Andrei Makine - The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme

The woman gets up, pours the hot tea, puts another log into the little iron stove in the corner of the room. I read the sentence again, I almost know it by heart. To think about this warrior of days gone by reduces the pain caused by the mockery relentlessly burning into me with its acid: "Your father, shot like a dog…"

It would all be different in a made-up story. Tinged with pointless exoticism: this house with its walls covered in dark weatherboarding, and its gloomy aspect in the approaching dusk; a room hidden away in a warren of apartments and shadowy staircases, a woman whose origins are shrouded in mystery; this ancient French book…

Yet nothing about that November evening struck me as bizarre. I had come, as I did every Saturday night on leave from the orphanage, to spend twenty-four hours at Alexandra's: the good fortune of those among us who had some improbable aunt ready to welcome them. In my case it was this woman who had once known my parents. A foreigner? Most assuredly, but her origins had long since been blurred by the length and harshness of her life in Russia, blotted out by the devastation of the war, which cut off those who had survived it from their past, from their nearest and dearest, from their own former selves. Also living in this great wooden house were a family of Germans from the Volga, an ageless Korean (the victim of one of those population transfers that were an obsession of Stalin's), and, in a long, narrow room on the ground floor, a Tartar from the Crimea, Yussuf, the joiner, who had one day remarked to the woman who took me in, this woman born near Paris: "You know, Shura, you Russians…" Her French forename had also undergone a slow process of Russification, becoming first of all "Shura," then slipping into the affectionate diminutive "Sasha," and finally reverting to the full name of "Alexandra," which had no connection at all with her real forename.

Only the books she had bit by bit taught me to read still betrayed her imperceptible French origins. "… Thus he gave his life for the three fleurs-de-lis…"

 novelist's way of evoking this apprenticeship would no doubt link together a series of boyhood surprises in order to relate the story of an "éducation française." But in reality the most surprising thing was the natural way in which, having arrived at the big wooden house, I would climb its dark staircases, open Alexandra's door, put my bag down on a chair. I was vaguely familiar with the house's history: a certain Venedikt Samoylov, who had been engaged in the wool trade with Central Asia before the Revolution, had built what, at the beginning of the century, was a small manor house in light wood. He had been expelled from it and disappeared, leaving behind a rich library that soon fell victim to the hungry stoves installed by the new inhabitants of its increasingly dilapidated rooms. During the war, the house, located in a small township near Stalingrad, had been partly destroyed by an incendiary bomb. It had lost one of its wings and at the time of my childhood still displayed a broad stretch of charred wall.

The truth of memory compels me to recognize that I found neither these blackened timbers nor the extreme poverty of the rooms surprising. Nor did I notice their caravanserai exoticism. I climbed the stairs, imbibing with pleasure the smells that only family life can produce, a mixture of cooking and laundry; I walked past the inhabitants, happy to feel that I was their equal, liberated as I was from my regimented existence; I went into Alexandra's room (the aroma of good tea could already be detected from the icy darkness of the staircase) and it felt like a definitive return, like going back to a house that awaited me, one I would not have to leave the following day. I was home at last.

In my adult life since then I have never again been able to experience the same feeling of permanence…

In the course of these visits I had certainly received a French education. But an education without structure, unpremeditated. A book left open on the corner of a table, a Russian word whose French past Alexandra revealed to me… The feeling of being home at last mingled imperceptibly with this foreign language I was learning. The association became so intense that for me many years later the French language would always be evocative of a place and time similar to the atmosphere of the childhood home I had never known.

She had begun to teach me her language because, in the extreme poverty of our lives then, it was the last remaining treasure she could share with me. An evening with her, from time to time, that gave me the illusion of family life. And this language. There was probably a moment that first triggered things, a word, a story, something arousing my curiosity, I no longer remember. But I remember very well the day I managed to get into a little room cut off from the rest of the house by that fire in the spring of 1942. For twenty years this cubbyhole, tucked away under the rafters, had remained inaccessible, sealed off by the thick planks the inhabitants had nailed up where the wall had been breached. The door to this tiny room led to the outside, to the empty space where the wing had collapsed. To reach it I had climbed out through the landing window. This acrobatic feat was not without risk, as I had to cling to the remnant of a beam, place my foot on the skirting of a floor that had vanished, and, squeezing the whole of my body against the charred wood, grasp the door handle. Inside I had discovered the remnants of Samoylov's library, piles of books damaged by fire, age, and rain. Foreign books especially, useless to the building's residents and saved from their stoves thanks to this room being sealed off. I had brought some of them back from my perilous expedition. Alexandra had scolded me (I was barely seven years old) and then shown me her own books. Did they, too, come from the ruined library, or from a more distant past? I do not know. All that comes back to me now is this moment: pressed flat against the blackened timbers, I reach my hand out toward the handle, suddenly see my reflection in a mirror with a tin frame hanging on the wall, realize that the void, along the edge of which I am sidling, was once an inhabited room, have time to stare at my own face. An instant of my life, the extreme singularity of this instant, a sky in which snow floats down very slowly, almost motionless.

My French education resembled the efforts of a paleontologist to reconstruct a vanished world, starting from discovered bones. The isolation in which our country lived at that time turned the French universe into a landscape as mysterious as that of the Cretaceous or the Carboniferous eras. Every novel on Alexandra's shelves became the vestigial remains of a vanished – not to say extraterrestrial – civilization, a fossil, a droplet of amber that held within it not an imprisoned insect but some character, a French town, a district of Paris.

In the ensuing years Alexandra made me read some of the classics, but it was thanks to the little sealed-orf room that my sense of being engaged in exploration was at its most vivid. I found many French books there, some of them eaten away by damp and now unreadable, some of them printed with the old spelling of verbs in the imperfect tense ending in "-oit," instead of "-ait," which confused me at first. In one of these abandoned volumes I came across an anecdote that made a greater impression on me (I have long been ashamed to admit) than the work of many a famous novelist. It concerned the actress Madeleine Brohant, celebrated in her day, but who lived out her last years in great penury, lodging on the fifth floor of an ancient apartment building in the rue de Rivoli. One of the rare friends who remained faithful to her complained breathlessly one day about the exhausting climb. "But my dear friend," replied the actress, "this staircase is all I have now to make men's hearts beat faster!" The most glittering alexandrines, the most cunningly plotted novels, would never teach me more about the nature of Frenchness than that gentle, wry remark, whose rhythmic resonance, it seems to me, I can still hear.