Andrei Makine - The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme

The wind banishes the sultry, resinous heat of the steppes, the smell of burning oil, the dense breath of human beings crammed into hundreds of rail cars. As the raindrops begin pattering down on the floor through the gap, they suddenly blend in with the clatter of the beads from the broken necklace. For a moment, the bodies pause in their amorous struggle, their breathing stilled, then all at once they fuse again, lost in a tempo quickened by desire, letting the beads beat time as they slip from the thread.

I needed to have lived to understand both the rain and the blissful weariness which permeated the woman's movements as she got up, went over to the gap, lingered in the warm, fluid embrace of the storm. To understand the measured pace of the remarks obliterated by the downpour's noisy torrent, to perceive that what was important was precisely this measured pace and not the sense of the words spoken. To understand that these lost remarks, the bliss of these slow movements, the wild cherry's scent, mingled with the acidity of the lightning flashes, all these elements, not retained in any memory, amounted to the essence of a life, one that the two lovers had truly lived, which was the first thing doomed to disappear into oblivion.

Also hidden behind those recollections of "what the weather was like," there was that other night, the hypnotic stillness of the air, the static density of a storm that does not break. They go down, cross the tracks, walk out from the township, which lies unmoving in the darkness, like scenery in a closed theater, and set out along a sandy path across the steppe. The silence lets them hear the rustle of every footfall and, when they stop, the faint crackling of bone-dry plants. The heat casts a veil over the stars; they seem more alive, less severe toward human brevity. At one moment an antitank obstacle raises its crossed steel girders. They finger these sections of rail rearing up in the darkness. The metal is still hot from the day's sunlight. In the torpor of the night these metal crosses, strung out in a line, look like the relics of some ancient, forgotten war. They say nothing, knowing the thought is unavoidable: a line of defense on the far side of the Volga, a willingness to envisage the war crossing the Volga, engulfing its left bank, strangling Stalingrad. They think this and yet the soldered steel seems to derive from a past history with no relevance to this night. They walk on in silence, with a physical sense that the ties binding them to the houses of the township, to the labyrinth of tracks in the switch yard, and their lives back there are growing weaker. There is only the chalky gleam of the path, the darkness tinged with blue by the silent flickering of lightning flashes, and suddenly, there at their feet, the abyss of this night sky, the stars floating on the black surface of the water.

It is one of the seasonal oxbow lakes that appear in the spring with the melting of the snows, only to be swallowed in a few gulps by the steppe during the summer drought. Its fleeting existence is for the moment at its most abundant. The water fills its ephemeral banks to the brim, the clayey smell seems as if it has always hung there. And the body, as it dives in, is tickled by the long stems of yellow water lilies, solidly rooted.

They remain for a whole hour in this sluggish flow, scarcely moving, starting to swim, then lingering at the center of the water's shallow expanse. The silent flashes of lightning last long enough for them to see each other, for him to see this woman with wet hair, her hands smoothing a face upturned toward the stars. To see the woman's closed eyes. To see her stretched out on the shore, where the fine, smooth soil seems to be heated deep down.

"If it had not been for this war I should never have met you…" The man's voice is at once very close, like a whisper in the ear, and lost in the remoteness of the steppes. It must be audible even over there, on the horizon where the summer lightning glimmers. "No, that's not what I meant to say," he corrects himself. "You see, this plain, this water, this night. All this is so simple and, in fact, this is all we need. This is all anyone needs. And yet the war will come all the way here…" He falls silent, feels the woman placing her hand on his arm. A bird flies by, they can hear the hushed stirring of the air. It feels to them as if the war, now so imminent, has already passed over these steppes, bringing destruction and death, and has finally evaporated into the void. They are going to live through it soon, to be sure, and yet one part of them is already beyond it, already in a night where the recently erected steel obstacles are nothing more than rusting relics. Where there is nothing left but the soundless glittering of the horizon, this star in a footprint filled with water, the face of the woman, leaning over him, the caress of the damp ends of her hair. A postwar night, endless.

In their life of just over a week together, there was also that morning blinded with fog. Not a plane in the sky, no risk of air raids, trains advancing at a sleepwalker's slow pace. The women who worked with Alexandra had allowed her to go, had almost forced her to take this morning off, for they had learned or guessed that it was her last.

It was cold, more like an autumn morning. A cool, misty day in May. They walked along beside a meadow, passed through a village from which the inhabitants had just been evacuated. The presence of the river was revealed in the fog by the dull echo of the void and the scent of rushes. One of the mornings in their life… They sensed that it was the moment to speak grave, definitive words, words of farewell and hope, but what came to mind seemed heavy and pointless. What needed to be admitted was that this single week had been a long life of love. During it time had vanished. The pain to come, absence, death, would leave this life unblemished. This needed to be said. Yet they held their peace, certain it was a sentiment they shared, down to the tiniest nuance.

Invisible, in the cotton-wool blindness of the fog, a boat passed, close to the bank, they could hear the oars slipping lazily into the water, the rhythmic groan of the rowlocks.

During the hours they lived through together, Alexandra had told Jacques Dorme the story I was to hear as a child. A young Frenchwoman's arrival in Russia in 1921 as a member of a Red Cross mission, a temporary visit, or so she had thought, which became more and more irreversible as the country very rapidly cut itself off from the world.

What they talked about, in fact, was four different countries: two Russias and two Frances. For the Russia Jacques Dorme had just traveled through, a Russia broken by defeat, was hardly known to Alexandra. As for her France, that of the days following the Great War and the start of the twenties, her memories had long since blended with the sweet and often illusory shade of the homeland she dreamed of. He had known a quite different country.

One day, thanks to a news bulletin they happened to hear on the radio, these two Frances came into collision.

They had lunch together that day. When there was a break in the flow of trains beneath the windows and the hum of the aircraft died away, they could imagine they "were lunching in peacetime on a sunny day in spring… They were just about to part when, with a mysterious air, Alexandra murmured: "This evening I shall need your help. No, no, it's very serious. You must put on a white shirt, shine your shoes, and have a good shave. It's a surprise…" He smiled, promising to come dressed to the nines. It was then that they heard the radio announcer's voice, reporting in grim, metallic tones that the town of Kerch had fallen and speaking of fierce fighting in defense of Sebastopol… They knew this news implied the impending loss of the Crimea and a German breakthrough to the south, which would open a route to the Volga. The radio also reported that the Allies were in no hurry to open a "second front." Perhaps these were the words that set the match to the powder keg.