The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme

by Andrei Makine

  He was to hold on to the sensation of that elsewhere right up to the end, right up to the purple luminescence of the northern fire that set the sky ablaze.

  ALEXANDRA FINISHED HER STORY as we walked back nome. Dusk was already falling over the steppe. She spoke about the journey she had made to the former Alsib airfields, most of them abandoned after the war, and the peak at the southern end of the Chersky chain, three crags clustered together, which the local inhabitants called “the Trident,” that she had failed to reach.

  I walked beside her upon the dry grass, an endless rippling expanse that dazzled the eye as, stirred by the wind, it alternated between mauve and gold. The details of her journey stuck in my mind (and this would help me, a quarter of a century later, to locate the places she had told me about) but the astonishment I experienced was caused by something else. A man who had been quite unknown to me a week ago stood before me now, fully realized. Jacques Dorme, whose life story I perceived as a living and luminous whole.

  Everyone’s perception of mankind and the world has its share of truth. That of a thirteen-year-old boy walking on the steppe beside the Volga was no less true than my judgment as an adult. It even had a certain advantage: being innocent of psychoanalysis, probings into the mind, or sentimental rhetoric, it operated by entities, blocks.

  Such was the Jacques Dorme who had appeared to me in the blaze of that sunset. A man hewn from the very stuff of his native land, that France I had discovered, thanks to my reading and my conversations with Alexandra. He was a combination of those qualities that reminded me of “the finest and purest soldier in old France,” the warrior in “The Last Square,” the exiled emperor returning to his native soil on board the ghost ship, and the “four gentlemen of Aquitaine.” The grain of this human substance was yet more subtle; what I perceived was not the characters and their actions but rather the dense aura of their lives. The spirit of their earthly undertakings. Their soul.

  No proofs existed of the accuracy of such a vision. My certainty was enough for me. That and also the photo Alexandra showed me when we reached home. A rectangle with yellowed edges but still retaining the crisp clarity of black and white. A score of pilots, clad in jackets lined with sheepskin and heavy reindeer-skin boots. American airmen recognizable by their lighter clothing, more elegant, more “pilot as film star.” The photo had probably been taken after a ceremonial parade, for in its corner the metallic glint of a military band could be seen. No doubt the Soviet and American national anthems had just been played. . . Guided by Alexandra, I located Jacques Dorme. He stood out from the others in neither physique nor clothes (the same three-quarter-length jacket, the same boots). But I could have recognized him without Alexandra’s help. Among the pilots who were beginning to break rank after standing at attention, as required by the anthems, he alone had remained still, his face marked by a certain seriousness, his gaze directed far away. It was as if he could hear a music inaudible to the others, an anthem the band had forgotten to play.

  It took me some time to grasp that Jacques Dorme’s solitude, evident even as he was surrounded by a crowd, gave him a kinship with the old giant I had seen in front of a monument to the dead, the French general who had broken off in the middle of his speech and allowed his gaze to stray into the immensity of the steppe.

  The following evening I left Alexandra’s house. I had to return to the orphanage, now half emptied of its past, to prepare myself for a new life. After boarding a crowded local train, I managed to catch a glimpse of Alexandra upon the platform teeming with vacationers. She did not see me, her eyes flitting anxiously along the row of windows. With a hesitant hand she was waving a farewell to someone she could not locate among all these faces. To me she looked younger and at the same time somehow defenseless. I thought of another departure, of the train carrying Jacques Dorme toward the east in May 1942.

  It suddenly struck me that this woman’s life was like a weighty accusation. Or at least a severe reproach, a silent reproach to the country that had so cruelly ravaged her life. A country that had caught up a very young woman in its toils and now disgorged onto this dirty platform a bemused old lady, lost among these tanned faces. For the first time in my life I believed that this reproach was directed at me as well, and that I, too, in ways it was hard to formulate, had a responsibility for this elderly, solitary existence, reduced to great deprivation, forgotten there in an ancient building, in a township carved up by railroad tracks, on the edge of the empty steppes. After all that she had done, given, suffered for this country . . . The people who surrounded me on the train, packed close together, laden with crates of vegetables they were bringing back from their kitchen gardens, had placid faces, tinged with routine, natural contentment. “The simple contentment she has never had,” I thought, observing them. Not some copybook bliss, just a simple, contented, daily routine, a family life, in the pleasant and predictable round of the little facts of existence.

  It was from that evening onward that I would embark upon the reinvention of her life, as if by dreaming it differently I could expiate the wrong my country had done her. The habit we had at the orphanage of remaking the life stories of our disgraced fathers would stand me in good stead. It would have taken little for her husband not to have been shot (how many times had I heard tales of condemned men saved by a miracle during the Stalin era), for them to have had children, for her to be living not in that old, dark house but over there, for example — I looked across at a handsome façade with balconies surrounded by pretty moldings. She would have been reading books not to the young barbarian I was, but to a refined and sensitive child, to her grandson and her granddaughter too, perhaps, two children who would have listened to her wide-eyed.

  Reality often swept these daydreams away. But I set great store by them, telling myself that at least in this renascent life I could give Alexandra back her real Christian name. And her language, too, which sometimes, when she was speaking to me in French, lost a word or an expression, for which she would desperately rack her brain, with a mild look of distress in her eyes. This was not a case, I sensed, of banal forgetfulness or a failing in her aging memory. No, this was an absolute loss, the disappearance of a whole world, her native land, that was being obliterated, word by word, in the depths of the snow-covered steppes, where she had no one to talk to in her own language.

  7

  WHEN I ARRIVED IN JACQUES DORME’s NATIVE TOWN I felt no disorientation. In Paris I had lived in the rue Myrha, which cuts across the African bustle of the Boulevard Barbès. I had also lodged in the suburbs at Aubervilliers, later on in the outskirts of Montreuil, and subsequently in the Belleville district, where I had ended up no longer noticing the strangeness of this new country.

  This little town in northern France was very much a part of that country.

  The town hall, in a neat and tidy square, was reminiscent of those elderly Parisian ladies I used to pass occasionally near the Boulevard Barbès: survivors from another era, with carefully groomed clothes and hair, trotting along intrepidly amid this human cocktail squeezed from pulverized continents . . .

  The safe island on which the town hall stood was indeed very tiny. The main street, elegant at the start, rapidly ran out of steam, disintegrating into rough façades, their windows filled in with cinderblocks. The window of a confectioner’s was fractured in a number of places and patched with plywood. A little notice announced: “Closed. Owner has had enough.” I consulted my street map and turned left.

  On the telephone Jacques Dorme’s brother had advised me to take a taxi from the train station: “It’s quite a long way We’re at the edge of the town . . .” But I needed to walk, to see this town, to sense what it must have been like half a century earlier. I could not reconcile myself to the idea of climbing out of a taxi, ringing the front doorbell, and going in like someone who knew the area.

  A motor scooter passed at full speed, brushed against me, swerved in and out of overturned garbage cans. A beer bottle rolled under my feet, I w
as not sure if it had been aimed at me or not. The sign bearing the street name was daubed with red. It took me a moment to decipher it: rue Henri Barbusse. Beneath a broken window, dangling from a clothes dryer, scraps of cloth blew back and forth. The glass had been replaced by a blue plastic bag, an unexpected patch of color on a gray-brown wall. Another window on the first floor looked almost bizarre with its little vase of flowers and neat, pale curtains. And in the wan December air an aged hand was closing the shutters, a wrinkled face and the gleam of white hair, eyes that met mine: a woman who might have lived here in Jacques Dorme’s time.

  The town soon flattened out beneath the roofs of empty warehouses and abandoned garages and disintegrated into moribund little houses. Modern residential dwellings now made their appearance, having waited for the town to lose heart before thrusting up their towers, interspersed with four- or five-story apartment buildings. Subconsciously, I was just comparing them to the suburbs of Moscow, finding the housing here much better designed and with a more humane architecture, when at that moment I noticed a burned-out front door, like the mouth of an enormous furnace, and a line of mailboxes thrown down on a patch of grass covered in garbage bags. The people I saw seemed in a hurry to get home and avoided me when I tried to stop them and ask the way. Two women, one of them very old, her face marked with blue ink, the other young and veiled, listened to me, staring at me in perplexity, as if the place I was looking for were the subject of some kind of taboo. The young woman showed me the direction with a vague gesture and I saw her look back at me, still with that incredulous air.

  The low-rise housing zone was separated from the new buildings by the Avenue de l’Egalité, which ran along a blackish, porous wall. I only realized there was a cemetery here when I reached the entrance. One of the gates had been ripped off and hung from the upper hinge. I went in without really going in, just glancing at the first of the graves. “The Verdun sector,” one could read on a little pillar. The crosses took the form of swords: all of them too rusty for one to be able to read the names, some of them broken, lying there among broken bottles, old newspapers, dog shit. Outside a car drove past, blaring out rhythmic chanting, a singer’s protesting cries. The silence returned, mellowed by the rustling of bare branches in the wind.

  I saw the other car as I was following the cemetery wall, about to turn down into the residential streets. A car surrounded by five or six youths, or rather cornered by them at an intersection. It was not, properly speaking, an assault. They were kicking the sides of the car, laughing and climbing onto the hood, tugging at the door handles. The driver, who was trying to get out to push them away, was forced to remain stooped, neither sitting nor standing, for they had trapped his leg in the door. One of them, a can of beer in his hand, was gargling and spitting out the froth into the car.

  It may have been this spitting that propelled me toward the group. I noticed the driver’s foot, a fine black shoe, a long sock, and the very pale skin revealed beneath the trouser leg, which the edge of the door had rolled back, an old man’s skin, crisscrossed by dark veins. There was nothing heroic about my impulse, just a sudden inability to tolerate the sight of this old foot, comically pawing the asphalt. And probably the outcome of my intervention would have been quite different had it not been for two motor scooters that suddenly emerged around the cemetery wall and began pursuing one another in and out of the narrow alleyways. Four of the young men clinging to the car ran off to watch the chase. The other two remained, finding that harassing the driver was more entertaining.

  One of them continued spitting and choking with laughter. The other was leaning against the door with all his weight and drumming on the car roof with his fists, as on a tom-tom . . . I hit the spitting youth as hard as I could, with a blow designed to knock him down. He swayed, his back planted against the car, and I had time to see a flash of surprise in his eyes, the astonishment of one who had thought himself unassailable. He dodged the second blow and began running, shouting that he would come back with his “brothers.” I grasped the other one, in an attempt to free the door. He twisted around, spewing out a mouthful of the French I most detested: that new French, made up of verbal filth and acclaimed as the language of the young. The old man’s leg was still trapped by the door. I saw a hand feverishly trying to wind up the window, and on the passenger seat the figure of a woman, with very delicate fingers folded over a box of pastries. The next few seconds of struggle seemed predictably ugly and drawn out. As ugly as this handsome young face (“a handsome face combined with a foul mouth,” I was to think later). As long-drawn-out as the maneuvering of the young man, unable to pull a switchblade out of his pocket. He pressed the button too soon and the blade at once cut through the cloth of his jeans. I leaned my arm harder against his throat. His voice hissed, then fell silent. For a moment his mouth opened dumbly, then suddenly his eyes grew cloudy and at all once flickered in a basic animal refusal to suffocate. His body collapsed like that of a puppet. I loosed my grip, pushed him toward the sidewalk. He staggered away, stumbling, rubbing his throat and hissing threats in his broken voice.

  The door slammed, the car drove off and turned in to an avenue.

  Now several minutes spent wandering around with a feeling of nausea, compounded with useless anger and belated fear, fear arriving in sickening gusts that corresponded to the buzzing of the scooters in the streets. But most of all, a vivid awareness of the total futility of my intervention. I could at this very moment have been lying in the gutter with a switchblade between my ribs. And it would have changed nothing and surprised no one, for there are so many small towns like this, so many old men attacked. Now my anger turns against the driver, who had had the stupidity to stop and parley instead of putting his foot down and driving home. I feel more remote than ever from this country. What am I doing interfering in its life, reprimanding young armed gorillas, playing the good citizen, with my stateless person’s identity card in my pocket. . . ?

  The burning sensation from these words delays my search. I finally find the Allée de la Marne but number sixteen appears to be nonexistent. I cross the road twice, study each of the houses, feeling certain I have recognized Jacques Dorme’s, without being able to see the number. But the number, precisely, is missing. I walk along the street in the other direction: a sequence of two-story houses, with bare gardens. In the depths of a room, a feeling of expectation that goes back a long way. An open garage door and on the other side of the street, at number eleven, an old woman thrusting her hand into the mailbox, finding nothing, taking advantage of these moments to observe me. Or rather, she pretends to look for letters while scrutinizing this strange passerby who is now retracing his footsteps. So as not to alarm her I call out from some way off: “Number sixteen, Madame?” Her voice is strangely beautiful, strong, the voice of an elderly singer, one might think: “Why, it’s over there, Monsieur. Just behind you . . .” I turn, take a few steps. The open garage door hides the ceramic circle with the number on it. Inside a man is cleaning the windshield of his car with a sponge. I recognize him immediately: the old man with elegant black shoes. Jacques Dorme’s brother, “Captain,” as I called him, in accordance with Alexandra’s stories.

  I tell him my name, remind him of our conversations on the telephone, my letters. His smile does not entirely succeed in obliterating the hint of sourness lurking in his wrinkles. I do not know if he recognizes me as the man who intervened just now. It seems as if he does not. He closes the garage, invites me to come up into the house, and on the front steps asks me this question, which ought to be utterly banal. “Did you find it easily? Did you come by taxi?” It is not banal, a tiny quaver in his voice betrays the secret tension with which these words are uttered. So he has recognized me . . . Settled in the drawing room, we talk about the town and succeed in avoiding the slightest allusion to what has just happened in the Avenue de l’Egalité. His wife enters, offers me her hand, those fragile fingers I saw clutching a beribboned cardboard box. Her face, with its Asiatic impass
ivity (she is Vietnamese), shows no trace of emotion. “I’ll bring tea,” she says with a slight smile and leaves us alone.

  I have nothing new to tell him. In my first letter, thirty pages long, I set down with the assiduity of a chronicler everything I knew about Jacques Dorme, about the Alsib, about the week the pilot spent in Stalingrad. No, not everything, far from that. Like an archaeologist, I simply wanted this history to be added to the history of their country, like a national art object discovered abroad and repatriated. I talk about my journey to Siberia, to the house on the Edge, about the Trident mountain . . . That journey, made at the beginning of the year (we are now in December), is still vividly present, with the sounds of the wind, voices made clear by the cold. However, my enthusiasm in recounting it seems to embarrass the Captain. He senses my purpose: the repatriation of a parcel of history that got lost in the snowy wastes of eastern Siberia. I feel his face growing tense, his eyes see me without seeing me, peering into a past that suddenly reappears in front of us, in this drawing room, on this December afternoon. I interpret his emotion incorrectly and lay my cards on the table: I am writing a book that will rescue the French pilot from oblivion, the press will be interested in him, and, as I know the place where he died, it will be possible to bring his mortal remains back to France, to the town of his birth . . .

  I break off, seeing his lips painfully stretched, attempting an unsteady smile. His voice is pitched higher than before, almost shrill: “To France? To the town of his birth? What for? To bury him in that cemetery that’s become a garbage dump? In this town where people don’t dare leave their homes anymore? For him to listen to that racket?”