Andrei Makine - The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme

Suddenly he fell silent. Someone thought the speech was finished. Two or three hesitant handclaps rang out. Then everyone froze, their eyes riveted to this man in the middle of the space. His stillness turned him into a tall monolith, indifferent to human emotion. Amid this silence that had fallen from the sky – or so it seemed to us – the hot wind's mighty blast could be heard sweeping across the plain.

For several moments the old giant directed his gaze into the distance, over our heads, beyond the unfinished building they had sought to hide from him, beyond the Volga, and into the endless solitude of the steppes. And I believed he could even see the cross, made from two branches of birchwood above an unknown grave.

This minute of silence (in reality six or seven seconds) was very likely involuntary, but it altered the whole sense of the ceremony. The giant roused himself, and in a final coda, throatier than his earlier words, he spoke of victory, of honor, of the mother country. He lifted up his arms and our hearts went with them. The applause, perhaps for the first time ever at such a ceremony, was sincere.

The officials surrounded him, reforming their Lilliputian escort, and began guiding him toward the downward slope. But, with his art of making space pliant to his will, he broke through their circle and walked with giant strides along the line formed by the young. The extras in their white shirts smiled broadly; each one waved the carnation he had been issued for the occasion. The giant passed by, eyeing them with just a tinge of disappointment. In front of our square he halted. We had no flowers and were not smiling, and remained at attention. I do not know if he understood who we were, with our peeling faces and our cropped hair, the minimal difference between the boys and the girls. I think he did. He must, at all events, have realized that we came from another era, the era they were trying to bury beneath the concrete of the memorial. The era that was dear to him. He looked at us, nodded his head, and screwed up his eyes, as if to say: "Chin up!" And we saw him walking away, not with his entourage, but with an elderly army officer. The two of them had no need of the interpreter weaving his way between them. The military man was making broad gestures, no doubt explaining troop movements, the deployment of artillery pieces, breakthroughs of armored divisions. The old giant approved, making up with his hands for the hesitations of the interpreter, now trailing behind…

I spoke to the supervisor, who was waiting for us beside the bus, in the manner of a condemned man formulating his last request: "There's someone in the city I must see. My aunt… If I'm not allowed to go, I'll run away all the same." He gave me a searching look, gauging the unstable frontier between the unlimited submissiveness we normally displayed and a rebellion that might erupt at the most unexpected moment. At that very moment indeed, just as we were being promised a whole morning of bathing in the Volga the following day. As a good psychologist, he sensed that here was an exceptional case. "If you don't show up tomorrow I'll set the militia on you as a fugitive. It'll be a reeducation colony for you. Don't say I didn't warn you. Now, beat it. You can still catch the last train. Hold on: take this as your ticket."

The following morning Alexandra telephoned him and, on the pretext of sunstroke and a high fever, won for me the handful of days I was to spend with her that came to count for more in my life than some whole years.

I had arrived at about ten o'clock at night and, without explaining anything, told her everything in such breathless haste that it could indeed have been taken for fever or the early stages of drunkenness. The window overlooking the railroad tracks was open, and you could hear the heavy clanking of a train on its way from the Urals. She made tea, lit the lamp. It was only when she asked in a very calm voice, too calm: "So what did he speak about?" that I sensed her emotion.

I took a deep breath and suddenly felt utterly tongue-tied. I could tell her about the handkerchief wiping away the slime from the sturgeon. I recalled the smallest of the giant's gestures. I had even had a memory of the moment when he used the past historic tense of a verb that sounded old-fashioned to my ear (some "naquit" or quite simply "fut") that had struck me like the sighting of a prehistoric reptile. I could easily have said: "He spoke about the war and the victory and the debt all peoples owe to their heroes…" But the real essence of it was not there. It was in that silent voice I believed I had heard, in the gaze he directed toward the forgotten cross in the middle of the plain… Yet how to speak of that? And indeed, was it real or had I dreamed it?

Seeing my confusion, Alexandra thought I had been unable to follow the spoken French or that the content of the speech was too complex for a boy of my age. It was doubtless in order to rescue me from my predicament that, in tones of a very distant reminiscence, she said: "He came here to the city once before. In forty-four. Yes, in the autumn of forty-four. I didn't see him. The hospital was full to bursting. Everyone was working day and night. But we had already talked about him for the first time long before that…"

"Who is 'we'?" I asked, emerging from my torpor. "'We' is myself and… Jacques Dorme." My "sunstroke" lasted for less than a week. But Jacques Dormes life story, the fragmentary sketch of this life story, had time to knit itself forever into what I was. The tale Alexandra told me that July 1966 was one of those you only hear once in a lifetime.

Four years and a few months after that ceremony on the broad plain, I learned of the tall old man's death. The gaze that embraced the steppe beyond the Volga, the moment of silence he had spun out that day, all this had just vanished into eternity. I can still see the newspaper kiosk near the Anichkov Bridge in Leningrad, the page with his picture on it, the report of his death. "The Lilliputians have won," I thought as I bought the paper. I could not yet guess how accurate this phrase was. But I was already grown up enough to know that prior to this death there had been betrayal by some, cowardice by others. Above all the ingratitude of a country whose honor he had once saved.

In my memory, however, he would remain unchanged: an old giant in the middle of a former battlefield, paying homage to fallen warriors. Just one sentence of his, which I was to come across much later in a book, would be added to this vision of him, as if in reply to Alexandra's question as to what he had spoken about: "Now that baseness is in the ascendant it is they who can look upon Heaven without turning pale and upon Earth without blushing."

On that day any distance between the painful duty of living and the calm acceptance of death vanishes.

A day in May 1942, some twenty miles from Stalingrad, the heat as dense as tar, the railroad tracks littered with dirty bandages, fragments of bombs, trash. A train has been hit. The railroad workers are trying to disconnect the burning tank car so as to shunt it onto a siding. The oil in it is ablaze, plunging the surrounding area into a night shot through by a purple sun. The rest of the train traffic advances tentatively now, but does not come to a halt – the only thing that matters. Westbound trains: soldiers, shells, arms, armaments. Eastbound trains: mangled flesh, the residue of battles. The monstrous culinary process of war, an immense cauldron that has to be fed at every moment with tons of steel, oil, and blood.

Alexandra finds herself caught between the wall of immobilized tank cars and the line of coaches moving forward on the neighboring track. If the fire spreads, the rail junction will become an inferno over half a mile long. She ought to fall to the ground, crawl under the train, emerge on the other side, escape. She does not stir, and stares at her reflection in the tank car's side, which glistens with oil. Mute. Suddenly her name rings out within her, her real name, and her French surname. Her life, lost here in this noonday twilight, in a foreign land that is in its death throes all around her. The brownish air, the cries of the wounded, her own body melting in the heat, stained, exhausted with her efforts, asphyxiated. She tells herself death could never sweep her away at a moment of greater anguish. At the end of the train the smoke grows thicker, the track is no longer visible…