Andrei Makine - The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme

Alexandra spoke in harsh, mocking tones that were new to him. She affected amazement at the casual attitude of the Americans and the caution of the English, sitting tight on their battleship island. And, with still more bitterness, she declared herself sickened by France, by the spinelessness of her military leaders, by the treachery of her government. No doubt she carried in her mind a memory of the army, bled white but triumphant, at the victory parade of 1919. As for that of 1940… She spoke of cowardice, evasion, an easy life paid for by shifty compromises. "But we fought…" Jacques Dorme did not raise his voice as he said it. He spoke in the tones of one who accepts the other's arguments, merely seeking to bear witness to the facts.

How a French soldier like him might have replied to her I shall never know. Did he describe the battle of the Ardennes? The fight for Flanders? Or perhaps the air battles in which his own comrades in the squadron had perished? In any event, he appeared to be justifying himself. Alexandra cut him short. "At least let me picture a country that rises up as a whole and drives out the Boche, instead of making pacts with them. Yes, a country that fights back. What the Russians are doing. It's already clear that the Germans are not unbeatable. But of course if people don't want to put up a fight…"

"You're saying what they'll say after the war. What people will say who didn't fight in it." Jacques Dorme's voice remained calm, a little drier perhaps. Infuriated, Alexandra was almost shouting: "And they'll be right to say it! For if the French had really decided to fight…"

"If they had really decided to do so, here's what you'd have had where France is now…"

Jacques Dorme took the map of the world from a shelf, spread it out on the table among the plates from lunch, and repeated: "Here's what you'd have had…" He held a box of matches in his hand and the box covered the purple hexagon of France almost completely, with only the western tip of Brittany and the Alpine fringe showing. Then the matchbox flew over Europe and landed on the USSR, on the territory conquered by the Nazis. There was room on this for four matchboxes. "Four times the size of France…" he said in grim tones. "And I'll tell you something. I've seen every one of these four Frances devastated, towns razed to the ground, roads covered in corpses. I've traveled across them, these four lands of France. That's just to tell you what the Boche army can do. As for the Russians, I've seen all kinds. I've even seen one whose arms had been cut to ribbons by shrapnel and who had his teeth clamped around a broken telephone cable, copper against copper, wrapped in a scrap of cloth, in accordance with instructions. And he died with his teeth clenched… They're going to lose ten million men in this war, maybe even more. Lose them, do you understand? Ten million… That's the total number of able-bodied men France had to give."

He folded up the map, put it back on the shelf. And in a voice once more calm, no longer judgmental, he added: "And, by the way, we didn't have a 'second front' in May 1940 either.

That evening he arrived dressed in a white shirt, his cheeks smooth, his shoes well polished. They smiled at each other, and, when they spoke, avoided any return to the subject of their quarrel. "It's a little surprise. You'll see," she told him again as they set out. The previous day the director of the military hospital had asked her to take part in a concert that was being organized prior to the evacuation of all the wounded, now that the front was getting nearer. Several women would be singing, he explained, and then a couple would dance a waltz – he was counting on her for this. The concert hall had been set up, not in the hospital, which was too cluttered with beds, but in an engine shed, from which the locomotives had been withdrawn for the evening.

As they made their way inside, she recoiled in shock. The surprise was greater for her than for him. Hundreds of pairs of eyes were focused on the still-empty platform, countless tightly packed rows of men sitting there, each unique and yet all alike. The living mass of them extended right to the back of this long brick building and was lost in the darkness, giving the impression of stretching away, row upon row, to infinity. She was accustomed to seeing them divided up into separate wards, overcrowded of course, but where the multiplicity of their injuries and suffering was matched by individual faces. Here, in this vast parade of pain, all the eye could see was an undifferentiated mass of tissue in torment. Studded with pale heads, white with bandages.

Half a dozen women sang in chorus, unaccompanied. Their voices sounded naked; even in the cheerful songs they tugged at the heartstrings, too close to tears. The applause was muted: many arms in slings, stumps where arms should be.

Now it was their turn. A nurse placed a chair at the side of the stage. Two soldiers came on and set down a legless amputee, a young man with bright red hair and a dashing look. They brought him an accordion. As if in a dream, Alexandra and Jacques Dorme stepped up onto the boards that smelled of fresh timber.

Their bodies' memories quickly overcame the fear of not recalling the steps. The accordion player played with an imperceptibly delayed waltz tempo, as if he would have liked to see them dancing for as long as possible. As they revolved, they saw the blaze of his hair and this devastating contrast: a broad smile, gleaming teeth, and eyes brimming with distress. Briefly and intermittently, they also noticed the looks of the wounded men, lines of sparks burning into their bodies as they danced. Nothing remained now of their lunchtime argument. All talk was charred to a cinder by these looks. An aircraft passed very low overhead and drowned out the music for several seconds. They continued revolving amid this hubbub, then, as one dives into a wave, fell back into the melody as it returned.

They felt in the end as if they were alone, dancing in an empty hall, each one's face reflected in the other's eyes. Several times she lowered her eyelids to drive away her tears.

Two days later there came that cold, misty morning, and in the evening, his departure. Before boarding the train, he had already mingled with the members of what would be his squadron now, his new life. The train moved off, the men talked louder, more cheerfully, it seemed. She just had time to catch sight of his face once more, alongside the grinning countenance of a big fellow who was waving to someone on the platform, then the night blended the cars into a single dark wall… On the way home she listened within herself to the words he had spoken that morning as they walked beside the river. "After the war, you know, you must think about coming back to the old country… Of course they'll let you leave. You'll be a Frenchman's wife. That's if you'll agree to marry me, naturally. That means you'll become a Frenchwoman again and I'll show you my hometown and the house where I was born…"

S SPOKE SLOWLY, BREAKING OFF TO LISTEN TO THE WIND as it scoured the steppe or to let her gaze follow a bird across the July sky. Or did these pauses, perhaps, correspond in her memory to the long months that brought no news of Jacques Dorme? I allowed my eyes to travel along the narrow stream that cast a cooling veil about us, beyond the foliage of the willows and alders that sheltered us beneath their restless network. The banks were cracked in the heat, and the almost unmoving brook seemed to be dwindling before our very eyes, sucked dry by the sun. In its place I pictured a broad stretch of water one May long ago, a nocturnal lake and the figures of the two swimmers silhouetted against the blue light of a silent thunderstorm.

There were few things left for her to tell me. She did not talk about the fighting at Stalingrad, knowing that they told us tales of it every year at school, backed up by eyewitness accounts from old soldiers. Nor about the hell behind the lines, in townships transformed into vast field hospitals.