Andrei Makine - The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme

The chink of crockery can be heard from the kitchen. He grasps at the pretext: "This tea of yours, Li En, is it ready?" His wife appears at that very moment, a tray with teacups in her hands, as if to say: "I wanted to leave the two of you to talk, man to man. Don't you understand?" He does understand, helps her to set down the tray, stops her leaving, squeezes her shoulders: "You stay with our guest. I'll see to the cake…" He goes into the kitchen. His wife, seeing me in front of the photos, picks up the thread of the interrupted commentary. "That one, that's in Saigon…" A jetty, the pale side of a boat, her and him, dressed in white, young, their eyes blinking in the sunlight. "This one's in Senegal. And that's in your country, at Odessa. Eisenstein's famous steps…" She talks to me about their travels, not as tourists do, but simply running through the various stages of their life.

"Li, I can't find the little cake knife!" She smiles at me, excuses herself, goes to join her husband in the kitchen. I walk around the armchairs, stop at the other end of the drawing room. A portrait on the wall: a young man with a serious, open face, a bushy mustache, and in the corner of the photo, the date, 1913. The father.

This hour spent in the house where Jacques Dorme was born leaves me with an impression of imminent departure.

Not that of my return to Paris, no. Rather the clear perception that what we say is being uttered for the last time, and that, when we have finished our tea, we shall have to get up, take a last look at the photos in their frames, leave the place behind. We all three experience, and each of us can sense in the others, the beginning of a separation, a distancing, now arising between us and the house, one that is all the more painful because our hands can still touch the back of this old armchair and our eyes still meet the gaze of a portrait on the wall.

And yet their house, a true family house, is deeply permeated with the slow memory of the generations, with the human aura taken on by furniture and objects, linking lives from father to son, marking deaths, greeting the return of prodigal children. I feel exactly as if I have returned after a long absence, to discover what I had known in Alexandra's house. The room where she used to read to me seems, in my memory, to be adjacent to this drawing room where we are drinking tea. The France I pictured through all those pages we once read is here in the gaze of these portraits, in the words I am now hearing. But this rediscovered house will become a dream once more.

Our conversation, in which I know there must be no further mention of Jacques Dorme, often teeters on the brink of this erasure. The Captain talks about the church I saw on my way here, a local curiosity. And then falls silent, embarrassed, recalling at the same moment as myself, no doubt, the old walls covered in graffiti, the dark corners behind the apse, stained with urine. He shows me a book with a red-and-gold cover, the first he read as a child. He opens it with a smile, recites the first part of a sentence, closes it abruptly: the din of the joyriding in the street stops him from speaking. For several seconds we do not move, exchanging embarrassed glances, waiting for the racket to cease. Amid the rhythmic yelling of the singer a rhyme can be heard: "He's in the hole – she's wearin' a stole." The class struggle…

Going out onto the front steps, we pause for a moment in the half-light of the winter dusk, the Captain fingering a bunch of keys, me trying to make out the bottom of the garden where the trees give the illusion of a veritable wood. Li En speaks in a perfectly level voice, without bitterness: "In the old days you could feel quite remote in the copse there. But now, with that parking lot…" I take a few steps. Beyond the branches of the trees looms a flat, ugly supermarket building, surrounded by a stretch of asphalt, from which comes the metallic clatter of shopping carts being stacked. "Right. We can leave now," announces the Captain, and leans forward to kiss Li En.

This simple remark, this word, "leave," suddenly explains everything. We are not leaving, it is the country, their country, their France, that is moving away, being replaced by another country. This house, surrounded by bare trees and the foliage of yew bushes, dark green, almost black, is evocative of the last rock of a submerged archipelago.

I shake hands with Li En and prepare to take my leave of the Captain, but he stops me: "No, no, I'll drive you to the station," and leads me toward the gate, despite my protestations. I sense that for him this is more than a gesture of courtesy. He needs to demonstrate, to the foreigner I am, that he is still at home in this street, this country.

As he is opening the garage I have time to take one more look at the front of the house, the gate with its railings, the steps up to the door. I tell myself that during the century now drawing to a close this house has twice witnessed the same scene: a man carrying a military knapsack on his shoulder walks over the road, reaches the crossroads, and turns back to wave to a woman standing beside the gate at number sixteen. A man going off to the front. The crossroads… Where an hour ago the Captain's car was covered in spittle. In the darkness I see the beams of headlights sweeping over the crossroads, engines roaring. The fun's not over yet.

The Captain invites me to get in, and the car heads for the crossroads. He could turn off before he reaches it, go down one of the side roads. But we travel back past the precise place where the couple was set upon. A motor scooter appears, follows us, presses up close beside the car for several yards, then lets us go. I watch the Captain's face discreetly. It is a mask with tensed lips, his eyes slightly screwed up, as if from a profound weariness of vision.

Just before we get there I try my luck one more time. I ask him if he would agree to his brother's story appearing under the cover of a fictitious name, that of a character in a novel. He seems to hesitate, then confides to me: "You know, when he was very young all Jacques ever dreamed of was becoming a pilot. He had one idol, an ace in the Great War, René Dorme. He talked about him so often that we ended up nicknaming him 'Dorme.' We used to tease him: 'Frère Jacques, dormez-vous? His friends at school always called him 'Dorme.' And he was proud of it, you know. The few letters he sent from the front, he always signed them with that nickname…"

In the train I shall muster a review beneath my eyelids of the various stages in the life of this French pilot: Spain, Flanders, Poland, the Ukraine, Stalingrad, Alsib… Little by little, as the eyes slowly adjust to it, this life will take on the name of Jacques Dorme.

IN THE LETTER I RECEIVED TWO YEARS AFTER OUR MEETING the Captain made a few sober and appropriate remarks about the book I had sent him, this novel in which I told the story of Alexandra's life, or rather dreamed up a life for her. Jacques Dorme did not appear in it. The Captain had no doubt taken this omission to be out of respect for our agreement. I had not had the courage to tell him the French pilot had been sacrificed because he was considered to be "too true for a novel." Like the old general in the middle of the sunbaked steppes beside the Volga…

His letter was penned in that precise and subtle French whose use was becoming rare in France. Struck by the elegance of his style, I did not immediately discern a slight hint of disappointment lurking behind his words: unspoken approval at seeing our agreement respected and at the same time this barely perceptible regret at not seeing it broken. Indeed, expressed in the lines he had written, or rather between these lines, was a hope that, by means of some literary magic, Jacques Dorme might live again, without being subjected to the idle curiosity of a country he would no longer have recognized as his own.