I knew in advance that it would be impossible to touch up Jacques Dorme’s life story. To make it more “literary”? To what end? Impossible, too, to tamper with the figure of the general, the man for whom, according to the pilot, heaven would “play a greater part than anything else.” That was the way those words had been reported to me, out of context, as a simple matter of fact. This French general was no more than a vague figure mentioned in a more or less chance conversation on a night rescued from oblivion thanks to a broken amber necklace. Why should it be necessary to tell it differently?
So I sacrificed these two men, tightened up the narrative, thinking somewhat ruefully as I did so of those group portraits in Stalin’s era, from which — thanks to expert brushwork — the faces of leaders who had been shot used to disappear.
Wasted effort, because the text was rejected anyway, later accepted elsewhere, published, enjoyed great success, exposed me to fleeting renown and to a surprisingly more tenacious resentment (“Do these immigrants think they can teach us how to write in French?” ruminated one Parisian critic), and finally relegated me to a new anonymity, infinitely preferable to the previous one, stripped as it was now of any illusions.
Toward the end of this whirlwind, however, I had an encounter indirectly linked to the two characters who had been sacrificed. A May evening in Canberra, autumn in Australia, a discussion with my readers (their irrepressible desire to know what is “true” and what is fiction in the book). Then a conversation with a man in his thirties, the French cultural attache, who has had the tact not to carry on over dinner where my readers left off, as people from embassies generally do; he lets me catch my breath and also talks very little about himself. Only after dinner, when we find ourselves under the sky, with its strange array of constellations, does he talk, very simply, about the day of the generals death (he is his great-great-nephew and bears the same name, but has no reason to suppose what this name signifies in my own life). In any case he had not seen much that day, he was too young. An armored personnel carrier, with the turret removed, bore the coffin up to the little church, a sober ceremony . . . Later, in school, the teacher asked them to write what they thought about the dead man.
As he talks to me, he evinces no desire to fire my imagination, recognizing that, being a child, he has remembered only details, often trivial ones. I sense that I could add my own tale to his, but that to do so I would have to go back to the boy listening to the story of the snapped necklace and the pilot who flew over endless icy wastes, the boy who had seen the French general in the middle of the steppes beyond the Volga. For a moment I am on the point of coming out with it, and he seems to sense this past in me . . . Then we both remark on the beauty of the Southern Cross, particularly glorious on this autumn night, and part company.
2
FROM THAT BOYHOOD WHAT REMAINS NOW is an early morning in front of the half-open door of the infirmary. I am there, my hand poised to knock, I can already see the woman sitting inside, then, suddenly, this gesture: the woman squeezes her left breast, massages it, as if she were suffering from heartburn or were quite simply adjusting a brassiere too tight for that large breast. I knock and go in. She examines me and sets about washing the ugly scratch along my thigh. She is a young woman with slightly red hair, her movements are slow. I stay standing, towering over her, it is strange to be seeing an adult woman in this way, seeing her face bowed forward, the apparent resignation in her eyes. When she looks up there is an admission of complicity between us. I leave the room unable to distinguish between mother and woman in the one who has just dressed my wound. Both unknown, both desired, intensely so.
* * *
I had been hurt trying to hold back the orphanages garbage bin on a waterlogged slope. Each morning a supervisor appears at the entrance to the dormitory a list of names in his hand, and announces the duty roster. Always two names and, in response, a sotto voce muttering of oaths.
This time my partner was a youth despised by us all, not for his weakness, which would have been logical in the enclosed world of the orphanage, where only strength counted, but for being peasant-like. Indeed, such was his rustic air, with his perpetually muddy shoes and his way of scratching his shaven head, that he was nicknamed “Village” . . . Without saying a word to him, I grasped one of the handles of the bin and we set about pushing this great steel container along a dirt road in the rain-sodden darkness of an autumn morning. Suddenly, there was this voice behind us: “Wait, take these as well!” On the threshold of the service door stood the librarian, with two great cardboard cartons at his feet. “Take these to the boiler room . . .” Village went and fetched them, placed them on the lid of the bin, and pretended to get started again. But as soon as the door banged shut he stopped, threw me a wink, and took hold of one of the cartons. “You never know, there could be stuff to eat in there,” he explained. I had always thought him spineless, devoid of imagination . . . With a broad five- kopeck piece, sharpened into a cutting edge (the supervisors harried the possessors of knives relentlessly), he cut through the string, snapped back the cardboard flaps . . . “Shit! Just a lot of old books . . . Hold on. What’s in the other one?” It was the same thing. Pamphlets, all with a photo on the covers we had no difficulty recognizing. The round, smooth face, the bald head: Khrushchev, who had been overthrown the year before. Since then his portrait had disappeared from the fronts of buildings in the town, and now, like a belated echo of events in Moscow, his “Speech to the Twentieth Party Congress” was being withdrawn from provincial libraries.
Seated in front of a stove’s red-hot mouth, the engineer in charge of heating received the cardboard cartons impassively. He opened one of them, gave a rather sad little laugh, and began throwing the pamphlets into the fire, one after the other. “Oh, Nikita, they were too smart for you, weren’t they?” he observed, contemplating the auto-da-fe. “And now the ones who’ve not been rehabilitated don’t have a chance in hell. . .” Then, remembering us: “Go on, get a move on, you kids. The bell’s rung already . . .”
On the way back Village asked me to wait for him and slipped into the bushes that bordered the roadside. I took several paces to distance myself from the stink of the bin. Up there on a hill the orphanage windows were strung out in a line: dark in the dormitories, lit up in the classrooms. You could even make out the figures of teachers in front of the blackboards. The only advantage of garbage duty was that you were allowed to be a few minutes late.
“The ones who’ve not been rehabilitated . . .” The most widely shared and most jealously cherished myth among the pupils at the orphanage was precisely this: the hero- father, after being unjustly condemned, is finally rehabilitated, he returns, walks into the classroom, interrupts the lesson, and inspires silent rapture in both the female teacher and the rest of the class. A handsome officer, his tunic ablaze with medals. There were other variants on this: fathers who were Arctic explorers, fathers killed in battle, ones who were submarine captains. But the return of the rehabilitated hero took precedence over all the other legends, for it was closer to the truth. It was the special function of this establishment to house the children of men and women who had distinguished themselves during the last war but who had subsequently proved unworthy of their heroic exploits. Such, at least, was the version communicated to us, sometimes with a degree of tact, it must be conceded, sometimes with all the venom of a supervisor in a rage: “Like father, like son . .
“Look at them all slaving away, the little canaries!” Village had just appeared out of the darkness and was pointing up at the windows, where the heads of the pupils could be seen. “Birds in a cage,” he added with mild scorn. We set off once more. At that time I did not fully understand what lay behind the engineers words (we were eleven- and twelve- year-olds, Village must have been fourteen, for he had repeated the same grade at least two years running), but I had grasped the main thrust: another era was beginning that would make our daydreams more unrealistic than ever. The handsome officer, rehabilitated
at last, was going to remain forever outside the classroom door, would never bring himself to throw it open now.
These thoughts distracted me, and as we braced ourselves to heave the bin up a slope, I slipped and found myself on the ground with a gash on my thigh from the rusty steel. “Lucky devil! You’re done for the day,” Village observed, feeling the wound. “Hurry and go see the nurse!”
So there was this day of rest, but above all the obsessive recollection of a woman lifting her left breast and then of my own presence a few inches away from this woman, in the intimacy of a stolen secret.
Love makes us vulnerable. I dare say those who attacked me two days later had sensed in me the weakness of someone in love. All relationships at the orphanage were governed by lines of force stretched to extremes. You had to maintain your position in the hierarchy of the strong and the less strong at all costs. Precisely as in a prison or in the underworld. I was neither one of the young gang leaders, of which there were several, nor one of the underdogs. Attacks were not made at random, however, for even the puniest of us might be clutching between his fingers a thick five- kopeck piece sharpened into a razor blade.
During one break (I was gazing through the glass at the bare trees outside and telling myself that the nurse must be able to see them from her window too), a blow from someone’s shoulder thrust me over against the wall, creating a space around me in the crowd of pupils, which quickly parted. It was a little gang leader surrounded by his bodyguard. His face, as is often the case with southerners, already had the texture of a man’s and exhibited all the little grimaces of virility, all the tics of a young male who knows he is handsome. A few insults, to initiate the brawl, followed by hoots of laughter from the gang. Finally, as he spat out a mixture of spittle and the scraps of tobacco that stuck to his lip, this sentence, in which his superiority found its ultimate expression, scornful and almost languid: “Look, we all know about your father. The firing squad shot him like a . . .”
Every single one of our codes had been flouted. While we often insulted and fought with one another, we never laid a finger on the legend of the hero-fathers. I hurled myself at him, as he was already turning his back, leaving his henchman to take care of me. Others joined in, excited by the general melee, happy to upgrade themselves in a pecking order suddenly thrown into chaos.
I was rescued by the appearance of a teacher at the end of the hallway. I stood up, hastily adjusting my shirt, which had lost several buttons, and wiping my nose, which was bleeding. In our world aggressors and victims were punished without distinction.
In the toilet area, with my face upturned under the icy jet from a faucet, I gradually recovered my wits. As I waited for the bleeding to stop, I even had time to reflect on the sally that had imperiled all our legends: “Your father gunned down like a . . .” Naturally this little warlord, who was testing his virility, knew nothing about the matter. Or rather, he knew that this tale would serve for every one of our fathers: lapsed heroes who had become mired in drink, crime, or, worse still, dissidence, and who would end their days in a camp, or beneath the bullets of some guard perched high on his watchtower. He had said it out loud but for a while now we had all been aware that cracks were appearing in the heroic myth. And even without listening to the old heating engineer’s words as he burned Khrushchev, my fellow pupils could sense that the time when hope was still possible was drawing to a close. It was the middle of the sixties (November 1965, to be precise). Ill informed as we were, we did not know the word “thaw,” and yet we were, quite literally, the children of the Thaw. It was thanks to that bald, tubby man, whose books they were burning, that we lived in the relative comfort of an orphanage and not behind the barbed wire of a reeducation colony.
At the time I understood all this very confusedly. A presentiment, a vague anxiety shared with the others. There was a kind of relief, too: it was not my lovesick demeanor that provoked the others’ aggression. Quite simply, our little world was beginning to fall apart and one of the first fragments had just come and hit me in the face.
In a novel it would be possible to evoke many nuances to that day and the pain of that day, to invent days that led up to it and followed it. But all that stays in my memory of it is the figure of a boy, standing upright beside the wall, with his nose in the air, squeezing it between his thumb and index finger. The bathroom’s dirty little windows look out over a row of bare trees, the meander of a river, a muddy road. The boy smiles. It has just occurred to him that if all he had suffered had been a simple nosebleed he could have reported to the infirmary, gone in, asked for treatment . . . As in the scene he had dreamed of a thousand times. But his nose is hideously swollen. (Show it to the woman in her white coat? Never!) Another time, perhaps. Blood and pain suddenly seem marvelously linked to the promise of love. He relaxes his finger and thumb, wipes his face, listens. Outside the door, the silence of a long, empty corridor. Over there, gathered in their classrooms, are boys and girls who can still live in their heroic lies. He has just lost the right to dream. The truth tastes of blood spat into the sink and the poignant beauty of the first snowflakes, which he suddenly notices outside the windowpane. Their white, stellar perfection swallowed up by the thick, rutted mud.
IN MEMORY’S FRAGILE TRUTH THERE IS ALSO AN AUTUMN evening, a room lit by an old table lamp with a blue-green shade, a woman with silvery hair sewing buttons back onto my shirt, our two cups of tea, a book bound in stiff covers with worn leather corners, in which I have just read a sentence I shall still remember thirty years later (although I do not know it at the time): “Thus it came to pass that on the banks of the Meuse, almost as destitute of money as when he had come from thence to Paris in the first flush of youth, one of the purest and fairest soldiers of old France gave his life for the three fleurs-de-lis . . .”
The woman gets up, pours the hot tea, puts another log into the little iron stove in the corner of the room. I read the sentence again, I almost know it by heart. To think about this warrior of days gone by reduces the pain caused by the mockery relentlessly burning into me with its acid: “Your father, shot like a . . . .”
* * *
It would all be different in a made-up story. Tinged with pointless exoticism: this house with its walls covered in dark weatherboarding, and its gloomy aspect in the approaching dusk; a room hidden away in a warren of apartments and shadowy staircases, a woman whose origins are shrouded in mystery; this ancient French book . . .
Yet nothing about that November evening struck me as bizarre. I had come, as I did every Saturday night on leave from the orphanage, to spend twenty-four hours at Alexandra’s: the good fortune of those among us who had some improbable aunt ready to welcome them. In my case it was this woman who had once known my parents. A foreigner? Most assuredly, but her origins had long since been blurred by the length and harshness of her life in Russia, blotted out by the devastation of the war, which cut off those who had survived it from their past, from their nearest and dearest, from their own former selves. Also living in this great wooden house were a family of Germans from the Volga, an ageless Korean (the victim of one of those population transfers that were an obsession of Stalin’s), and, in a long, narrow room on the ground floor, a Tartar from the Crimea, Yussuf, the joiner, who had one day remarked to the woman who took me in, this woman born near Paris: “You know, Shura, you Russians . . .” Her French forename had also undergone a slow process of Russification, becoming first of all “Shura,” then slipping into the affectionate diminutive “Sasha,” and finally reverting to the full name of “Alexandra,” which had no connection at all with her real forename.
Only the books she had bit by bit taught me to read still betrayed her imperceptible French origins. “. . . Thus he gave his life for the three fleurs-de-lis . . .”
A novelists way of evoking this apprenticeship would no doubt link together a series of boyhood surprises in order to relate the story of an “éducation française.” But in reality the most surprising thing was the natura
l way in which, having arrived at the big wooden house, I would climb its dark staircases, open Alexandra’s door, put my bag down on a chair. I was vaguely familiar with the house’s history: a certain Venedikt Samoylov, who had been engaged in the wool trade with Central Asia before the Revolution, had built what, at the beginning of the century, was a small manor house in light wood. He had been expelled from it and disappeared, leaving behind a rich library that soon fell victim to the hungry stoves installed by the new inhabitants of its increasingly dilapidated rooms. During the war, the house, located in a small township near Stalingrad, had been partly destroyed by an incendiary bomb. It had lost one of its wings and at the time of my childhood still displayed a broad stretch of charred wall.
The truth of memory compels me to recognize that I found neither these blackened timbers nor the extreme poverty of the rooms surprising. Nor did I notice their caravanserai exoticism. I climbed the stairs, imbibing with pleasure the smells that only family life can produce, a mixture of cooking and laundry; I walked past the inhabitants, happy to feel that I was their equal, liberated as I was from my regimented existence; I went into Alexandra’s room (the aroma of good tea could already be detected from the icy darkness of the staircase) and it felt like a definitive return, like going back to a house that awaited me, one I would not have to leave the following day. I was home at last.
In my adult life since then I have never again been able to experience the same feeling of permanence . . .
In the course of these visits I had certainly received a French education. But an education without structure, unpremeditated. A book left open on the corner of a table, a Russian word whose French past Alexandra revealed to me . . . The feeling of being home at last mingled imperceptibly with this foreign language I was learning. The association became so intense that for me many years later the French language would always be evocative of a place and time similar to the atmosphere of the childhood home I had never known.
The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme Page 3