Andrei Makine - The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme

At the start of the winter they were captured, and then adopted, by a group of partisans living in an encampment hidden away in the forest and marshland. Once the period of suspicion had passed, their involvement was accepted, and Jacques Dorme now discovered an invisible war, tucked away beneath the humus of the forest; an often clumsy struggle, since it was waged by elderly peasants armed with ancient rifles, but which in the long term wore down the enemy more than conventional attacks would have done. He also noted that in this war an infinitely more violent hatred prevailed than he had experienced in the air. On one occasion they succeeded in driving the Germans out of a village and found a crowd of naked women and children standing upright at a crossroads under falling snow: transformed beneath a stream of water into a cluster of frozen bodies. This was, no doubt, the response to what could sometimes be seen at roadsides: a German soldier stripped bare, an ice statue as well, with an uplifted, frozen arm pointing in the direction marked on a sign hung about his neck: "Berlin." Or had the idea for this come first from the occupying power? Catching the look of a peasant who had recognized his wife in the group turned to ice, Jacques Dorme perceived that this question had by now become meaningless.

In March 1942, an aircraft that came to deliver arms to the partisan camps took the two pilots on board. As the plane became airborne, they started singing for joy. Jacques Dorme no longer knew what language he was singing in.

Here was how they had pictured the end of their odyssey: an airfield, a row of fighter planes, mechanics busying themselves with the aircraft, and a squadron commander asking them to show what they could do, before accepting them.

What happens to them is not totally remote from what they had hoped for. There is a terrain suggestive of an airfield but empty; all that can be seen is the outline of a Russian Pe-2 bomber without its undercarriage, its fuselage riddled with holes. A few wooden huts, which serve as hangars, but not a single mechanic at work there. There is, however, a bustle of soldiers, who seem to be preparing to evacuate the area. And planes can be heard in the sky above the town. The pilots recognize them: "Junkers 87. Yes, dive-bombers…" They are then locked up in one of the hangars and try not to interpret this as a bad sign. The door opens: flanked by two soldiers, the person whom they had hoped would be the squadron commander appears. He is a thin little man, dressed in black leather, with a shoulder belt. His greatcoat and boots gleam in the sun. He does not greet them, announces that they will be interrogated separately, points at Witold, and says to the guards: "Bring him…"

Jacques Dorme watches what happens through a broad crack between the planks of the wall. In the middle of the courtyard a wooden table and two benches can be seen. The man in black leather sits down, Witold prepares to do the same but the soldiers seize him and force him to stand. The place suddenly begins to look like one of those indeterminate backyards we wander through in our nightmares. There is that table, in bright sunlight, on the trampled snow. Soldiers carry crates, cans of gasoline, cooking pans; they cross the courtyard, paying no attention to the interrogation, and disappear at the other end. The roar of the aircraft sometimes becomes deafening, then stops for a moment, and one can hear the noisy trickle of drops sliding off the roof, still heavy with ice. The man in leather shouts an order and the scurrying of the carriers comes to a halt. All that can be seen now is the interrogation table and an army truck parked under a tree.

When the aircraft noise fades, Jacques Dorme manages to catch certain words but senses that, more than the words, it is the difference between these two men that tells and will determine the outcome: the pilot, tall, with an open face and a firm voice; the man in black, very neat, despite the springtime mud, staring at the Pole with unconcealed hatred. At one moment their voices are raised. To overcome the droning of the dive-bombers, Jacques Dorme tells himself. But the tone continues to harden even when silence returns. He sees the man in black leather stand up, his two fists leaning on the table. Witold shouts and waves his hands, the soldiers poke him in the ribs with their submachine guns. Jacques Dorme hears the Pole yelling Stalin's name in a contemptuous outburst. The man in black stands up again, his mouth twists, hisses, "You filthy spy…" several times, and he suddenly starts to draw his revolver. The seconds become unbelievably long. Witold and the two soldiers watch him doing it, unmoving. To Jacques Dorme it seems as if this fixity of stares lasts for at least a minute. The man grasps the gun, everyone has time to realize what is happening, Witold has time to lick his lips. And the shot is fired, then another.

Jacques Dorme knows it is impossible. A man is not killed like this without a trial. It must be a blank cartridge, to inspire fear. You cannot kill a man in front of this table, in this sunlight… Witold falls. The man in black leather puts away his pistol, and the solders drag the body in through the open door of one of the barrack huts.

When he finds himself out there on the bench, Jacques Dorme has the strange sensation of not having left his observation post behind the hangar wall, of continuing to observe the scene, of there being quite simply this other man, himself, who will now talk for several minutes, then die. The one looking through the crack ought to do something: hurl himself at the man in black leather, wrest his pistol from him, shout, alert a commanding officer. The man repeats his question; one of the soldiers thrusts the barrel of his submachine gun into the back of Jacques Dorme's neck, prompting him to speak. He replies, is amazed at the automatic correctness of what he is saying, realizes he is speaking Russian and that it is the first time this language has been quite as useful as this to him. He also has enough presence of mind to appreciate the strangeness of this first time. To appreciate that his replies will not ward off what awaits him and that this knowledge of Russian is the gravest charge against him, against this "spy," parachuted in by the Germans, and trying to pass himself off- a likely story! – as a French pilot. In particular, he believes he has identified the man in black leather, not him but the men of this type, whom he came across in Spain. Men in black leather. The Russian airmen, he recalls, used to break off their conversations when one of these men approached, and Jacques Dorme could not for the life of him understand this fear in pilots who confronted death ten times a day. They would stiffen and the only explanation they gave was a combination of letters: GPU – or else NKVD…

The scream of planes going into a nosedive obliterates all words. They face one another in silence, staring into one another's eyes. Suddenly Jacques Dorme senses that the man in leather is very frightened, that these narrow brown eyes are squinting with fear. An aircraft flies over the hangars, dives down on the infantrymen in the next street who are preparing to pull out. There are shouts, the stampeding of a crowd. Jacques Dorme looks up, notices the notched silhouette of another plane, and in an automatic and instant computation, assesses the angle, the distance, the approach speed… He has an impulse to warn the man in leather, but the latter is already running, running slowly, caught up in the stiff panels of his greatcoat, his hand gripping the holster of his revolver. He ought to get down, throw himself behind a wall, beneath this bench under which Jacques Dorme slides, but the dive-bomber is already passing overhead, bursting their eardrums with its roar, firing.