Andrei Makine - The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme

"Well, as for these contacts of yours, we'll see about that after the victory," the inspector resumed. "What's needed now is to bring some order into this shambles. Here is the map showing you the most direct routes between airfields. From now on you will travel via Zyryanka and not via Seymchan. This will cut out hundreds of kilometers, with a consequent saving on fuel. I wonder why the squadron commanders haven't thought of it before. But perhaps the longer route was recommended to them by American government representatives…"

This time no one said anything. On the map, a straight line, drawn with scholarly application, traced a route that started in Alaska and crossed Siberia. In its geometric logic it passed closer to Zyryanka, one of the auxiliary airfields, far to the north of the normal route. This was more of an emergency runway, envisaged for days when those at Seymchan disappeared beneath snowstorms. The man's pencil had drawn a line right across the terrible Chersky mountain chain, Arctic wastelands, even less explored than the areas currently overflown by the Alsib route… Left alone, the pilots stared long and hard at the map with its stubborn pencil line. The absurdity of it was too evident to be worth mentioning. "The Party line…" murmured the flying officer who had spoken earlier.

They knew the inspector could not return to Moscow without reporting on the subversive activities he had unmasked, the errors he had corrected. That was how the whole country functioned, by denouncing, criticizing, breaking records, and exceeding plans. And even at the People's Commissariat of State Security, to which the inspector belonged ("the GPU…" thought Jacques Dorme), plans had to be exceeded, you had to arrest more people than in the previous month, shoot more than your colleagues…

They talked briefly about the makeup of the flights for the next day then went to get some sleep. Outside, in the darkness of the polar night, the prisoners went on digging the frozen earth for the new runway.

After an hour in the air, Jacques Dorme transmitted this message to the group of aircraft he was leading: "Take the second route. Landing at Z impossible. Divert S." During the previous night he had managed to persuade the men in his squadron that the best solution was to go, as usual, to Seymchan. He alone would go to Zyryanka, from where he would call the base. The inspector, who was due to leave the following day, would not have time to hold an inquiry.

He veered slowly off to the right and in the ashen gloaming that passed for daylight saw the lights of the Aira-cobras turning toward the south.

As the minutes slipped by the man gradually became one with his aircraft, the shuddering of the steel matching the rhythm of his blood. The pilot's body yielded to the life of the machine, disappearing into the rhythm of the engine at his back as the throbbing of its vibrations varied from time to time. His gaze was lost in the gray light of this day on which the sun would not rise, then returned to the luminous specks on the instrument panel. The man was at once profoundly involved in the motion of this flying cockpit and utterly absent. Or rather present elsewhere, far from this ashen sky and these Chersky mountains that were beginning to pile up tier upon tier of their icy wastes. An elsewhere made up of a woman's voice, a woman's silences, the stillness of a house, of a time he felt he had always inhabited. This time unfolded quite separately from what was happening in the aircraft, around the aircraft. The violence of the wind made it necessary to maneuver, the icing-over reduced visibility. At a given moment it became clear that the runways of Zyryanka lay still farther to the northeast and that, at the risk of colliding with one of the mountain peaks, he was going to have to fly at a lower altitude, watch, concentrate, not give way to panic. The remoteness he sensed within himself gave him the strength to remain calm, to avoid going into a spin (that curse of the Airacobras), to stop checking the fuel at every moment. Not to sink to the level of being a man anxious to save his own skin at all costs.

He was to hold on to the sensation of that elsewhere right up to the end, right up to the purple luminescence of the northern fire that set the sky ablaze.

Alexandra finished her story as we walked back home. Dusk was already falling over the steppe. She spoke about the journey she had made to the former Alsib airfields, most of them abandoned after the war, and the peak at the southern end of the Chersky chain, three crags clustered together, which the local inhabitants called "the Trident," that she had failed to reach.

I walked beside her upon the dry grass, an endless rippling expanse that dazzled the eye as, stirred by the wind, it alternated between mauve and gold. The details of her journey stuck in my mind (and this would help me, a quarter of a century later, to locate the places she had told me about) but the astonishment I experienced was caused by something else. A man who had been quite unknown to me a week ago stood before me now, fully realized. Jacques Dorme, whose life story I perceived as a living and luminous whole.

Everyone's perception of mankind and the world has its share of truth. That of a thirteen-year-old boy walking on the steppe beside the Volga was no less true than my judgment as an adult. It even had a certain advantage: being innocent of psychoanalysis, probings into the mind, or sentimental rhetoric, it operated by entities, blocks.

Such was the Jacques Dorme who had appeared to me in the blaze of that sunset. A man hewn from the very stuff of his native land, that France I had discovered, thanks to my reading and my conversations with Alexandra. He was a combination of those qualities that reminded me of "the finest and purest soldier in old France," the warrior in "The Last Square," the exiled emperor returning to his native soil on board the ghost ship, and the "four gentlemen of Aquitaine." The grain of this human substance was yet more subtle; what I perceived was not the characters and their actions but rather the dense aura of their lives. The spirit of their earthly undertakings. Their soul.

No proofs existed of the accuracy of such a vision. My certainty was enough for me. That and also the photo Alexandra showed me when we reached home. A rectangle with yellowed edges but still retaining the crisp clarity of black and white. A score of pilots, clad in jackets lined with sheepskin and heavy reindeer-skin boots. American airmen recognizable by their lighter clothing, more elegant, more "pilot as film star." The photo had probably been taken after a ceremonial parade, for in its corner the metallic glint of a military band could be seen. No doubt the Soviet and American national anthems had just been played… Guided by Alexandra, I located Jacques Dorme. He stood out from the others in neither physique nor clothes (the same three-quarter-length jacket, the same boots). But I could have recognized him without Alexandra's help. Among the pilots who were beginning to break rank after standing at attention, as required by the anthems, he alone had remained still, his face marked by a certain seriousness, his gaze directed far away. It was as if he could hear a music inaudible to the others, an anthem the band had forgotten to play.

It took me some time to grasp that Jacques Dorme's solitude, evident even as he was surrounded by a crowd, gave him a kinship with the old giant I had seen in front of a monument to the dead, the French general who had broken off in the middle of his speech and allowed his gaze to stray into the immensity of the steppe.

The following evening I left Alexandra's house. I had to return to the orphanage, now half emptied of its past, to prepare myself for a new life. After boarding a crowded local train, I managed to catch a glimpse of Alexandra upon the platform teeming with vacationers. She did not see me, her eyes flitting anxiously along the row of windows. With a hesitant hand she was waving a farewell to someone she could not locate among all these faces. To me she looked younger and at the same time somehow defenseless. I thought of another departure, of the train carrying Jacques Dorme toward the east in May 1942.