The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme

by Andrei Makine

  Yet she succeeded in making me picture — almost relive — the era of this air bridge hidden from the world. Among the routes I have traveled or dreamed of in my life, that of the Alsib was one of the first to imprint its vertiginous space within me. Three thousand miles from Alaska to Krasnoyarsk in the heart of Siberia, a score of airfields located on the permafrost of the tundra, and their names as mysterious as those of staging posts on a quest: Fairbanks, Nome, Uelkal, Omolon, Seymchan . . . The violence of the Arctic winds that knocked men over, dragging them across ice where the hand could find nothing to hold on to. The air, at sixty below, a mouthful of which was like biting into a volley of razor blades. Squadrons that relieved one another from one airfield to the next, without days of rest, with no right to weakness, never using the excuse of bad weather, magnetic storms, or the overloading of aircraft. The landing runways built by the prisoners from the camps, the areas around them studded with their frozen corpses, which nobody bothered to count. The only count kept related to the number of aircraft flown by each of the pilots: more than three hundred by Jacques Dorme, according to his letter dated September 1944. And a more discreet addendum: the tally of pilots killed in crashes — over a hundred deaths, to which, on New Year’s Day 1945, was added his own.

  Alexandra had probably guessed a good deal more than the letters and conversations revealed. Moreover, she had not joined in the New Year’s Eve celebration with railway colleagues on December 31, 1944. A patient, sly prescience was choking her. It was as if a voice had fallen silent over there within the icy confines of Siberia, a voice that was no longer responding. When, some months later, a friend of Jacques Dorme came to her house and told her the truth, she did not dare mention that presentiment, afraid lest he see it as mere “women’s superstition.” When she came to tell me about it, it was with a sad little smile and I would blush, not daring to tell her how much I believed her, believed every single word, especially about that foreboding, which proved to me how deeply they had loved one another.

  In those days I did not have a better definition of love (and I do not know if I have now) than that of a kind of silent prayer which continuously bonds two human beings, separated by space or by death, into an intuitive sharing of the sorrows and moments of joy each experiences.

  Sorrow, for him one day, came from examining a heavy Douglas C-47 they had managed to track down, as one does a wounded animal, following a trail of blood: despite a snowstorm on the rocky slope the plane had smashed into, there was this long, tawny streak, the color of fuel, standing out in the middle of the endless white. A warm color in this world of ice. Warm lives, suddenly destroyed, whose faces and voices Jacques Dorme still remembered. . . Shaking hands with the pilot, who, before he climbed into the aircraft, had been telling him about his three-year-old son back in Moscow. A warm handshake.

  In cold like this all liquids froze within the bowels of the aircraft. Oil solidified into jelly. And even steel became fragile as glass. The air strove to dissolve the planes into its own crystalline substance. The pilots traveled very close to the zone that broke all records for cold on earth. “Seventy- two degree below zero,” Jacques Dorme had announced to his Russian mechanic, with a touch of pride.

  Joy was discovering a technique for combating the encrustation of ice, which grew thicker in flight and little by little coated the entire aircraft. You had to alter the engine speed regularly: as it varied, the vibrations shattered the crust of ice.

  Joy was the idea that another ten planes were on their way to Stalingrad, where the outcome of the battle might depend on the arrival of these ten aircraft in the nick of time. Or even that of the single fighter plane he himself was flying, this Airacobra, weighed down, thanks to Siberian distances, by a one-hundred-and-sixty-gallon drop tank beneath the fuselage. He was no fool, he knew that in the monstrous hand-to-hand struggle between two armies, between the millions of men killing one another at Stalingrad, this scrap of sheet metal with a propeller could hardly tip the scales. And yet on each flight an irrational conviction returned: this is the plane that will prevent the destruction of an old wooden house with wild cherry boughs beneath its windows.

  In April 1944 he became what in the pilots’ language they called a “leader.” Now at the controls of a bomber — a Boston or a Boeing 25 — he was guiding ten or fifteen Airacobras, with quite a different sense of the weight of this little squadron in the scales of the war.

  Joy resided in the confidence others had in him, by the resurgent light of the polar sun, which was now showing itself for longer and longer periods. In the devotion of the people on the ground, who would mark out the runways with fir branches when there were blizzards. And also in the thought that these missions at the end of the world were bringing the liberation of his native land closer.

  One day he had occasion to suffer a shock such as no brush with death would have administered. He had just landed, and, still numb from several hours of flying, saw a column of prisoners walking along beside the airfield. Over the course of a week, these men had been breaking the ice from dawn until dusk, installing steel plates and covering them with gravel for new runways. That evening they were moving off in single file through the snowdrifts. The guards surrounded them, training their submachine guns on this mass of human beings, chilled to the bone and staggering with weariness. Jacques Dorme watched their progress and tried to catch the other pilots’ eyes, but the latter turned away, in a hurry to settle down out of the wind, to eat . . . A submachine gun spat just at the moment when he, too, was about to step inside. He had seen what happened prior to this gunshot. A prisoner had slipped and, to avoid falling, had moved out a little from the line of walking men. With no hesitation a guard fired, the guilty man fell, the column froze for a second, then continued its jolting progress. Jacques Dorme rushed up to the guard, shook him, gave shouted vent to his anger. And heard a level voice: “Just following the rule.” Then, more quietly, in tones of hate-filled contempt: “I’ll give you a couple in the balls, too, if you like.” One of the pilots took Jacques Dorme by the arm and led him firmly toward the rest of the squadron personnel.

  During the meal he sensed a strain in their voices, thanks both to the impossibility of admitting to what had happened and to shame. Shame that a foreigner had seen it. The only true fact he would learn over supper that evening would be the “rule,” the words repeated automatically by the guards before the column of prisoners sets off: “One step to the left, one step to the right, and I shoot without warning.”

  That night, inside the dark cabin of the Douglas transport plane that was taking them back to their base, he stayed awake, his thoughts constantly returning to this strange country, whose language he already spoke well, which he believed he knew so well and which he failed to understand, which he sometimes refused to understand. Comparing it to France, he had a notion that left him even more perplexed: this country, too, was occupied. Like France. No, worse than France, for it was occupied from within by the regime that governed it, by the spirit of that rule — “One step to the left, one step to the right . . .”

  The memory of that death stood in the way of the easy joy he had experienced before: in the soft bluish luminescence of the Bostons’ instrument panels, so much more agreeable than the harsh lighting in Russian aircraft, the almost excessive comfort of the cockpit, and, upon landing, a system that responded perfectly. Now, when he climbed out onto the runway, the memory of the prisoners in their single file and the man who had stumbled on an icy path came back to him.

  At the end of August 1944, he recalled this man, but in a new way. That day he was feted by all his comrades, the pilots and the mechanics, from the morning onward: they had just learned of the liberation of Paris. As he responded to their congratulations, Jacques Dorme wondered what they knew about France. Interspersing their excited cries were references to the Paris Commune and Maurice Thorez — along with the name of Marshal Pétain, uttered with contempt and distorted by the lack of nasal sounds in Russian. He
did not even try to explain, feeling himself to be relieved at last of the burden of the fall of France, for which, in conversation, they had sometimes seemed to reproach him. Now they were laughing, remarking that once Hitler had been driven out, the French people would settle the capitalists’ hash and embark upon the building of Communism. A little dazed by their voices, he tried to imagine what kind of books they might have read about France. Alexandra’s tale returned to his memory: the volume she had unearthed in the public library in a Siberian town, the domicile assigned to her. A collection of texts by French authors, translated into Russian, among them a poem that was a veritable “Hymn to the GPU” . . .

  During his monotonous flights he pictured Paris, the popular jubilation, windows open to a fine summer sky. And, more than anything, the café terraces, a life spent at tables, garrulous, carefree, made up of snatches of words, exchanged glances, the complicity of bodies brushing against one another . . . Through a fine layer of cloud, beneath the Boston’s wings, bristled the peaks that arose from the endless Kolyma plateau, still tinged with green and gleaming with watercourses. “In a few days’ time,” he thought, “all this will be white. Devoid of life . . .” All that remained would be the rows of rectangles, the barrack huts and watchtowers of a camp, reliable beacons for the pilots in the midst of this mountainous vastness with no landmarks. The only point of reference the thousands of human lives concentrated together here in this nothingness. In his mind’s eye he again pictured the little round tables on the café terraces and reflected that the author of the “Hymn to the GPU” might well be sitting at one of those tables at that very moment, talking to a woman, ordering coffee or wine, commenting on the past, criticizing the present, celebrating the future. Jacques Dorme suddenly realized that you could never make that poet understand the infinity that now lay beneath the wings of the plane, nor the rule: “One step to the left, one step to the right,” nor the death of the prisoner who stumbled . . . No, impossible. He felt something like a muscular spasm locking his jaws. Down there, at their café table, what they were speaking was a different language.

  In the course of that flight Jacques Dorme saw himself for the first time as a foreigner in the land of his birth.

  * * *

  He did not immediately recognize the man in black leather. Indeed, this one bore scant resemblance to the little inquisitor who had killed Witold. Still less to the second one, the fat, hysterical one with his orders for an overloaded plane to take off. Those two had spread terror when the war seemed lost, they were more afraid than the servicemen they threatened. The man Jacques Dorme beheld in December 1944 already had a victors self-confidence. He was short and thin, like the first one, but his leather coat was lined with thick fur. He shook its lapels when a little frost fell on them from a propeller, the specifications of which, no one could understand why, were the subject of his inquiries. His curiosity was disconcerting. The pilots felt as if they were undergoing an interrogation in which the excessively simple questions were merely a way of confusing the person interrogated. Occasionally he smiled, and Jacques Dorme noticed that at once the smile would vanish from other people’s faces.

  The man inspected the aircraft, asked his strange questions that would have been considered stupid if they had not contained hidden catches, never listened to the complete answer, and smiled. Everyone realized he had come because the war was about to end and back in Moscow they needed to issue a reminder of who was master. However, what the pilots could not yet guess was that soon the Americans, who were supplying these countless Douglases, Boeings, and Airacobras, were going to become enemies again and that all those who had taken part in this air bridge would come under suspicion. The man in black leather was already there to spot the lost sheep, to guard against ideological contagion.

  At the end of his inspection he summoned those in charge of the base and the “leaders” of the squadrons. He talked about the slackening of Communist discipline, the lowering of class vigilance, and in particular castigated them over the organization of flights. “The command staff have tolerated total anarchy,” he rapped out. “Bombers have been flying in the same groups as fighter aircraft and transport planes. I advise you to put an end to this chaos. Fighter planes must fly with fighters and bombers with . . .”

  The pilots exchanged furtive glances, scratching their heads. They were secretly hoping that the man in leather would suddenly burst out laughing and exclaim in jocular tones: “I had you fooled for a moment!” But his voice remained accusatory and steely. When he spoke of flight plans being incorrectly drawn up, one of the pilots spoke up, belatedly, as if it had taken him time to bring himself to do so: “But, Comrade Inspector, a Boston has means of communication that are much more . . .” What he intended to say was that a bomber was better equipped with navigational aids than a fighter. The man in black leather lowered his voice almost to a whisper, and it was this menacing hiss that stopped the pilot short, better than a shout would have done: “I see, Comrade Lieutenant, that your contacts with the capitalist world have not been wasted on you . . .”

  For several moments of heavy silence all that could be heard was the lashing of the blizzard unleashing its fury against the windows and the crunch of the gravel the prisoners were spreading over one of the runways. Quite physically, in his bones, Jacques Dorme sensed how fine the line was in this country that separated a free man, this flying officer staring in silence at his big hands as they lay on the table, from those prisoners whose only identity was a number stitched onto their padded jackets.

  “Well, as for these contacts of yours, we’ll see about that after the victory,” the inspector resumed. “What’s needed now is to bring some order into this shambles. Here is the map showing you the most direct routes between airfields. From now on you will travel via Zyryanka and not via Seymchan. This will cut out hundreds of kilometers, with a consequent saving on fuel. I wonder why the squadron commanders haven’t thought of it before. But perhaps the longer route was recommended to them by American government representatives . . .”

  This time no one said anything. On the map, a straight line, drawn with scholarly application, traced a route that started in Alaska and crossed Siberia. In its geometric logic it passed closer to Zyryanka, one of the auxiliary airfields, far to the north of the normal route. This was more of an emergency runway, envisaged for days when those at Seymchan disappeared beneath snowstorms. The man’s pencil had drawn a line right across the terrible Chersky mountain chain, Arctic wastelands, even less explored than the areas currently overflown by the Alsib route . . . Left alone, the pilots stared long and hard at the map with its stubborn pencil line. The absurdity of it was too evident to be worth mentioning. “The Party line . . .” murmured the flying officer who had spoken earlier.

  They knew the inspector could not return to Moscow without reporting on the subversive activities he had unmasked, the errors he had corrected. That was how the whole country functioned, by denouncing, criticizing, breaking records, and exceeding plans. And even at the People’s Commissariat of State Security, to which the inspector belonged (“the GPU . . .” thought Jacques Dorme), plans had to be exceeded, you had to arrest more people than in the previous month, shoot more than your colleagues . . .

  They talked briefly about the makeup of the flights for the next day then went to get some sleep. Outside, in the darkness of the polar night, the prisoners went on digging the frozen earth for the new runway.

  After an hour in the air, Jacques Dorme transmitted this message to the group of aircraft he was leading: “Take the second route. Landing at Z impossible. Divert S.” During the previous night he had managed to persuade the men in his squadron that the best solution was to go, as usual, to Seymchan. He alone would go to Zyryanka, from where he would call the base. The inspector, who was due to leave the following day, would not have time to hold an inquiry.

  He veered slowly off to the right and in the ashen gloaming that passed for daylight saw the lights of the Airacobra
s turning toward the south.

  As the minutes slipped by the man gradually became one with his aircraft, the shuddering of the steel matching the rhythm of his blood. The pilots body yielded to the life of the machine, disappearing into the rhythm of the engine at his back as the throbbing of its vibrations varied from time to time. His gaze was lost in the gray light of this day on which the sun would not rise, then returned to the luminous specks on the instrument panel. The man was at once profoundly involved in the motion of this flying cockpit and utterly absent. Or rather present elsewhere, far from this ashen sky and these Chersky mountains that were beginning to pile up tier upon tier of their icy wastes. An elsewhere made up of a woman’s voice, a woman’s silences, the stillness of a house, of a time he felt he had always inhabited. This time unfolded quite separately from what was happening in the aircraft, around the aircraft. The violence of the wind made it necessary to maneuver, the icing-over reduced visibility. At a given moment it became clear that the runways of Zyryanka lay still farther to the northeast and that, at the risk of colliding with one of the mountain peaks, he was going to have to fly at a lower altitude, watch, concentrate, not give way to panic. The remoteness he sensed within himself gave him the strength to remain calm, to avoid going into a spin (that curse of the Airacobras), to stop checking the fuel at every moment. Not to sink to the level of being a man anxious to save his own skin at all costs.