Andrei Makine - The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme

She read it both badly and well. Badly, because her voice was monotonous and evidently concerned by the somnolence of one camp and the giggling whispers of another. Well, because the banality of this voice enabled me to forget it, to forget this tall woman with her angular frame, to forget this classroom, and to enter into the nocturnal world of these stanzas, finding myself on an island lost in the middle of an ocean beside a stone tomb that opens once a year, at midnight on the anniversary of the emperor's death. The dead man arises and climbs aboard the ghost ship, which sets sail for "that beloved France where he had left his glory, his throne, his son and heir, and his faithful Guard." He lands by night and rouses the deserted shore with a powerful call that reverberates into the very depths of the country. But his native land remains deaf: "The mustachioed grenadiers are all asleep now, on the plain where the Elbe's waters flow, beneath the snows of cold Russia, in the burning sands of the pyramids." Then he summons his marshals: "Ney! Lannes! Murat…" No one comes to his side. "Some have fallen in battle, others have betrayed him and sold their swords." With a despairing cry he calls out to his son, but in reply hears only the deathly silence of the void. Dawn compels him to leave his native land. He boards the ghost ship, and it carries him back to his remote island.

I had never before had such a feeling of freedom in the face of reality. The beauty of this nocturnal voyage rendered the so-called real world all around me so insignificant that I wanted to laugh: the walls of this classroom, decorated with strips of red calico bearing quotations from Lenin and the last Party Congress; the orphanage building; the chimneys of a vast factory beyond the icebound river. The man who stood on the deck of that spectral ship, this figure in its tricorne hat, had nothing to do with the Bonaparte whose adventures we learned about from our history books, nor with the "literary personage" analyzed by our teacher, nor with that fat little man with his legs apart portrayed in the illustration. The exile returning to the shores of Brittany, sending out his calls to his marshals, was a reality divined by the poet. More true than History itself. More believable, because beautiful.

I knew the voyager on the ghost ship belonged to the land of the four noblemen from Aquitaine, and that he could, like them, encompass it in a single look, from the forests of the east to the dunes beside the ocean. When the hinged lids of our old desks came clattering down at the end of the lesson, I reflected that it might somehow be possible never to lose contact in my mind with this dreamed-of land.

According to the logic of my adolescent quest, I should have plunged into an increasingly disdainful and untamed solitude and adopted the posture of the young king in exile.

A being torn between his dreams of France and reality. A logic both novelistic and romantic. But it all turned out differently. It was reality that suddenly produced a dramatic twist in the plot.

At first it was just a rumor, so improbable that, talking about it during the New Year vacation, we treated it as a bizarre hoax. Our vacations, in any case, were not like those of normal schoolchildren. We would be sent out to clear railroad tracks, often blocked by snowstorms, or else, from time to time, we were lined up in a guard of honor on the occasion of some official visit. Our city's glorious past attracted foreign delegations. Lining the perimeter of a monument to the fallen, we represented "Soviet youth, assembled in evergreen commemoration of the war." It was especially during vacations that they had recourse to us, because at such times normal children were difficult to mobilize. Or when it was particularly cold, too, since parents would refuse to expose their little ones to snowstorms at twenty-five below.

That December it was indeed very cold. Despite being ordered to stand at attention, we jumped up and down in our ranks, the soles of our ancient shoes thumping on the ice, and to warm the cockles of our hearts while waiting for the official procession to pass we discussed this stupid rumor. What joker could have started it?

When lessons resumed the news broke – the rumor was true: next fall the orphanage was going to close.

In the months that followed we learned the details: the pupils would be transferred to ordinary boarding schools, the older ones to professional schools and factories, possibly even in distant towns. But we only really believed it all in June, when after lessons had finished, they ordered us to drag our old desks over to the boiler room. Right up to that day we went on clinging to the hope that it was all a false alarm. And yet each one of us, in his own way, was getting ready to leave.

The orphanage, the equivalent of the prison into which our fathers had vanished, suddenly took on a different character, revealing its hospitable, almost familial side to us. The lives led by other people, whose freedom we had always envied, now alarmed us. We were like the prison inmate who counts the hours at the end of a long sentence and at the same time dreads going outside, often escaping just before the great day, allowing himself to be caught, and settling down to a new number of days to be crossed off.

In outward appearance, our daily life remained the same. The most noticeable change was a kind of solidarity that imposed itself of its own accord, canceling the former hierarchies of weak and strong. Strength, hostile and unknown, now lay outside our walls.

One Saturday evening in January I went up to the sealed-off room where I had almost finished sorting through the books. In the half-light, their worlds came to life, their words resonated softly in my ears. On one of the boxes lay the blade of the future dagger, Misericordia… Alexandra called to me from the landing. I took a last look around me, thinking that I would soon have to leave these books behind for a long time, perhaps forever, and that I would try to carry away within me the land their pages had brought to life.

That winter marked a hiatus between two generations, the notorious "twenty years after," which, though too vague for historians, nevertheless defines the rhythm of a country's chronology. The war's end was already twenty years old. A generation had had the time to be born, grow up, and produce offspring. All without war. Blood ties to it were being stretched, the heritage of memory was collapsing, the dead were once and for all taking on solid shape in bronze. Now was precisely the time that they began erecting a forest of monuments in our city – vast concrete memorials in celebration of the battle of Stalingrad, colossal statues – and lighting "everlasting flames." And they closed our orphanage with the view that the quarantine had lasted long enough, we had expiated our fathers' past, and it would now be more ideologically judicious to disperse us, like fragments from that past, among the healthy population.

The last months before our departure were filled in equal measure with excitement and anxiety. We knew that the myth of the hero-fathers could not fail to raise smiles among the people in whose midst we would soon be living. Not only did we come from a strange place, but also from another era, from those days when the statues still moved and spoke, warm with the blood that flowed beneath the bronze. We would all, we knew very well, have to make up for lost time and find a place for ourselves in other people's reality. Learn to forget.

What I am left with from those months is a few brief fragments, snapshots in my memory, apparently random, but without which I should certainly have become a different person. Notably, that January afternoon, a biting cold that forces us to rub our noses and lips, which have lost all feeling, despite being ordered to remain still. The motorcade we are waiting for on one of the great avenues of the city is delayed. Everyone shifts on their feet to avoid turning into pillars of ice: the militiamen stationed several yards apart, ourselves behind them, along with other representatives of the "toiling masses." According to the rumor circulating, a very important person is expected, Brezhnev himself. Our curiosity is aroused by the desire to guess which of the cars in the motorcade this person will travel in. Not the one at the head, we are sure of that. The second, the third? A state secret. We feel we have been entrusted with a mission. And still the motorcade is not there. Our feet feel like ice cubes. Irritated, one of the pupils from the orphanage tells a joke. Wafted along by the breeze, it warms our ears. An attempt on Brezhnev's life. The gunman misses, is arrested, interrogated: