Andrei Makine - The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme

After Jacques Dorme's departure and in the course of the three years of his flights across Siberia, she had received four letters. Passed from hand to hand, thanks to servicemen on the move: the only means of sending mail from the Arctic wastes where his squadron was based and, especially, of thwarting the vigilance of the spy catchers.

The work of the pilots on the "Alaska-Siberia" line, the "Alsib," was doubly secret. During the war it had to be concealed from the Germans. After the war from the Soviet people themselves: the cold war had just begun and it was vital for the people not to know that the American imperialists had supplied their Russian ally with over eight thousand aircraft for the Eastern Front. All Alexandra ever learned came from those four letters, a single photo, and conversations with a comrade Jacques Dorme had asked to look her up, a task the men of the squadron used to undertake on one another's behalf, with their nearest and dearest in mind. There was also the journey she was to attempt at the beginning of the fifties, in the hope of finding the place where he had died. She brought little back from this: the memory of a barely accessible region, crisscrossed here and there by the barbed-wire fences of the camps, and, in response to her questions, prudent silence, ignorance either real or feigned.

Yet she succeeded in making me picture – almost relive – the era of this air bridge hidden from the world. Among the routes I have traveled or dreamed of in my life, that of the Alsib was one of the first to imprint its vertiginous space within me. Three thousand miles from Alaska to Krasnoyarsk in the heart of Siberia, a score of airfields located on the permafrost of the tundra, and their names as mysterious as those of staging posts on a quest: Fairbanks, Nome, Uelkal, Omolon, Seymchan… The violence of the Arctic winds that knocked men over, dragging them across ice where the hand could find nothing to hold on to. The air, at sixty below, a mouthful of which was like biting into a volley of razor blades. Squadrons that relieved one another from one airfield to the next, without days of rest, with no right to weakness, never using the excuse of bad weather, magnetic storms, or the overloading of aircraft. The landing runways built by the prisoners from the camps, the areas around them studded with their frozen corpses, which nobody bothered to count. The only count kept related to the number of aircraft flown by each of the pilots: more than three hundred by Jacques Dorme, according to his letter dated September 1944. And a more discreet addendum: the tally of pilots killed in crashes – over a hundred deaths, to which, on New Year's Day 1945, was added his own.

Alexandra had probably guessed a good deal more than the letters and conversations revealed. Moreover, she had not joined in the New Year's Eve celebration with railway colleagues on December 31, 1944. A patient, sly prescience was choking her. It was as if a voice had fallen silent over there within the icy confines of Siberia, a voice that was no longer responding. When, some months later, a friend of Jacques Dorme came to her house and told her the truth, she did not dare mention that presentiment, afraid lest he see it as mere "women's superstition." When she came to tell me about it, it was with a sad little smile and I would blush, not daring to tell her how much I believed her, believed every single word, especially about that foreboding, which proved to me how deeply they had loved one another.

In those days I did not have a better definition of love (and I do not know if I have now) than that of a kind of silent prayer which continuously bonds two human beings, sepa-

rated by space or by death, into an intuitive sharing of the sorrows and moments of joy each experiences.

Sorrow, for him one day, came from examining a heavy Douglas C-47 they had managed to track down, as one does a wounded animal, following a trail of blood: despite a snowstorm on the rocky slope the plane had smashed into, there was this long, tawny streak, the color of fuel, standing out in the middle of the endless white. A warm color in this world of ice. Warm lives, suddenly destroyed, whose faces and voices Jacques Dorme still remembered… Shaking hands with the pilot, who, before he climbed into the aircraft, had been telling him about his three-year-old son back in Moscow. A warm handshake.

In cold like this all liquids froze within the bowels of the aircraft. Oil solidified into jelly. And even steel became fragile as glass. The air strove to dissolve the planes into its own crystalline substance. The pilots traveled very close to the zone that broke all records for cold on earth. "Seventy-two degree below zero," Jacques Dorme had announced to his Russian mechanic, with a touch of pride.

Joy was discovering a technique for combating the encrustation of ice, which grew thicker in flight and little by little coated the entire aircraft. You had to alter the engine speed regularly: as it varied, the vibrations shattered the crust of ice.

Joy was the idea that another ten planes were on their way to Stalingrad, where the outcome of the battle might depend on the arrival of these ten aircraft in the nick of time. Or even that of the single fighter plane he himself was flying, this Airacobra, weighed down, thanks to Siberian distances, by a one-hundred-and-sixty-gallon drop tank beneath the fuselage. He was no fool, he knew that in the monstrous hand-to-hand struggle between two armies, between the millions of men killing one another at Stalingrad, this scrap of sheet metal with a propeller could hardly tip the scales. And yet on each flight an irrational conviction returned: this is the plane that will prevent the destruction of an old wooden house with wild cherry boughs beneath its windows.

In April 1944 he became what in the pilots' language they called a "leader." Now at the controls of a bomber – a Boston or a Boeing 25 – he was guiding ten or fifteen Airacobras, with quite a different sense of the weight of this little squadron in the scales of the war.

Joy resided in the confidence others had in him, by the resurgent light of the polar sun, which was now showing itself for longer and longer periods. In the devotion of the people on the ground, who would mark out the runways with fir branches when there were blizzards. And also in the thought that these missions at the end of the world were bringing the liberation of his native land closer.

One day he had occasion to suffer a shock such as no brush with death would have administered. He had just landed, and, still numb from several hours of flying, saw a column of prisoners walking along beside the airfield. Over the course of a week, these men had been breaking the ice from dawn until dusk, installing steel plates and covering them with gravel for new runways. That evening they were moving off in single file through the snowdrifts. The guards surrounded them, training their submachine guns on this mass of human beings, chilled to the bone and staggering with weariness. Jacques Dorme watched their progress and tried to catch the other pilots' eyes, but the latter turned away, in a hurry to settle down out of the wind, to eat… A submachine gun spat just at the moment when he, too, was about to step inside. He had seen what happened prior to this gunshot. A prisoner had slipped and, to avoid falling, had moved out a little from the line of walking men. With no hesitation a guard fired, the guilty man fell, the column froze for a second, then continued its jolting progress. Jacques Dorme rushed up to the guard, shook him, gave shouted vent to his anger. And heard a level voice: "Just following the rule."

Then, more quietly, in tones of hate-filled contempt: "I'll give you a couple in the balls, too, if you like." One of the pilots took Jacques Dorme by the arm and led him firmly toward the rest of the squadron personnel.