The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme

by Andrei Makine

  During the days that followed, when I had managed to find the language to understand that night, I recalled the priest’s litany, his quavering voice that had displeased me. Among others, he had called on us to pray “for those who have no one to pray for them.” This form of words, incomprehensible to me at the time, now seemed poignantly apt. Knowing nothing about religious practice, I saw prayer as, broadly speaking, the act of thinking about a person, picturing them lost and isolated under the sky and, by this thought, reaching them, even if they were unaware, especially if they were unaware of it.

  “. . . Who have no one to pray for them.” In the gray light of a dawn slow to appear, I helped Village retrieve his fishing lines, all of them without a catch. So the little wood fire he had just lit would serve no purpose. “The months with an V in them are no goddamned use for fishing,” he explained, making light of it. We had, in fact, reached the first days of March. The setback did not seem to affect him. He sat down on the carcass of an old boat, took out a hunk of bread, and offered me half of it. The river was still covered with a white carapace. Above it the clouds were beginning to turn pale. He ate, and then he became still, silent, his gaze directed beyond the river. I looked at him attentively, insistently even. “. . . Those who have no one to pray for them,” I thought again.

  “So, do you want to go and see her?” he said suddenly, without looking at me.

  “See who?” I asked, perplexed.

  “Don’t talk crap. You know very well. That nurse.”

  “Why should I? You’re crazy.”

  He said nothing, his eyes once more lost among the bushes along the riverbank. Frantically I racked my brains over what it was in our talks together that had betrayed me. Nothing. And everything . . . Every word, every gesture.

  “Give me your hand,” he said in almost brutal tones. He got up. I held out my right hand; he pushed it away, seized my other hand, and, before I could react, slashed the palm with a lump of ice, or so it seemed to me. No, it was a five-kopeck piece, sharpened into a razor blade. The shallow cut glistened, began to bleed.

  “You can tell her it was that rusty pile of crap . . .” I stood there, irresolute, looking now at him, now at the thread of blood. “Go on,” he said more softly, without brutality, and he gave me a kindly smile, such as I had never seen on any face at the orphanage.

  At the infirmary I was plunged for several minutes in that hypnotic state the woman’s slowness caused to reign about her. A blissful state for me, a blend of maternal gentleness and loving tenderness.

  Nothing now remained of Samoylov’s collection of books in the sealed-off room, apart from volumes badly damaged by the fire. My hands covered in ash, I was trying to resuscitate them, chiefly out of respect for their infirm state. Often, reading became impossible. I would just have time to focus on a page scorched by the fire when it would disintegrate in my fingers, carrying away its contents forever. Thus it was that I read, without being able to reread, a short poem in which the scenes depicted were strangely in harmony with the fragility of this single reading. I did not know the author, doubtless one of the obscure poets on the fringes of the romantic movement. Samoylov’s library, assembled with the omnivorous appetite of a neophyte, was well stocked with these names neglected by the anthologies and might well, I would tell myself years later, have formed the basis for an original history of literature, almost parallel to the one that is taught and honored.

  The poem had as its title “The Last Square,” probably borrowed from Victor Hugo, echoing the warlike epics of the early nineteenth century. The soldiers in their ranks in this square were falling one by one, under attack from an enemy more numerous and better armed. The hero expressed only one fear, that of seeing his companions weaken. They stood firm, however (a couplet would come back to me one day in which “batterie” [the battery] rhymed with ‘‘‘fratrie” [brotherhood]), closing rank in the square to fill the gaps left by the dead. At the end only two were left, the hero and his friend. Back-to-back they fought on, out of pure gallantry, each one fearing to leave the other on his own. When finally the warriors heart was pierced, he looked around, and in his friend’s place saw an angel whose powerful wings were flecked with blood.

  The page crumbled between my fingers like a fine sliver of slate. This ephemeral aspect reinforced the impact of the words. Few lines of verse have remained so vividly in my memory as these unknown stanzas.

  I remember, too, one of the last times (perhaps the very last)

  I spent reading in Alexandra’s company That evening at the end of March, it stayed light for a long time; we could drink our tea and read without lighting the lamps. Sometimes a train would go by and in its lit sleeping compartments the lives of the passengers could be covertly observed: a woman tucking in a sheet on her berth, a young man, his hands held up like blinders, his brow pressed against the window, as if he hoped to see those he had just left behind . . . Alexandra had opened the window, the mild air brought in with it the pleasantly bitter scent of the last mounds of snow, the swollen bark of the trees. The promise of spring. I thought of this as I observed Alexandra reading aloud, the ghost of a smile playing over her lips. For the first time I thought about what a woman could feel at the coming of a new spring. A woman of her age. Or perhaps age did not count?

  The book she was reading came from the devastated library, the accumulation of volumes by forgotten authors that had included “The Last Square.” This one was a collection of short tales, interesting only for their elegant construction, maintaining the suspense for the space of half a page before the final triumph of Good. I was listening, lulled by all these predictable happy endings, when the next story, even shorter than the others, suddenly upset all these neat narrative rhythms. A young man falls passionately in love with a young woman, as cruel as she is beautiful, he declares his love to her and offers her his heart. “No, my dear, I already have your heart. To prove to me that you love me truly, bring me your mother’s heart. Yes, rip the heart out from her breast.” The lover runs home, stabs his mother, makes off with her heart. In his haste to satisfy his beloved, he stumbles on the journey, falls, and drops the heart, which lands among stones. The lover groans, gets up, and suddenly hears an anxious voice, his mother’s heart speaking: “You’re not hurt, are you, my son?”

  I had no memory of getting to my feet, leaving the room, running. Quite simply, after a total loss of awareness, I found myself standing in the sealed-off room, to which I had gained access by going out onto the landing, sliding along against the wall of the house on an old skirting board, and pushing open the door. There I was, biting my lip until it bled, so as not to howl, my eyes seeing nothing at first, then seeing the space outside the door: the fields blanketed with tired gray snow, the dull sky, spring. A world at once perfectly familiar and unrecognizable. Alexandra did not call me, she left me alone, waited quietly for me to come down. And never referred to that story again.

  Many years later the difference between one’s mother tongue and an acquired language was to become a fashionable topic. I would often hear it said that only the former could evoke the deepest and most subtle — the most untranslatable — ties that bind our souls. Then I would think of maternal love, which I had first discovered and experienced in French, in a very simple little book, its pages tarnished by the fire.

  UNDER THE SUN’S BLAZE, immense slabs of ice slid down the river, collided, broke up, revealing their greenish rims, sometimes several feet thick. Just as we were crossing the bridge a section of floating ice struck one of the pillars. The roadway shook beneath our feet. The impact made an explosion of sound. Breaking rank, we rushed over to the handrail. It was giddy intoxication: the dazzle of the shafts of light, the wild chill of the liberated waters, the brutish power of the ice floes, rearing against the pillar, jolting upward in spasms. On the opposite bank, looking like black ants, children played at rafting, leaping from one slab of floating ice to the next. As the white surface broke up, the young daredevils would das
h onto the broadest fragment, which in its turn disintegrated, now driving them back onto terra firma, now, for the wildest of them, onto a slab whose instability demanded the contortions of a tightrope walker. Seen from the eminence of the bridge, these games were reminiscent of the flickering of a kaleidoscope.

  During those spring months our own life, too, was reminiscent of a kaleidoscope where the tube has been shattered so that, bit by bit, the glass sequins and mirrors spill out. Events followed one another, not so much leading us on to the future as draining our years in the orphanage, down to the last fragment of a dream.

  During the course of a few weeks, several people ran away — really ran away, never to return — one of them ending up, so we learned, in the Far East. Then, just before the May celebrations, one of the girls was escorted by the director into an ambulance parked near the entrance. It was difficult to grasp that an adolescent of fourteen, a thin girl with drab features, was about to become a mother, and that since the previous autumn she had been carrying this other life within her and had contrived not to give herself away, while we scribbled on the pages of our textbooks and told jokes about Brezhnev.

  On one of the first evenings of May, it became clear to me that the world of other people was going to exact a tribute from us. I was leaning against a tall table beside a kiosk where they served beer. I had no money, but as long as the serving woman did not notice my presence, I could listen to the customers’ conversations. They were almost all men who, before returning joylessly to their homes (I was discovering that a family home could be joyless), were here flaunting their virility, discussing women (two categories: those who “did it” and the rest), and cursing the injustice of fate. There were not many women in this male preserve. Only one that evening, two tables away from mine. The man with her was addressing her in tones of such contempt that it was as if at every word he was gathering up his saliva to spit. At one moment he struck her with a dry, furtive little slap. She turned her face away, I recognized her. It was Muza, a girl from the orphanage, three years older than me. She may have had some Caucasian or Tartar blood in her veins, for her features were remarkably finely formed, one of those faces whose nobility and harmony make one doubt the animal origins of the human race. No one among the pupils at the orphanage had ever ventured to court her. For us, such a degree of beauty placed her in another living species, somewhere between a snow-laden branch and a shooting star . . .

  There were not many customers; the booth was about to close. I could clearly hear the words the man was hissing through his teeth: “You’ll go just where I tell you, you dirty little whore . . . If it weren’t for me you wouldn’t even have anything to cover your ass with . . .” Muza shook her head in protest. At this, with a hate-filled grimace, the man very calmly pinched her lower lip, thrusting his finger into her now distorted mouth. He was twice her age and his beige suit and the color of his sparse hair made him look like a long cigar with the tobacco spilling out of it. She tried to break free but he squeezed her mouth more violently, preventing her from speaking. With this thumb thrust in behind her cheek she managed to mumble in pitifully comic tones: “I know where to go, I do. I won’t sleep in the street. . He released his grip, sneering as if disgusted: “Oh, sure! Go back to your filthy hole. They’ll soon be kicking you all out . . .” She began to weep and I was struck by these tears, for she sobbed like a woman already mature, already wearied by life.

  The waitress made half a dozen empty tankards clink as she picked them up with fanned-out fingers. “All right, you. Finish your popsicle right now or I’ll call the militiaman. He’s not far away. Beat it, before I get angry!”

  I walked away regretting that I had not intervened, with that feeling of shame every man experiences a dozen or more times in his life. This particular time would remain one of the most painful for me.

  I was not alone in having seen Muza in the company of the man who looked like a beige cigar. Some days later one of the boys claimed to have spied on them in a boat moored upstream from the orphanage. Despite the salacious exaggerations in his story, I believed him, for the behavior of the beige man as he described it corresponded precisely to what I had seen. Stuttering with excitement, he described the man seated in the boat with his pants unbuttoned and his lower abdomen exposed, whistling to himself, while Muza, on her knees, had her head pressed against his stomach, although her hair made it impossible to see anything. Proud of his success, the storyteller went over the scene once more, described how the man stared at the clouds and whistled to himself, while the woman’s mouth was distorted by the strenuous thrusting . . . Village, who never took part in our discussions, suddenly broke into our circle and, without saying anything, struck. The storyteller collapsed, his arms flailing. His lips bloody, he got up, hurled an oath, and fell silent as he met Village’s look. A look not threatening, but sad.

  In one other way or another we all approved of what Village had done, even the one who had received the blow.

  I saw the nurse again in May on a public holiday. She was coming out of a shop, holding one handle of a huge shopping bag. The other handle was held by (I thought at first) her twin brother. But it was her husband, and he looked like a comical masculine copy of her. Almost the same height, middling. The same build, rather well rounded. Fair, diaphanous curls, the man’s even more dazzling. I experienced neither jealousy nor disappointment. The couple looked like little piglets in a strip cartoon and could therefore have nothing in common with the silent woman who had tended my wound. With all my strength I wanted to believe in the possibility that this was her double. Within the cracked kaleidoscope of our lives I at least needed this shard of a dream to hold on to.

  Among the flickering visions reflected in the glass there were also those two girls and their boyfriends, chatting at the entrance to a lane. We saw them from a truck bringing us back from a work site. The driver had parked it under the trees and gone off in search of a pack of cigarettes. One of the boys was seated on his bicycle, the other was holding his by the handlebars. Fenced in as we were by the sides of the truck, we studied them in their little carefree oasis. Their freedom enthralled us. Even their skin was different from ours. After several baking hot days our faces were peeling, our short hair rough and discolored. The golden skin of these girls gave evidence of a mysterious way of life in which one took care of one’s body, as of an asset . . . At one moment the boy seated on his bike took hold of a fine lock of hair that had slipped over his girlfriends cheek and tucked it back behind her ear. She seemed not to notice, and continued talking. I sensed around me a swift muscular tension, as at the movies, when the hero is getting close to some danger . . . A volley of oaths erupted in the midst of our tightly packed crowd. Laughter, obscenities, banging on the metal of the cabin, and then, as if someone had given the order for it, silence. The two couples moved off rapidly down the lane beneath the trees. A girl leaning on the panel beside me had her eyes swollen with tears.

  From the same broken kaleidoscope this spray of sparks came fizzing out: the town hoodlums who sometimes arrived to taunt us were armed with short, two-edged blades known as “Finnish knives.” On that particular evening the impact of a blade against an iron bar in the already darkening air caused a tiny spurt of blue-green. We had yet to discover that these brawls were, in fact, a means for the local underworld to test our mettle. For it was from among youths such as ourselves that they recruited people with nothing to lose and no one to love. This burst of sparks fixed in my vision the flat, ugly face of one of our assailants. Some days later I was to pass him near the station. He was giving the beige man a light.

  * * *

  It was from this station that I used to set out for the township where Alexandra lived. I had not been back to see her since the May celebrations, and it was already the end of the month. The passengers were talking about a fire that had just destroyed a railway depot; the warm breeze carried a bitter taste of charred resin . . . Not finding Alexandra at home, I went downstairs, walke
d around the house, and caught sight of her in the distance, standing beside the railroad tracks. I saw her from behind but guessed at her gesture: her hand shading her eyes, she was looking up at the clouds of smoke above the long buildings of the depot. The train traffic had been interrupted, the firemen’s helmets were glinting amid the tracks. You could hear the crash of beams collapsing, the hiss of fire hoses. From time to time the murk framed a ghostly sun through the smoke, and the day froze into the contrasting black and white of a negative. Then the vividness of the flames and the intensity of the sky would flood back into this momentary dusk. The clusters of flowers on a lilac bush next to a buffer stop between the tracks seemed to be blooming on another day in another world.

  Alexandra looked like a tiny figure beside the soaring clouds of smoke against the plain horizon, toward which led the deserted tracks. I stared at her and, more clearly than ever, believed I understood who she was. I recalled her neighbor, the old Tartar, Yussuf, once remarking to her: “You know, Alexandra, you Russians . . .” He was right, this woman standing among the railroad tracks, her gaze fixed on the flames, was Russian. Time had erased in her everything that could still distinguish her from the life of this country, its wars, its sufferings, its sky. She was as much a part of it as the quivering of a blade of grass on the endless ocean swell of the steppe. She had invented a remote homeland and a language for herself. But her real homeland was that tiny room in an old wooden house, half destroyed by bombs. That house and the infinity of the steppes all around. The place where she would remain forever incarcerated, the prisoner of an era made up of wars and suffering. I felt myself reeling on the brink of this past, in danger of letting myself be drawn into its yawning darkness. I must distance myself from it, flee.

  A ball of fire, fringed with soot, billowed up over the depot. Alarmed, I drew back, and focused an uneasy gaze once more upon the figure of Alexandra, who was still there, unmoving. And I made off very quickly, jumping over the ties. I was afraid I might see her turning, calling me . . .