Andrei Makine - The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme

It was the contradiction I had sensed in his letter, this hesitation between a fear of complete oblivion and a refusal to condone a revelatory memoir, that suggested this unpretentious genre to me: a chronicle in which the ruling device would be faithfulness to the bare framework of the facts. With the pilot's name replaced by his nickname.

A year later my thoughts turned again to this modest narrative task on a journey back from Berlin. In no other city had I seen so many efforts to commemorate the past and such a triumphal will to flatten this past beneath the foundations of a new capital, arising like a phoenix. If the truth be told, I preferred this brutal flattening to what was being thought and said in France. To the condescending irony of that historian I once found myself sitting next to on a television panel. With his petty air of mocking disdain, he had spoken of "Adolf Hitler's pygmy campaigns." The participants had smiled, as if at an epigram, before continuing with the verbal ping-pong, noting Frances shameful inaction and the fact that the severity of the Russian winter had happily blocked the Nazis' advance… I should have responded immediately, reminded them that this particular pygmy warrior had defeated the most powerful armies in the world and, having come close to the carotid artery of the Volga, had stood within an ace of final victory. Impossible to get a word in edgewise, the talk came thick and fast. Then the memory of a gesture came back to me: a French pilot spreads out a map and covers the violet hexagon of his country with a matchbox, which he then applies to the red expanse of the Soviet Union. This gesture would have been the best possible response to these television strategists. But the broadcast was already reaching its conclusion with a sneering observation by one of the participants: "What happened at Stalingrad was that one brand of totalitarianism wrung another's neck! That's all!"

At this moment I felt able to understand the Captain's hesitations better than ever… Even as our makeup was being removed, four or five young women were awaiting their turn to be powdered for the cameras, all in a morbidly excited state, as is often the case with guests in the antechambers to these media bazaars. They were novelists and the theme they were due to discuss was: "Sex: can the pen have the last word?"

After the broadcast that evening, I reread an old pamphlet I had found among the bookstalls beside the Seine. Printed on terrible, dull, rough paper, published barely three months after the fall of France in June 1940, and drawing no historical lessons, it brought together the military exploits of the French campaign. A fragmentary chronicle, and, of course, one subject to German censorship, a series of sketches made at the time: the defense of a village, hand-to-hand fighting in a township, the loss of a ship…

Dates. Names. Ranks. A war seen by soldiers and not the one acted out all over again half a century later in the history books:

Following this, a retreat over seven days of continuous fighting brought the regiment into the Charmes region. Four French divisions, drawn up in defense and surrounded on all sides, fought there without hope. The Eighteenth Infantry Regiment had lost more than half its strength…

Now the battle took on a character of extraordinary ferocity. They fought with grenades and at certain points with bayonets. Captain Cafarel defended his own command post himself, and was killed… During these two days the Second Battalion of the Seventeenth Regiment of the Algerian Infantry Corps lost twelve out of fifteen of its officers, all but four of its noncommissioned officers, four-fifths of its strength. They died heroically, without having yielded an inch…

The strength of the Division was now reduced to a few men. At 1800 hours, seeking to complete the operation, the enemy launched a massed attack. Using the weapons of the wounded and dead, the cavalry of the Second Division resisted. The machine guns fired their last rounds. The enemy was repelled…

The torpedo boat Foudroyant sank rapidly For a few minutes the ship's stern stayed above the water. With magnificent gallantry, Commander Fontaine remained standing upon the stern until his vessel had sunk entirely from view…

That night the chronicle of Jacques Dormes life truly began to write itself inside me. I knew that, in addition, I would have to talk about that boy who was to discover a country where the four gentlemen of Aquitaine lived, as well as the soldier in the last square and that other one, who died on the banks of the Meuse "almost as destitute of money as when he had come from thence to Paris." Thirty years later they all had a close kinship in my mind with Captain Cafarel, Commander Fontaine, and the Second Battalion of the Seventeenth Algerian Infantry Corps.

I went back to jacques dorme's town a week after my return from Berlin. My plan on this occasion was to stay in a hotel and spend several days there, taking time to reconstruct the town as it used to be, in the way one restores a mosaic; but one in which, instead of tesserae, there would be the hundred-year-old tree beside that church covered in graffiti, the sign for a bakery, the florid lettering that had not changed since the years between the wars; the picture of a street untouched by the ugliness of satellite dishes. I thought I would be able, if only for the space of a glance, to reconstruct what Jacques Dorme saw in his youth, what his native town, his native land had been.

I telephoned the Captain several times without ever hearing either his voice or that of Li En. Silent, too, was the ritornello of their answering machine, with its ironic politeness, that had always made me smile. If I had had to invent such moments in the plot of a novel, I would probably have spoken of growing unease, imagining the worst… In reality my first thought was simply of death. And the most intense response provoked by this thought was not sadness nor even remorse at having delayed and wasted time on all those trivialities that generally go with a book's publication. No, I felt afflicted with muteness. It was as if the language in which I had spoken with the Captain was no longer spoken by anyone else.

In the train I told myself that this feeling of speaking a dead language was one that Alexandra must have experienced throughout her life in Russia.

In the Allée de la Marne, there were no signs of death. There was simply a sense of absence, emptiness behind the closed shutters of number sixteen. The garage door was covered in fluorescent scrawls that had lost their aggressiveness with the passage of time. The lengths of wire fastening the "For Sale" sign to the gate were rusty. But there were no papers spilling out of the mailbox. I turned around on hearing the voice I knew: it was the neighbor from number eleven, whom I had supposed to be a retired professional singer. "I'm the one who collects all the junk mail. You have to do that, otherwise they set fire to it. That's what they did to my neighbor across the road…" She opened the box, took out a leaflet. She had spoken of "them" without any rancor, with resignation, rather, the way they talk about the weather in those northern lands.

"Li En has gone to Canada. She's thinking of settling down over there, near her sister…" We walked diagonally across the road, from number sixteen to number eleven.

Thinking I was up to date, the "singer" did not say much more, just a few words about Li En going away, taking her husband's ashes.

Left alone in the Allée de la Marne, I pictured those last moments before her departure very intensely. Lien's face, that pale, impassive mask and the force of that Asian stare that spoke of her pain better than a face distorted with grief would have done. I saw her walking down the steps, closing the gate, taking the steering wheel…