The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme

by Andrei Makine

  What I was searching for in my reading was what I lacked. Attachment to a place (that of my own birth was too ill defined), a personal mythology, a family past. But, above all, that thing of which the others had just robbed me: the divine freedom to reinvent life, and to people it with heroes. For me the four knights of Aquitaine were much more real than those ghosts of handsome officers that haunted the orphanage dormitories.

  Did I really believe in these equestrian figures standing guard over France? I think I did, just as at the age of eleven or twelve one believes in nobility, compassion, self-sacrifice. After all, it was not the reality of this vision that interested me, but its beauty. A road high on a hillside, the dust muffling the clatter of the hooves, the four companions advancing slowly, their gaze directed into the distance, now toward the mountains, where they cluster in the mists, now toward the gap where the ocean glistens. That was how I saw them; it was my way of hoping.

  One day this dreamed-of land finally imprinted its space within me, as the pattern of the constellations is imprinted in our visual memory, and the ups and downs of a familiar road in the soles of our feet. I became aware of this during the last literature lesson before the New Year holidays. The atmosphere was not very studious. Some of us were dozing, hypnotized by the swirling of great snowflakes outside the window, others were choking with whispered laughter at the back of the class as they passed a textbook, open at a disfigured illustration, from hand to hand beneath the desks. From time to time, the voice of the teacher, a tall, bony woman with a massive, prominent chin, thundered out: “Who wants to go without food until tomorrow?” The class would freeze, she would resume her dissection of a poem by Lermontov, and the textbook would provoke new spasms of hilarity. When I set eyes on it I could not help smiling. The poem we were studying (dedicated to Napoleon) was illustrated with the painting that shows the emperor just after his abdication. An unfortunate choice, if one knows the penchant naughty schoolboys have for desecrating images of famous people in textbooks. Napoleon was seated, with a downcast air, his body shrunken, his gaze fixed, his legs wide apart. And it was in this space, between the imperial legs, that a sacrilegious hand had drawn a monstrous hairy tube adorned with two enormous balls. Another, more innocent hand had covered his face with long, stitched-up scars and hidden his left eye behind a pirates patch. I smiled, pondering those famous people in our textbooks who acquired even more infamous addenda, even more muscular appendages . . . It was at that moment that the teacher began to recite the poem.

  She read it both badly and well. Badly, because her voice was monotonous and evidently concerned by the somnolence of one camp and the giggling whispers of another. Well, because the banality of this voice enabled me to forget it, to forget this tall woman with her angular frame, to forget this classroom, and to enter into the nocturnal world of these stanzas, finding myself on an island lost in the middle of an ocean beside a stone tomb that opens once a year, at midnight on the anniversary of the emperors death. The dead man arises and climbs aboard the ghost ship, which sets sail for “that beloved France where he had left his glory, his throne, his son and heir, and his faithful Guard.” He lands by night and rouses the deserted shore with a powerful call that reverberates into the very depths of the country. But his native land remains deaf: “The mustachioed grenadiers are all asleep now, on the plain where the Elbe’s waters flow, beneath the snows of cold Russia, in the burning sands of the pyramids.” Then he summons his marshals: “Ney! Lannes! Murat. . .” No one comes to his side. “Some have fallen in battle, others have betrayed him and sold their swords.” With a despairing cry he calls out to his son, but in reply hears only the deathly silence of the void. Dawn compels him to leave his native land. He boards the ghost ship, and it carries him back to his remote island.

  I had never before had such a feeling of freedom in the face of reality. The beauty of this nocturnal voyage rendered the so-called real world all around me so insignificant that I wanted to laugh: the walls of this classroom, decorated with strips of red calico bearing quotations from Lenin and the last Party Congress; the orphanage building; the chimneys of a vast factory beyond the icebound river. The man who stood on the deck of that spectral ship, this figure in its tricorne hat, had nothing to do with the Bonaparte whose adventures we learned about from our history books, nor with the “literary personage” analyzed by our teacher, nor with that fat little man with his legs apart portrayed in the illustration. The exile returning to the shores of Brittany, sending out his calls to his marshals, was a reality divined by the poet. More true than History itself. More believable, because beautiful.

  I knew the voyager on the ghost ship belonged to the land of the four noblemen from Aquitaine, and that he could, like them, encompass it in a single look, from the forests of the east to the dunes beside the ocean. When the hinged lids of our old desks came clattering down at the end of the lesson, I reflected that it might somehow be possible never to lose contact in my mind with this dreamed-of land.

  According to the logic of my adolescent quest, I should have plunged into an increasingly disdainful and untamed solitude and adopted the posture of the young king in exile.

  A being torn between his dreams of France and reality. A logic both novelistic and romantic. But it all turned out differently. It was reality that suddenly produced a dramatic twist in the plot.

  At first it was just a rumor, so improbable that, talking about it during the New Year vacation, we treated it as a bizarre hoax. Our vacations, in any case, were not like those of normal schoolchildren. We would be sent out to clear railroad tracks, often blocked by snowstorms, or else, from time to time, we were lined up in a guard of honor on the occasion of some official visit. Our city’s glorious past attracted foreign delegations. Lining the perimeter of a monument to the fallen, we represented “Soviet youth, assembled in evergreen commemoration of the war.” It was especially during vacations that they had recourse to us, because at such times normal children were difficult to mobilize. Or when it was particularly cold, too, since parents would refuse to expose their little ones to snowstorms at twenty-five below.

  That December it was indeed very cold. Despite being ordered to stand at attention, we jumped up and down in our ranks, the soles of our ancient shoes thumping on the ice, and to warm the cockles of our hearts while waiting for the official procession to pass we discussed this stupid rumor. What joker could have started it?

  When lessons resumed the news broke — the rumor was true: next fall the orphanage was going to close.

  In the months that followed we learned the details: the pupils would be transferred to ordinary boarding schools, the older ones to professional schools and factories, possibly even in distant towns. But we only really believed it all in June, when after lessons had finished, they ordered us to drag our old desks over to the boiler room. Right up to that day we went on clinging to the hope that it was all a false alarm. And yet each one of us, in his own way, was getting ready to leave.

  The orphanage, the equivalent of the prison into which our fathers had vanished, suddenly took on a different character, revealing its hospitable, almost familial side to us. The lives led by other people, whose freedom we had always envied, now alarmed us. We were like the prison inmate who counts the hours at the end of a long sentence and at the same time dreads going outside, often escaping just before the great day, allowing himself to be caught, and settling down to a new number of days to be crossed off.

  In outward appearance, our daily life remained the same. The most noticeable change was a kind of solidarity that imposed itself of its own accord, canceling the former hierarchies of weak and strong. Strength, hostile and unknown, now lay outside our walls.

  One Saturday evening in January I went up to the sealed-off room where I had almost finished sorting through the books. In the half-light, their worlds came to life, their words resonated softly in my ears. On one of the boxes lay the blade of the future dagger, Misericordia . . . Alexandra called
to me from the landing. I took a last look around me, thinking that I would soon have to leave these books behind for a long time, perhaps forever, and that I would try to carry away within me the land their pages had brought to life.

  3

  THAT WINTER MARKED A HIATUS between two generations, the notorious “twenty years after,” which, though too vague for historians, nevertheless defines the rhythm of a country’s chronology. The war’s end was already twenty years old. A generation had had the time to be born, grow up, and produce offspring. All without war. Blood ties to it were being stretched, the heritage of memory was collapsing, the dead were once and for all taking on solid shape in bronze. Now was precisely the time that they began erecting a forest of monuments in our city — vast concrete memorials in celebration of the battle of Stalingrad, colossal statues — and lighting “everlasting flames.” And they closed our orphanage with the view that the quarantine had lasted long enough, we had expiated our fathers’ past, and it would now be more ideologically judicious to disperse us, like fragments from that past, among the healthy population.

  The last months before our departure were filled in equal measure with excitement and anxiety. We knew that the myth of the hero-fathers could not fail to raise smiles among the people in whose midst we would soon be living. Not only did we come from a strange place, but also from another era, from those days when the statues still moved and spoke, warm with the blood that flowed beneath the bronze. We would all, we knew very well, have to make up for lost time and find a place for ourselves in other people’s reality. Learn to forget.

  What I am left with from those months is a few brief fragments, snapshots in my memory, apparently random, but without which I should certainly have become a different person. Notably, that January afternoon, a biting cold that forces us to rub our noses and lips, which have lost all feeling, despite being ordered to remain still. The motorcade we are waiting for on one of the great avenues of the city is delayed. Everyone shifts on their feet to avoid turning into pillars of ice: the militiamen stationed several yards apart, ourselves behind them, along with other representatives of the “toiling masses.” According to the rumor circulating, a very important person is expected, Brezhnev himself. Our curiosity is aroused by the desire to guess which of the cars in the motorcade this person will travel in. Not the one at the head, we are sure of that. The second, the third? A state secret. We feel we have been entrusted with a mission. And still the motorcade is not there. Our feet feel like ice cubes. Irritated, one of the pupils from the orphanage tells a joke. Wafted along by the breeze, it warms our ears. An attempt on Brezhnev’s life. The gunman misses, is arrested, interrogated: “So what stopped you from shooting straight?” “The crowd. They were all trying to shoot first.” Laughter thaws our lips. The militiamen look around. A supervisor looms up behind us, cuffs heads rapidly . . . The motorcade sweeps past at such a speed that it is impossible to get a good look at the windows in this black stream of limousines. Our hands spring into action too late, merely saluting the motorcyclists who bring up the rear. They have helmets white with frost and ruddy faces . . . The “toiling masses” break ranks and disperse, hastening toward home and a hot drink. But our own mission is not yet accomplished. We are loaded onto a bus and taken to the foot of a brand-new monument, to act out the same charade of popular jubilation all over again, in Potemkin style. The wind from the steppes on this hillside is appalling. They arrange us in a hollow square, doubtless in simulation of a large crowd. We no longer talk, remaining motionless without the supervisors having to rebuke us. Even they seem to understand the inhuman absurdity of this waiting. The day wanes, the motorcade does not come. A noncom approaches our ranks, speaks into a supervisors ear. The latter smiles at us a little mournfully: “At ease!”

  At this moment I flee. Everyone is too tired to count us. I make my way down the other side of the hill and run toward the city. I do not explain to myself the reasons for this truancy. Possibly contempt for this visiting V.I.P., who has not deigned to come. Or else the picture I have of the rest of the extras, who have already gone home, happily drinking hot cups of tea in the bosom of their families. Probably the latter thought. This dazzling vision of domestic bliss, warmth, peace. I make my way through the streets, mimicking the gait of the passersby, I go into a store. Then pause for a moment, mingling with the gathering at a bus stop. With the ill- considered hope that their life will draw me into itself, make me like them. A screen like a fine sheet of glass separates me from these people . . . I find myself inside a church for no particular reason, simply to get warm. My rejection of everything connected with religion is instinctive. I do not like these old women crossing themselves and mumbling in front of the icons wreathed in smoke. The reverberation beneath the vaulted ceilings is unpleasant, chilling. The gleaming richness of the iconostasis is crushing. And even the candle flames are no good for unfreezing my fingers; they burn them, bite them, or else shrink away beneath them. I recall how one day at the orphanage one of the pupils was made to step forward to be castigated for his shameful crime: some reactionary old aunt of his had secretly taken him to the church and had him baptized! Our contempt for this tearful redhead had been sincere. “It was one of these old women here,” I say to myself, at the sight of their bowed shadows. The priest’s voice is slightly plaintive, quavering with cold. I find his prayers hard to follow. He calls on us to pray for all and sundry, to pray for everyone, for those close at hand, for those far away, for the dead . . . I get back to the orphanage just before supper. I cannot admit to anyone that my first attempt to live among the others has failed.

  * * *

  Nor would I have become the person that I am without having experienced a certain night at the end of the winter. Or rather that particular moment when for a very brief spell the passing of the trains that ran beside the house where Alexandra lived came to a stop. During the day the tracks, only a few yards away from the wooden walls, gave rise to the noisy symphony of trains on their way through the township. The inhabitants no longer even noticed all this pounding, clattering, whistling, and grinding, the crescendos and diminuendos. Just from the sound they could recognize the heavy drumming of a train coming from the Urals, its freight cars loaded with ore, the shock wave raised by the Novosibirsk express, the interminable clanking of the dark tank cars bringing oil from the Caspian Sea . . . Around about two o’clock in the morning there was a slack period in this rail activity, a brief respite between the very late trains and the ones that roused the switch yard at the crack of dawn. Sometimes this pause in the night was shattered by special trains passing through very rapidly. As I lay in my bed, separated from the rest of the room by an old curtain, all I had to do was crane my neck to see the long, low flatcars rolling past, the transport covers that allowed one to guess at the contours of armored vehicles, the shapes of guns. Then I remembered the things our teachers used to tell us about the world situation. These armaments were probably on their way to the defenders of Vietnam, currently being burned with napalm by the Americans, or to the Cubans, at their last gasp, thanks to the blockade, or to the Africans in their liberation struggle. The cause seemed to me just. I loved being awakened by these trains shrouded in mystery.

  That night I missed the passing of the nocturnal train. I sat up in bed as the last of the flatcars was already slipping by under the window. All I could make out was the unusual size of the devices being transported: the covers reached up higher than our first floor. “Maybe they’re rockets. . .” I thought, still half asleep, and remained like that for a while, listening to the slow fading of the sound. The night, as so often after the February thaws, was icy and clear. In the upper part of the window, where the fronds of frost had not made inroads, the darkness gleamed like clean-cut granite flecked with mica. Between two stalactites of ice that hung from the gutter, a star stood out clearly, alive and aware of our lives, of the existence of this old wooden house, suspended in total isolation in the somewhat terrifying splendor of this a
nimated sky.

  The final reverberations of the rails fell silent, the stillness was about to become absolute. And it was then that I became aware of a barely perceptible murmuring that still clouded the settling of the silence. I pricked up my ears and recognized Alexandra’s voice, or rather the shadow of Alexandra’s voice. The ceiling was faintly tinged with the glow of her night light. Embarrassed at overhearing this whispering, I was about to get back into bed when I suddenly thought I heard my name. “Perhaps she’s having a heart attack,” I thought, “and hasn’t the strength to call out to me . . .” Anxious, but not wanting to give myself away, I delicately pushed aside the tired satin of the curtain . . . In the corner of the room, on the other side of the wardrobe that formed my cubbyhole, I saw an old woman seated on her bed, her feet, below a long nightdress, resting on a small rectangle of carpet. At first she seemed like a stranger. Her white hair was undone and reached her shoulders. Most striking was her pose: her head deeply bowed, her fingers pressed against her brow. Among her faint, tremulous words I once more caught my name . . .

  I did not think, I did not say to myself: “A woman saying her prayers.” What occurred to me at that moment was much less considered. My whole being was filled with an awareness of the infinite night in which our house was adrift, the depth of the darkness, of the icy expanses of sky and earth, and, at the heart of this gaping space, of a woman, giving voice to my presence in the universe.

  The night light went out. I lay there, unsleeping. Amid the early-morning uproar of the trains, it struck me that she had been murmuring those secret words in her mother tongue.