The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme

by Andrei Makine

  He spoke. And I was certain I was the only one who understood the language he gave voice to. It was the one I had believed dead. French.

  The impression I had of being his only audience was not, by and large, false. The notables were incapable of listening to speeches not written down. The giant’s entourage thought they knew in advance what was going to be said. The young extras with their red neckerchiefs were aware of the fine, powerful, occasionally somewhat strident music of his sentences, but not of their meaning. The interpreters were concentrating on the syntax.

  He said what had to be said at such a ceremony, in the ponderous presence of a concrete monument upon soil heavy with steel and the mortal remains of fighting men. But now, initiated into his secret, I believed I could hear a silent voice, hidden behind the ringing tones of his speech. He spoke of thousands of heroes, but the hidden voice brought to mind not these nameless, faceless thousands but the one who, perhaps, lay beneath our feet. He spoke of the gratitude of peoples, but a perceptible bitterness made it possible to sense that he knew how ungrateful a people can reveal itself to be toward those who have given their lives to it. . .

  At one moment there was a brief stirring among his entourage. A mouth whispering in an ear, a discreet glance at a watch . . . The diplomats had no doubt noticed that things were running behind schedule for the visit. Like a hardened orator, the giant ignored this distraction, merely turning his head a little in the direction of their confabulations, with one eyebrow arched, as if to say: “Silence in the ranks!” The sight of these people in their elegant suits irritated him. The rhythm of his words did not change. But his silent voice suddenly became even more audible to me, perceptible as he spoke. “Look at them, these bureaucrats! Already counting the time until the banquet. But do they know how much time it took a company to secure this hill? And how many lives it cost to hold it? Do you know how many eternities each second lasts as you force yourself up from the ground and run out under fire?”

  Suddenly he fell silent. Someone thought the speech was finished. Two or three hesitant handclaps rang out. Then everyone froze, their eyes riveted to this man in the middle of the space. His stillness turned him into a tall monolith, indifferent to human emotion. Amid this silence that had fallen from the sky — or so it seemed to us — the hot winds mighty blast could be heard sweeping across the plain.

  For several moments the old giant directed his gaze into the distance, over our heads, beyond the unfinished building they had sought to hide from him, beyond the Volga, and into the endless solitude of the steppes. And I believed he could even see the cross, made from two branches of birchwood above an unknown grave.

  This minute of silence (in reality six or seven seconds) was very likely involuntary, but it altered the whole sense of the ceremony. The giant roused himself, and in a final coda, throatier than his earlier words, he spoke of victory, of honor, of the mother country. He lifted up his arms and our hearts went with them. The applause, perhaps for the first time ever at such a ceremony, was sincere.

  The officials surrounded him, reforming their Lilliputian escort, and began guiding him toward the downward slope. But, with his art of making space pliant to his will, he broke through their circle and walked with giant strides along the line formed by the young. The extras in their white shirts smiled broadly; each one waved the carnation he had been issued for the occasion. The giant passed by, eyeing them with just a tinge of disappointment. In front of our square he halted. We had no flowers and were not smiling, and remained at attention. I do not know if he understood who we were, with our peeling faces and our cropped hair, the minimal difference between the boys and the girls. I think he did. He must, at all events, have realized that we came from another era, the era they were trying to bury beneath the concrete of the memorial. The era that was dear to him. He looked at us, nodded his head, and screwed up his eyes, as if to say: “Chin up!” And we saw him walking away, not with his entourage, but with an elderly army officer. The two of them had no need of the interpreter weaving his way between them. The military man was making broad gestures, no doubt explaining troop movements, the deployment of artillery pieces, breakthroughs of armored divisions. The old giant approved, making up with his hands for the hesitations of the interpreter, now trailing behind . . .

  I spoke to the supervisor, who was waiting for us beside the bus, in the manner of a condemned man formulating his last request: “There’s someone in the city I must see. My aunt. . . If I’m not allowed to go, I’ll run away all the same.” He gave me a searching look, gauging the unstable frontier between the unlimited submissiveness we normally displayed and a rebellion that might erupt at the most unexpected moment. At that very moment indeed, just as we were being promised a whole morning of bathing in the Volga the following day. As a good psychologist, he sensed that here was an exceptional case. “If you don’t show up tomorrow I’ll set the militia on you as a fugitive. It’ll be a reeducation colony for you. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Now, beat it. You can still catch the last train. Hold on: take this as your ticket.”

  The following morning Alexandra telephoned him and, on the pretext of sunstroke and a high fever, won for me the handful of days I was to spend with her that came to count for more in my life than some whole years.

  I had arrived at about ten o’clock at night and, without explaining anything, told her everything in such breathless haste that it could indeed have been taken for fever or the early stages of drunkenness. The window overlooking the railroad tracks was open, and you could hear the heavy clanking of a train on its way from the Urals. She made tea, lit the lamp. It was only when she asked in a very calm voice, too calm: “So what did he speak about?” that I sensed her emotion.

  I took a deep breath and suddenly felt utterly tongue- tied. I could tell her about the handkerchief wiping away the slime from the sturgeon. I recalled the smallest of the giant’s gestures. I had even had a memory of the moment when he used the past historic tense of a verb that sounded old-fashioned to my ear (some “naquit” or quite simply “fut”) that had struck me like the sighting of a prehistoric reptile. I could easily have said: “He spoke about the war and the victory and the debt all peoples owe to their heroes . . .” But the real essence of it was not there. It was in that silent voice I believed I had heard, in the gaze he directed toward the forgotten cross in the middle of the plain . . . Yet how to speak of that? And indeed, was it real or had I dreamed it?

  Seeing my confusion, Alexandra thought I had been unable to follow the spoken French or that the content of the speech was too complex for a boy of my age. It was doubtless in order to rescue me from my predicament that, in tones of a very distant reminiscence, she said: “He came here to the city once before. In forty-four. Yes, in the autumn of forty-four. I didn’t see him. The hospital was full to bursting. Everyone was working day and night. But we had already talked about him for the first time long before that. . .”

  “Who is ‘we’?” I asked, emerging from my torpor.

  “‘We’ is myself and . . . Jacques Dorme.”

  My “sunstroke” lasted for less than a week. But Jacques Dorme’s life story, the fragmentary sketch of this life story, had time to knit itself forever into what I was. The tale Alexandra told me that July 1966 was one of those you only hear once in a lifetime.

  Four years and a few months after that ceremony on the broad plain, I learned of the tall old man’s death. The gaze that embraced the steppe beyond the Volga, the moment of silence he had spun out that day, all this had just vanished into eternity. I can still see the newspaper kiosk near the Anichkov Bridge in Leningrad, the page with his picture on it, the report of his death. “The Lilliputians have won,” I thought as I bought the paper. I could not yet guess how accurate this phrase was. But I was already grown up enough to know that prior to this death there had been betrayal by some, cowardice by others. Above all the ingratitude of a country whose honor he had once saved.

  In my memory, however, he
would remain unchanged: an old giant in the middle of a former battlefield, paying homage to fallen warriors. Just one sentence of his, which I was to come across much later in a book, would be added to this vision of him, as if in reply to Alexandra’s question as to what he had spoken about: “Now that baseness is in the ascendant it is they who can look upon Heaven without turning pale and upon Earth without blushing.”

  5

  ON THAT DAY ANY DISTANCE between the painful duty of living and the calm acceptance of death vanishes.

  A day in May 1942, some twenty miles from Stalingrad, the heat as dense as tar, the railroad tracks littered with dirty bandages, fragments of bombs, trash. A train has been hit. The railroad workers are trying to disconnect the burning tank car so as to shunt it onto a siding. The oil in it is ablaze, plunging the surrounding area into a night shot through by a purple sun. The rest of the train traffic advances tentatively now, but does not come to a halt — the only thing that matters. Westbound trains: soldiers, shells, arms, armaments. Eastbound trains: mangled flesh, the residue of battles. The monstrous culinary process of war, an immense cauldron that has to be fed at every moment with tons of steel, oil, and blood.

  Alexandra finds herself caught between the wall of immobilized tank cars and the line of coaches moving forward on the neighboring track. If the fire spreads, the rail junction will become an inferno over half a mile long. She ought to fall to the ground, crawl under the train, emerge on the other side, escape. She does not stir, and stares at her reflection in the tank cars side, which glistens with oil. Mute. Suddenly her name rings out within her, her real name, and her French surname. Her life, lost here in this noonday twilight, in a foreign land that is in its death throes all around her. The brownish air, the cries of the wounded, her own body melting in the heat, stained, exhausted with her efforts, asphyxiated. She tells herself death could never sweep her away at a moment of greater anguish. At the end of the train the smoke grows thicker, the track is no longer visible . . .

  Her reflection begins to slip away, then disappears. They have succeeded in cutting the train in two, and towing away the burning portion. Life can resume. A life that could so easily be mistaken for death.

  Through the pounding of the wheels she hears a voice calling her: “Shura!” She returns to her Russian life, gets back to work. Day after day, together with other women, she unravels the tangle of the trains, the comings and goings of the locomotives. It all happens with the tension of raw nerves, in a melee of yelling and oaths, oblivious of tiredness, of hunger, of oneself. An engineer swears at her, her fierce response is curt and effective. A colleague helps her to lift a dead man down from the train that carries the wounded. They take hold of him, set him down on a pile of old ties. The man’s eyes are open, seem animated, in them you can see the smoke rising from the fire. Two more trains squeeze her between their walls, one traveling westward (the plaintive sound of an accordion, the smiling face of a soldier cupping his hands and asking her to marry him), the other eastward, silent (at a window a head entirely swathed in bandages, a mouth trying to snatch a little air). And for her, between these two moving walls, the illusion of solitude and repose. And this thought: “Why do I cling to this hell?” She studies her right hand, her fingers injured in an air raid. Great soldier’s boots on her feet. Without seeing it, she senses the dried-up and aged mask of her face.

  The two trains clear at almost the same moment. A man comes walking along, stepping over the tracks, calmly swinging a little suitcase, careless of the chaotic maneuvering of the trains. He is dressed in a bizarre outfit, part military, part civilian. His unfettered gait, the glances he throws all around him, make him look like someone taking a peaceful Sunday walk who has landed by chance in this day of war. For several seconds he remains hidden behind the coils of smoke, then reappears, dodges a locomotive by a hair’s breadth, and continues his stroll. “A German spy . . .” Alexandra says to herself, mindful of the countless posters that call for the unmasking of these enemies, who are being dropped in by parachute behind the lines in vast numbers, or so it appears. Shielding his eyes, the man observes the rapid flight of a fighter plane above the flames, then heads toward the switch box. No, too clumsy for a spy. This one is going to end up under the wheels of a handcar or of the train that now materializes, cleaving through the smoke. Alexandra starts running toward the man, signaling to him to move away, trying to make her cry heard above the grinding wheels on the track. She catches up with him, pushes him, they both stumble, lashed by the draft from the train. The words she hurls at him also hiss like lashes. Rough, coarse words that turn her voice into a man’s voice. She knows the words are ugly, that she herself must be very ugly in the eyes of this errant vacationer, but she needs this revulsion, she seeks this pain, this inescapable torment. The stroller screws up his eyes, as if in an effort to understand, a smile on his lips. He replies, explaining calmly, with the incongruous politeness of another age. His speech is correct but this very correctness stands out. “He’s speaking with an accent,” she says to herself, and suddenly, dumbfounded, incredulous, she thinks she has guessed what the accent is.

  They still have time to exchange a few words in Russian, but already the recognition is occurring, or rather a rapid series of acts of recognition: the timbre of the voice, the body language, a gesture that a Russian would make differently. They start speaking French and she now feels as if it is she who speaks with an accent. After twenty years of silence in this language.

  The same hell still surrounds them, the same restless labyrinth of trains, the same grating of steel, crushing the tiniest grain of silence on the track, the same aircraft propellers shredding the sky above their heads, and this smoke that throws the shadow of unknown days across their faces. They notice none of this. When the noise obliterates their voices they guess at words simply from the movement of lips. He gathers she is a nurse but was wounded three weeks ago and has been assigned to this signal box. She knows he mistook his direction at Stalingrad station and has so far failed to meet the squadron he has been posted to. But for the moment it is the sound of the words more than the meaning that matters, the simple possibility of recognizing them, of hearing these French words come to life. Of speaking the name of the town near Paris where she was born, that of another, his own hometown, near Roubaix, in the north. Names that resonate, like passwords.

  It will feel to them as if they have not been parted all day. At three o’clock in the morning, they will still be talking, sitting in a room with no light, their tea cold in front of them. At a certain moment they will notice that the night has grown pale and daybreak has made its appearance through the shattered wall. They did, of course, go their separate ways after their brief encounter in the middle of the tracks: he to continue his search, she running toward the firemen’s handcar. They had just enough time to arrange this rendezvous for very late in the evening. But from now on a different time exists for them, uninterrupted, invisible to other people, as fragile as the pallor slipping in through the hole in the wall, as the freshness of a wild cherry tree beneath the open window.

  They should not have told each other the things they did; he, talking about the squadron he was to join (military secret!), she, admitting her fear (defeatism!): “If the Germans cross the Volga the war is lost. . .” But they spoke in French, with the feeling that they were using a coded language, designed for confidences, one that made them remote from the smoke engulfing the railroad tracks.

  Particularly now, at around three in the morning, she takes stock of this remoteness. The first pallor in the sky, the scent of the wild cherry, a cool breeze blowing over from the Volga. The face of the man opposite her, the very strong tea in their cups, tea he had brought with him, whose taste she had long since forgotten. Even the moments of silence between them are different from the silence she normally hears. Yet the inferno is very close, just a few hundred ties’ distance from this house. By five o’clock she will be plunging back into it. The man will go and join h
is unit. She listens to him talking about the last days before the war, days he spent in Paris in August 1939. He was coming out of the cinema (he had just seen Toute la Ville Danse . . . “Not bad . . . Nice music”) when through an office window he saw this fair-haired woman rigged out in a gas mask, talking on the telephone. A training exercise . . . They laugh.

  There is no order to the things they tell each other. They have too many years, too many faces, to conjure up. In the darkness it costs her less pain to tell him about the grief she carries within her, which was choking her the previous day, when they met. Seven years before she had experienced the same desolation. Her husband (“My Russian husband . . .” she explains) had just been arrested and shot after a trial that lasted twenty minutes. At that time she had longed for death, had thought of death with a kind of gratitude, but had also pictured another solution: to escape from the Siberian town to which they had banished her and return to France. This idea had kept her alive. She had hunted down the slightest item of news coming from Paris. One day she had come upon a collection of texts: ten French writers translated into Russian. The first one was called: “Stalin, the Man Who Shows Us the New World.” Then there was a poem that bore the title: “Hymn to the GPU.” Lines in celebration of the secret police who had killed her husband, among millions of others. . . She had read the collection to the end — unable to imagine what kind of human beings these Frenchmen could be, eyes that chose such ignoble blindness, mouths that dared utter such words.