Andrei Makine - The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme

"So what stopped you from shooting straight?" "The crowd. They were all trying to shoot first." Laughter thaws our lips. The militiamen look around. A supervisor looms up behind us, cuffs heads rapidly… The motorcade sweeps past at such a speed that it is impossible to get a good look at the windows in this black stream of limousines. Our hands spring into action too late, merely saluting the motorcyclists who bring up the rear. They have helmets white with frost and ruddy faces… The "toiling masses" break ranks and disperse, hastening toward home and a hot drink. But our own mission is not yet accomplished. We are loaded onto a bus and taken to the foot of a brand-new monument, to act out the same charade of popular jubilation all over again, in Potemkin style. The wind from the steppes on this hillside is appalling. They arrange us in a hollow square, doubtless in simulation of a large crowd. We no longer talk, remaining motionless without the supervisors having to rebuke us. Even they seem to understand the inhuman absurdity of this waiting. The day wanes, the motorcade does not come. A noncom approaches our ranks, speaks into a supervisor's ear. The latter smiles at us a little mournfully: "At ease!"

At this moment I flee. Everyone is too tired to count us. I make my way down the other side of the hill and run toward the city. I do not explain to myself the reasons for this truancy. Possibly contempt for this visiting V.I.P., who has not deigned to come. Or else the picture I have of the rest of the extras, who have already gone home, happily drinking hot cups of tea in the bosom of their families. Probably the latter thought. This dazzling vision of domestic bliss, warmth, peace. I make my way through the streets, mimicking the gait of the passersby, I go into a store. Then pause for a moment, mingling with the gathering at a bus stop. With the ill-considered hope that their life will draw me into itself, make me like them. A screen like a fine sheet of glass separates me from these people… I find myself inside a church for no particular reason, simply to get warm. My rejection of everything connected with religion is instinctive. I do not like these old women crossing themselves and mumbling in front of the icons wreathed in smoke. The reverberation beneath the vaulted ceilings is unpleasant, chilling. The gleaming richness of the iconostasis is crushing. And even the candle flames are no good for unfreezing my fingers; they burn them, bite them, or else shrink away beneath them. I recall how one day at the orphanage one of the pupils was made to step forward to be castigated for his shameful crime: some reactionary old aunt of his had secretly taken him to the church and had him baptized! Our contempt for this tearful redhead had been sincere. "It was one of these old women here," I say to myself, at the sight of their bowed shadows. The priest's voice is slightly plaintive, quavering with cold. I find his prayers hard to follow. He calls on us to pray for all and sundry, to pray for everyone, for those close at hand, for those far away, for the dead… I get back to the orphanage just before supper. I cannot admit to anyone that my first attempt to live among the others has failed.

Nor would I have become the person that I am without having experienced a certain night at the end of the winter. Or rather that particular moment when for a very brief spell the passing of the trains that ran beside the house where Alexandra lived came to a stop. During the day the tracks, only a few yards away from the wooden walls, gave rise to the noisy symphony of trains on their way through the township. The inhabitants no longer even noticed all this pounding, clattering, whistling, and grinding, the crescendos and diminuendos. Just from the sound they could recognize the heavy drumming of a train coming from the Urals, its freight cars loaded with ore, the shock wave raised by the Novosibirsk express, the interminable clanking of the dark tank cars bringing oil from the Caspian Sea… Around about two o'clock in the morning there was a slack period in this rail activity, a brief respite between the very late trains and the ones that roused the switch yard at the crack of dawn. Sometimes this pause in the night was shattered by special trains passing through very rapidly. As I lay in my bed, separated from the rest of the room by an old curtain, all I had to do was crane my neck to see the long, low flatcars rolling past, the transport covers that allowed one to guess at the contours of armored vehicles, the shapes of guns. Then I remembered the things our teachers used to tell us about the world situation. These armaments were probably on their way to the defenders of Vietnam, currently being burned with napalm by the Americans, or to the Cubans, at their last gasp, thanks to the blockade, or to the Africans in their liberation struggle.

The cause seemed to me just. I loved being awakened by these trains shrouded in mystery.

That night I missed the passing of the nocturnal train. I sat up in bed as the last of the flatcars was already slipping by under the window. All I could make out was the unusual size of the devices being transported: the covers reached up higher than our first floor. "Maybe they're rockets…" I thought, still half asleep, and remained like that for a while, listening to the slow fading of the sound. The night, as so often after the February thaws, was icy and clear. In the upper part of the window, where the fronds of frost had not made inroads, the darkness gleamed like clean-cut granite flecked with mica. Between two stalactites of ice that hung from the gutter, a star stood out clearly, alive and aware of our lives, of the existence of this old wooden house, suspended in total isolation in the somewhat terrifying splendor of this animated sky.

The final reverberations of the rails fell silent, the stillness was about to become absolute. And it was then that I became aware of a barely perceptible murmuring that still clouded the settling of the silence. I pricked up my ears and recognized Alexandra's voice, or rather the shadow of Alexandra's voice. The ceiling was faintly tinged with the glow of her night light. Embarrassed at overhearing this whispering, I was about to get back into bed when I suddenly thought I heard my name. "Perhaps she's having a heart attack," I thought, "and hasn't the strength to call out to me…" Anxious, but not wanting to give myself away, I delicately pushed aside the tired satin of the curtain… In the corner of the room, on the other side of the wardrobe that formed my cubbyhole, I saw an old woman seated on her bed, her feet, below a long nightdress, resting on a small rectangle of carpet. At first she seemed like a stranger. Her white hair was undone and reached her shoulders. Most striking was her pose: her head deeply bowed, her fingers pressed against her brow. Among her faint, tremulous words I once more caught my name…

I did not think, I did not say to myself: "A woman saying her prayers." What occurred to me at that moment was much less considered. My whole being was filled with an awareness of the infinite night in which our house was adrift, the depth of the darkness, of the icy expanses of sky and earth, and, at the heart of this gaping space, of a woman, giving voice to my presence in the universe.

The night light went out. I lay there, unsleeping. Amid the early-morning uproar of the trains, it struck me that she had been murmuring those secret words in her mother tongue.

During the days that followed, when I had managed to find the language to understand that night, I recalled the priest's litany, his quavering voice that had displeased me. Among others, he had called on us to pray "for those who have no one to pray for them." This form of words, incomprehensible to me at the time, now seemed poignantly apt. Knowing nothing about religious practice, I saw prayer as, broadly speaking, the act of thinking about a person, picturing them lost and isolated under the sky and, by this thought, reaching them, even if they were unaware, especially if they were unaware of it.