Andrei Makine: The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme

For several seconds I regretted not having recounted this anecdote to the editorial director. But did the story, in fact, prove anything? Battle maps or Madame de Genlis? Perhaps, quite simply, the melancholy of an old man with only one year left to live, a man who has seen so many wars, so many victories, and so many defeats and who at "that fateful hour" lets his gaze stray into the serenity of a fine day in early September. He knows that tomorrow this calm will vanish beneath explosions that turn the earth upside down, beneath the tramp of hundreds of thousands of men impatient to slit one another's throats, beneath the torrents of blood shed by the expected fifty to a hundred thousand victims. Then sometime later the same calm will reign once more, the same sun will shine, the same gossamer threads will float on the air.

As I continued along the rue du , I thought that to escape from this childish equation, balancing the real against the imaginary, one should probably merely write down those utterly simple moments of human presence. Old Kutuzov's gaze at a window open onto the September sky… Nothing else.

I knew in advance that it would be impossible to touch up Jacques Dormes life story. To make it more "literary"? To what end? Impossible, too, to tamper with the figure of the general, the man for whom, according to the pilot, heaven would "play a greater part than anything else." That was the way those words had been reported to me, out of context, as a simple matter of fact. This French general was no more than a vague figure mentioned in a more or less chance conversation on a night rescued from oblivion thanks to a broken amber necklace. Why should it be necessary to tell it differently?

So I sacrificed these two men, tightened up the narrative, thinking somewhat ruefully as I did so of those group portraits in Stalin's era, from which – thanks to expert brushwork – the faces of leaders who had been shot used to disappear.

Wasted effort, because the text was rejected anyway, later accepted elsewhere, published, enjoyed great success, exposed me to fleeting renown and to a surprisingly more tenacious resentment ("Do these immigrants think they can teach us how to write in French?" ruminated one Parisian critic), and finally relegated me to a new anonymity, infinitely preferable to the previous one, stripped as it was now of any illusions.

Toward the end of this whirlwind, however, I had an encounter indirectly linked to the two characters who had been sacrificed. A May evening in Canberra, autumn in Australia, a discussion with my readers (their irrepressible desire to know what is "true" and what is fiction in the book). Then a conversation with a man in his thirties, the French cultural attaché, who has had the tact not to carry on over dinner where my readers left off, as people from embassies generally do; he lets me catch my breath and also talks very little about himself. Only after dinner, when we find ourselves under the sky, with its strange array of constellations, does he talk, very simply, about the day of the general's death (he is his great-great-nephew and bears the same name, but has no reason to suppose what this name signifies in my own life). In any case he had not seen much that day, he was too young. An armored personnel carrier, with the turret removed, bore the coffin up to the little church, a sober ceremony… Later, in school, the teacher asked them to write what they thought about the dead man. As he talks to me, he evinces no desire to fire my imagination, recognizing that, being a child, he has remembered only details, often trivial ones. I sense that I could add my own tale to his, but that to do so I would have to go back to the boy listening to the story of the snapped necklace and the pilot who flew over endless icy wastes, the boy who had seen the French general in the middle of the steppes beyond the Volga. For a moment I am on the point of coming out with it, and he seems to sense this past in me… Then we both remark on the beauty of the Southern Cross, particularly glorious on this autumn night, and part company.

From that boyhood what remains now is an early morning in front of the half-open door of the infirmary. I am there, my hand poised to knock, I can already see the woman sitting inside, then, suddenly, this gesture: the woman squeezes her left breast, massages it, as if she were suffering from heartburn or were quite simply adjusting a brassiere too tight for that large breast. I knock and go in. She examines me and sets about washing the ugly scratch along my thigh. She is a young woman with slightly red hair, her movements are slow. I stay standing, towering over her, it is strange to be seeing an adult woman in this way, seeing her face bowed forward, the apparent resignation in her eyes. When she looks up there is an admission of complicity between us. I leave the room unable to distinguish between mother and woman in the one who has just dressed my wound. Both unknown, both desired, intensely so.

I had been hurt trying to hold back the orphanage's garbage bin on a waterlogged slope. Each morning a supervisor appears at the entrance to the dormitory, a list of names in his hand, and announces the duty roster. Always two names and, in response, a sotto voce muttering of oaths.

This time my partner was a youth despised by us all, not for his weakness, which would have been logical in the enclosed world of the orphanage, where only strength counted, but for being peasant-like. Indeed, such was his rustic air, with his perpetually muddy shoes and his way of scratching his shaven head, that he was nicknamed "Village"… Without saying a word to him, I grasped one of the handles of the bin and we set about pushing this great steel container along a dirt road in the rain-sodden darkness of an autumn morning. Suddenly, there was this voice behind us: "Wait, take these as well!" On the threshold of the service door stood the librarian, with two great cardboard cartons at his feet. "Take these to the boiler room…" Village went and fetched them, placed them on the lid of the bin, and pretended to get started again. But as soon as the door banged shut he stopped, threw me a wink, and took hold of one of the cartons. "You never know, there could be stuff to eat in there," he explained. I had always thought him spineless, devoid of imagination… With a broad five-kopeck piece, sharpened into a cutting edge (the supervisors harried the possessors of knives relentlessly), he cut through the string, snapped back the cardboard flaps… "Shit! Just a lot of old books… Hold on. What's in the other one?" It was the same thing. Pamphlets, all with a photo on the covers we had no difficulty recognizing. The round, smooth face, the bald head: Khrushchev, who had been overthrown the year before. Since then his portrait had disappeared from the fronts of buildings in the town, and now, like a belated echo of events in Moscow, his "Speech to the Twentieth Party Congress" was being withdrawn from provincial libraries.

Seated in front of a stove's red-hot mouth, the engineer in charge of heating received the cardboard cartons impassively. He opened one of them, gave a rather sad little laugh, and began throwing the pamphlets into the fire, one after the other. "Oh, Nikita, they were too smart for you, weren't they?" he observed, contemplating the auto-da-fé. "And now the ones who've not been rehabilitated don't have a chance in hell…" Then, remembering us: "Go on, get a move on, you kids. The bell's rung already…"

On the way back Village asked me to wait for him and slipped into the bushes that bordered the roadside. I took several paces to distance myself from the stink of the bin. Up there on a hill the orphanage windows were strung out in a line: dark in the dormitories, lit up in the classrooms. You could even make out the figures of teachers in front of the blackboards. The only advantage of garbage duty was that you were allowed to be a few minutes late.