At the start of May he crossed the Volga at Stalingrad and recalled Witold’s words: “For the Russians, the Volga is like . . He got off the train too soon by mistake and spent a long time walking along the tracks at a switch yard. Through the smoke from a tank car set on fire by incendiary bombs, he saw a woman directing the chaotic traffic. “Here is yet another war,” he thought. “This woman, so beautiful, so poorly clad, so soon forgotten . . .” He did not immediately grasp that he was the one the woman was shouting at.
6
THAT SUMMER WHEN ALEXANDRA TOLD ME about the French pilot I was thirteen. The questions I asked were about the maximum speed of the Bloch aircraft, the operating range of the bomber Jacques Dorme had shot down, the type of pistol the man in the black leather greatcoat was armed with, the gas mask that allowed you to talk on the telephone (the ones we used during paramilitary exercises at the orphanage offered no such possibility). She smiled, confessing her ignorance of such matters.
Years later I would come to know what her smile had left unspoken: the infinite distance between what aroused my curiosity and her life of a few days with Jacques Dorme. She could not tell me about their love. Because of my age, I would at first think, lamenting the stupidity of that age, focused as it is on the minutiae of warfare and bold strategic thrusts. Because of her old-fashioned modesty, I would later tell myself, regretting the elusiveness of those few furtive moments in May 1942 that her story had scarcely allowed me to glimpse. And then one day I would come to realize that nothing more could have been said about that love. And that those moments (“She talked to me about what the weather was like,” I more than once thought bitterly), those random recollections of rain or of a misty morning, were enough and told the essential truth about this brief and simple love affair. As the years passed, I learned to read them better, to conjure up their light, to hear the wind and the hiss of the rain coming in through the gap in the wall, transmitting its chill right over to the bed. This love, never referred to, came to reveal itself and ripen in me as I grew older. As did the moment when the old amber bead necklace snapped, which had at first been merely evocative of a night of rain and wind.
The wind banishes the sultry, resinous heat of the steppes, the smell of burning oil, the dense breath of human beings crammed into hundreds of rail cars. As the raindrops begin pattering down on the floor through the gap, they suddenly blend in with the clatter of the beads from the broken necklace. For a moment, the bodies pause in their amorous struggle, their breathing stilled, then all at once they fuse again, lost in a tempo quickened by desire, letting the beads beat time as they slip from the thread.
I needed to have lived to understand both the rain and the blissful weariness which permeated the woman’s movements as she got up, went over to the gap, lingered in the warm, fluid embrace of the storm. To understand the measured pace of the remarks obliterated by the downpours noisy torrent, to perceive that what was important was precisely this measured pace and not the sense of the words spoken. To understand that these lost remarks, the bliss of these slow movements, the wild cherry’s scent, mingled with the acidity of the lightning flashes, all these elements, not retained in any memory, amounted to the essence of a life, one that the two lovers had truly lived, which was the first thing doomed to disappear into oblivion.
Also hidden behind those recollections of “what the weather was like,” there was that other night, the hypnotic stillness of the air, the static density of a storm that does not break. They go down, cross the tracks, walk out from the township, which lies unmoving in the darkness, like scenery in a closed theater, and set out along a sandy path across the steppe. The silence lets them hear the rustle of every footfall and, when they stop, the faint crackling of bone-dry plants. The heat casts a veil over the stars; they seem more alive, less severe toward human brevity. At one moment an antitank obstacle raises its crossed steel girders. They finger these sections of rail rearing up in the darkness. The metal is still hot from the day’s sunlight. In the torpor of the night these metal crosses, strung out in a line, look like the relics of some ancient, forgotten war. They say nothing, knowing the thought is unavoidable: a line of defense on the far side of the Volga, a willingness to envisage the war crossing the Volga, engulfing its left bank, strangling Stalingrad. They think this and yet the soldered steel seems to derive from a past history with no relevance to this night. They walk on in silence, with a physical sense that the ties binding them to the houses of the township, to the labyrinth of tracks in the switch yard, and their lives back there are growing weaker. There is only the chalky gleam of the path, the darkness tinged with blue by the silent flickering of lightning flashes, and suddenly, there at their feet, the abyss of this night sky, the stars floating on the black surface of the water.
It is one of the seasonal oxbow lakes that appear in the spring with the melting of the snows, only to be swallowed in a few gulps by the steppe during the summer drought. Its fleeting existence is for the moment at its most abundant. The water fills its ephemeral banks to the brim, the clayey smell seems as if it has always hung there. And the body, as it dives in, is tickled by the long stems of yellow water lilies, solidly rooted.
They remain for a whole hour in this sluggish flow, scarcely moving, starting to swim, then lingering at the center of the waters shallow expanse. The silent flashes of lightning last long enough for them to see each other, for him to see this woman with wet hair, her hands smoothing a face upturned toward the stars. To see the woman’s closed eyes. To see her stretched out on the shore, where the fine, smooth soil seems to be heated deep down.
“If it had not been for this war I should never have met you . . .” The man’s voice is at once very close, like a whisper in the ear, and lost in the remoteness of the steppes. It must be audible even over there, on the horizon where the summer lightning glimmers. “No, that’s not what I meant to say,” he corrects himself. “You see, this plain, this water, this night. All this is so simple and, in fact, this is all we need. This is all anyone needs. And yet the war will come all the way here . . He falls silent, feels the woman placing her hand on his arm. A bird flies by, they can hear the hushed stirring of the air. It feels to them as if the war, now so imminent, has already passed over these steppes, bringing destruction and death, and has finally evaporated into the void. They are going to live through it soon, to be sure, and yet one part of them is already beyond it, already in a night where the recently erected steel obstacles are nothing more than rusting relics. Where there is nothing left but the soundless glittering of the horizon, this star in a footprint filled with water, the face of the woman, leaning over him, the caress of the damp ends of her hair. A postwar night, endless.
In their life of just over a week together, there was also that morning blinded with fog. Not a plane in the sky, no risk of air raids, trains advancing at a sleepwalker’s slow pace. The women who worked with Alexandra had allowed her to go, had almost forced her to take this morning off, for they had learned or guessed that it was her last.
It was cold, more like an autumn morning. A cool, misty day in May. They walked along beside a meadow, passed through a village from which the inhabitants had just been evacuated. The presence of the river was revealed in the fog by the dull echo of the void and the scent of rushes. One of the mornings in their life . . . They sensed that it was the moment to speak grave, definitive words, words of farewell and hope, but what came to mind seemed heavy and pointless. What needed to be admitted was that this single week had been a long life of love. During it time had vanished. The pain to come, absence, death, would leave this life unblemished. This needed to be said. Yet they held their peace, certain it was a sentiment they shared, down to the tiniest nuance.
Invisible, in the cotton-wool blindness of the fog, a boat passed, close to the bank, they could hear the oars slipping lazily into the water, the rhythmic groan of the rowlocks.
During the hours they lived through together, Alexandra had told Jacques Dorme
the story I was to hear as a child. A young Frenchwoman’s arrival in Russia in 1921 as a member of a Red Cross mission, a temporary visit, or so she had thought, which became more and more irreversible as the country very rapidly cut itself off from the world.
What they talked about, in fact, was four different countries: two Russias and two Frances. For the Russia Jacques Dorme had just traveled through, a Russia broken by defeat, was hardly known to Alexandra. As for her France, that of the days following the Great War and the start of the twenties, her memories had long since blended with the sweet and often illusory shade of the homeland she dreamed of. He had known a quite different country.
One day, thanks to a news bulletin they happened to hear on the radio, these two Frances came into collision.
They had lunch together that day. When there was a break in the flow of trains beneath the windows and the hum of the aircraft died away, they could imagine they were lunching in peacetime on a sunny day in spring . . . They were just about to part when, with a mysterious air, Alexandra murmured: “This evening I shall need your help. No, no, it’s very serious. You must put on a white shirt, shine your shoes, and have a good shave. It’s a surprise . . .” He smiled, promising to come dressed to the nines. It was then that they heard the radio announcer’s voice, reporting in grim, metallic tones that the town of Kerch had fallen and speaking of fierce fighting in defense of Sebastopol. . . They knew this news implied the impending loss of the Crimea and a German breakthrough to the south, which would open a route to the Volga. The radio also reported that the Allies were in no hurry to open a “second front.” Perhaps these were the words that set the match to the powder keg.
Alexandra spoke in harsh, mocking tones that were new to him. She affected amazement at the casual attitude of the Americans and the caution of the English, sitting tight on their battleship island. And, with still more bitterness, she declared herself sickened by France, by the spinelessness of her military leaders, by the treachery of her government. No doubt she carried in her mind a memory of the army, bled white but triumphant, at the victory parade of 1919. As for that of 1940 . .. She spoke of cowardice, evasion, an easy life paid for by shifty compromises. “But we fought. . .” Jacques Dorme did not raise his voice as he said it. He spoke in the tones of one who accepts the others arguments, merely seeking to bear witness to the facts.
How a French soldier like him might have replied to her I shall never know. Did he describe the battle of the Ardennes? The fight for Flanders? Or perhaps the air battles in which his own comrades in the squadron had perished? In any event, he appeared to be justifying himself. Alexandra cut him short. “At least let me picture a country that rises up as a whole and drives out the Boche, instead of making pacts with them. Yes, a country that fights back. What the Russians are doing. It’s already clear that the Germans are not unbeatable. But of course if people don’t want to put up a fight. .
“You’re saying what they’ll say after the war. What people will say who didn’t fight in it.” Jacques Dorme’s voice remained calm, a little drier perhaps. Infuriated, Alexandra was almost shouting: “And they’ll be right to say it! For if the French had really decided to fight. . .”
“If they had really decided to do so, here’s what you’d have had where France is now . . .”
Jacques Dorme took the map of the world from a shelf, spread it out on the table among the plates from lunch, and repeated: “Here’s what you’d have had . . .” He held a box of matches in his hand and the box covered the purple hexagon of France almost completely, with only the western tip of Brittany and the Alpine fringe showing. Then the matchbox flew over Europe and landed on the USSR, on the territory conquered by the Nazis. There was room on this for four matchboxes. “Four times the size of France he said in grim tones. “And I’ll tell you something. I’ve seen every one of these four Frances devastated, towns razed to the ground, roads covered in corpses. I’ve traveled across them, these four lands of France. That’s just to tell you what the Boche army can do. As for the Russians, I’ve seen all kinds. I’ve even seen one whose arms had been cut to ribbons by shrapnel and who had his teeth clamped around a broken telephone cable, copper against copper, wrapped in a scrap of cloth, in accordance with instructions. And he died with his teeth clenched . . . They’re going to lose ten million men in this war, maybe even more. Lose them, do you understand? Ten million . . . That’s the total number of able-bodied men France had to give.”
He folded up the map, put it back on the shelf. And in a voice once more calm, no longer judgmental, he added: “And, by the way, we didn’t have a ‘second front’ in May 1940 either . . .”
That evening he arrived dressed in a white shirt, his cheeks smooth, his shoes well polished. They smiled at each other, and, when they spoke, avoided any return to the subject of their quarrel. “It’s a little surprise. You’ll see,” she told him again as they set out. The previous day the director of the military hospital had asked her to take part in a concert that was being organized prior to the evacuation of all the wounded, now that the front was getting nearer. Several women would be singing, he explained, and then a couple would dance a waltz — he was counting on her for this. The concert hall had been set up, not in the hospital, which was too cluttered with beds, but in an engine shed, from which the locomotives had been withdrawn for the evening.
As they made their way inside, she recoiled in shock. The surprise was greater for her than for him. Hundreds of pairs of eyes were focused on the still-empty platform, countless tightly packed rows of men sitting there, each unique and yet all alike. The living mass of them extended right to the back of this long brick building and was lost in the darkness, giving the impression of stretching away, row upon row, to infinity. She was accustomed to seeing them divided up into separate wards, overcrowded of course, but where the multiplicity of their injuries and suffering was matched by individual faces. Here, in this vast parade of pain, all the eye could see was an undifferentiated mass of tissue in torment. Studded with pale heads, white with bandages.
Half a dozen women sang in chorus, unaccompanied. Their voices sounded naked; even in the cheerful songs they tugged at the heartstrings, too close to tears. The applause was muted: many arms in slings, stumps where arms should be.
Now it was their turn. A nurse placed a chair at the side of the stage. Two soldiers came on and set down a legless amputee, a young man with bright red hair and a dashing look. They brought him an accordion. As if in a dream, Alexandra and Jacques Dorme stepped up onto the boards that smelled of fresh timber.
Their bodies’ memories quickly overcame the fear of not recalling the steps. The accordion player played with an imperceptibly delayed waltz tempo, as if he would have liked to see them dancing for as long as possible. As they revolved, they saw the blaze of his hair and this devastating contrast: a broad smile, gleaming teeth, and eyes brimming with distress. Briefly and intermittently, they also noticed the looks of the wounded men, lines of sparks burning into their bodies as they danced. Nothing remained now of their lunchtime argument. All talk was charred to a cinder by these looks. An aircraft passed very low overhead and drowned out the music for several seconds. They continued revolving amid this hubbub, then, as one dives into a wave, fell back into the melody as it returned.
They felt in the end as if they were alone, dancing in an empty hall, each one’s face reflected in the other’s eyes. Several times she lowered her eyelids to drive away her tears.
Two days later there came that cold, misty morning, and in the evening, his departure. Before boarding the train, he had already mingled with the members of what would be his squadron now, his new life. The train moved off, the men talked louder, more cheerfully, it seemed. She just had time to catch sight of his face once more, alongside the grinning countenance of a big fellow who was waving to someone on the platform, then the night blended the cars into a single dark wall . . . On the way home she listened within herself to the words he had spoken that morn
ing as they swalked beside the river. “After the war, you know, you must think about coming back to the old country . . . Of course they’ll let you leave. You’ll be a Frenchman’s wife. That’s if you’ll agree to marry me, naturally. That means you’ll become a Frenchwoman again and I’ll show you my hometown and the house where I was born . . .”
SHE SPOKE SLOWLY, BREAKING OFF TO LISTEN TO THE WIND as it scoured the steppe or to let her gaze follow a bird across the July sky. Or did these pauses, perhaps, correspond in her memory to the long months that brought no news of Jacques Dorme? I allowed my eyes to travel along the narrow stream that cast a cooling veil about us, beyond the foliage of the willows and alders that sheltered us beneath their restless network. The banks were cracked in the heat, and the almost unmoving brook seemed to be dwindling before our very eyes, sucked dry by the sun. In its place I pictured a broad stretch of water one May long ago, a nocturnal lake and the figures of the two swimmers silhouetted against the blue light of a silent thunderstorm.
There were few things left for her to tell me. She did not talk about the fighting at Stalingrad, knowing that they told us tales of it every year at school, backed up by eyewitness accounts from old soldiers. Nor about the hell behind the lines, in townships transformed into vast field hospitals. After Jacques Dorme ‘s departure and in the course of the three years of his flights across Siberia, she had received four letters. Passed from hand to hand, thanks to servicemen on the move: the only means of sending mail from the Arctic wastes where his squadron was based and, especially, of thwarting the vigilance of the spy catchers.
The work of the pilots on the “Alaska-Siberia” line, the “Alsib,” was doubly secret. During the war it had to be concealed from the Germans. After the war from the Soviet people themselves: the cold war had just begun and it was vital for the people not to know that the American imperialists had supplied their Russian ally with over eight thousand aircraft for the Eastern Front. All Alexandra ever learned came from those four letters, a single photo, and conversations with a comrade Jacques Dorme had asked to look her up, a task the men of the squadron used to undertake on one another’s behalf, with their nearest and dearest in mind. There was also the journey she was to attempt at the beginning of the fifties, in the hope of finding the place where he had died. She brought little back from this: the memory of a barely accessible region, crisscrossed here and there by the barbed-wire fences of the camps, and, in response to her questions, prudent silence, ignorance either real or feigned.
The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme Page 11
