The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme

by Andrei Makine

  A car drives along the street; the torrent of chanting, backed by a rhythmic drumbeat, rips into the house. The noise of scooters cuts through the rap. The Captain says, or rather shouts, something, but I do not hear him. He realizes I have not heard him. I catch only the last few words: “. . . to be spat upon . . .”

  Time stands still. I watch his face as swift shudders pass across it and his chin trembles. He is an old man fighting off tears with all his strength. I remain motionless, mute, totally incapable of any gesture or word that might break the deadlock of grief confronting grief. The wretched Parisian critic, who will later refer to me as an immigrant, will be right: I shall never be French, for I do not know what should be said in a situation like this. In Russian I know. In French I shall never know and, indeed, shall never want to know what to say . . . His eyes remain dry, and simply grow red.

  With an abrupt tensing of his jaws he succeeds in gaining control of his face, which now looks hollow, as if after a long period of mourning. In a dull, jaded voice he chokes more than he says: “No, no, there’s no point . . . The press, speeches . . . Too late . . . And besides, you know, Jacques was a very private person . . .” I see his lips twitching again. He gets up, turns toward the photos hanging on the wall. He needs to be unobserved for a few moments. I get up, too, and stand behind him, listening to his commentary. On one of the photos the two of them are on the front steps of the house. Of this house. On this street. The tone of his remarks is still uneven, often sliding up into high registers it is painful to hear.

  The chink of crockery can be heard from the kitchen. He grasps at the pretext: “This tea of yours, Li En, is it ready?” His wife appears at that very moment, a tray with teacups in her hands, as if to say: “I wanted to leave the two of you to talk, man to man. Don’t you understand?” He does understand, helps her to set down the tray, stops her leaving, squeezes her shoulders: “You stay with our guest. I’ll see to the cake . . .” He goes into the kitchen. His wife, seeing me in front of the photos, picks up the thread of the interrupted commentary. “That one, that’s in Saigon . . .” A jetty, the pale side of a boat, her and him, dressed in white, young, their eyes blinking in the sunlight. “This one’s in Senegal. And that’s in your country, at Odessa. Eisenstein’s famous steps. . .” She talks to me about their travels, not as tourists do, but simply running through the various stages of their life.

  “Li, I can’t find the little cake knife!” She smiles at me, excuses herself, goes to join her husband in the kitchen. I walk around the armchairs, stop at the other end of the drawing room. A portrait on the wall: a young man with a serious, open face, a bushy mustache, and in the corner of the photo, the date, 1913. The father.

  This hour spent in the house where Jacques Dorme was born leaves me with an impression of imminent departure. Not that of my return to Paris, no. Rather the clear perception that what we say is being uttered for the last time, and that, when we have finished our tea, we shall have to get up, take a last look at the photos in their frames, leave the place behind. We all three experience, and each of us can sense in the others, the beginning of a separation, a distancing, now arising between us and the house, one that is all the more painful because our hands can still touch the back of this old armchair and our eyes still meet the gaze of a portrait on the wall.

  And yet their house, a true family house, is deeply permeated with the slow memory of the generations, with the human aura taken on by furniture and objects, linking lives from father to son, marking deaths, greeting the return of prodigal children. I feel exactly as if I have returned after a long absence, to discover what I had known in Alexandra’s house. The room where she used to read to me seems, in my memory, to be adjacent to this drawing room where we are drinking tea. The France I pictured through all those pages we once read is here in the gaze of these portraits, in the words I am now hearing. But this rediscovered house will become a dream once more.

  Our conversation, in which I know there must be no further mention of Jacques Dorme, often teeters on the brink of this erasure. The Captain talks about the church I saw on my way here, a local curiosity. And then falls silent, embarrassed, recalling at the same moment as myself, no doubt, the old walls covered in graffiti, the dark corners behind the apse, stained with urine. He shows me a book with a red-and-gold cover, the first he read as a child. He opens it with a smile, recites the first part of a sentence, closes it abruptly: the din of the joyriding in the street stops him from speaking. For several seconds we do not move, exchanging embarrassed glances, waiting for the racket to cease. Amid the rhythmic yelling of the singer a rhyme can be heard: “He’s in the hole — she’s wearin’ a stole.” The class struggle . . .

  Going out onto the front steps, we pause for a moment in the half-light of the winter dusk, the Captain fingering a bunch of keys, me trying to make out the bottom of the garden where the trees give the illusion of a veritable wood. Li En speaks in a perfectly level voice, without bitterness: “In the old days you could feel quite remote in the copse there. But now, with that parking lot. . .” I take a few steps. Beyond the branches of the trees looms a flat, ugly supermarket building, surrounded by a stretch of asphalt, from which comes the metallic clatter of shopping carts being stacked. “Right. We can leave now,” announces the Captain, and leans forward to kiss Li En.

  This simple remark, this word, “leave,” suddenly explains everything. We are not leaving, it is the country, their country, their France, that is moving away, being replaced by another country. This house, surrounded by bare trees and the foliage of yew bushes, dark green, almost black, is evocative of the last rock of a submerged archipelago.

  I shake hands with Li En and prepare to take my leave of the Captain, but he stops me: “No, no, I’ll drive you to the station,” and leads me toward the gate, despite my protestations. I sense that for him this is more than a gesture of courtesy. He needs to demonstrate, to the foreigner I am, that he is still at home in this street, this country.

  As he is opening the garage I have time to take one more look at the front of the house, the gate with its railings, the steps up to the door. I tell myself that during the century now drawing to a close this house has twice witnessed the same scene: a man carrying a military knapsack on his shoulder walks over the road, reaches the crossroads, and turns back to wave to a woman standing beside the gate at number sixteen. A man going off to the front. The crossroads . . . Where an hour ago the Captain’s car was covered in spittle. In the darkness I see the beams of headlights sweeping over the crossroads, engines roaring. The fun’s not over yet.

  The Captain invites me to get in, and the car heads for the crossroads. He could turn off before he reaches it, go down one of the side roads. But we travel back past the precise place where the couple was set upon. A motor scooter appears, follows us, presses up close beside the car for several yards, then lets us go. I watch the Captain’s face discreetly. It is a mask with tensed lips, his eyes slightly screwed up, as if from a profound weariness of vision.

  Just before we get there I try my luck one more time. I ask him if he would agree to his brother’s story appearing under the cover of a fictitious name, that of a character in a novel. He seems to hesitate, then confides to me: “You know, when he was very young all Jacques ever dreamed of was becoming a pilot. He had one idol, an ace in the Great War, René Dorme. He talked about him so often that we ended up nicknaming him ‘Dorme.’ We used to tease him: ‘Frère Jacques, dormez-vous?’ His friends at school always called him ‘Dorme.’ And he was proud of it, you know. The few letters he sent from the front, he always signed them with that nickname . . .”

  In the train I shall muster a review beneath my eyelids of the various stages in the life of this French pilot: Spain, Flanders, Poland, the Ukraine, Stalingrad, Alsib . . . Little by little, as the eyes slowly adjust to it, this life will take on the name of Jacques Dorme.

  IN THE LETTER I RECEIVED TWO YEARS AFTER OUR MEETING the Captain made a few sober and a
ppropriate remarks about the book I had sent him, this novel in which I told the story of Alexandra’s life, or rather dreamed up a life for her. Jacques Dorme did not appear in it. The Captain had no doubt taken this omission to be out of respect for our agreement. I had not had the courage to tell him the French pilot had been sacrificed because he was considered to be “too true for a novel.” Like the old general in the middle of the sunbaked steppes beside the Volga . . .

  His letter was penned in that precise and subtle French whose use was becoming rare in France. Struck by the elegance of his style, I did not immediately discern a slight hint of disappointment lurking behind his words: unspoken approval at seeing our agreement respected and at the same time this barely perceptible regret at not seeing it broken. Indeed, expressed in the lines he had written, or rather between these lines, was a hope that, by means of some literary magic, Jacques Dorme might live again, without being subjected to the idle curiosity of a country he would no longer have recognized as his own.

  It was the contradiction I had sensed in his letter, this hesitation between a fear of complete oblivion and a refusal to condone a revelatory memoir, that suggested this unpretentious genre to me: a chronicle in which the ruling device would be faithfulness to the bare framework of the facts. With the pilot’s name replaced by his nickname.

  A year later my thoughts turned again to this modest narrative task on a journey back from Berlin. In no other city had I seen so many efforts to commemorate the past and such a triumphal will to flatten this past beneath the foundations of a new capital, arising like a phoenix. If the truth be told, I preferred this brutal flattening to what was being thought and said in France. To the condescending irony of that historian I once found myself sitting next to on a television panel. With his petty air of mocking disdain, he had spoken of “Adolf Hitler’s pygmy campaigns.” The participants had smiled, as if at an epigram, before continuing with the verbal ping-pong, noting France’s shameful inaction and the fact that the severity of the Russian winter had happily blocked the Nazis’ advance . . . I should have responded immediately, reminded them that this particular pygmy warrior had defeated the most powerful armies in the world and, having come close to the carotid artery of the Volga, had stood within an ace of final victory. Impossible to get a word in edgewise, the talk came thick and fast. Then the memory of a gesture came back to me: a French pilot spreads out a map and covers the violet hexagon of his country with a matchbox, which he then applies to the red expanse of the Soviet Union. This gesture would have been the best possible response to these television strategists. But the broadcast was already reaching its conclusion with a sneering observation by one of the participants: “What happened at Stalingrad was that one brand of totalitarianism wrung another’s neck! That’s all!”

  At this moment I felt able to understand the Captain’s hesitations better than ever . . . Even as our makeup was being removed, four or five young women were awaiting their turn to be powdered for the cameras, all in a morbidly excited state, as is often the case with guests in the antechambers to these media bazaars. They were novelists and the theme they were due to discuss was: “Sex: can the pen have the last word?”

  After the broadcast that evening, I reread an old pamphlet I had found among the bookstalls beside the Seine. Printed on terrible, dull, rough paper, published barely three months after the fall of France in June 1940, and drawing no historical lessons, it brought together the military exploits of the French campaign. A fragmentary chronicle, and, of course, one subject to German censorship, a series of sketches made at the time: the defense of a village, hand-to-hand fighting in a township, the loss of a ship . . . Dates. Names. Ranks. A war seen by soldiers and not the one acted out all over again half a century later in the history books:

  Following this, a retreat over seven days of continuous fighting brought the regiment into the Charmes region. Four French divisions, drawn up in defense and surrounded on all sides, fought there without hope. The Eighteenth Infantry Regiment had lost more than half its strength . . .

  Now the battle took on a character of extraordinary ferocity. They fought with grenades and at certain points with bayonets. Captain Cafarel defended his own command post himself, and was killed . . . During these two days the Second Battalion of the Seventeenth Regiment of the Algerian Infantry Corps lost twelve out of fifteen of its officers, all but four of its noncommissioned officers, four-fifths of its strength. They died heroically, without having yielded an inch . . .

  The strength of the Division was now reduced to a few men. At 1800 hours, seeking to complete the operation, the enemy launched a massed attack. Using the weapons of the wounded and dead, the cavalry of the Second Division resisted. The machine guns fired their last rounds. The enemy was repelled. . . .

  The torpedo boat Foudroyant sank rapidly. For a few minutes the ship’s stern stayed above the water. With magnificent gallantry, Commander Fontaine remained standing upon the stern until his vessel had sunk entirely from view. . . .

  That night the chronicle of Jacques Dorme’s life truly began to write itself inside me. I knew that, in addition, I would have to talk about that boy who was to discover a country where the four gentlemen of Aquitaine lived, as well as the soldier in the last square and that other one, who died on the banks of the Meuse “almost as destitute of money as when he had come from thence to Paris.” Thirty years later they all had a close kinship in my mind with Captain Cafarel, Commander Fontaine, and the Second Battalion of the Seventeenth Algerian Infantry Corps.

  I WENT BACK TO JACQUES DORME’S TOWN a week after my return from Berlin. My plan on this occasion was to stay in a hotel and spend several days there, taking time to reconstruct the town as it used to be, in the way one restores a mosaic; but one in which, instead of tesserae, there would be the hundred-year-old tree beside that church covered in graffiti, the sign for a bakery, the florid lettering that had not changed since the years between the wars; the picture of a street untouched by the ugliness of satellite dishes. I thought I would be able, if only for the space of a glance, to reconstruct what Jacques Dorme saw in his youth, what his native town, his native land had been.

  I telephoned the Captain several times without ever hearing either his voice or that of Li En. Silent, too, was the ritornello of their answering machine, with its ironic politeness, that had always made me smile. If I had had to invent such moments in the plot of a novel, I would probably have spoken of growing unease, imagining the worst. . . In reality my first thought was simply of death. And the most intense response provoked by this thought was not sadness nor even remorse at having delayed and wasted time on all those trivialities that generally go with a book’s publication. No, I felt afflicted with muteness. It was as if the language in which I had spoken with the Captain was no longer spoken by anyone else.

  In the train I told myself that this feeling of speaking a dead language was one that Alexandra must have experienced throughout her life in Russia.

  In the Allée de la Marne, there were no signs of death. There was simply a sense of absence, emptiness behind the closed shutters of number sixteen. The garage door was covered in fluorescent scrawls that had lost their aggressiveness with the passage of time. The lengths of wire fastening the “For Sale” sign to the gate were rusty. But there were no papers spilling out of the mailbox. I turned around on hearing the voice I knew: it was the neighbor from number eleven, whom I had supposed to be a retired professional singer. “I’m the one who collects all the junk mail. You have to do that, otherwise they set fire to it. That’s what they did to my neighbor across the road . . .” She opened the box, took out a leaflet. She had spoken of “them” without any rancor, with resignation, rather, the way they talk about the weather in those northern lands.

  “Li En has gone to Canada. She’s thinking of settling down over there, near her sister . . .” We walked diagonally across the road, from number sixteen to number eleven. Thinking I was up to date, the “singer” did not say muc
h more, just a few words about Li En going away, taking her husband’s ashes.

  Left alone in the Allée de la Marne, I pictured those last moments before her departure very intensely. Liens face, that pale, impassive mask and the force of that Asian stare that spoke of her pain better than a face distorted with grief would have done. I saw her walking down the steps, closing the gate, taking the steering wheel. . .

  At the crossroads she had passed over I stopped. In the opaque humidity of dusk the streetlights were becoming suffused with a milky blue. In a telephone booth with broken doors a receiver dangled, and there was a sound of whispering voices, just as if someone could still be making a call there. The wind ruffled the charred pages of a telephone directory.

  At the center of the row of houses beside the Allée de la Marne I could just make out the gate of number sixteen. I decided that to understand Jacques Dorme’s country, those hundred yards were enough, the distance between the house a man has just left to go to the war and this crossroads, where he turns back to take a last look at those who will remain behind to wait for him.

  AS IT TAKES OFF’THE HELICOPTER BANKS steeply and I have time to glimpse the house on the Edge, the glow from the kitchen windows. It seems to me as if the pilot is also glancing at this radiance. Perhaps the very last glimmer of light between here and the Arctic Ocean, I say to myself, and I find it difficult to get the measure of this white infinity opening up before us and ingesting our frail cockpit, like a bubble of warm air, in a huge, icy inhalation.

  The untouched emptiness of the Chersky mountain chain.

  The height of the peaks is increasing imperceptibly, as can be judged from the disappearance of the little dark stripes, the trunks of the dwarf trees, that until a few moments ago were still managing to find a foothold at this extreme limit of the tundra. Higher up there are only two textures, ice and rock. And two kinds of surface: the granite- hard snowfields and the naked crags of the pinnacles.