Andrei Makine - The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme

"… Who have no one to pray for them." In the gray light of a dawn slow to appear, I helped Village retrieve his fishing lines, all of them without a catch. So the little wood fire he had just lit would serve no purpose. "The months with an Y in them are no goddamned use for fishing," he explained, making light of it. We had, in fact, reached the first days of March. The setback did not seem to affect him. He sat down on the carcass of an old boat, took out a hunk of bread, and offered me half of it. The river was still covered with a white carapace. Above it the clouds were beginning to turn pale. He ate, and then he became still, silent, his gaze directed beyond the river. I looked at him attentively, insistently even. "… Those who have no one to pray for them," I thought again.

"So, do you want to go and see her?" he said suddenly, without looking at me.

"See who?" I asked, perplexed.

"Don't talk crap. You know very well. That nurse."

"Why should I? You're crazy."

He said nothing, his eyes once more lost among the bushes along the riverbank. Frantically I racked my brains over what it was in our talks together that had betrayed me. Nothing. And everything… Every word, every gesture.

"Give me your hand," he said in almost brutal tones. He got up. I held out my right hand; he pushed it away, seized my other hand, and, before I could react, slashed the palm with a lump of ice, or so it seemed to me. No, it was a five-kopeck piece, sharpened into a razor blade. The shallow cut glistened, began to bleed.

"You can tell her it was that rusty pile of crap…" I stood there, irresolute, looking now at him, now at the thread of blood. "Go on," he said more softly, without brutality, and he gave me a kindly smile, such as I had never seen on any face at the orphanage.

At the infirmary I was plunged for several minutes in that hypnotic state the woman's slowness caused to reign about her. A blissful state for me, a blend of maternal gentleness and loving tenderness.

Nothing now remained of Samoylov's collection of books in the sealed-off room, apart from volumes badly damaged by the fire. My hands covered in ash, I was trying to resuscitate them, chiefly out of respect for their infirm state. Often, reading became impossible. I would just have time to focus on a page scorched by the fire when it would disintegrate in my fingers, carrying away its contents forever. Thus it was that I read, without being able to reread, a short poem in which the scenes depicted were strangely in harmony with the fragility of this single reading. I did not know the author, doubtless one of the obscure poets on the fringes of the romantic movement. Samoylov's library, assembled with the omnivorous appetite of a neophyte, was well stocked with these names neglected by the anthologies and might well, I would tell myself years later, have formed the basis for an original history of literature, almost parallel to the one that is taught and honored.

The poem had as its title "The Last Square," probably borrowed from Victor Hugo, echoing the warlike epics of the early nineteenth century. The soldiers in their ranks in this square were falling one by one, under attack from an enemy more numerous and better armed. The hero expressed only one fear, that of seeing his companions weaken. They stood firm, however (a couplet would come back to me one day in which "batterie" [the battery] rhymed with "fratrie" [brotherhood]), closing rank in the square to fill the gaps left by the dead. At the end only two were left, the hero and his friend. Back-to-back they fought on, out of pure gallantry, each one fearing to leave the other on his own. When finally the warrior's heart was pierced, he looked around, and in his friend s place saw an angel whose powerful wings were flecked with blood.

The page crumbled between my fingers like a fine sliver of slate. This ephemeral aspect reinforced the impact of the words. Few lines of verse have remained so vividly in my memory as these unknown stanzas.

I remember, too, one of the last times (perhaps the very last) I spent reading in Alexandra's company. That evening at the end of March, it stayed light for a long time; we could drink our tea and read without lighting the lamps. Sometimes a train would go by and in its lit sleeping compartments the lives of the passengers could be covertly observed: a woman tucking in a sheet on her berth, a young man, his hands held up like blinders, his brow pressed against the window, as if he hoped to see those he had just left behind… Alexandra had opened the window, the mild air brought in with it the pleasantly bitter scent of the last mounds of snow, the swollen bark of the trees. The promise of spring. I thought of this as I observed Alexandra reading aloud, the ghost of a smile playing over her lips. For the first time I thought about what a woman could feel at the coming of a new spring. A woman of her age. Or perhaps age did not count?

The book she was reading came from the devastated library, the accumulation of volumes by forgotten authors that had included "The Last Square." This one was a collection of short tales, interesting only for their elegant construction, maintaining the suspense for the space of half a page before the final triumph of Good. I was listening, lulled by all these predictable happy endings, when the next story, even shorter than the others, suddenly upset all these neat narrative rhythms. A young man falls passionately in love with a young woman, as cruel as she is beautiful, he declares his love to her and offers her his heart. "No, my dear, I already have your heart. To prove to me that you love me truly, bring me your mother's heart. Yes, rip the heart out from her breast." The lover runs home, stabs his mother, makes off with her heart. In his haste to satisfy his beloved, he stumbles on the journey, falls, and drops the heart, which lands among stones. The lover groans, gets up, and suddenly hears an anxious voice, his mother's heart speaking: "You're not hurt, are you, my son?"

I had no memory of getting to my feet, leaving the room, running. Quite simply, after a total loss of awareness, I found myself standing in the sealed-off room, to which I had gained access by going out onto the landing, sliding along against the wall of the house on an old skirting board, and pushing open the door. There I was, biting my lip until it bled, so as not to howl, my eyes seeing nothing at first, then seeing the space outside the door: the fields blanketed with tired gray snow, the dull sky, spring. A world at once perfectly familiar and unrecognizable. Alexandra did not call me, she left me alone, waited quietly for me to come down. And never referred to that story again.

Many years later the difference between one's mother tongue and an acquired language was to become a fashionable topic. I would often hear it said that only the former could evoke the deepest and most subtle – the most untranslatable – ties that bind our souls. Then I would think of maternal love, which I had first discovered and experienced in French, in a very simple little book, its pages tarnished by the fire.

UNDER the sun's blaze, immense slabs of ice slid down the river, collided, broke up, revealing their greenish rims, sometimes several feet thick. Just as we were crossing the bridge a section of floating ice struck one of the pillars. The roadway shook beneath our feet. The impact made an explosion of sound. Breaking rank, we rushed over to the handrail. It was giddy intoxication: the dazzle of the shafts of light, the wild chill of the liberated waters, the brutish power of the ice floes, rearing against the pillar, jolting upward in spasms. On the opposite bank, looking like black ants, children played at rafting, leaping from one slab of floating ice to the next. As the white surface broke up, the young daredevils would dash onto the broadest fragment, which in its turn disintegrated, now driving them back onto terra firma, now, for the wildest of them, onto a slab whose instability demanded the contortions of a tightrope walker. Seen from the eminence of the bridge, these games were reminiscent of the flickering of a kaleidoscope.