Andrei Makine - The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme

One of them continued spitting and choking with laughter. The other was leaning against the door with all his weight and drumming on the car roof with his fists, as on a tom-tom… I hit the spitting youth as hard as I could, with a blow designed to knock him down. He swayed, his back planted against the car, and I had time to see a flash of surprise in his eyes, the astonishment of one who had thought himself unassailable. He dodged the second blow and began running, shouting that he would come back with his "brothers." I grasped the other one, in an attempt to free the door. He twisted around, spewing out a mouthful of the French I most detested: that new French, made up of verbal filth and acclaimed as the language of the young. The old man's leg was still trapped by the door. I saw a hand feverishly trying to wind up the window, and on the passenger seat the figure of a woman, with very delicate fingers folded over a box of pastries. The next few seconds of struggle seemed predictably ugly and drawn out. As ugly as this handsome young face ("a handsome face combined with a foul mouth," I was to think later). As long-drawn-out as the maneuvering of the young man, unable to pull a switchblade out of his pocket. He pressed the button too soon and the blade at once cut through the cloth of his jeans. I leaned my arm harder against his throat. His voice hissed, then fell silent. For a moment his mouth opened dumbly, then suddenly his eyes grew cloudy and at all once flickered in a basic animal refusal to suffocate. His body collapsed like that of a puppet. I loosed my grip, pushed him toward the sidewalk. He staggered away, stumbling, rubbing his throat and hissing threats in his broken voice.

The door slammed, the car drove off and turned in to an avenue.

Now several minutes spent wandering around with a feeling of nausea, compounded with useless anger and belated fear, fear arriving in sickening gusts that corresponded to the buzzing of the scooters in the streets. But most of all, a vivid awareness of the total futility of my intervention. I could at this very moment have been lying in the gutter with a switchblade between my ribs. And it would have changed nothing and surprised no one, for there are so many small towns like this, so many old men attacked. Now my anger turns against the driver, who had had the stupidity to stop and parley instead of putting his foot down and driving home. I feel more remote than ever from this country. What am I doing interfering in its life, reprimanding young armed gorillas, playing the good citizen, with my stateless person's identity card in my pocket…?

The burning sensation from these words delays my search. I finally find the Allée de la Marne but number sixteen appears to be nonexistent. I cross the road twice, study each of the houses, feeling certain I have recognized Jacques Dormes, without being able to see the number. But the number, precisely, is missing. I walk along the street in the other direction: a sequence of two-story houses, with bare gardens. In the depths of a room, a feeling of expectation that goes back a long way. An open garage door and on the other side of the street, at number eleven, an old woman thrusting her hand into the mailbox, finding nothing, taking advantage of these moments to observe me. Or rather, she pretends to look for letters while scrutinizing this strange passerby who is now retracing his footsteps. So as not to alarm her I call out from some way off: "Number sixteen, Madame?" Her voice is strangely beautiful, strong, the voice of an elderly singer, one might think: "Why, it's over there, Monsieur. Just behind you…" I turn, take a few steps. The open garage door hides the ceramic circle with the number on it. Inside a man is cleaning the windshield of his car with a sponge. I recognize him immediately: the old man with elegant black shoes. Jacques Dorme's brother, "Captain," as I called him, in accordance with Alexandra's stories.

I tell him my name, remind him of our conversations on the telephone, my letters. His smile does not entirely succeed in obliterating the hint of sourness lurking in his wrinkles. I do not know if he recognizes me as the man who intervened just now. It seems as if he does not. He closes the garage, invites me to come up into the house, and on the front steps asks me this question, which ought to be utterly banal. "Did you find it easily? Did you come by taxi?" It is not banal, a tiny quaver in his voice betrays the secret tension with which these words are uttered. So he has recognized me… Settled in the drawing room, we talk about the town and succeed in avoiding the slightest allusion to what has just happened in the Avenue de l'Egalité. His wife enters, offers me her hand, those fragile fingers I saw clutching a beribboned cardboard box. Her face, with its Asiatic impassivity (she is Vietnamese), shows no trace of emotion. "I'll bring tea," she says with a slight smile and leaves us alone.

I have nothing new to tell him. In my first letter, thirty pages long, I set down with the assiduity of a chronicler everything I knew about Jacques Dorme, about the Alsib, about the week the pilot spent in Stalingrad. No, not everything, far from that. Like an archaeologist, I simply wanted this history to be added to the history of their country, like a national art object discovered abroad and repatriated. I talk about my journey to Siberia, to the house on the Edge, about the Trident mountain… That journey, made at the beginning of the year (we are now in December), is still vividly present, with the sounds of the wind, voices made clear by the cold. However, my enthusiasm in recounting it seems to embarrass the Captain. He senses my purpose: the repatriation of a parcel of history that got lost in the snowy wastes of eastern Siberia. I feel his face growing tense, his eyes see me without seeing me, peering into a past that suddenly reappears in front of us, in this drawing room, on this December afternoon. I interpret his emotion incorrectly and lay my cards on the table: I am writing a book that will rescue the French pilot from oblivion, the press will be interested in him, and, as I know the place where he died, it will be possible to bring his mortal remains back to France, to the town of his birth…

I break off, seeing his lips painfully stretched, attempting an unsteady smile. His voice is pitched higher than before, almost shrill: "To France? To the town of his birth?

What for? To bury him in that cemetery that's become a garbage dump? In this town where people don't dare leave their homes anymore? For him to listen to that racket?"

A car drives along the street; the torrent of chanting, backed by a rhythmic drumbeat, rips into the house. The noise of scooters cuts through the rap. The Captain says, or rather shouts, something, but I do not hear him. He realizes I have not heard him. I catch only the last few words: "… to be spat upon…"

Time stands still. I watch his face as swift shudders pass across it and his chin trembles. He is an old man fighting off tears with all his strength. I remain motionless, mute, totally incapable of any gesture or word that might break the deadlock of grief confronting grief. The wretched Parisian critic, who will later refer to me as an immigrant, will be right: I shall never be French, for I do not know what should be said in a situation like this. In Russian I know. In French I shall never know and, indeed, shall never want to know what to say… His eyes remain dry, and simply grow red.

With an abrupt tensing of his jaws he succeeds in gaining control of his face, which now looks hollow, as if after a long period of mourning. In a dull, jaded voice he chokes more than he says: "No, no, there's no point… The press, speeches… Too late… And besides, you know, Jacques was a very private person…" I see his lips twitching again. He gets up, turns toward the photos hanging on the wall. He needs to be unobserved for a few moments. I get up, too, and stand behind him, listening to his commentary. On one of the photos the two of them are on the front steps of the house. Of this house. On this street. The tone of his remarks is still uneven, often sliding up into high registers it is painful to hear.