Andrei Makine - The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme

That evening was probably the time when I first perceived with so much clarity what it was that Alexandra's language had given me…

The door opened abruptly. The intruder looked like someone coming home. It was Village. He stared at me, vexed, but not fiercely. "So you're the one that's been spilling all that water down the hallway. I just slid ten yards along it on my ass. It's worse than a skating rink…" Under his coat he was clutching a bundle wrapped in a sheet of newspaper. The cool of the snow that he had brought in with him stood out clearly from a very appetizing, smoky smell that made me swallow my saliva and reminded me I had eaten nothing since midday. Village noticed my famished grimace and gave a satisfied smile. "So, didn't they give you a scrap to eat, the two-faced devils?" he asked, taking off his jacket.

"No, nothing," I choked, in another contraction of the throat, surprised by this description of the others.

"Ah well, too bad for them. They get the same grub every single day Enough to give a cockroach the runs. Now you and me are going to enjoy this…"

In the twinkling of an eye he transformed the cubbyhole into a dining room. The lid of a crate laid over a bucket formed the table. Two other buckets, upturned, became chairs. From out of the folded newspaper a grilled fish made its appearance, with a broad, curved body, its fins blackened by the fire… We began to eat… Village told me tales of his secret fishing trips, his tricks for escaping from the orphanage. From time to time, he cocked an ear, then resumed his talk, speaking more softly… At the end of our meal footsteps outside the door gave us a start. A supervisor's voice called out my name. Village stood up, handed me a bucket, opened the door, and hid behind it.

"What are you doing in there?" the man demanded, patting the wall, but not finding the switch.

"Well, I was just putting the bucket away, that's all," I replied with rough assurance that surprised even myself.

The supervisor, still in the half-light, sniffed the air, but the supposition that came to him seemed so far-fetched that he withdrew, growling: "All right. Put all that stuff away and get to bed immediately." Squeezed behind the door, Village gave me the thumbs-up: "Well acted!"

It was up on the dormitory floor, before we went our separate ways, that he then said to me, with that shaky intonation that betrays words deeply buried that are painful to bring readily to the lips: "You know… my dad, they… shot him too. With a comrade. He was trying to escape… But the guard caught them and machine-gunned them. An old man once told me that in the camps, when fellows were killed trying to escape, they left them in full view for three days, in front of the barrack huts, so the others knew what to expect… When my mother heard the news she took to drinking. And when she died the doctor said it was like she was burned from the inside. And just before she went, she kept saying to me: 'It was to see you he did that.' But I never believed her, you know…"

The laconic friendship that bound us together taught me a lot. The most despised pariah in the orphanage, Village was in reality the freest of us all. Almost every day he was to be seen engaged on garbage duty, but what we did not know was that he volunteered for it and could thus spend long, stolen moments pacing up and down on the banks of the river, sometimes venturing as far as the Volga. He was also the only one to accept reality, not to invoke the phantom of the officer who was going to come knocking at the classroom door. What he did not accept was the reality they constructed for us, with its myths, its lapsed heroes, its books burned in the boiler-room stove. And while we were lined up in our grades in the hallway, before lessons started, listening, without listening, to the singsong ranting of the loudspeaker ("The party of Lenin, a people's force, leads us on to the triumph of Communism!"), Village was slipping through the willow plantations in the morning mist, in the fragile awakening of the waters fringed with the first ice. That was his reality.

I told myself that my "estran" was not so far removed from Village's misty mornings.

The land of the "estran," a land of refuge, where it was still possible for me to dream, revealed itself bit by bit, without any logic, amid the relics of Samoylov's library. It was there, one day, that a torn page, marked by the fire, came to hand; on it, the opening lines of a poem, whose author I was never able to identify:

When upon Nancy the sun doth rise Already he's shining in Burgundy 's skies. He'll soon be here to start our day, Then on to Gascony make his way.

No geography would ever give me a more concrete sense of the land of France, a territory that had always seemed to me much too tiny on the maps to have pretensions to time zones. What the poet had expressed was his feeling for the beloved space, a physical perception of one's native land that enables us to take in a whole country at a single glance, to perceive its tonalities very distinctively, as they differ, from one valley to the next, the variation in landscapes, the unique substance of each of its towns, the mineral texture of their walls. From Nancy to Gascony…

As I explored the ruins of these books in the sealed-off room, I did not feel as if I were in pursuit of any goal. Mine was the simple curiosity of one who pokes about in attics, the pleasure of coming upon a book spared by the fire, an unblemished engraving, a note calligraphed in the old style. The joy, above all, of descending, my arms piled high with these treasures, and showing them to Alexandra. Yet shortly after reading those four lines of verse on that torn-out page I grasped what it was that drove me to spend long hours in the company of these mutilated books. From the bottom of a box in which the wood was disintegrating like sand, I drew out a History of the Late Roman Empire with the pages stuck together by damp, then a book in German, printed in flamboyant Gothic lettering, and finally, from a collection of texts with its cover missing, an obituary notice. I no longer remember whom it concerned. The shade of a great, vanished lineage is linked, all too confusedly, with my reading of this. All I can recall, but I recall them by heart, are the words of François I, quoted by the author, which were underlined in that violet ink whose faded tint I recognized: "We are four noblemen from Aquitaine, who will fight in the lists against all comers from France: myself, Sansac, Montalembert, and la Châtaigneraie. " I pictured that country, encompassed by a loving gaze that followed the sun's course from Nancy to Gascony, knowing now that it was the gaze of these four knights, scanning their native land, the better to defend it.

What I was searching for in my reading was what I lacked. Attachment to a place (that of my own birth was too ill defined), a personal mythology, a family past. But, above all, that thing of which the others had just robbed me: the divine freedom to reinvent life, and to people it with heroes. For me the four knights of Aquitaine were much more real than those ghosts of handsome officers that haunted the orphanage dormitories. Did I really believe in these equestrian figures standing guard over France? I think I did, just as at the age of eleven or twelve one believes in nobility, compassion, self-sacrifice. After all, it was not the reality of this vision that interested me, but its beauty. A road high on a hillside, the dust muffling the clatter of the hooves, the four companions advancing slowly, their gaze directed into the distance, now toward the mountains, where they cluster in the mists, now toward the gap where the ocean glistens. That was how I saw them; it was my way of hoping.

One day this dreamed-of land finally imprinted its space within me, as the pattern of the constellations is imprinted in our visual memory, and the ups and downs of a familiar road in the soles of our feet. I became aware of this during the last literature lesson before the New Year holidays. The atmosphere was not very studious. Some of us were dozing, hypnotized by the swirling of great snowflakes outside the window, others were choking with whispered laughter at the back of the class as they passed a textbook, open at a disfigured illustration, from hand to hand beneath the desks. From time to time, the voice of the teacher, a tall, bony woman with a massive, prominent chin, thundered out: "Who wants to go without food until tomorrow?" The class would freeze, she would resume her dissection of a poem by Lermontov, and the textbook would provoke new spasms of hilarity. When I set eyes on it I could not help smiling. The poem we were studying (dedicated to Napoleon) was illustrated with the painting that shows the emperor just after his abdication. An unfortunate choice, if one knows the penchant naughty schoolboys have for desecrating images of famous people in textbooks. Napoleon was seated, with a downcast air, his body shrunken, his gaze fixed, his legs wide apart. And it was in this space, between the imperial legs, that a sacrilegious hand had drawn a monstrous hairy tube adorned with two enormous balls. Another, more innocent hand had covered his face with long, stitched-up scars and hidden his left eye behind a pirate's patch. I smiled, pondering those famous people in our textbooks who acquired even more infamous addenda, even more muscular appendages… It was at that moment that the teacher began to recite the poem.