The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme

7

When I arrived in Jacques Dorme's native town I

felt no disorientation. In Paris I had lived in the rue Myrha, which cuts across the African bustle of the Boulevard Barbes. I had also lodged in the suburbs at Aubervilliers, later on in the outskirts of Montreuil, and subsequently in the Belleville district, where I had ended up no longer noticing the strangeness of this new country.

This little town in northern France was very much a part of that country.

The town hall, in a neat and tidy square, was reminiscent of those elderly Parisian ladies I used to pass occasionally near the Boulevard Barbes: survivors from another era, with carefully groomed clothes and hair, trotting along intrepidly amid this human cocktail squeezed from pulverized continents…

The safe island on which the town hall stood was indeed very tiny. The main street, elegant at the start, rapidly ran out of steam, disintegrating into rough façades, their windows filled in with cinderblocks. The window of a confectioner's was fractured in a number of places and patched with plywood. A little notice announced: "Closed. Owner has had enough." I consulted my street map and turned left.

On the telephone Jacques Dorme's brother had advised me to take a taxi from the train station: "It's quite a long way. We're at the edge of the town…" But I needed to walk, to see this town, to sense what it must have been like half a century earlier. I could not reconcile myself to the idea of climbing out of a taxi, ringing the front doorbell, and going in like someone who knew the area.

A motor scooter passed at full speed, brushed against me, swerved in and out of overturned garbage cans. A beer bottle rolled under my feet, I was not sure if it had been aimed at me or not. The sign bearing the street name was daubed with red. It took me a moment to decipher it: rue Henri Barbusse. Beneath a broken window, dangling from a clothes dryer, scraps of cloth blew back and forth. The glass had been replaced by a blue plastic bag, an unexpected patch of color on a gray-brown wall. Another window on the first floor looked almost bizarre with its little vase of flowers and neat, pale curtains. And in the wan December air an aged hand was closing the shutters, a wrinkled face and the gleam of white hair, eyes that met mine: a woman who might have lived here in Jacques Dorme's time.

The town soon flattened out beneath the roofs of empty warehouses and abandoned garages and disintegrated into moribund little houses. Modern residential dwellings now made their appearance, having waited for the town to lose heart before thrusting up their towers, interspersed with four- or five-story apartment buildings. Subconsciously, I was just comparing them to the suburbs of Moscow, finding the housing here much better designed and with a more humane architecture, when at that moment I noticed a burned-out front door, like the mouth of an enormous furnace, and a line of mailboxes thrown down on a patch of grass covered in garbage bags. The people I saw seemed in a hurry to get home and avoided me when I tried to stop them and ask the way. Two women, one of them very old, her face marked with blue ink, the other young and veiled, listened to me, staring at me in perplexity, as if the place I was looking for were the subject of some kind of taboo. The young woman showed me the direction with a vague gesture and I saw her look back at me, still with that incredulous air.

The low-rise housing zone was separated from the new buildings by the Avenue de l'Egalité, which ran along a blackish, porous wall. I only realized there was a cemetery here when I reached the entrance. One of the gates had been ripped off and hung from the upper hinge. I went in without really going in, just glancing at the first of the graves. "The Verdun sector," one could read on a little pillar. The crosses took the form of swords: all of them too rusty for one to be able to read the names, some of them broken, lying there among broken bottles, old newspapers, dog shit.

Outside a car drove past, blaring out rhythmic chanting, a singer's protesting cries. The silence returned, mellowed by the rustling of bare branches in the wind.

I saw the other car as I was following the cemetery wall, about to turn down into the residential streets. A car surrounded by five or six youths, or rather cornered by them at an intersection. It was not, properly speaking, an assault. They were kicking the sides of the car, laughing and climbing onto the hood, tugging at the door handles. The driver, who was trying to get out to push them away, was forced to remain stooped, neither sitting nor standing, for they had trapped his leg in the door. One of them, a can of beer in his hand, was gargling and spitting out the froth into the car.

It may have been this spitting that propelled me toward the group. I noticed the driver's foot, a fine black shoe, a long sock, and the very pale skin revealed beneath the trouser leg, which the edge of the door had rolled back, an old man's skin, crisscrossed by dark veins. There was nothing heroic about my impulse, just a sudden inability to tolerate the sight of this old foot, comically pawing the asphalt. And probably the outcome of my intervention would have been quite different had it not been for two motor scooters that suddenly emerged around the cemetery wall and began pursuing one another in and out of the narrow alleyways. Four of the young men clinging to the car ran off to watch the chase. The other two remained, finding that harassing the driver was more entertaining.

One of them continued spitting and choking with laughter. The other was leaning against the door with all his weight and drumming on the car roof with his fists, as on a tom-tom… I hit the spitting youth as hard as I could, with a blow designed to knock him down. He swayed, his back planted against the car, and I had time to see a flash of surprise in his eyes, the astonishment of one who had thought himself unassailable. He dodged the second blow and began running, shouting that he would come back with his "brothers." I grasped the other one, in an attempt to free the door. He twisted around, spewing out a mouthful of the French I most detested: that new French, made up of verbal filth and acclaimed as the language of the young. The old man's leg was still trapped by the door. I saw a hand feverishly trying to wind up the window, and on the passenger seat the figure of a woman, with very delicate fingers folded over a box of pastries. The next few seconds of struggle seemed predictably ugly and drawn out. As ugly as this handsome young face ("a handsome face combined with a foul mouth," I was to think later). As long-drawn-out as the maneuvering of the young man, unable to pull a switchblade out of his pocket. He pressed the button too soon and the blade at once cut through the cloth of his jeans. I leaned my arm harder against his throat. His voice hissed, then fell silent. For a moment his mouth opened dumbly, then suddenly his eyes grew cloudy and at all once flickered in a basic animal refusal to suffocate. His body collapsed like that of a puppet. I loosed my grip, pushed him toward the sidewalk. He staggered away, stumbling, rubbing his throat and hissing threats in his broken voice.

The door slammed, the car drove off and turned in to an avenue.

Now several minutes spent wandering around with a feeling of nausea, compounded with useless anger and belated fear, fear arriving in sickening gusts that corresponded to the buzzing of the scooters in the streets. But most of all, a vivid awareness of the total futility of my intervention. I could at this very moment have been lying in the gutter with a switchblade between my ribs. And it would have changed nothing and surprised no one, for there are so many small towns like this, so many old men attacked. Now my anger turns against the driver, who had had the stupidity to stop and parley instead of putting his foot down and driving home. I feel more remote than ever from this country. What am I doing interfering in its life, reprimanding young armed gorillas, playing the good citizen, with my stateless person's identity card in my pocket…?

The burning sensation from these words delays my search. I finally find the Allée de la Marne but number sixteen appears to be nonexistent. I cross the road twice, study each of the houses, feeling certain I have recognized Jacques Dormes, without being able to see the number. But the number, precisely, is missing. I walk along the street in the other direction: a sequence of two-story houses, with bare gardens. In the depths of a room, a feeling of expectation that goes back a long way. An open garage door and on the other side of the street, at number eleven, an old woman thrusting her hand into the mailbox, finding nothing, taking advantage of these moments to observe me. Or rather, she pretends to look for letters while scrutinizing this strange passerby who is now retracing his footsteps. So as not to alarm her I call out from some way off: "Number sixteen, Madame?" Her voice is strangely beautiful, strong, the voice of an elderly singer, one might think: "Why, it's over there, Monsieur. Just behind you…" I turn, take a few steps. The open garage door hides the ceramic circle with the number on it. Inside a man is cleaning the windshield of his car with a sponge. I recognize him immediately: the old man with elegant black shoes. Jacques Dorme's brother, "Captain," as I called him, in accordance with Alexandra's stories.

I tell him my name, remind him of our conversations on the telephone, my letters. His smile does not entirely succeed in obliterating the hint of sourness lurking in his wrinkles. I do not know if he recognizes me as the man who intervened just now. It seems as if he does not. He closes the garage, invites me to come up into the house, and on the front steps asks me this question, which ought to be utterly banal. "Did you find it easily? Did you come by taxi?" It is not banal, a tiny quaver in his voice betrays the secret tension with which these words are uttered. So he has recognized me… Settled in the drawing room, we talk about the town and succeed in avoiding the slightest allusion to what has just happened in the Avenue de l'Egalité. His wife enters, offers me her hand, those fragile fingers I saw clutching a beribboned cardboard box. Her face, with its Asiatic impassivity (she is Vietnamese), shows no trace of emotion. "I'll bring tea," she says with a slight smile and leaves us alone.

I have nothing new to tell him. In my first letter, thirty pages long, I set down with the assiduity of a chronicler everything I knew about Jacques Dorme, about the Alsib, about the week the pilot spent in Stalingrad. No, not everything, far from that. Like an archaeologist, I simply wanted this history to be added to the history of their country, like a national art object discovered abroad and repatriated. I talk about my journey to Siberia, to the house on the Edge, about the Trident mountain… That journey, made at the beginning of the year (we are now in December), is still vividly present, with the sounds of the wind, voices made clear by the cold. However, my enthusiasm in recounting it seems to embarrass the Captain. He senses my purpose: the repatriation of a parcel of history that got lost in the snowy wastes of eastern Siberia. I feel his face growing tense, his eyes see me without seeing me, peering into a past that suddenly reappears in front of us, in this drawing room, on this December afternoon. I interpret his emotion incorrectly and lay my cards on the table: I am writing a book that will rescue the French pilot from oblivion, the press will be interested in him, and, as I know the place where he died, it will be possible to bring his mortal remains back to France, to the town of his birth…

I break off, seeing his lips painfully stretched, attempting an unsteady smile. His voice is pitched higher than before, almost shrill: "To France? To the town of his birth?

What for? To bury him in that cemetery that's become a garbage dump? In this town where people don't dare leave their homes anymore? For him to listen to that racket?"

A car drives along the street; the torrent of chanting, backed by a rhythmic drumbeat, rips into the house. The noise of scooters cuts through the rap. The Captain says, or rather shouts, something, but I do not hear him. He realizes I have not heard him. I catch only the last few words: "… to be spat upon…"

Time stands still. I watch his face as swift shudders pass across it and his chin trembles. He is an old man fighting off tears with all his strength. I remain motionless, mute, totally incapable of any gesture or word that might break the deadlock of grief confronting grief. The wretched Parisian critic, who will later refer to me as an immigrant, will be right: I shall never be French, for I do not know what should be said in a situation like this. In Russian I know. In French I shall never know and, indeed, shall never want to know what to say… His eyes remain dry, and simply grow red.

With an abrupt tensing of his jaws he succeeds in gaining control of his face, which now looks hollow, as if after a long period of mourning. In a dull, jaded voice he chokes more than he says: "No, no, there's no point… The press, speeches… Too late… And besides, you know, Jacques was a very private person…" I see his lips twitching again. He gets up, turns toward the photos hanging on the wall. He needs to be unobserved for a few moments. I get up, too, and stand behind him, listening to his commentary. On one of the photos the two of them are on the front steps of the house. Of this house. On this street. The tone of his remarks is still uneven, often sliding up into high registers it is painful to hear.

The chink of crockery can be heard from the kitchen. He grasps at the pretext: "This tea of yours, Li En, is it ready?" His wife appears at that very moment, a tray with teacups in her hands, as if to say: "I wanted to leave the two of you to talk, man to man. Don't you understand?" He does understand, helps her to set down the tray, stops her leaving, squeezes her shoulders: "You stay with our guest. I'll see to the cake…" He goes into the kitchen. His wife, seeing me in front of the photos, picks up the thread of the interrupted commentary. "That one, that's in Saigon…" A jetty, the pale side of a boat, her and him, dressed in white, young, their eyes blinking in the sunlight. "This one's in Senegal. And that's in your country, at Odessa. Eisenstein's famous steps…" She talks to me about their travels, not as tourists do, but simply running through the various stages of their life.

"Li, I can't find the little cake knife!" She smiles at me, excuses herself, goes to join her husband in the kitchen. I walk around the armchairs, stop at the other end of the drawing room. A portrait on the wall: a young man with a serious, open face, a bushy mustache, and in the corner of the photo, the date, 1913. The father.

This hour spent in the house where Jacques Dorme was born leaves me with an impression of imminent departure.

Not that of my return to Paris, no. Rather the clear perception that what we say is being uttered for the last time, and that, when we have finished our tea, we shall have to get up, take a last look at the photos in their frames, leave the place behind. We all three experience, and each of us can sense in the others, the beginning of a separation, a distancing, now arising between us and the house, one that is all the more painful because our hands can still touch the back of this old armchair and our eyes still meet the gaze of a portrait on the wall.

And yet their house, a true family house, is deeply permeated with the slow memory of the generations, with the human aura taken on by furniture and objects, linking lives from father to son, marking deaths, greeting the return of prodigal children. I feel exactly as if I have returned after a long absence, to discover what I had known in Alexandra's house. The room where she used to read to me seems, in my memory, to be adjacent to this drawing room where we are drinking tea. The France I pictured through all those pages we once read is here in the gaze of these portraits, in the words I am now hearing. But this rediscovered house will become a dream once more.

Our conversation, in which I know there must be no further mention of Jacques Dorme, often teeters on the brink of this erasure. The Captain talks about the church I saw on my way here, a local curiosity. And then falls silent, embarrassed, recalling at the same moment as myself, no doubt, the old walls covered in graffiti, the dark corners behind the apse, stained with urine. He shows me a book with a red-and-gold cover, the first he read as a child. He opens it with a smile, recites the first part of a sentence, closes it abruptly: the din of the joyriding in the street stops him from speaking. For several seconds we do not move, exchanging embarrassed glances, waiting for the racket to cease. Amid the rhythmic yelling of the singer a rhyme can be heard: "He's in the hole – she's wearin' a stole." The class struggle…

Going out onto the front steps, we pause for a moment in the half-light of the winter dusk, the Captain fingering a bunch of keys, me trying to make out the bottom of the garden where the trees give the illusion of a veritable wood. Li En speaks in a perfectly level voice, without bitterness: "In the old days you could feel quite remote in the copse there. But now, with that parking lot…" I take a few steps. Beyond the branches of the trees looms a flat, ugly supermarket building, surrounded by a stretch of asphalt, from which comes the metallic clatter of shopping carts being stacked. "Right. We can leave now," announces the Captain, and leans forward to kiss Li En.

This simple remark, this word, "leave," suddenly explains everything. We are not leaving, it is the country, their country, their France, that is moving away, being replaced by another country. This house, surrounded by bare trees and the foliage of yew bushes, dark green, almost black, is evocative of the last rock of a submerged archipelago.

I shake hands with Li En and prepare to take my leave of the Captain, but he stops me: "No, no, I'll drive you to the station," and leads me toward the gate, despite my protestations. I sense that for him this is more than a gesture of courtesy. He needs to demonstrate, to the foreigner I am, that he is still at home in this street, this country.

As he is opening the garage I have time to take one more look at the front of the house, the gate with its railings, the steps up to the door. I tell myself that during the century now drawing to a close this house has twice witnessed the same scene: a man carrying a military knapsack on his shoulder walks over the road, reaches the crossroads, and turns back to wave to a woman standing beside the gate at number sixteen. A man going off to the front. The crossroads… Where an hour ago the Captain's car was covered in spittle. In the darkness I see the beams of headlights sweeping over the crossroads, engines roaring. The fun's not over yet.

The Captain invites me to get in, and the car heads for the crossroads. He could turn off before he reaches it, go down one of the side roads. But we travel back past the precise place where the couple was set upon. A motor scooter appears, follows us, presses up close beside the car for several yards, then lets us go. I watch the Captain's face discreetly. It is a mask with tensed lips, his eyes slightly screwed up, as if from a profound weariness of vision.

Just before we get there I try my luck one more time. I ask him if he would agree to his brother's story appearing under the cover of a fictitious name, that of a character in a novel. He seems to hesitate, then confides to me: "You know, when he was very young all Jacques ever dreamed of was becoming a pilot. He had one idol, an ace in the Great War, René Dorme. He talked about him so often that we ended up nicknaming him 'Dorme.' We used to tease him: 'Frère Jacques, dormez-vous? His friends at school always called him 'Dorme.' And he was proud of it, you know. The few letters he sent from the front, he always signed them with that nickname…"

In the train I shall muster a review beneath my eyelids of the various stages in the life of this French pilot: Spain, Flanders, Poland, the Ukraine, Stalingrad, Alsib… Little by little, as the eyes slowly adjust to it, this life will take on the name of Jacques Dorme.

IN THE LETTER I RECEIVED TWO YEARS AFTER OUR MEETING the Captain made a few sober and appropriate remarks about the book I had sent him, this novel in which I told the story of Alexandra's life, or rather dreamed up a life for her. Jacques Dorme did not appear in it. The Captain had no doubt taken this omission to be out of respect for our agreement. I had not had the courage to tell him the French pilot had been sacrificed because he was considered to be "too true for a novel." Like the old general in the middle of the sunbaked steppes beside the Volga…

His letter was penned in that precise and subtle French whose use was becoming rare in France. Struck by the elegance of his style, I did not immediately discern a slight hint of disappointment lurking behind his words: unspoken approval at seeing our agreement respected and at the same time this barely perceptible regret at not seeing it broken. Indeed, expressed in the lines he had written, or rather between these lines, was a hope that, by means of some literary magic, Jacques Dorme might live again, without being subjected to the idle curiosity of a country he would no longer have recognized as his own.

It was the contradiction I had sensed in his letter, this hesitation between a fear of complete oblivion and a refusal to condone a revelatory memoir, that suggested this unpretentious genre to me: a chronicle in which the ruling device would be faithfulness to the bare framework of the facts. With the pilot's name replaced by his nickname.

A year later my thoughts turned again to this modest narrative task on a journey back from Berlin. In no other city had I seen so many efforts to commemorate the past and such a triumphal will to flatten this past beneath the foundations of a new capital, arising like a phoenix. If the truth be told, I preferred this brutal flattening to what was being thought and said in France. To the condescending irony of that historian I once found myself sitting next to on a television panel. With his petty air of mocking disdain, he had spoken of "Adolf Hitler's pygmy campaigns." The participants had smiled, as if at an epigram, before continuing with the verbal ping-pong, noting Frances shameful inaction and the fact that the severity of the Russian winter had happily blocked the Nazis' advance… I should have responded immediately, reminded them that this particular pygmy warrior had defeated the most powerful armies in the world and, having come close to the carotid artery of the Volga, had stood within an ace of final victory. Impossible to get a word in edgewise, the talk came thick and fast. Then the memory of a gesture came back to me: a French pilot spreads out a map and covers the violet hexagon of his country with a matchbox, which he then applies to the red expanse of the Soviet Union. This gesture would have been the best possible response to these television strategists. But the broadcast was already reaching its conclusion with a sneering observation by one of the participants: "What happened at Stalingrad was that one brand of totalitarianism wrung another's neck! That's all!"

At this moment I felt able to understand the Captain's hesitations better than ever… Even as our makeup was being removed, four or five young women were awaiting their turn to be powdered for the cameras, all in a morbidly excited state, as is often the case with guests in the antechambers to these media bazaars. They were novelists and the theme they were due to discuss was: "Sex: can the pen have the last word?"

After the broadcast that evening, I reread an old pamphlet I had found among the bookstalls beside the Seine. Printed on terrible, dull, rough paper, published barely three months after the fall of France in June 1940, and drawing no historical lessons, it brought together the military exploits of the French campaign. A fragmentary chronicle, and, of course, one subject to German censorship, a series of sketches made at the time: the defense of a village, hand-to-hand fighting in a township, the loss of a ship…

Dates. Names. Ranks. A war seen by soldiers and not the one acted out all over again half a century later in the history books:

Following this, a retreat over seven days of continuous fighting brought the regiment into the Charmes region. Four French divisions, drawn up in defense and surrounded on all sides, fought there without hope. The Eighteenth Infantry Regiment had lost more than half its strength…

Now the battle took on a character of extraordinary ferocity. They fought with grenades and at certain points with bayonets. Captain Cafarel defended his own command post himself, and was killed… During these two days the Second Battalion of the Seventeenth Regiment of the Algerian Infantry Corps lost twelve out of fifteen of its officers, all but four of its noncommissioned officers, four-fifths of its strength. They died heroically, without having yielded an inch…

The strength of the Division was now reduced to a few men. At 1800 hours, seeking to complete the operation, the enemy launched a massed attack. Using the weapons of the wounded and dead, the cavalry of the Second Division resisted. The machine guns fired their last rounds. The enemy was repelled…

The torpedo boat Foudroyant sank rapidly For a few minutes the ship's stern stayed above the water. With magnificent gallantry, Commander Fontaine remained standing upon the stern until his vessel had sunk entirely from view…

That night the chronicle of Jacques Dormes life truly began to write itself inside me. I knew that, in addition, I would have to talk about that boy who was to discover a country where the four gentlemen of Aquitaine lived, as well as the soldier in the last square and that other one, who died on the banks of the Meuse "almost as destitute of money as when he had come from thence to Paris." Thirty years later they all had a close kinship in my mind with Captain Cafarel, Commander Fontaine, and the Second Battalion of the Seventeenth Algerian Infantry Corps.

I went back to jacques dorme's town a week after my return from Berlin. My plan on this occasion was to stay in a hotel and spend several days there, taking time to reconstruct the town as it used to be, in the way one restores a mosaic; but one in which, instead of tesserae, there would be the hundred-year-old tree beside that church covered in graffiti, the sign for a bakery, the florid lettering that had not changed since the years between the wars; the picture of a street untouched by the ugliness of satellite dishes. I thought I would be able, if only for the space of a glance, to reconstruct what Jacques Dorme saw in his youth, what his native town, his native land had been.

I telephoned the Captain several times without ever hearing either his voice or that of Li En. Silent, too, was the ritornello of their answering machine, with its ironic politeness, that had always made me smile. If I had had to invent such moments in the plot of a novel, I would probably have spoken of growing unease, imagining the worst… In reality my first thought was simply of death. And the most intense response provoked by this thought was not sadness nor even remorse at having delayed and wasted time on all those trivialities that generally go with a book's publication. No, I felt afflicted with muteness. It was as if the language in which I had spoken with the Captain was no longer spoken by anyone else.

In the train I told myself that this feeling of speaking a dead language was one that Alexandra must have experienced throughout her life in Russia.

In the Allée de la Marne, there were no signs of death. There was simply a sense of absence, emptiness behind the closed shutters of number sixteen. The garage door was covered in fluorescent scrawls that had lost their aggressiveness with the passage of time. The lengths of wire fastening the "For Sale" sign to the gate were rusty. But there were no papers spilling out of the mailbox. I turned around on hearing the voice I knew: it was the neighbor from number eleven, whom I had supposed to be a retired professional singer. "I'm the one who collects all the junk mail. You have to do that, otherwise they set fire to it. That's what they did to my neighbor across the road…" She opened the box, took out a leaflet. She had spoken of "them" without any rancor, with resignation, rather, the way they talk about the weather in those northern lands.

"Li En has gone to Canada. She's thinking of settling down over there, near her sister…" We walked diagonally across the road, from number sixteen to number eleven.

Thinking I was up to date, the "singer" did not say much more, just a few words about Li En going away, taking her husband's ashes.

Left alone in the Allée de la Marne, I pictured those last moments before her departure very intensely. Lien's face, that pale, impassive mask and the force of that Asian stare that spoke of her pain better than a face distorted with grief would have done. I saw her walking down the steps, closing the gate, taking the steering wheel…

At the crossroads she had passed over I stopped. In the opaque humidity of dusk the streetlights were becoming suffused with a milky blue. In a telephone booth with broken doors a receiver dangled, and there was a sound of whispering voices, just as if someone could still be making a call there. The wind ruffled the charred pages of a telephone directory.

At the center of the row of houses beside the Allée de la Marne I could just make out the gate of number sixteen. I decided that to understand Jacques Dorme's country, those hundred yards were enough, the distance between the house a man has just left to go to the war and this crossroads, where he turns back to take a last look at those who will remain behind to wait for him.

As it takes off, the helicopter banks steeply and I have time to glimpse the house on the Edge, the glow from the kitchen windows. It seems to me as if the pilot is also glancing at this radiance. Perhaps the very last glimmer of light between here and the Arctic Ocean, I say to myself, and I find it difficult to get the measure of this white infinity opening up before us and ingesting our frail cockpit, like a bubble of warm air, in a huge, icy inhalation.

The untouched emptiness of the Chersky mountain chain.

The height of the peaks is increasing imperceptibly, as can be judged from the disappearance of the little dark stripes, the trunks of the dwarf trees, that until a few moments ago were still managing to find a foothold at this extreme limit of the tundra. Higher up there are only two textures, ice and rock. And two kinds of surface: the granite-hard snowfields and the naked crags of the pinnacles.

It was on one of these snowfields that we landed, after an hour of flight. Seen from above, the ground appeared quite vast, but as we descended it became enclosed between two white walls, revealing itself to be a long hanging valley flanked by steep, icy slopes. I help the two Levs to unload their equipment and balance it on a small, flat sled.

"How many firecrackers have you got?" the pilot asks them. Big Lev gets muddled up trying to count them. Little Lev calls out with the zealous air of a Boy Scout: "Twelve, Chief. We'll start when the sun's up and we'll be finished before it sets. After that, just time to get back on board." The sun has not yet risen. Today it will be there for an hour and thirty-five minutes, the pilot explains to me… The geologists move off in the direction of a slope that rises in uneven terraces. Extending his arm toward a hollow in the rock, the pilot shows me the way. I'll have to skirt the obstacle of a glacier, leave the valley, traverse a narrow saddle until the moment when the summit, which will at first look like a vast monolith, divides up into three bare peaks: the Trident… "They have twelve charges today, our bombardiers. So you'll hear twelve explosions. Count them carefully At the last one turn back immediately. They'll still have their rocks to gather up. Then we'll take off at once. We won't be able to wait for you…"

I set off, glancing several times at the crenellation of the mountains all around our landing ground, trying to take note of a few features. Already the sky is almost light; the sun will rise in half an hour… Just as I am making my way around a rock with an icy fissure gouged out of it and losing sight of the landing ground, I hear the first explosion.

The echo of the seventh, multiplied by the mountain, reaches me at the very moment when a huge, rocky peak with a silvery density comes into view. Its shape is suggestive of a great milky flint, coarsely sculpted by the winds. I consult my watch. The sun has already been up for twenty minutes. "Been up" means it slips onto the level of the horizon, invisible behind the peaks, before disappearing for a night more than twenty hours in duration.

As with all mountains, the summit seems to recede as one draws closer. My progress is engulfed in a time that pushes me back and slows me down, like the hard snow on which I slither about. The eighth explosion is followed almost immediately by the ninth, just as if it were its echo. And the summit is still monolithic in form. Perhaps, after all, it is not the Trident. I look about me: there are three or four other peaks all towering up in much the same location. The echo of the tenth explosion catches up with me, already a dull, matte sound that gives a measure of the distance it has traveled. The sun, invisibly, has been in the sky for three-quarters of an hour. I lengthen my stride, try to run, and fall. The snowy ground I push against to raise myself has the dry roughness of emery.

Suddenly, narrow blades of light slice into the summit. Its surface, which seemed flat, molds itself into facets, slopes, grooves where deep violet shadows slumber. The sun has burst through some hidden crevice, an aperture that brings this brief luminous vision to life. The next explosive charge detonates a very long way off. The sequence of reverberations is longer than before. The eleventh? Or already the twelfth, the last one? I do not know anymore if I have counted correctly I remember the pilot's words: "We won't wait for you. Otherwise I'll be hacking all this loose rock to pieces in the dark with my propeller." I begin to run, my eyes on the summit, slip several times, the ground is no longer firm, the wind drives long ribbons of spindrift before it. At every step, however, the change is perceptible. The rays of light grow broader, break up the summit, dividing the mountain into three immense crystals. This looks less like a trident than a bird's broken wing. I stumble into a slope, stop, my breathing flayed raw by the cold. The grayish mass of a glacier bars the way. I study the three illuminated sections of the mountain: the rock is barely whitened with frost, the snow, rare in these lands with dry winters, fails to cling to the smooth walls. Vertical buttresses, ravines, high cols where frozen snow accumulates, scarcely reshaped by the millennia. And the rays of light already beginning to fade. Nothing else. Nothing…

Suddenly I see the cross formed by the aircraft.

Two dark crossed lines against the pale suede of the frost. They are not in the triangles of sunlight on the summit but much lower down, near the base of the massif. The silhouette of the aircraft is easily recognizable; it is not a plane that has broken up in a crash, but one that, in attempting to land, has become embedded in the rock and has remained there, welded to this mountain, to this Arctic wasteland, its nights without end.

No thought speaks within me. No emotion. Not even joy at having achieved the goal. Only the certainty of experiencing the essence of what I had to understand.

The sun's breakthrough is weaker now. But the aircraft is still visible. I can even see the gleam of the cockpit. Beneath its glass a glimmer of life can be sensed. A silent life, focused on a past, of which soon nothing more will remain on this earth. The life that our words, clumsily, sometimes refer to as death, sometimes oblivion, sometimes the memory of men.

Then the phrase uttered by that tall old man comes to my mind, as he tried to speak of this life and the distance that separates us from it. "… They can look up to the Heavens without turning pale and upon the Earth without blushing." In a past, long dreamed of and suddenly present, a pilot leaps from his cockpit and stands beside the aircraft, one hand resting on the edge of a wing. I am infinitely close to his silence, I sense the focus of the gaze he directs at the Earth. An old wooden house, lost in the midst of the steppes, a night of war, a woman's slow words, the first ripples of a summer storm, a brief love, whose infinite duration trickles away in a cascade of beads from a broken necklace…

The reverberation from the explosion is a long one and from its echoes arises a prolonged, billowing vibration that becomes increasingly limpid. A resonance that goes on refining itself until it seems to be ringing out beyond our lives, in a distant place, of which this Arctic day is but an ephemeral reflection. Here the echo's notes are fading away, obliterated beneath the hiss of the frost needles the wind sweeps across the ground. But over there the man standing beside his aircraft hears them still. A long farewell song, a song of light.

The ray of sunlight has been gone for a moment now, the cross of the aircraft fades in the swiftly advancing pallor of the night. Snow squalls start to blur the outline of the mountains. I shall not be able to see the rock outcrops noted as landmarks on my outward journey Yet the vibration of the last echo still seems to survive among the summits. A subtle resonance that resists the wind. I sense its vibrations deep within me.

Quite simply, what I must do to find my way back is make sure I keep hearing it.