Andrei Makine - The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme

During those spring months our own life, too, was reminiscent of a kaleidoscope where the tube has been shattered so that, bit by bit, the glass sequins and mirrors spill out. Events followed one another, not so much leading us on to the future as draining our years in the orphanage, down to the last fragment of a dream.

During the course of a few weeks, several people ran away – really ran away, never to return – one of them ending up, so we learned, in the Far East. Then, just before the May celebrations, one of the girls was escorted by the director into an ambulance parked near the entrance. It was difficult to grasp that an adolescent of fourteen, a thin girl with drab features, was about to become a mother, and that since the previous autumn she had been carrying this other life within her and had contrived not to give herself away, while we scribbled on the pages of our textbooks and told jokes about Brezhnev.

On one of the first evenings of May, it became clear to me that the world of other people was going to exact a tribute from us. I was leaning against a tall table beside a kiosk where they served beer. I had no money, but as long as the serving woman did not notice my presence, I could listen to the customers' conversations. They were almost all men who, before returning joylessly to their homes (I was discovering that a family home could be joyless), were here flaunting their virility, discussing women (two categories: those who "did it" and the rest), and cursing the injustice of fate. There were not many women in this male preserve. Only one that evening, two tables away from mine. The man with her was addressing her in tones of such contempt that it was as if at every word he was gathering up his saliva to spit. At one moment he struck her with a dry, furtive little slap. She turned her face away, I recognized her. It was Muza, a girl from the orphanage, three years older than me. She may have had some Caucasian or Tartar blood in her veins, for her features were remarkably finely formed, one of those faces whose nobility and harmony make one doubt the animal origins of the human race. No one among the pupils at the orphanage had ever ventured to court her. For us, such a degree of beauty placed her in another living species, somewhere between a snow-laden branch and a shooting star…

There were not many customers; the booth was about to close. I could clearly hear the words the man was hissing through his teeth: "You'll go just where I tell you, you dirty little whore… If it weren't for me you wouldn't even have anything to cover your ass with…" Muza shook her head in protest. At this, with a hate-filled grimace, the man very calmly pinched her lower lip, thrusting his finger into her now distorted mouth. He was twice her age and his beige suit and the color of his sparse hair made him look like a long cigar with the tobacco spilling out of it. She tried to break free but he squeezed her mouth more violently, preventing her from speaking. With this thumb thrust in behind her cheek she managed to mumble in pitifully comic tones: "I know where to go, I do. I won't sleep in the street…" He released his grip, sneering as if disgusted: "Oh, sure! Go back to your filthy hole. They'll soon be kicking you all out…" She began to weep and I was struck by these tears, for she sobbed like a woman already mature, already wearied by life.

The waitress made half a dozen empty tankards clink as she picked them up with fanned-out fingers. "All right, you. Finish your popsicle right now or I'll call the militiaman. He's not far away. Beat it, before I get angry!"

I walked away regretting that I had not intervened, with that feeling of shame every man experiences a dozen or more times in his life. This particular time would remain one of the most painful for me.

I was not alone in having seen Muza in the company of the man who looked like a beige cigar. Some days later one of the boys claimed to have spied on them in a boat moored upstream from the orphanage. Despite the salacious exaggerations in his story, I believed him, for the behavior of the beige man as he described it corresponded precisely to what I had seen. Stuttering with excitement, he described the man seated in the boat with his pants unbuttoned and his lower abdomen exposed, whistling to himself, while Muza, on her knees, had her head pressed against his stomach, although her hair made it impossible to see anything. Proud of his success, the storyteller went over the scene once more, described how the man stared at the clouds and whistled to himself, while the woman's mouth was distorted by the strenuous thrusting… Village, who never took part in our discussions, suddenly broke into our circle and, without saying anything, struck. The storyteller collapsed, his arms flailing. His lips bloody, he got up, hurled an oath, and fell silent as he met Village's look. A look not threatening, but sad.

In one other way or another we all approved of what Village had done, even the one who had received the blow.

I saw the nurse again in May on a public holiday. She was coming out of a shop, holding one handle of a huge shopping bag. The other handle was held by (I thought at first) her twin brother. But it was her husband, and he looked like a comical masculine copy of her. Almost the same height, middling. The same build, rather well rounded. Fair, diaphanous curls, the man's even more dazzling. I experienced neither jealousy nor disappointment. The couple looked like little piglets in a strip cartoon and could therefore have nothing in common with the silent woman who had tended my wound. With all my strength I wanted to believe in the possibility that this was her double. Within the cracked kaleidoscope of our lives I at least needed this shard of a dream to hold on to.

Among the flickering visions reflected in the glass there were also those two girls and their boyfriends, chatting at the entrance to a lane. We saw them from a truck bringing us back from a work site. The driver had parked it under the trees and gone off in search of a pack of cigarettes. One of the boys was seated on his bicycle, the other was holding his by the handlebars. Fenced in as we were by the sides of the truck, we studied them in their little carefree oasis. Their freedom enthralled us. Even their skin was different from ours. After several baking hot days our faces were peeling, our short hair rough and discolored. The golden skin of these girls gave evidence of a mysterious way of life in which one took care of one's body, as of an asset… At one moment the boy seated on his bike took hold of a fine lock of hair that had slipped over his girlfriend's cheek and tucked it back behind her ear. She seemed not to notice, and continued talking. I sensed around me a swift muscular tension, as at the movies, when the hero is getting close to some danger… A volley of oaths erupted in the midst of our tightly packed crowd. Laughter, obscenities, banging on the metal of the cabin, and then, as if someone had given the order for it, silence. The two couples moved off rapidly down the lane beneath the trees. A girl leaning on the panel beside me had her eyes swollen with tears.

From the same broken kaleidoscope this spray of sparks came fizzing out: the town hoodlums who sometimes arrived to taunt us were armed with short, two-edged blades known as "Finnish knives." On that particular evening the impact of a blade against an iron bar in the already darkening air caused a tiny spurt of blue-green. We had yet to discover that these brawls were, in fact, a means for the local underworld to test our mettle. For it was from among youths such as ourselves that they recruited people with nothing to lose and no one to love. This burst of sparks fixed in my vision the flat, ugly face of one of our assailants. Some days later I was to pass him near the station. He was giving the beige man a light.