Andrei Makine - The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme

She tells Jacques Dorme that now this notion of getting back to France seems even more improbable than ever. Not on account of the French poets hymning the GPU but on account of the war, this one war that reaches from the Volga to the Seine. On account of all the trainloads of wounded, who must be sent to the rear.

He talks about the house where he spent his childhood and youth, the German units now marching down the street past the drawing room windows. On the wall in this room there is a photo of his father, still very young, who went away to the war, the "Great War," and came back from it an old man, to await his death in 1925. He does not know if the memory he retains of his father derives solely from this portrait or from the few seconds during which a three-year-old child sees a man on the front steps, with a knapsack slung across his shoulder, then the silhouette of this man walking away up the street and disappearing.

The next evening they are to meet again, once more with the feeling that they have not been parted from each other for a single moment.

"No Pretender, I. I am…"

Many years afterward, when I thought about Jacques Dorme, it would be those words that best evoked for me the nature of the man, the unspoken credo of this pilot, this stranger who materialized out of the smoke from a blazing train. Words once uttered by a king of France.

In my youth I wanted to see him as a shining hero, his life as a series of glorious exploits. A habit of mind doubtless left over from our childish daydreams at the orphanage. But from the start of the story Alexandra told me, my yearning for grand gestures was stilled by the simplicity of what I heard. A life in no way concerned to be molded into a predestined course, one that lagged behind events and sometimes even came to a standstill, as it did during the nights spent in a room where one of the walls, stove in, was open to the sky, admitting the tart fragrance of a wild cherry. Far away from the timekeeping of men.

He touched down in Spain too late (my desire to see him at the head of an international brigade proved to be vain). It was January 1939, two months after the fall of Madrid. Had he hoped to join the battle against Franco's air force and the German fighter planes, to fly a Dewoitine or a Potez, such as he had piloted in France? In any event, the reality was different. He did not fight but retrieved the debris of lost battles: arms, the wounded, the dead. And he flew not a dashing fighter aircraft but a heavy three-engined transport plane, a Junkers 52 captured from the Nazis.

He had certainly dreamed of aerial dogfights and little stars marked on the side of the cockpit, the tally of victories. But the suffering of crowds seeking refuge, the cunning multiplicity of sufferings devised by war, gave him a humbler notion of his pilot's task: it was to move people from a place of great suffering to a place where there would be less suffering.

He even ended up reconciling himself to his Boche aircraft. At first he had told himself that in the event of war with Germany, familiarity with it would be useful for knowing how best to shoot down planes of this type. In time the aircraft's patient reliability warmed their relationship into an almost human friendship, grudging but forgiving at critical moments. "I have reeducated her," he would say to the Russian pilots he often came across, who had taught him a smattering of their language. He could not yet guess at the importance these two details, insignificant in themselves, would one day assume: knowing this old

Junkers aircraft and the ability to string together a dozen sentences in Russian.

Another thing he learned was that war memories tended to lie in ambush for a pilot, especially on the brink of sleep, where the skies they wove for him were cluttered with steel beams, fragments of cable, and the branches of trees, through which his plane had to steer a tortuous, unbearably slow course. He often woke up, suffocating in these tangles. And in the morning it was the empty space that surprised him. This deserted alleyway in Port-Vendres (just over the border), a few hours after the firing of the last shots in the war, a few miles away from bombed towns and howling crowds, this first-floor window open, a woman ironing linen, her daughter out in the street holding up a doll and placing it on the windowsill, the soft hiss of the water beneath the iron, the steam with its poignant aroma of a happy life. It would take him several months to get used to these oases of happiness and routine, the snares of forgetfulness.

In Paris he tried to people this void with the glib excitement of the cinema, went to see all the latest movies and at one performance noticed a woman in the audience weeping: the screen heroine was sobbing her heart out, her face immaculate as she looked up from a letter. He lost track of the plot, thinking back to the streets of Barcelona, a distraught mother with a dead child in her arms… On the way out he was amused to notice a young fair-haired woman through an office window talking on the telephone, her head rendered monstrous by a gas mask. It was funny and also upsetting to him because the young woman strongly resembled his fiancée. He had just received a letter from her, breaking off their engagement, reproaching him for his involvement in Spain, for his by now intolerable absence, and for what she called "your vagabond streak." He smiled wryly Inside the window a man was adjusting the gas mask on the blonde woman's head. She turned her tapir's muzzle toward him. It was funny after all. He promised himself to tell his family about it; he was due to see them at the beginning of September.

The day he reached the family home was the day war was declared. His sixteen-year-old brother could hardly contain his delight: he dreamed of becoming a ship's captain. Jacques Dorme even heard him exclaim: "Let's hope it lasts for a while!" He said nothing, knowing that to really fear and hate war you had to have fought in one. At the moment of his departure his mother doubtless uttered almost the same words she had addressed to her husband in 1914. The portrait of his father was still in the same place in the drawing room, only now this man, photographed a year before he went off to the front, struck Jacques Dorme as astonishingly young. And indeed, he really was younger than his son.

During the course of that sleepless night at Stalingrad in May 1942, he recalled the incident of the fair-haired girl in the gas mask and recounted it to the woman he had just met among the trains. They laughed at the thought of the strange grunting sounds her lover might have found himself listening to at the other end of the line. And, in a moment of vertigo, he had a vision of everything that lay between him and that day in Paris, everything that in less than two years had turned him into another being, all the density of life and death that he had had to ingest. From an August day in Paris, coming out of the cinema, to this great wooden house, half destroyed by bombing, this woman, a stranger but suddenly so close to him, this township beyond the Volga, the terrible convulsions of a country preparing to fight for its life, and the boundless calm of these moments, of that star in the break in the wall, of the scent exhaled by those white clusters in the darkness. And this giddiness at the thought of what had brought him all the way to this spot.

He would try to talk of it that night, from the chaos of his memories, of things forgotten, of admissions that took him by surprise. From time to time, there would be a silence, they would look at each other, bonded by the awareness of the extreme inadequacy of words.

The silences also covered up his reluctance to admit that he had more than once gambled with his life. He spoke of "blazing streamers," to describe bursts of tracers on the nights of the air battles in May and June of 1940. After mentioning that the pilots in his squadron had been fighting one against five, he checked himself at once, afraid to sound boastful, and described the ribbons of blazing streamers in which the German fighter force entangled them. As if at a carnival ball…