The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme

by Andrei Makine

  She tells Jacques Dorme that now this notion of getting back to France seems even more improbable than ever. Not on account of the French poets hymning the GPU but on account of the war, this one war that reaches from the Volga to the Seine. On account of all the trainloads of wounded, who must be sent to the rear.

  He talks about the house where he spent his childhood and youth, the German units now marching down the street past the drawing room windows. On the wall in this room there is a photo of his father, still very young, who went away to the war, the “Great War,” and came back from it an old man, to await his death in 1925. He does not know if the memory he retains of his father derives solely from this portrait or from the few seconds during which a three-year- old child sees a man on the front steps, with a knapsack slung across his shoulder, then the silhouette of this man walking away up the street and disappearing.

  The next evening they are to meet again, once more with the feeling that they have not been parted from each other for a single moment.

  NO PRETENDER, 1.1 AM. . .”

  Many years afterward, when I thought about Jacques Dorme, it would be those words that best evoked for me the nature of the man, the unspoken credo of this pilot, this stranger who materialized out of the smoke from a blazing train. Words once uttered by a king of France.

  In my youth I wanted to see him as a shining hero, his life as a series of glorious exploits. A habit of mind doubtless left over from our childish daydreams at the orphanage. But from the start of the story Alexandra told me, my yearning for grand gestures was stilled by the simplicity of what I heard. A life in no way concerned to be molded into a predestined course, one that lagged behind events and sometimes even came to a standstill, as it did during the nights spent in a room where one of the walls, stove in, was open to the sky, admitting the tart fragrance of a wild cherry. Far away from the timekeeping of men.

  * * *

  He touched down in Spain too late (my desire to see him at the head of an international brigade proved to be vain). It was January 1939, two months after the fall of Madrid. Had he hoped to join the battle against Franco’s air force and the German fighter planes, to fly a Dewoitine or a Potez, such as he had piloted in France? In any event, the reality was different. He did not fight but retrieved the debris of lost battles: arms, the wounded, the dead. And he flew not a dashing fighter aircraft but a heavy three-engined transport plane, a Junkers 52 captured from the Nazis.

  He had certainly dreamed of aerial dogfights and little stars marked on the side of the cockpit, the tally of victories. But the suffering of crowds seeking refuge, the cunning multiplicity of sufferings devised by war, gave him a humbler notion of his pilot’s task: it was to move people from a place of great suffering to a place where there would be less suffering.

  He even ended up reconciling himself to his Boche aircraft. At first he had told himself that in the event of war with Germany, familiarity with it would be useful for knowing how best to shoot down planes of this type. In time the aircraft’s patient reliability warmed their relationship into an almost human friendship, grudging but forgiving at critical moments. “I have reeducated her,” he would say to the Russian pilots he often came across, who had taught him a smattering of their language. He could not yet guess at the importance these two details, insignificant in themselves, would one day assume: knowing this old Junkers aircraft and the ability to string together a dozen sentences in Russian.

  Another thing he learned was that war memories tended to lie in ambush for a pilot, especially on the brink of sleep, where the skies they wove for him were cluttered with steel beams, fragments of cable, and the branches of trees, through which his plane had to steer a tortuous, unbearably slow course. He often woke up, suffocating in these tangles. And in the morning it was the empty space that surprised him. This deserted alleyway in Port-Vendres (just over the border), a few hours after the firing of the last shots in the war, a few miles away from bombed towns and howling crowds, this first-floor window open, a woman ironing linen, her daughter out in the street holding up a doll and placing it on the windowsill, the soft hiss of the water beneath the iron, the steam with its poignant aroma of a happy life. It would take him several months to get used to these oases of happiness and routine, the snares of forgetfulness.

  In Paris he tried to people this void with the glib excitement of the cinema, went to see all the latest movies and at one performance noticed a woman in the audience weeping: the screen heroine was sobbing her heart out, her face immaculate as she looked up from a letter. He lost track of the plot, thinking back to the streets of Barcelona, a distraught mother with a dead child in her arms . . . On the way out he was amused to notice a young fair-haired woman through an office window talking on the telephone, her head rendered monstrous by a gas mask. It was funny and also upsetting to him because the young woman strongly resembled his fiancée. He had just received a letter from her, breaking off their engagement, reproaching him for his involvement in Spain, for his by now intolerable absence, and for what she called “your vagabond streak.” He smiled wryly. Inside the window a man was adjusting the gas mask on the blonde woman’s head. She turned her tapirs muzzle toward him. It was funny after all. He promised himself to tell his family about it; he was due to see them at the beginning of September.

  The day he reached the family home was the day war was declared. His sixteen-year-old brother could hardly contain his delight: he dreamed of becoming a ship’s captain. Jacques Dorme even heard him exclaim: “Let’s hope it lasts for a while!” He said nothing, knowing that to really fear and hate war you had to have fought in one. At the moment of his departure his mother doubtless uttered almost the same words she had addressed to her husband in 1914. The portrait of his father was still in the same place in the drawing room, only now this man, photographed a year before he went off to the front, struck Jacques Dorme as astonishingly young. And indeed, he really was younger than his son.

  During the course of that sleepless night at Stalingrad in May 1942, he recalled the incident of the fair-haired girl in the gas mask and recounted it to the woman he had just met among the trains. They laughed at the thought of the strange grunting sounds her lover might have found himself listening to at the other end of the line. And, in a moment of vertigo, he had a vision of everything that lay between him and that day in Paris, everything that in less than two years had turned him into another being, all the density of life and death that he had had to ingest. From an August day in Paris, coming out of the cinema, to this great wooden house, half destroyed by bombing, this woman, a stranger but suddenly so close to him, this township beyond the Volga, the terrible convulsions of a country preparing to fight for its life, and the boundless calm of these moments, of that star in the break in the wall, of the scent exhaled by those white clusters in the darkness. And this giddiness at the thought of what had brought him all the way to this spot.

  He would try to talk of it that night, from the chaos of his memories, of things forgotten, of admissions that took him by surprise. From time to time, there would be a silence, they would look at each other, bonded by the awareness of the extreme inadequacy of words.

  The silences also covered up his reluctance to admit that he had more than once gambled with his life. He spoke of “blazing streamers,” to describe bursts of tracers on the nights of the air battles in May and June of 1940. After mentioning that the pilots in his squadron had been fighting one against five, he checked himself at once, afraid to sound boastful, and described the ribbons of blazing streamers in which the German fighter force entangled them. As if at a carnival ball. . .

  As for his last engagement, again Jacques Dorme told her about it in few words, mainly to explain that his presence there, at a switch yard in a Russian city, was ultimately due to his stubborn determination to catch up with a German bomber, a Heinkel, that had unloaded its two tons of death and was simply returning to base, as one goes home after work. On a fine afternoon in June . . . The
advantage in speed his Bloch had over the German was minimal; he knew the chase would take time. He had little ammunition left: he would have to approach prudently, avoiding the bombers many machine guns, maneuver faultlessly, fire without counting on a second chance. It took him an interminable time to close in and refine the angle of attack so that by the end it was as if he had known the Heinkel’s pilot for a long period of time and could guess at the thoughts of this man within the glinting cockpit. . . Even as he shot him down he still had this strange feeling of a personal bond, which generally did not have time to form in the frenzy of brief duels with fighter planes. Alongside his satisfaction at the task accomplished, this barely formulated notion crossed his mind: that pilots life and those of the men in the crew, the final seconds of their lives . . . At this very moment he came under attack, as if by way of a stinging reprimand. No daydreaming! The transparency of the window became iridescent with streaks of oil, fanning out, the wind whistled into his pierced shell, and the outline of a Messerschmitt slowly appeared in a steep, vertical dive. He managed to climb out onto the fuselage, lost consciousness, and came to as a prisoner.

  His account of this last battle is interrupted by the dull, rhythmic throb of a heavy train passing in the dark. A train traveling eastward. Jacques Dorme falls silent and they both pause to listen to the panting sound and, from one car to the next, a groan of pain, a cry, an abusive response to that cry. The freshness of the air is mingled now with the brackish residue of wounds.

  “In any case I don’t think I’d have had enough fuel for the return flight. I was already operating a long way behind enemy lines, I’d gotten carried away . . .” She senses that he is smiling in the darkness. As if to excuse himself for having spoken about his victory, the contortion he went through to wrest his plane out of a spin, his fainting. For having talked about it in the proximity of these railroad cars packed with thousands of soldiers hovering on the brink of death. He smiles.

  If love has a beginning, it must, for Alexandra, have been that slight invisible smile in the darkness.

  DURING THE MONTHS OF CAPTIVITY his thoughts often went back to those days in May and June of 1940, and what struck him every time was the vast amount of sky. There had been nothing else during those weeks of dogfights, no recollection of what was happening on the ground, no encounters in the town streets, just this blue. Shattered archipelagoes of cloud, a blue infinity from which the earth had vanished. His memory was not deceiving him: with several sorties a day, and brief periods of sleep all haunted by these same sorties, it was a simple fact that he rarely had the leisure to find himself on solid ground.

  Now, in the confined space of the camp, the earth’s clinging gravitational pull dragged at the soles of his feet. And by night the smell of fresh clay stagnated in their hut, pricking his nostrils with its humid acidity. And yet they were privileged, he and the three Polish pilots with whom he shared this low building beside a farm, now transformed into a prisoner-of-war camp. He had spent time in various other places, first of all in Germany, before ending up here, on the eastern frontier of defeated Poland. Everyone sensed that another war was already brewing. These captive pilots could be useful. The German officers who came to inspect them from time to time gave them to understand that henceforth they all had a common enemy and that, as between civilized people, it would always be possible to reach an understanding. So they were entitled to the same food as the guards and to this dwelling where, instead of bunks, each of them had a bed at his disposal. They were free to come and go throughout the camp without special authorization.

  In the course of these wanderings Jacques Dorme saw the ordinary prisoners’ huts on the far side of the road and, one day, for the first time in his life, an execution by hanging. One of the hanged men was very tall: his toes stuck into the earth like the point of a top, his body spun round upon itself several times, before growing slack . . . Jacques Dorme experienced a vague feeling of shame, resenting this status of military aristocracy the pilots enjoyed.

  It was in that camp across the road, during the summer of 1941, that he noticed a long column of Russian soldiers and thus learned that the other war, the one everyone had been waiting for, had just broken out.

  One night the earth smell that dogged him was unbearable. He got up, crossed the room in the darkness, went to open the door, and suddenly noticed a glimmer of light behind the pile of old crates, then the silhouette of one of the Poles. That was where the smell came from. Seeing themselves caught in the act, the men made no further attempt at concealment. At the corner of the house a hole opened out into the ground. A head appeared there, eyes blinking in the aura of a match. The Poles looked at one another. Without exchanging any words, as if it was quite simply his turn, Jacques Dorme began helping them to shift the earth from the tunnel.

  They escaped on a night of torrential rain at the beginning of autumn. The guards did not dare to set foot outside, the searchlights looked like the glaucous lights of some bathyscaphe, smells and footprints were swallowed up in the mud. One of the pilots, Witold, knew the area well. The next day they reached a village, where they spent two days hidden in a peasants cellar. It was he who warned them that a search was being organized to retrieve the fugitives. They had time to get away, but on entering the forest had an argument: Witold wanted to press on toward the east, the other two proposed to mark time, wait, and prepare for winter. Jacques Dorme went with Witold, and that is how after several nights’ march, they crossed the Russian frontier, without at first being aware of it, and found themselves in the unstable and deceptive world of the land just behind the front line.

  They came upon villages where the orchards were heavy with fruit but the streets were peopled with corpses, like that hamlet in the Kiev region where a dozen women who had been shot looked as if they were resting after a day of harvesting. They skirted the towns — during the night — and would sometimes hear German songs, drunken voices. One day they found themselves in a stretch of surrounded territory, and passed by Russian units but did not attempt to make contact with them: they were no longer an army, but fragments of human flotsam — clinging to one another, pushing one another aside into the mud, snatching each other’s food, falling, shot down by officers striving to halt the retreat, and shooting back at the officers to clear a path for themselves. Amid this disorderly torrent there were pockets of astonishing stability: detachments, isolated and without hope of assistance, that dug shelters, gathered arms, and prepared their defense.

  When the running noose was drawn tight and every direction became equally dangerous to take, they hid among the dead on a battlefield. The German regiments passed by just a few yards from them — sometimes the mocking laughter of a harmonica floated over on the breeze — but there were so many bodies strewn across the plain, in the trenches, behind the shattered timbers of a fortified position, that it would have taken a whole army to flush out these two living men: the tall red-haired Pole, stretched out in a shell crater, and the dark-haired Frenchman, watching the trucks drive past with half-closed eyes. At night, to forget about the rustling of the wings ceaselessly flapping above the corpses, they talked at length in their habitual mixture of Polish, Russian, German, and French. They were both amazed to see the Germans already thrusting so deeply into the heart of Russia. “If they continue like this,” observed Witold, “they’ll cut off the Volga. And for the Russians the Volga is like . . .” He drew the edge of his hand across his throat, by the carotid artery. They also noted that for weeks now there had no longer been any Russian planes to be seen in the sky.

  At the start of the winter they were captured, and then adopted, by a group of partisans living in an encampment hidden away in the forest and marshland. Once the period of suspicion had passed, their involvement was accepted, and Jacques Dorme now discovered an invisible war, tucked away beneath the humus of the forest; an often clumsy struggle, since it was waged by elderly peasants armed with ancient rifles, but which in the long term wore down the enemy more
than conventional attacks would have done. He also noted that in this war an infinitely more violent hatred prevailed than he had experienced in the air. On one occasion they succeeded in driving the Germans out of a village and found a crowd of naked women and children standing upright at a crossroads under falling snow: transformed beneath a stream of water into a cluster of frozen bodies. This was, no doubt, the response to what could sometimes be seen at roadsides: a German soldier stripped bare, an ice statue as well, with an uplifted, frozen arm pointing in the direction marked on a sign hung about his neck: “Berlin.” Or had the idea for this come first from the occupying power? Catching the look of a peasant who had recognized his wife in the group turned to ice, Jacques Dorme perceived that this question had by now become meaningless.

  * * *

  In March 1942, an aircraft that came to deliver arms to the partisan camps took the two pilots on board. As the plane became airborne, they started singing for joy. Jacques Dorme no longer knew what language he was singing in.

  Here was how they had pictured the end of their odyssey: an airfield, a row of fighter planes, mechanics busying themselves with the aircraft, and a squadron commander asking them to show what they could do, before accepting them.

  What happens to them is not totally remote from what they had hoped for. There is a terrain suggestive of an airfield but empty; all that can be seen is the outline of a Russian Pe-2 bomber without its undercarriage, its fuselage riddled with holes. A few wooden huts, which serve as hangars, but not a single mechanic at work there. There is, however, a bustle of soldiers, who seem to be preparing to evacuate the area. And planes can be heard in the sky above the town. The pilots recognize them: “Junkers 87. Yes, dive- bombers . . .” They are then locked up in one of the hangars and try not to interpret this as a bad sign. The door opens: flanked by two soldiers, the person whom they had hoped would be the squadron commander appears. He is a thin little man, dressed in black leather, with a shoulder belt. His greatcoat and boots gleam in the sun. He does not greet them, announces that they will be interrogated separately, points at Witold, and says to the guards: “Bring him . . .”