Andrei Makine - The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme

As for his last engagement, again Jacques Dorme told her about it in few words, mainly to explain that his presence there, at a switch yard in a Russian city, was ultimately due to his stubborn determination to catch up with a German bomber, a Heinkel, that had unloaded its two tons of death and was simply returning to base, as one goes home after work. On a fine afternoon in June… The advantage in speed his Bloch had over the German was minimal; he knew the chase would take time. He had little ammunition left: he would have to approach prudently, avoiding the bomber's many machine guns, maneuver faultlessly, fire without counting on a second chance. It took him an interminable time to close in and refine the angle of attack so that by the end it was as if he had known the Heinkel's pilot for a long period of time and could guess at the thoughts of this man within the glinting cockpit… Even as he shot him down he still had this strange feeling of a personal bond, which generally did not have time to form in the frenzy of brief duels with fighter planes. Alongside his satisfaction at the task accomplished, this barely formulated notion crossed his mind: that pilot's life and those of the men in the crew, the final seconds of their lives… At this very moment he came under attack, as if by way of a stinging reprimand. No daydreaming! The transparency of the window became iridescent with streaks of oil, fanning out, the wind whistled into his pierced shell, and the outline of a Messerschmitt slowly appeared in a steep, vertical dive. He managed to climb out onto the fuselage, lost consciousness, and came to as a prisoner.

His account of this last battle is interrupted by the dull, rhythmic throb of a heavy train passing in the dark. A train traveling eastward. Jacques Dorme falls silent and they both pause to listen to the panting sound and, from one car to the next, a groan of pain, a cry, an abusive response to that cry The freshness of the air is mingled now with the brackish residue of wounds.

"In any case I don't think I'd have had enough fuel for the return flight. I was already operating a long way behind enemy lines, I'd gotten carried away…" She senses that he is smiling in the darkness. As if to excuse himself for having spoken about his victory, the contortion he went through to wrest his plane out of a spin, his fainting. For having talked about it in the proximity of these railroad cars packed with thousands of soldiers hovering on the brink of death. He smiles.

If love has a beginning, it must, for Alexandra, have been that slight invisible smile in the darkness.

During the months of captivity his thoughts often went back to those days in May and June of 1940, and what struck him every time was the vast amount of sky. There had been nothing else during those weeks of dogfights, no recollection of what was happening on the ground, no encounters in the town streets, just this blue. Shattered archipelagoes of cloud, a blue infinity from which the earth had vanished. His memory was not deceiving him: with several sorties a day, and brief periods of sleep all haunted by these same sorties, it was a simple fact that he rarely had the leisure to find himself on solid ground.

Now, in the confined space of the camp, the earth's clinging gravitational pull dragged at the soles of his feet. And by night the smell of fresh clay stagnated in their hut, pricking his nostrils with its humid acidity. And yet they were privileged, he and the three Polish pilots with whom he shared this low building beside a farm, now transformed into a prisoner-of-war camp. He had spent time in various other places, first of all in Germany, before ending up here, on the eastern frontier of defeated Poland. Everyone sensed that another war was already brewing. These captive pilots could be useful. The German officers who came to inspect them from time to time gave them to understand that henceforth they all had a common enemy and that, as between civilized people, it would always be possible to reach an understanding. So they were entitled to the same food as the guards and to this dwelling where, instead of bunks, each of them had a bed at his disposal. They were free to come and go throughout the camp without special authorization.

In the course of these wanderings Jacques Dorme saw the ordinary prisoners' huts on the far side of the road and, one day, for the first time in his life, an execution by hanging. One of the hanged men was very tall: his toes stuck into the earth like the point of a top, his body spun round upon itself several times, before growing slack… Jacques Dorme experienced a vague feeling of shame, resenting this status of military aristocracy the pilots enjoyed.

It was in that camp across the road, during the summer of 1941, that he noticed a long column of Russian soldiers and thus learned that the other war, the one everyone had been waiting for, had just broken out.

One night the earth smell that dogged him was unbearable. He got up, crossed the room in the darkness, 'went to open the door, and suddenly noticed a glimmer of light behind the pile of old crates, then the silhouette of one of the Poles. That was where the smell came from. Seeing themselves caught in the act, the men made no further attempt at concealment. At the corner of the house a hole opened out into the ground. A head appeared there, eyes blinking in the aura of a match. The Poles looked at one another. Without exchanging any words, as if it was quite simply his turn, Jacques Dorme began helping them to shift the earth from the tunnel.

They escaped on a night of torrential rain at the beginning of autumn. The guards did not dare to set foot outside, the searchlights looked like the glaucous lights of some bathyscaphe, smells and footprints were swallowed up in the mud. One of the pilots, Witold, knew the area well. The next day they reached a village, where they spent two days hidden in a peasant's cellar. It was he who warned them that a search was being organized to retrieve the fugitives. They had time to get away, but on entering the forest had an argument: Witold wanted to press on toward the east, the other two proposed to mark time, wait, and prepare for winter. Jacques Dorme went with Witold, and that is how after several nights' march, they crossed the Russian frontier, without at first being aware of it, and found themselves in the unstable and deceptive world of the land just behind the front line.

They came upon villages where the orchards were heavy with fruit but the streets were peopled with corpses, like that hamlet in the Kiev region where a dozen women who had been shot looked as if they were resting after a day of harvesting. They skirted the towns – during the night – and would sometimes hear German songs, drunken voices. One day they found themselves in a stretch of surrounded territory, and passed by Russian units but did not attempt to make contact with them: they were no longer an army, but fragments of human flotsam – clinging to one another, pushing one another aside into the mud, snatching each other's food, falling, shot down by officers striving to halt the retreat, and shooting back at the officers to clear a path for themselves. Amid this disorderly torrent there were pockets of astonishing stability: detachments, isolated and without hope of assistance, that dug shelters, gathered arms, and prepared their defense.

When the running noose was drawn tight and every direction became equally dangerous to take, they hid among the dead on a battlefield. The German regiments passed by just a few yards from them – sometimes the mocking laughter of a harmonica floated over on the breeze – but there were so many bodies strewn across the plain, in the trenches, behind the shattered timbers of a fortified position, that it would have taken a whole army to flush out these two living men: the tall red-haired Pole, stretched out in a shell crater, and the dark-haired Frenchman, watching the trucks drive past with half-closed eyes. At night, to forget about the rustling of the wings ceaselessly flapping above the corpses, they talked at length in their habitual mixture of Polish, Russian, German, and French. They were both amazed to see the Germans already thrusting so deeply into the heart of Russia. "If they continue like this," observed Witold, "they'll cut off the Volga. And for the Russians the Volga is like…" He drew the edge of his hand across his throat, by the carotid artery. They also noted that for weeks now there had no longer been any Russian planes to be seen in the sky.