Andrei Makine - The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme

It suddenly struck me that this woman's life was like a weighty accusation. Or at least a severe reproach, a silent reproach to the country that had so cruelly ravaged her life. A country that had caught up a very young woman in its toils and now disgorged onto this dirty platform a bemused old lady, lost among these tanned faces. For the first time in my life I believed that this reproach was directed at me as well, and that I, too, in ways it was hard to formulate, had a responsibility for this elderly, solitary existence, reduced to great deprivation, forgotten there in an ancient building, in a township carved up by railroad tracks, on the edge of the empty steppes. After all that she had done, given, suffered for this country… The people who surrounded me on the train, packed close together, laden with crates of vegetables they were bringing back from their kitchen gardens, had placid faces, tinged with routine, natural contentment. "The simple contentment she has never had," I thought, observing them. Not some copybook bliss, just a simple, contented, daily routine, a family life, in the pleasant and predictable round of the little facts of existence.

It was from that evening onward that I would embark upon the reinvention of her life, as if by dreaming it differently I could expiate the wrong my country had done her. The habit we had at the orphanage of remaking the life stories of our disgraced fathers would stand me in good stead. It would have taken little for her husband not to have been shot (how many times had I heard tales of condemned men saved by a miracle during the Stalin era), for them to have had children, for her to be living not in that old, dark house but over there, for example – I looked across at a handsome façade with balconies surrounded by pretty moldings. She would have been reading books not to the young barbarian I was, but to a refined and sensitive child, to her grandson and her granddaughter too, perhaps, two children who would have listened to her wide-eyed.

Reality often swept these daydreams away. But I set great store by them, telling myself that at least in this renascent life I could give Alexandra back her real Christian name. And her language, too, which sometimes, when she was speaking to me in French, lost a word or an expression, for which she would desperately rack her brain, with a mild look of distress in her eyes. This was not a case, I sensed, of banal forgetfulness or a failing in her aging memory. No, this was an absolute loss, the disappearance of a whole world, her native land, that was being obliterated, word by word, in the depths of the snow-covered steppes, where she had no one to talk to in her own language.

When I arrived in Jacques Dorme's native town I

felt no disorientation. In Paris I had lived in the rue Myrha, which cuts across the African bustle of the Boulevard Barbes. I had also lodged in the suburbs at Aubervilliers, later on in the outskirts of Montreuil, and subsequently in the Belleville district, where I had ended up no longer noticing the strangeness of this new country.

This little town in northern France was very much a part of that country.

The town hall, in a neat and tidy square, was reminiscent of those elderly Parisian ladies I used to pass occasionally near the Boulevard Barbes: survivors from another era, with carefully groomed clothes and hair, trotting along intrepidly amid this human cocktail squeezed from pulverized continents…

The safe island on which the town hall stood was indeed very tiny. The main street, elegant at the start, rapidly ran out of steam, disintegrating into rough façades, their windows filled in with cinderblocks. The window of a confectioner's was fractured in a number of places and patched with plywood. A little notice announced: "Closed. Owner has had enough." I consulted my street map and turned left.

On the telephone Jacques Dorme's brother had advised me to take a taxi from the train station: "It's quite a long way. We're at the edge of the town…" But I needed to walk, to see this town, to sense what it must have been like half a century earlier. I could not reconcile myself to the idea of climbing out of a taxi, ringing the front doorbell, and going in like someone who knew the area.

A motor scooter passed at full speed, brushed against me, swerved in and out of overturned garbage cans. A beer bottle rolled under my feet, I was not sure if it had been aimed at me or not. The sign bearing the street name was daubed with red. It took me a moment to decipher it: rue Henri Barbusse. Beneath a broken window, dangling from a clothes dryer, scraps of cloth blew back and forth. The glass had been replaced by a blue plastic bag, an unexpected patch of color on a gray-brown wall. Another window on the first floor looked almost bizarre with its little vase of flowers and neat, pale curtains. And in the wan December air an aged hand was closing the shutters, a wrinkled face and the gleam of white hair, eyes that met mine: a woman who might have lived here in Jacques Dorme's time.

The town soon flattened out beneath the roofs of empty warehouses and abandoned garages and disintegrated into moribund little houses. Modern residential dwellings now made their appearance, having waited for the town to lose heart before thrusting up their towers, interspersed with four- or five-story apartment buildings. Subconsciously, I was just comparing them to the suburbs of Moscow, finding the housing here much better designed and with a more humane architecture, when at that moment I noticed a burned-out front door, like the mouth of an enormous furnace, and a line of mailboxes thrown down on a patch of grass covered in garbage bags. The people I saw seemed in a hurry to get home and avoided me when I tried to stop them and ask the way. Two women, one of them very old, her face marked with blue ink, the other young and veiled, listened to me, staring at me in perplexity, as if the place I was looking for were the subject of some kind of taboo. The young woman showed me the direction with a vague gesture and I saw her look back at me, still with that incredulous air.

The low-rise housing zone was separated from the new buildings by the Avenue de l'Egalité, which ran along a blackish, porous wall. I only realized there was a cemetery here when I reached the entrance. One of the gates had been ripped off and hung from the upper hinge. I went in without really going in, just glancing at the first of the graves. "The Verdun sector," one could read on a little pillar. The crosses took the form of swords: all of them too rusty for one to be able to read the names, some of them broken, lying there among broken bottles, old newspapers, dog shit.

Outside a car drove past, blaring out rhythmic chanting, a singer's protesting cries. The silence returned, mellowed by the rustling of bare branches in the wind.

I saw the other car as I was following the cemetery wall, about to turn down into the residential streets. A car surrounded by five or six youths, or rather cornered by them at an intersection. It was not, properly speaking, an assault. They were kicking the sides of the car, laughing and climbing onto the hood, tugging at the door handles. The driver, who was trying to get out to push them away, was forced to remain stooped, neither sitting nor standing, for they had trapped his leg in the door. One of them, a can of beer in his hand, was gargling and spitting out the froth into the car.

It may have been this spitting that propelled me toward the group. I noticed the driver's foot, a fine black shoe, a long sock, and the very pale skin revealed beneath the trouser leg, which the edge of the door had rolled back, an old man's skin, crisscrossed by dark veins. There was nothing heroic about my impulse, just a sudden inability to tolerate the sight of this old foot, comically pawing the asphalt. And probably the outcome of my intervention would have been quite different had it not been for two motor scooters that suddenly emerged around the cemetery wall and began pursuing one another in and out of the narrow alleyways. Four of the young men clinging to the car ran off to watch the chase. The other two remained, finding that harassing the driver was more entertaining.