Andrei Makine: The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme

Translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan

Andrei' Makine was born and raised in Russia, but like his other novels, The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme was written in French. The book is set in Russia and France, and I have kept some of the Russian words the author uses in the French text in this translation. These include shapka (a fur hat or cap, often with earflaps); izba (a traditional wooden house built of logs); and taiga (the virgin pine forest that spreads across Siberia south of the tundra).

The text contains a number of references to Russian historical figures, including Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin, Catherine the Great's administrator for newly acquired lands in the south, who reputedly gave orders for sham villages to be built for her tour in 1787, and Mikhail Harionovich Kutuzov, commander in chief of the Russian forces at Borodino in 1812. There are also a number of references to institutions from the Communist era in Russia. A kolkhoz was a collective farm. The Pioneers were junior members of the Young Communist youth movement. The GPU (later OGPU) was the agency for investigating and combating counterrevolutionary activities in the USSR from 1922 to 1934. The NKVD, the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, were the police charged with maintaining political control during the years of Stalin's purges from 1934 to 1946.

References to French history include allusion to the new calendar established in the early years of the French Revolution, starting with Year I in 1793. Ventôse, one of the newly named months, corresponded to late February and early March. Year II was one of many political executions, as the Terror continued.

THE SPAN OF THEIR LIFE TOGETHER is to be so short that everything will happen to them for both the first and the last time.

Early in the night, in the violence of their lovemaking, he snapped the thread of the old necklace that she never removed. The little amber beads clattered onto the floor, and as the rain began to fall, it mimicked at first this gentle buckshotlike patter, then changed its tune, turned into a downpour, torrents of water, and ultimately, an ocean surge that flooded into the room. After a blazing hot day, the dry wind rustling like insect wings, this tidal wave reaches their naked bodies, filling the sheets with the damp aroma of leaves and the bitter freshness of the plains. The wall facing the bed does not exist, only gaps in the charred timbers, the havoc wrought by the fire of two weeks ago. Beyond this space, the purple, resinous flesh of the stormy sky swells heavily. The first and last May storm of their shared life.

She gets up; draws the table toward the corner that is most sheltered from the deluge; then pauses beside the gaping wall. He stands up, goes to join her, slips his arms around her, his mouth buried in her hair, his gaze lost in the seething darkness outside the gap. A long, soaking wet ribbon of wind clings to their skin; the man shivers and murmurs in the woman's ear: "So you never feel the cold, then…" She laughs softly: "I've been out here on the steppes for over twenty years. And you… a year? There you are… You'll get used to it. You'll see…"

A train shakes the track heavily very close to the house. The puffing of the engine cuts into the darkness, through the rain. The mass of cars comes to a halt beneath the windows, the beam from a lamp rakes through the room. The man and woman are silent, pressed close together. From the train there arises a blend of sibilant voices, groans, a long gasp of pain. Men, wounded beyond repair for the front, being evacuated into the depths of the country. It is strange to feel his own body so alive and still stirred by pleasure. This woman's shoulder held in his fingers' caress, the slow, warm throb of the blood there in the hollow of his groin. The slithering of an amber bead beneath his foot. And the thought that tomorrow they will have to gather them all up, repair the necklace…

Most stunning of all is the very idea of tomorrow, and of hunting for those tiny spheres… Here, in a house barely seventy miles from the front line, in this country foreign to the woman and still more foreign to the man… The train moves off below the windows and begins its rhythmic drumming on the steel. They listen as the jolting sounds fade beneath the swish of the rain. The woman's body is burning hot. "Out here on the steppes for over twenty years…," the man recalls and smiles in the darkness. Since they met the day before yesterday, he has had time to talk to her about what has occurred in France during those twenty years. As if it were possible to remember everything, as if he could reel off all the events one after the other, starting in 1921, right up to June 1940, when he left the country…

The rain bounces off the floor; they feel a veil of dampness over their faces. "Do you think he'll really be able to prevail? Get the people to accept him?" she murmurs. "Without an army, without money. It's all very well his being a general…" He does not reply at once, struck by the strangeness of these moments: a woman who for so many years had not heard herself called by her true given name ("Shura" is the name they use here when speaking to her, Shura, or sometimes Alexandra); his having become a Russian pilot; this house gutted by an explosion; this township on the banks of a great river, in the middle of the steppes, where preparations are under way for a gigantic battle…

A bird frightened by the storm hurtles into the room, weaves a jerky flight through the darkness, and makes its escape through the gap.

"It's true that he has very few people around him," murmurs the man. "And, as for the English, I don't know if we can count on them… But you know, it's like a battle in the air. It's not always the number of planes that decides it, nor even how good they are. It's… How to explain it? It's the air. Yes, the air. Sometimes you feel the air is supporting you, playing on your side. The air or heaven itself. You just have to have great faith in it. For him, too, it's heaven that will play a greater part in this than anything else… That's what he believes."

Over the course op this journey I have often calculated the years that separated me from those two lovers.

"Fifty years, give or take a month or two…" I tell myself once more, watching through the aircraft's window the monotony of the night hours over Siberia. Fifty years… The number ought to impress me. But instead of amazement, I have a vivid sense of the presence of those two beings within me, of their deep connection to what I am.

Outside, one can only walk by thrusting a pike or a ski pole into the carapace of snow swept clean by the blizzard. Indoors, in the izba's long mess hall, the steel stove is red hot. The air smells of burning bark, dark brown tobacco, and ninety-proof alcohol laced with cranberry syrup. It is scarcely an hour since I arrived, the goal has been reached, I am there in the house that is known as "the Edge." ("It's right at the edge," a local inhabitant told me, as he showed me the way. "At the edge of what?" "Just at the Edge. That's what they call it. It's the last house. You'll see. There's a helicopter pad over there. Mind you, in this blizzard you won't see a thing now. Whatever you do, don't let go of the cable!") I began walking, bent double under the snow squalls, my knapsack swaying around on my back, one hand gripping an old ski pole, the other sliding along a thick rope stretched between one house and the next.