS AFTER THAT SECRET JOURNEY my manuscript was complete. A much fictionalized account, for at the time I believed that only a novel could render the improbabilities of real life readable.

  It was turned down by several publishers and then embarked on that ghostly but heady existence undergone by all texts that are repeatedly rejected: the life of a stillborn child or that of a specter. Periods in limbo interspersed with renewed hopes, with nights of feverish rereading, with ultimate disgust at the written word. The feeling of preaching in an all too crowded wilderness. A dead-end street whose extremity recedes, the farther down it you travel. An endless cul-de-sac.

  I was halfway along this course when the receding of the dead-end street seemed to come to a halt. I was in the office of an editorial director at one of the big Paris publishing houses, listening to such fervent praise that I feared a trap. In fact, everything about this meeting was suspicious. I had expected to be confronted by a man of letters with thinning white hair, a hacking cough, his clothes steeped in tobacco, his body half buried beneath manuscripts, a real publishing animal. Yet here was a woman, seated with a lizard’s elegance at a table where my text and nothing else occupied the place of honor. Petite, dark, with very intense, shining eyes, she was perched upon a tall, old-fashioned chair, so hard that a cushion was needed. Hers was the charm that a man may find provocative in a woman who is not his type but in whom he can see precisely what it is that might inspire passionate love in another man, the man he is not. This notion came to me later on. All I saw at the time was the movement of her lips, voicing a wildly enthusiastic opinion without any publisher’s reserve. I doubtless believed in the miracle of the preacher in the wilderness who is heard at last. This was my undoing.

  I interrupted her (she was saying: “What’s so great is the two of them, the child and the old Frenchwoman telling him about her country and teaching him her language . . .”). I began to reveal the true story that lay behind the fiction. Odd scraps of life experience that only the plot of a novel could link together, scraps of love that only imagination could fashion into a love story, and a vast throng of men and women who had had to be cast aside into oblivion . . .

  “You see, the old Frenchwoman and her grandson were not actually . . .” I pressed on with what was, in spite of myself, fast becoming a work of demolition. I must have noticed this from the slight expression of pique that came over the woman’s face. “But all the characters are real people!” I concluded, as if offering the authentication of a vintage.

  I do not know if she was aware that it was her eulogies that had lured me into this absurd outpouring. Her disappointment was that of a numismatist, ecstatic over some old coins a ditchdigger has brought in, who holds forth elegantly about the time and place of their minting and suddenly sees the workman pick up a precious ducat and mark it with his tooth, to show that it is, indeed, gold.

  Her tone did not change. “Fine. But what I’m trying to say is that, in the last part especially, where you talk about the pilot. . . there are too many raw facts that have not been imaginatively reworked at all. And then there’s the character of that general. That random encounter . . .”

  “But it’s all true.”

  “Which is precisely my point. And that’s what jars. It’s too true for a novel.”

  I left, having been given a polite but firm ultimatum to the effect that I should rewrite the section in question.

  The late retort, the esprit de Vescalier, occurred to me, not on the staircase, which was too narrow and hazardous for thoughts about literature, but on the curve of the sidewalk as I walked toward the rue du Bac. Amid a torrent of belated arguments, what came to mind was the debate about truth and fiction unleashed by War and Peace. Murderous criticism, historians finding more than a thousand errors in the book, and one newspapers verdict: “Even if this author had a shred of talent, he must still be condemned.” But especially the opinion of the old academician, Narov, who could not forgive Tolstoy for the degrading portrayal of Kutuzov, the commander in chief of the Russian forces. For on the eve of the decisive battle against Bonaparte at Borodino we see the savior of Russia lounging in an armchair, a somewhat relaxed and extremely unmilitary posture, and to add insult to injury, immersed in a French novel! Les Chevaliers du Cygne (The Knights of the Swan) by Madame de Genlis . . . “What kind of perverse imagination would create so false a scene?” thundered the academician. “At that fateful hour Kutuzov would have been engaged in poring over battle maps — or at the very least, reading Caesars Commentaries” Difficult to gainsay Narov, who took part in the battle and even lost an arm there. And yet. . . After Narov’s death a good many French novels are actually found in his own library, among them Les Chevaliers du Cygne, with this note in handwriting on the flyleaf: “Read in the hospital, where I was nursing my wounds, after being taken prisoner by the French.”

  For several seconds I regretted not having recounted this anecdote to the editorial director. But did the story, in fact, prove anything? Battle maps or Madame de Genlis? Perhaps, quite simply, the melancholy of an old man with only one year left to live, a man who has seen so many wars, so many victories, and so many defeats and who at “that fateful hour” lets his gaze stray into the serenity of a fine day in early September. He knows that tomorrow this calm will vanish beneath explosions that turn the earth upside down, beneath the tramp of hundreds of thousands of men impatient to slit one another’s throats, beneath the torrents of blood shed by the expected fifty to a hundred thousand victims. Then sometime later the same calm will reign once more, the same sun will shine, the same gossamer threads will float on the air.

  As I continued along the rue du Bac, I thought that to escape from this childish equation, balancing the real against the imaginary, one should probably merely write down those utterly simple moments of human presence. Old Kutuzov’s gaze at a window open onto the September sky . . . Nothing else.