Andrei Makine - The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme

The door creaked. The two Levs emerged, laden with crates, and made for the helicopter. I heard Valya's voice. The pilot paused on the threshold. I accosted him awkwardly, standing in his path: "Listen, perhaps I could…" I saw the expression in his eyes, did not finish my sentence ("pay you?"). He gave me a pat on the shoulder and advised me, in more friendly tones: "If I were you, I'd head straight for the village. There won't be another tractor until this evening…"

It was then that, in a lackluster voice, reconciled to the setback and no longer asking for anything, I talked about Jacques Dorme. I managed to tell the story of his life in a few brief, spare sentences. I was in such a state of dejection that I scarcely heard what I was saying. And it was only in the state I was in that I was able to convey all the grievous truth of that life. A pilot from a remote country meets a woman from the same country and for a very few days, in a city that will soon be reduced to ruins, they are lovers; then he goes off to the ends of the earth to fly airplanes destined for the front and dies, crashing into an icy hillside under the pale sky of the Arctic Circle.

I told it differently. Not better but still more briefly, closer to the essence of their love.

The pilot took his hand off the door handle and murmured, as if in an effort of memory: "Yes, I recall it now… It was that air bridge between Alaska and Siberia. The Alsib… They were real aces. They've almost been forgotten these days. That plane, it's not the one you can see on the Trident?" I nodded. The Trident, a mountain with three peaks…

"This is the last one, Chief. We're ready to go!" Little Lev was coming down the front steps, a crate balanced on his shoulder.

The pilot gave a slight cough. "And this woman. She was your…? Did you know her?" I spoke very softly, as if there were no one listening to me in this white desert. "To me she was like a kind of… Yes, like a mother…"

"We're O.K., Captain!" Big Lev's voice was cut off by the slamming of a door.

"Do you have any papers on you?" asked the pilot, rubbing his nose. I thought about my passport written in a language he would not be able to read, and the note on it: "To any country except the USSR."

"No, I'm… No. No papers…" He shook his head, and spread his hands wide, as if to say: "In that case, there's nothing I can do for you." Then suddenly he indicated his helicopter with a jerk of his chin, sighed, and smiled: "All right, come on, then. Get in!"

As it took off, the aircraft banked and for the space of a second I saw the house on the Edge, the light in the kitchen window. It seemed to me as if the pilot had his eye on that window too.

TWO AND A HALF YEARS AFTER THAT SECRET JOURNEY my manuscript was complete. A much fictionalized account, for at the time I believed that only a novel could render the improbabilities of real life readable.

It was turned down by several publishers and then embarked on that ghostly but heady existence undergone by all texts that are repeatedly rejected: the life of a stillborn child or that of a specter. Periods in limbo interspersed with renewed hopes, with nights of feverish rereading, with ultimate disgust at the written word. The feeling of preaching in an all too crowded wilderness. A dead-end street whose extremity recedes, the farther down it you travel. An endless cul-de-sac.

I was halfway along this course when the receding of the dead-end street seemed to come to a halt. I was in the office of an editorial director at one of the big Paris publishing houses, listening to such fervent praise that I feared a trap. In fact, everything about this meeting was suspicious. I had expected to be confronted by a man of letters with thinning white hair, a hacking cough, his clothes steeped in tobacco, his body half buried beneath manuscripts, a real publishing animal. Yet here was a woman, seated with a lizard's elegance at a table where my text and nothing else occupied the place of honor. Petite, dark, with very intense, shining eyes, she was perched upon a tall, old-fashioned chair, so hard that a cushion was needed. Hers was the charm that a man may find provocative in a woman who is not his type but in whom he can see precisely what it is that might inspire passionate love in another man, the man he is not. This notion came to me later on. All I saw at the time was the movement of her lips, voicing a wildly enthusiastic opinion without any publisher's reserve. I doubtless believed in the miracle of the preacher in the wilderness who is heard at last. This was my undoing.

I interrupted her (she was saying: "What's so great is the two of them, the child and the old Frenchwoman telling him about her country and teaching him her language…"). I began to reveal the true story that lay behind the fiction. Odd scraps of life experience that only the plot of a novel could link together, scraps of love that only imagination could fashion into a love story, and a vast throng of men and women who had had to be cast aside into oblivion…

"You see, the old Frenchwoman and her grandson were not actually…" I pressed on with what was, in spite of myself, fast becoming a work of demolition. I must have noticed this from the slight expression of pique that came over the woman's face. "But all the characters are real people!" I concluded, as if offering the authentication of a vintage.

I do not know if she was aware that it was her eulogies that had lured me into this absurd outpouring. Her disappointment was that of a numismatist, ecstatic over some old coins a ditchdigger has brought in, who holds forth elegantly about the time and place of their minting and suddenly sees the workman pick up a precious ducat and mark it with his tooth, to show that it is, indeed, gold.

Her tone did not change. "Fine. But what I'm trying to say is that, in the last part especially, where you talk about the pilot… there are too many raw facts that have not been imaginatively reworked at all. And then there's the character of that general. That random encounter…"

"But it's all true."

"Which is precisely my point. And that's what jars. It's too true for a novel."

I left, having been given a polite but firm ultimatum to the effect that I should rewrite the section in question.

The late retort, the esprit de l'escalier, occurred to me, not on the staircase, which was too narrow and hazardous for thoughts about literature, but on the curve of the sidewalk as I walked toward the rue du . Amid a torrent of belated arguments, what came to mind was the debate about truth and fiction unleashed by War and Peace. Murderous criticism, historians finding more than a thousand errors in the book, and one newspaper's verdict: "Even if this author had a shred of talent, he must still be condemned." But especially the opinion of the old academician, Narov, who could not forgive Tolstoy for the degrading portrayal of Kutuzov, the commander in chief of the Russian forces. For on the eve of the decisive battle against Bonaparte at Borodino we see the savior of Russia lounging in an armchair, a somewhat relaxed and extremely unmilitary posture, and to add insult to injury, immersed in a French novel! Les Chevaliers du Cygne (The Knights of the Swan) by Madame de Genlis… "What kind of perverse imagination would create so false a scene?" thundered the academician. "At that fateful hour Kutuzov would have been engaged in poring over battle maps – or at the very least, reading Caesar's Commentaries." Difficult to gainsay Narov, who took part in the battle and even lost an arm there. And yet… After Narov's death a good many French novels are actually found in his own library, among them Les Chevaliers du Cygne, with this note in handwriting on the flyleaf: "Read in the hospital, where I was nursing my wounds, after being taken prisoner by the French."