The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme

by Andrei Makine

  In the train I thought about the language she had taught me. Its words, I knew, had no bearing on anything in the world that surrounded us. I remembered Muza and her beauty, the beige man, the story told by the boy who had spied on them . . . One of the last poems I had come across in the ruins of Samoylov’s library spoke of a pair of lovers disporting themselves in “a meadow shimmering with a thousand flowers.” I suddenly felt something akin to disgust for the affectation of this torrent of words. Outside the carriage window lay the monotonous expanse of the steppe, dry and rough, stained blood red by the sunset.

  So what I had learned was a dead language.

  * * *

  On my return to the orphanage I noticed that Village was absent. He had not come in to supper. I caught up with him among the willow groves on the riverbank at one of his fishing spots. He was embarrassed to be discovered constructing a child’s toy: a tiny raft made of sticks that he was binding together with strips of bark. The remains of a fire were smoldering gently. So as not to lose face, he explained to me with a wink: “Look at this. It’ll float down our river first. Then, zip, on to the Volga. And then, so long as a pike doesn’t have it for breakfast, straight on to the Caspian Sea. One day those Persians’11 be picking it up, you mark my words!” Using a piece of wood, he lifted several still glowing brands out of the embers, laid them on his raft, and put it in the water. We stayed for a long while, watching these tiny lights as they drifted away in the purple air of dusk.

  On the footpath that led back up to the orphanage, he confided to me in somewhat embarrassed tones: “You know that boat where that bastard and Muza . . . Well, I’ve sunk it now.”

  Twenty years later, when I was beginning to write, I contemplated turning that evening spent in the company of Village into a short story about the last twenty-four hours in the life of a young man. For he was to die at the end of the following day. A striking subject, I thought, the quintessence of a life revealed amid the mellow banality of a May dusk. I never wrote it, no doubt sensing the falseness of a contrivance of this kind. Instead of reinventing those twenty-four hours in such a way as to milk them for significance, I needed to hold on to what little I knew of them, tell that and avoid the temptation to wax philosophical.

  The following evening (it was a Sunday), the same gang of loutish “recruiting sergeants” appeared and this time invited us to have a drink with them. It was clear that — between the stick and the carrot — they were seeking our weak spots. We did not refuse, some of our number eager to act like hard men, and others, perhaps all of us, eager to respond to the least promise of friendship. They drank, too, and had probably not even foreseen the brawl that erupted on account of an overturned glass, an oath, a slap. Or else, on the contrary, everything was calculated, to divide us up into those who would nibble the carrot and those who would resist.

  The only weapons we had were our five-kopeck pieces sharpened into blades, along with an iron bar snatched from one of the louts and a broken bottle. I already knew that hand-to-hand combat only looked good in films and that this brawl would be much like the previous ones: clumsy shuffling, blows missing the target, no mercy for those who fell, animal glee at any sign of weakness. The alcohol made the fight even uglier; we all simply felt we were saving our own skins. One of our number was already on the ground, huddled in on himself like a scarab to ward off blows to his head.

  I noticed Village during a moments respite as, with broken bottle in hand, I contrived to keep at bay an adversary as out of breath as I was. Village was coming up from the river, doubtless attracted by our gasps and groans. I saw him drop his lines, pick up a big stone, rush toward us. Then a few minutes later (finding I had time to spit out a fragment of broken tooth) I saw him again. Inexplicably the assault by the louts had just started to falter, they were retreating; one of them, tapping the others on the back, was urging them to leave. At length they all ran across a patch of waste ground, leaving us an unhoped-for victory. Now we were laughing, wiping away the blood, discussing the best bits of the fight. . . Suddenly we heard this voice. We saw Village sitting there, his arms lolling on the ground, and — as it seemed to us — glassy-eyed with astonishment. He was not groaning but from his lips came forth a wet babbling, like that of a babe in arms. Someone touched his shoulder, and Village toppled gently backward. We gathered around him, crouching, made uneasy by this fixed stare, clumsily felt his chest, his head . . . All the arms clutching at him seemed to be straining to hold him back on a slippery slope. There was still time for one of our number to jokingly suggest a glass of vodka, but already beneath the unbuttoned shirt a fine trickle of blood was to be seen and the gray glint of a blade — that of a “Finnish knife,” which had snapped at the hilt.

  All I can remember of our headlong run to the orphanage and the minutes that followed it is the desperate hammering on the sick-bay door: we had forgotten it was a Sunday.

  During the days that followed I was haunted by the notion that this death expected some gesture from me, some idea that I could not contrive to come up with. Some serious, significant gesture. But the trifling nature of everything that happened now was distressing to me. The next day, just as if nothing had occurred, the nurse opened the infirmary at nine o’clock precisely. Two days later they ordered us to carry out our old desks from the classrooms, and among the tabletops covered in drawings and writing, nobody took note of the one that had belonged to Village. Trifling, too, was my feverish speculation about the odds: what if I had had the idea of taking along the Misericordia dagger that day. Then, maybe . . . Yet I knew a blow from an iron bar would have smashed that slender blade like glass.

  One evening at the beginning of June, I found a way to force myself from this verbiage of remorse as I remembered that little raft Village had launched on its nocturnal voyage. It suddenly seemed to me that it was very important to keep picturing this tiny craft with its freight of smoky charcoal. Not to allow its slow progress toward the Caspian Sea to be interrupted in my mind. To believe it was still afloat.

  At the time of the funeral we had all noted that there was no one to inform about Villages death. For us this was not a new idea, but we were struck by the cosmic absoluteness of it: no one upon the whole terrestrial globe! That priests words from the preceding winter came back to me then: “. . . Those who have no one to pray for them.” Once more I pictured the little raft, the glowing embers drifting away into the night beneath the Volga’s immense sky.

  4

  THE SKY WHITE WITH HEAT, the timeless lethargy of the steppes, a bird flapping its wings, unable to make any progress in a void that was too dense. Like the bird, we moved forward with no other point of reference than the vastness of the plains and a horizon made molten by the flow of overheated air. The gigantic excavator advancing in front of us ripped open the earth’s crust with its bucket wheel, tracing an endless straight line. Covered in dust, deafened by the roar of the machine and the grinding of crushed rocks, we dragged along lengthy slabs of pine which the workmen used to reinforce the sides of this future irrigation canal. As if in the mad hope of containing the changeless surge of the infinite with this ephemeral casing . . . In the evening our weariness could be gauged by the buzzing of a bee that beat against the walls of the barrack hut and which no one had the strength left to chase away. That would have meant getting up, stepping over bodies stretched out on their bunks, flapping a shirt, steering the insect toward the door . . . But we were already asleep and its hum was blending into the beginnings of our dreams.

  To melt into this desert of light was the best way to forget, the best way to mourn, the best way to forget mourning. We talked a good deal less than in previous years, when we had still viewed this summertime penal servitude as a purgatory with promise. Now we knew that the future would not be very different from this daily trudge of ours behind the disemboweling machine, from the absurdly stubborn line of this ditch, whose sides must unremittingly be strengthened.

  One day, along with scoops of earth,
the digger began hurling out human remains, skulls, soldiers’ boots, helmets from the last war. On another occasion there were much older bones, ancient helms, swords brown with rust. . . possibly a millennium lay between these warriors and the others. A thousand years of sleep. Ten centuries of nothingness. The next day when the machine plowed on, away from these ransacked graves, we saw archaeologists moving into the area. A handful of black specks lost amid the sunlit void of the plain.

  As in previous summers, our work was often interrupted: they would disguise us in white short-sleeved shirts and clean pants and take us to appear as extras on vast esplanades, where important visitors were making speeches in front of commemorative monuments and concrete obelisks. In this way we were privileged one day to see a certain North Korean leader, from a distance, as always. He spent a long time reading from a sheaf of papers that the warm breeze, very strong that day, threatened to snatch away from him at every moment. This man, puny and with a slight stoop, was battling to control the flapping sheets, like a seaman unable to master a shivering sail. . . There was also an African statesman, who decided to hold forth in Russian and spoke very slowly, detaching each syllable from the next and getting the stresses all wrong. The tip of the monument showed greenish white against a dark sky heavy with a storm. The lazy rumbling of thunder beyond the river sounded like muffled laughter someone was trying to repress. But we did not flinch: the photographers needed us in unmoving ranks, with faces all turned in the same direction . . . Many years later, when I chanced to meet my former comrades, we would regret not having paid more attention to all those V.I.P. guests. As time went by we would have been able to identify them, some still active in political life, some having passed into the pages of history books. But in those days we were simply waiting for the moment when our patience would be rewarded with a dip in the Volga. That summer, however, even these swims did not give rise to the shouting enthusiasm of past times.

  The narrow transom window in our barrack hut was broken, and every evening before we went to sleep we would see a beautiful rainbow of light spawned by the crack in the glass, a long peacocks tail suddenly flooding the cluttered interior of our dwelling for a few minutes, slipping along toward the nails where our earth-stained clothes hung. One evening this solar spectrum did not materialize. We were at the end of June, the angle of the sun’s rays had changed. Nobody said anything, but I frequently saw glances straying toward our “cloakroom,” now left in shadow. Having been completely forgetful of time, that salutary forgetfulness the steppe bestowed on us, we suddenly remembered that this was the last summer we would spend together.

  The next morning, very close to the line of the canal, we came upon a wooden cross with a helmet hanging from one of its arms. We gathered around it, intrigued by the anonymity and loneliness of this tomb amid the immensity of these plains blinded by the sun. What we were used to seeing were mountains of concrete celebrating death, gilded inscriptions, effigies of heroes. Here, just two lengths of birchwood with cracked bark, a mound long since leveled by the winds. Strangely enough, the sight of this tomb provoked no distress, offered no invitation to share pain. There was even something light and ethereal, almost carefree, about the cross. Its presence at this spot (why just here and not two hundred miles to the north or south?), the human randomness of its presence, seemed to indicate that what really mattered was happening somewhere other than beneath this rectangle of earth . . .

  On the other side of the channel a supervisor called out to us: “Look alive! We’re off now! There’s a ceremony . . .” It was the hallowed formula for our work as extras.

  It got off to a bad start this time. We took five hours to reach the site, and, disguised as Pioneers bold and true in our red neckerchiefs, we began to wait, cooped up in the bus at the side of a road. Evidently they were not certain whether they would need us or not. In the old days we would have hatched a rebellion, demanded bread, simulated a collective attack of diarrhea. That day each of us remained alone with his thoughts, some trying to sleep, others taking refuge in the memory of a special day, a special smile. The supervisors seemed more than usually on edge. Yet, according to the rumors, all that was involved was the visit of a general. And we had seen field marshals, even a cosmonaut. . .

  An official in a dark suit suddenly climbed onto the steps of the coach and uttered a kind of whispered shout: “Quick! Get out! They’re coming. Quickly! Fall in!” He had a red face, seemed panic-struck.

  They led us on the double up to a broad terrain at the top of a hill that was already surrounded by several detachments of young extras. One corner of this living frame appeared to be empty; they filled the breach with our troops. When we were installed there I glanced behind us. In the distance, the empty window frames of a half-finished building were clearly visible. So we were there to hide it from the visitors. . . What we had to do now, as we all knew from past experience, was to sink as rapidly as possible into a torpid state that would make us impervious to the burning heat of the sun, thirst, and the absurd duration of the ceremony. To concentrate on the shape of a cloud that was gradually, very gradually, growing longer . . .

  Suddenly a swift tensing of muscles around me jerked me out of my drowsy state. Thanks to our communal existence, we had synchronized reflexes. I brought my eyes into focus, observed the open space. A crowd of notables, doubtless the towns administrators, was already present, looking toward the other end of the field, where there was a break in the surrounding line of white shirts, leaving a broad way in. All my comrades’ eyes were fixed on this opening. Quite a large group of people was approaching at a steady pace, as always happened in ceremonies of this kind; so far there was nothing extraordinary about this procession . . .

  All at once I saw what was extraordinary.

  My first impression was the most unlikely and yet the most accurate: “The Lilliputians leading the captured Gulliver . . .” The man walking at the center of the group was at least a head taller than all the others. Or rather, his head and shoulders were visible above the bobbing motion of the faces surrounding him. I looked for the glint of a general’s gold braid, a cap with the kind of insignia I imagined from the generals’ uniforms in our army. But the giant who, from the very first moment, was at the heart of the ceremony, wore a dark suit devoid of any hint of rank. Only perhaps in his gait, in his rather stiff way of planting his feet on the ground, in the firm carriage of his body, was there something military about him. Moreover, as he drew closer, I perceived that it was not his exceptional height that gave him his central position, but his way of shaping the space around him.

  I could already see his face, with an expression reminiscent of a wise and disenchanted old elephant, and eyelids that lifted slowly to reveal a penetrating gaze of surprising vitality. Very close to me I suddenly heard someone murmur with admiring apprehension: “Did you see the nose on him?” This powerful eminence was a source of fascination in the land of the steppes, where the flat faces of Asia prevailed. But the enthusiastic whisper in fact portended something else: the arrival of such a man was bound to give rise to something of a sensation.

  And the sensation was forthcoming. A man with a kolkhoz directors banal features emerged from the group of town notables and walked toward the old giant, who had stopped with his entourage in the middle of the space. Although we were standing at attention I had a sense of a slight creaking of vertebrae: all necks were being craned toward an incredible spectacle.

  For the director of the kolkhoz, or the man who looked like one, was carrying an enormous sturgeon, holding it by its gills. It looked rather as if he were dancing with the monstrous fish, whose mouth was poking into his face and whose tail was trying to wrap itself around the calves of his legs. The creature’s weight compelled the dancer to lean his body backward and walk with jerky steps, as if in a strange, swaying tango. He was already drawing close to the giant. Everyone held their breath.

  When they were a few paces apart, an optical illusion occurred. The sturgeon beg
an to shrink, to seem less long, less heavy. Finally, when the gift took its place in the guest’s hands, the silvery body of the fish seemed almost slender. It was displayed to the audience as a fine fishing trophy, held aloft without apparent effort. The beaming giant’s strength was applauded. Then a top administrator, all the way from Moscow, stepped up to the microphone and began speaking, his eyes fixed on the typewritten sheets.

  I saw neither the speaker nor the crowd of notables. I had just solved the tall old man’s real mystery. At that moment, having entrusted the fish to one of his aides, he had taken advantage of the noise of the ovation, and with a conjuror’s dexterity, all the while approving with his head the words his entourage were addressing to him, which he was not listening to, he had slipped his right hand into his jacket pocket, taken out a handkerchief, and rapidly wiped his fingertips, which were no doubt sticky from the sturgeon’s slime. I was possibly the only person to have observed his action, and this detail, once noted, gave me the feeling that I had discovered his secret: it was his solitude. He was surrounded, acclaimed, lent himself with grace to all these diplomatic games, he even accepted the slimy monster and knew, by instinct, for how many seconds he should show the gift before handing it to his aide-de-camp. He was utterly present. And yet very much apart, in a profound, pensive solitude.

  Now he was listening to the speech, with one ear cocked toward the interpreter, who had to stand on tiptoe. The more pompous the words became, the more remote was his expression. At intervals a look flashed out from beneath his heavy eyelids. Like a tracer it would target the crowd of notables, reach the ranks of the white shirts, land upon the speaker. At one moment his eyes rested on our square, and his eyebrows went up slightly, as if speculating about something that he would like to have had confirmed. But already the speaker was folding up his papers to the sound of obedient applause from the audience. With a measured tread, his head bowed in a gesture of concentration, the old giant made his way over to the microphone, which a technician hastily adjusted upward. He produced no sheet of paper and among the Party officials there was a little flutter of anxiety: words spoken off the cuff were by their very nature subversive.