She had begun to teach me her language because, in the extreme poverty of our lives then, it was the last remaining treasure she could share with me. An evening with her, from time to time, that gave me the illusion of family life. And this language. There was probably a moment that first triggered things, a word, a story, something arousing my curiosity, I no longer remember. But I remember very well the day I managed to get into a little room cut off from the rest of the house by that fire in the spring of 1942. For twenty years this cubbyhole, tucked away under the rafters, had remained inaccessible, sealed off by the thick planks the inhabitants had nailed up where the wall had been breached. The door to this tiny room led to the outside, to the empty space where the wing had collapsed. To reach it I had climbed out through the landing window. This acrobatic feat was not without risk, as I had to cling to the remnant of a beam, place my foot on the skirting of a floor that had vanished, and, squeezing the whole of my body against the charred wood, grasp the door handle. Inside I had discovered the remnants of Samoylov’s library, piles of books damaged by fire, age, and rain. Foreign books especially, useless to the buildings residents and saved from their stoves thanks to this room being sealed off. I had brought some of them back from my perilous expedition. Alexandra had scolded me (I was barely seven years old) and then shown me her own books. Did they, too, come from the ruined library, or from a more distant past? I do not know. All that comes back to me now is this moment: pressed flat against the blackened timbers, I reach my hand out toward the handle, suddenly see my reflection in a mirror with a tin frame hanging on the wall, realize that the void, along the edge of which I am sidling, was once an inhabited room, have time to stare at my own face. An instant of my life, the extreme singularity of this instant, a sky in which snow floats down very slowly, almost motionless.
My French education resembled the efforts of a paleontologist to reconstruct a vanished world, starting from discovered bones. The isolation in which our country lived at that time turned the French universe into a landscape as mysterious as that of the Cretaceous or the Carboniferous eras. Every novel on Alexandra’s shelves became the vestigial remains of a vanished — not to say extraterrestrial — civilization, a fossil, a droplet of amber that held within it not an imprisoned insect but some character, a French town, a district of Paris.
In the ensuing years Alexandra made me read some of the classics, but it was thanks to the little sealed-off room that my sense of being engaged in exploration was at its most vivid. I found many French books there, some of them eaten away by damp and now unreadable, some of them printed with the old spelling of verbs in the imperfect tense ending in “-oit” instead of “-ait” which confused me at first. In one of these abandoned volumes I came across an anecdote that made a greater impression on me (I have long been ashamed to admit) than the work of many a famous novelist. It concerned the actress Madeleine Brohant, celebrated in her day, but who lived out her last years in great penury, lodging on the fifth floor of an ancient apartment building in the rue de Rivoli. One of the rare friends who remained faithful to her complained breathlessly one day about the exhausting climb. “But my dear friend,” replied the actress, “this staircase is all I have now to make men’s hearts beat faster!” The most glittering alexandrines, the most cunningly plotted novels, would never teach me more about the nature of Frenchness than that gentle, wry remark, whose rhythmic resonance, it seems to me, I can still hear.
Was there any logic to this apprenticeship? A work of fiction could easily invent stages in this, progress made, things learned. My memory only retains a handful of moments or apparently unconnected insights. Madeleine Brohant’s remark and also that day in the troubled and tempestuous life of the Duchesse de Longeville. When they brought her a glass of water, the adventuress, parched with thirst, hurled herself upon it and declared, with a voluptuous sigh: “Such a shame this is not a sin!”
And yet there was a connection, all the same, between these fragments preserved in the memory. The art of eloquence and epigram, the cult of sense turned on its head, wordplay that made reality less absolute and judgments less predictable. At that time Russian life still resonated with echoes of Stalin’s day: “enemy of the People” and “traitor to the Country” were not really out of current use. At the orphanage, indeed, despite our daydreams of heroes, we knew that our fathers had been described in precisely those terms. Once poured into the mold of propaganda, words had the hardness of steel, the heaviness of lead. As he burned Khrushchev’s pamphlets, the old heating engineer had muttered the words “arbitrary voluntarism” (an official accusation he must have heard on the radio and had difficulty in articulating), as if it were the complicated name of a shameful disease. We did not know what it meant but we felt an obscure respect for the power of this “ism,” which had just brought down the country’s top man and compelled our teachers to steer clear of certain passages in our textbooks.
Unconsciously, perhaps, I drew a parallel between this steely language and the lightness of the glass of water that became a sin on the Duchesse de Longeville’s lips, or the airy sweetness of an arduous staircase that caused hearts to beat faster. Words that killed and words that, when used in a certain way, liberated.
This contrast had led me one day to Alphonse Martin- ville . . . My fingers grimy with soot, I was laying out volumes that often fell to pieces in my hands. The doorway of the abandoned room framed a spring sky, tender and luminous, and yet the pages of the book I had discovered beneath a bundle of old newspapers quivered with Jacobinic fury and the clatter of the guillotine. It was Year II of the Revolution and the crowd thirsted for blood. One day, it was the fifteenth of the month of Ventose, the March rain streamed down the blade of the machine onto the scaffold there had been no time to wash down. A young condemned man appeared: “Stand before us, Alphonse de Martinville!” ordered the Presiding Judge. Surprised to be awarded an aristocratic “de,” the young man retorted with a desperado’s courage: “But I have come here to be made shorter — not longer.” This repartee won over the crowd and pleased the tribunal. A cry went up: “Citizens! Release him!” The rejoicing was general. Martinville was acquitted.
Among all these books, I have remembered some rather against my will on account of the notes in purple ink in the margin. In particular one very heavily annotated one: Will the Human Race Improve? I was at an age when this title did not yet seem comical. I spent a long time studying the elegant “NB”s and ‘ ‘sic’s added by the former owner of the house, the merchant Samoylov, the doughty autodidact, whom I pictured in his study of an evening, with big round spectacles perched on his nose, his brow creased, running his finger along sentences penned by a long-forgotten French thinker.
But as it happens, more than the great classics and the vicissitudes of History, it was a textbook in French dealing with various processes used for tempering blades that for a long time fascinated me. I spent hours deciphering the methods described (I recall: powdered graphite mixed with oil. . .), trying to construct the replica of a dagger that bore the exciting name of Misericordia. The book gave details of its origin and use. When a knight, brought to the ground and protected by his armor, refused to yield, recourse was had to this long, slender blade, “that pierced the heart like a scorpions sting.”
The French education I was receiving was really not all that academic.
This particular November evening was like all the others and utterly different. I had ended up telling Alexandra about the fight in which I was confronted by the others, their mocking taunts: “. . . your father, gunned down like a dog.” She broke off from her task, sewing the buttons back onto my shirt, laid it down on the table, and began talking very naturally about my parents, going back over the story I already knew fragments of: their flight, their settling in the north of the Caucasus, my birth, their death . . .
In a novel, the child would perforce have listened to such an account with grief-stricken attention (how many books would I read, subsequently, often
pathetic and lachrymose, about the quest for family origins). But in fact I was sunk in a dull insensibility and followed it with a kind of resigned deafness. Alexandra noticed this, no doubt understanding that what counted for me, for all of us at the orphanage, was not the truth of the facts (broadly speaking similar for all our parents), but the fine legend of an officer unjustly condemned, who would one day throw open the classroom door. She persevered, however, knowing that what she confided to me was being inscribed in my memory, without my being aware of it, and might thus escape being forgotten.
I listened to her distractedly, from time to time glancing at the pages of the book open in front of me, at the sentence I preferred to all the truths of reality: “Thus it came to pass that. . . one of the purest and fairest soldiers of old France gave his life for the three fleurs-de-lis. .
T HE BRAWL THAT HAD MADE IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME to picture a heroic father also had another consequence. Some days later there was this bone that one of the pupils fished up from his plate and threw across the refectory table in my direction. His shout: “Here. Give the dog a bone!” was followed by an outburst of laughter from the whole table and immediately afterward a tense silence, everyone looking down at their food: a supervisor had just appeared at the door. “What do you think you’re doing, throwing filth about?” he said angrily, pointing his finger at the bone that had landed near my plate. “No supper tonight! You can clean the corridor outside the ‘Lenin Room.’ I don’t want to see a speck of dirt left there!”
In the solitude of this long corridor that led to the “Lenin Room” (part museum, part treasure house, which honored the great man’s memory in every school in the country), I felt almost happy. With that happiness that follows the extinguishing of all hope and teaches us that in the end every grief is bearable. The wet floorboards reflected the light of the single lamp at the end of the corridor. Dazed by the to-ing and fro-ing of the floorcloth, it was as if, beneath the dark, watery surface, my gaze were discovering the illusory depths of a secret world.
The task finished, I lugged the bucket along to the bathrooms. As I washed my hands I noticed brown stains on the wall around the faucet. They were the dried specks of my blood, traces of the fight three days before. There I had bled and with wistful tenderness had thought about the woman massaging her left breast. . . I threw water over the soiled place, rubbing it hastily, as if someone might have been able to divine its mystery.
I remained for a while in the storage room where the cleaning women kept their brushes and where I had put away my bucket. I liked this place: boxes of brown soap that gave off a pleasant, musky smell, a narrow transom open onto a freezing night, my body pressed against the radiator that warmed my knees through the cloth of my pants . . . My personal space. It was precisely on that evening that I became aware of it: a tiny island where the world was not an open wound. Away from it, everything hurt. In a claustrophobic reflex, no doubt, I was racking my brains for an escape, a continuation of these moments of tranquillity, an archipelago of brief joys. I recalled one of the last readings at Alexandra’s house. I had come across an unfamiliar French word, “estran” meaning “foreshore.” She had explained its meaning to me in French. I had pictured this strip of sand liberated by the waves, and, without ever having seen the sea, I had a perfect sense of being there, studying everything the ocean leaves behind on a beach as it retreats. I now understood that this “estran,” for which I did not know the word in Russian, was also my life, just like the fifth floor of that ancient apartment building where Madeleine Brohant lived.
That evening was probably the time when I first perceived with so much clarity what it was that Alexandra’s language had given me . . .
The door opened abruptly. The intruder looked like someone coming home. It was Village. He stared at me, vexed, but not fiercely. “So you’re the one that’s been spilling all that water down the hallway. I just slid ten yards along it on my ass. It’s worse than a skating rink . . .” Under his coat he was clutching a bundle wrapped in a sheet of newspaper. The cool of the snow that he had brought in with him stood out clearly from a very appetizing, smoky smell that made me swallow my saliva and reminded me I had eaten nothing since midday. Village noticed my famished grimace and gave a satisfied smile. “So, didn’t they give you a scrap to eat, the two-faced devils?” he asked, taking off his jacket.
“No, nothing,” I choked, in another contraction of the throat, surprised by this description of the others.
“Ah well, too bad for them. They get the same grub every single day. Enough to give a cockroach the runs. Now you and me are going to enjoy this . . .”
In the twinkling of an eye he transformed the cubbyhole into a dining room. The lid of a crate laid over a bucket formed the table. Two other buckets, upturned, became chairs. From out of the folded newspaper a grilled fish made its appearance, with a broad, curved body, its fins blackened by the fire . . . We began to eat. . . Village told me tales of his secret fishing trips, his tricks for escaping from the orphanage. From time to time, he cocked an ear, then resumed his talk, speaking more softly . . . At the end of our meal footsteps outside the door gave us a start. A supervisor’s voice called out my name. Village stood up, handed me a bucket, opened the door, and hid behind it.
“What are you doing in there?” the man demanded, patting the wall, but not finding the switch.
“Well, I was just putting the bucket away, that’s all,” I replied with rough assurance that surprised even myself.
The supervisor, still in the half-light, sniffed the air, but the supposition that came to him seemed so far-fetched that he withdrew, growling: “All right. Put all that stuff away and get to bed immediately.” Squeezed behind the door, Village gave me the thumbs-up: “Well acted!”
It was up on the dormitory floor, before we went our separate ways, that he then said to me, with that shaky intonation that betrays words deeply buried that are painful to bring readily to the lips: “You know . . . my dad, they . . . shot him too. With a comrade. He was trying to escape . . . But the guard caught them and machine-gunned them. An old man once told me that in the camps, when fellows were killed trying to escape, they left them in full view for three days, in front of the barrack huts, so the others knew what to expect. . . When my mother heard the news she took to drinking. And when she died the doctor said it was like she was burned from the inside. And just before she went, she kept saying to me: It was to see you he did that.’ But I never believed her, you know . . .”
The laconic friendship that bound us together taught me a lot. The most despised pariah in the orphanage, Village was in reality the freest of us all. Almost every day he was to be seen engaged on garbage duty, but what we did not know was that he volunteered for it and could thus spend long, stolen moments pacing up and down on the banks of the river, sometimes venturing as far as the Volga. He was also the only one to accept reality, not to invoke the phantom of the officer who was going to come knocking at the classroom door. What he did not accept was the reality they constructed for us, with its myths, its lapsed heroes, its books burned in the boiler-room stove. And while we were lined up in our grades in the hallway, before lessons started, listening, without listening, to the singsong ranting of the loudspeaker (“The party of Lenin, a peoples force, leads us on to the triumph of Communism!”), Village was slipping through the willow plantations in the morning mist, in the fragile awakening of the waters fringed with the first ice. That was his reality.
I told myself that my “estran” was not so far removed from Villages misty mornings.
The land of the “estran” a land of refuge, where it was still possible for me to dream, revealed itself bit by bit, without any logic, amid the relics of Samoylov’s library. It was there, one day, that a torn page, marked by the fire, came to hand; on it, the opening lines of a poem, whose author I was never able to identify:
When upon Nancy the sun doth rise
Already he’s shining in Burgundy’s skies.
He’ll soon be here to start our day,
Then on to Gascony make his way.
No geography would ever give me a more concrete sense of the land of France, a territory that had always seemed to me much too tiny on the maps to have pretensions to time zones. What the poet had expressed was his feeling for the beloved space, a physical perception of one’s native land that enables us to take in a whole country at a single glance, to perceive its tonalities very distinctively, as they differ, from one valley to the next, the variation in landscapes, the unique substance of each of its towns, the mineral texture of their walls. From Nancy to Gascony . . .
As I explored the ruins of these books in the sealed-off room, I did not feel as if I were in pursuit of any goal. Mine was the simple curiosity of one who pokes about in attics, the pleasure of coming upon a book spared by the fire, an unblemished engraving, a note calligraphed in the old style. The joy, above all, of descending, my arms piled high with these treasures, and showing them to Alexandra. Yet shortly after reading those four lines of verse on that torn-out page I grasped what it was that drove me to spend long hours in the company of these mutilated books. From the bottom of a box in which the wood was disintegrating like sand, I drew out a History of the Late Roman Empire with the pages stuck together by damp, then a book in German, printed in flamboyant Gothic lettering, and finally, from a collection of texts with its cover missing, an obituary notice. I no longer remember whom it concerned. The shade of a great, vanished lineage is linked, all too confusedly, with my reading of this. All I can recall, but I recall them by heart, are the words of François I, quoted by the author, which were underlined in that violet ink whose faded tint I recognized: “We are four noblemen from Aquitaine, who will fight in the lists against all comers from France: myself, Sansac, Montalembert, and la Châtaigneraie.” I pictured that country, encompassed by a loving gaze that followed the suns course from Nancy to Gascony, knowing now that it was the gaze of these four knights, scanning their native land, the better to defend it.
The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme Page 4