The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme

2

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.

"The ones who've not been rehabilitated…" The most widely shared and most jealously cherished myth among the pupils at the orphanage was precisely this: the hero-father, after being unjustly condemned, is finally rehabilitated, he returns, walks into the classroom, interrupts the lesson, and inspires silent rapture in both the female teacher and the rest of the class. A handsome officer, his tunic ablaze with medals. There were other variants on this: fathers who were Arctic explorers, fathers killed in battle, ones who were submarine captains. But the return of the rehabilitated hero took precedence over all the other legends, for it was closer to the truth. It was the special function of this establishment to house the children of men and women who had distinguished themselves during the last war but who had subsequently proved unworthy of their heroic exploits. Such, at least, was the version communicated to us, sometimes with a degree of tact, it must be conceded, sometimes with all the venom of a supervisor in a rage: "Like father, like son…"

"Look at them all slaving away, the little canaries!" Village had just appeared out of the darkness and was pointing up at the windows, where the heads of the pupils could be seen. "Birds in a cage," he added with mild scorn. We set off once more. At that time I did not fully understand what lay behind the engineer's words (we were eleven- and twelve-year-olds, Village must have been fourteen, for he had repeated the same grade at least two years running), but I had grasped the main thrust: another era was beginning that would make our daydreams more unrealistic than ever. The handsome officer, rehabilitated at last, was going to remain forever outside the classroom door, would never bring himself to throw it open now.

These thoughts distracted me, and as we braced ourselves to heave the bin up a slope, I slipped and found myself on the ground with a gash on my thigh from the rusty steel. "Lucky devil! You're done for the day," Village observed, feeling the wound. "Hurry and go see the nurse!"

So there was this day of rest, but above all the obsessive recollection of a woman lifting her left breast and then of my own presence a few inches away from this woman, in the intimacy of a stolen secret.

Love makes us vulnerable. I dare say those who attacked me two days later had sensed in me the weakness of someone in love. All relationships at the orphanage were governed by lines of force stretched to extremes. You had to maintain your position in the hierarchy of the strong and the less strong at all costs. Precisely as in a prison or in the underworld. I was neither one of the young gang leaders, of which there were several, nor one of the underdogs. Attacks were not made at random, however, for even the puniest of us might be clutching between his fingers a thick five-kopeck piece sharpened into a razor blade.

During one break (I was gazing through the glass at the bare trees outside and telling myself that the nurse must be able to see them from her window too), a blow from someone's shoulder thrust me over against the wall, creating a space around me in the crowd of pupils, which quickly parted. It was a little gang leader surrounded by his bodyguard. His face, as is often the case with southerners, already had the texture of a man's and exhibited all the little grimaces of virility, all the tics of a young male who knows he is handsome. A few insults, to initiate the brawl, followed by hoots of laughter from the gang. Finally, as he spat out a mixture of spittle and the scraps of tobacco that stuck to his lip, this sentence, in which his superiority found its ultimate expression, scornful and almost languid: "Look, we all know about your father. The firing squad shot him like a dog…"

Every single one of our codes had been flouted. While we often insulted and fought with one another, we never laid a finger on the legend of the hero-fathers. I hurled myself at him, as he was already turning his back, leaving his henchman to take care of me. Others joined in, excited by the general melee, happy to upgrade themselves in a pecking order suddenly thrown into chaos.

I was rescued by the appearance of a teacher at the end of the hallway. I stood up, hastily adjusting my shirt, which had lost several buttons, and wiping my nose, which was bleeding. In our world aggressors and victims were punished without distinction.

In the toilet area, with my face upturned under the icy jet from a faucet, I gradually recovered my wits. As I waited for the bleeding to stop, I even had time to reflect on the sally that had imperiled all our legends: "Your father gunned down like a dog…" Naturally this little warlord, who was testing his virility, knew nothing about the matter. Or rather, he knew that this tale would serve for every one of our fathers: lapsed heroes who had become mired in drink, crime, or, worse still, dissidence, and who would end their days in a camp, or beneath the bullets of some guard perched high on his watchtower. He had said it out loud but for a while now we had all been aware that cracks were appearing in the heroic myth. And even without listening to the old heating engineer's words as he burned Khrushchev, my fellow pupils could sense that the time when hope was still possible was drawing to a close. It was the middle of the sixties (November 1965, to be precise). Ill informed as we were, we did not know the word "thaw," and yet we were, quite literally, the children of the Thaw. It was thanks to that bald, tubby man, whose books they were burning, that we lived in the relative comfort of an orphanage and not behind the barbed wire of a reeducation colony.

At the time I understood all this very confusedly. A presentiment, a vague anxiety shared with the others. There was a kind of relief, too: it was not my lovesick demeanor that provoked the others' aggression. Quite simply, our little world was beginning to fall apart and one of the first fragments had just come and hit me in the face.

In a novel it would be possible to evoke many nuances to that day and the pain of that day, to invent days that led up to it and followed it. But all that stays in my memory of it is the figure of a boy, standing upright beside the wall, with his nose in the air, squeezing it between his thumb and index finger. The bathroom's dirty little windows look out over a row of bare trees, the meander of a river, a muddy road. The boy smiles. It has just occurred to him that if all he had suffered had been a simple nosebleed he could have reported to the infirmary, gone in, asked for treatment… As in the scene he had dreamed of a thousand times. But his nose is hideously swollen. (Show it to the woman in her white coat? Never!) Another time, perhaps. Blood and pain suddenly seem marvelously linked to the promise of love. He relaxes his finger and thumb, wipes his face, listens. Outside the door, the silence of a long, empty corridor. Over there, gathered in their classrooms, are boys and girls who can still live in their heroic lies. He has just lost the right to dream. The truth tastes of blood spat into the sink and the poignant beauty of the first snowflakes, which he suddenly notices outside the windowpane. Their white, stellar perfection swallowed up by the thick, rutted mud.

In memory's fragile truth there is also an autumn evening, a room lit by an old table lamp with a blue-green shade, a woman with silvery hair sewing buttons back onto my shirt, our two cups of tea, a book bound in stiff covers with worn leather corners, in which I have just read a sentence I shall still remember thirty years later (although I do not know it at the time): "Thus it came to pass that on the banks of the Meuse, almost as destitute of money as when he had come from thence to Paris in the first flush of youth, one of the purest and fairest soldiers of old France gave his life for the three fleurs-de-lis…"

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.

Was there any logic to this apprenticeship? A work of fiction could easily invent stages in this, progress made, things learned. My memory only retains a handful of moments or apparently unconnected insights. Madeleine Brohant's remark and also that day in the troubled and tempestuous life of the Duchesse de Longeville. When they brought her a glass of water, the adventuress, parched with thirst, hurled herself upon it and declared, with a voluptuous sigh: "Such a shame this is not a sin!"

And yet there was a connection, all the same, between these fragments preserved in the memory. The art of eloquence and epigram, the cult of sense turned on its head, wordplay that made reality less absolute and judgments less predictable. At that time Russian life still resonated with echoes of Stalin's day: "enemy of the People" and "traitor to the Country" were not really out of current use. At the orphanage, indeed, despite our daydreams of heroes, we knew that our fathers had been described in precisely those terms. Once poured into the mold of propaganda, words had the hardness of steel, the heaviness of lead. As he burned Khrushchev's pamphlets, the old heating engineer had muttered the words "arbitrary voluntarism" (an official accusation he must have heard on the radio and had difficulty in articulating), as if it were the complicated name of a shameful disease. We did not know what it meant but we felt an obscure respect for the power of this "ism," which had just brought down the country's top man and compelled our teachers to steer clear of certain passages in our textbooks.

Unconsciously, perhaps, I drew a parallel between this steely language and the lightness of the glass of water that became a sin on the Duchesse de Longeville's lips, or the airy sweetness of an arduous staircase that caused hearts to beat faster. Words that killed and words that, when used in a certain way, liberated.

This contrast had led me one day to Alphonse Martin-ville… My fingers grimy with soot, I was laying out volumes that often fell to pieces in my hands. The doorway of the abandoned room framed a spring sky, tender and luminous, and yet the pages of the book I had discovered beneath a bundle of old newspapers quivered with Jacobinic fury and the clatter of the guillotine. It was Year II of the Revolution and the crowd thirsted for blood. One day, it was the fifteenth of the month of Ventôse, the March rain streamed down the blade of the machine onto the scaffold there had been no time to wash down. A young condemned man appeared: "Stand before us, Alphonse de Martinville!" ordered the Presiding Judge. Surprised to be awarded an aristocratic "de," the young man retorted with a desperado's courage: "But I have come here to be made shorter – not longer." This repartee won over the crowd and pleased the tribunal. A cry went up: "Citizens! Release him!" The rejoicing was general. Martinville was acquitted.

Among all these books, I have remembered some rather against my will on account of the notes in purple ink in the margin. In particular one very heavily annotated one: Will the Human Race Improve? I was at an age when this title did not yet seem comical. I spent a long time studying the elegant "NB"s and "sic"s added by the former owner of the house, the merchant Samoylov, the doughty autodidact, whom I pictured in his study of an evening, with big round spectacles perched on his nose, his brow creased, running his finger along sentences penned by a long-forgotten French thinker.

But as it happens, more than the great classics and the vicissitudes of History, it was a textbook in French dealing with various processes used for tempering blades that for a long time fascinated me. I spent hours deciphering the methods described (I recall: powdered graphite mixed with oil…), trying to construct the replica of a dagger that bore the exciting name of Misericordia. The book gave details of its origin and use. When a knight, brought to the ground and protected by his armor, refused to yield, recourse was had to this long, slender blade, "that pierced the heart like a scorpion's sting."

The French education I was receiving was really not ah that academic.

This particular November evening was like all the others and utterly different. I had ended up telling Alexandra about the fight in which I was confronted by the others, their mocking taunts: "… your father, gunned down like a dog." She broke off from her task, sewing the buttons back onto my shirt, laid it down on the table, and began talking very naturally about my parents, going back over the story I already knew fragments of: their flight, their settling in the north of the Caucasus, my birth, their death…

In a novel, the child would perforce have listened to such an account with grief-stricken attention (how many books would I read, subsequently, often pathetic and lachrymose, about the quest for family origins). But in fact I was sunk in a dull insensibility and followed it with a kind of resigned deafness. Alexandra noticed this, no doubt understanding that what counted for me, for all of us at the orphanage, was not the truth of the facts (broadly speaking similar for all our parents), but the fine legend of an officer unjustly condemned, who would one day throw open the classroom door. She persevered, however, knowing that what she confided to me was being inscribed in my memory, without my being aware of it, and might thus escape being forgotten.

I listened to her distractedly, from time to time glancing at the pages of the book open in front of me, at the sentence I preferred to all the truths of reality: "Thus it came to pass that… one of the purest and fairest soldiers of old France gave his life for the three fleurs-de-lis…"

THE BRAWL THAT HAD MADE IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TO picture a heroic father also had another consequence. Some days later there was this bone that one of the pupils fished up from his plate and threw across the refectory table in my direction. His shout: "Here. Give the dog a bone!" was followed by an outburst of laughter from the whole table and immediately afterward a tense silence, everyone looking down at their food: a supervisor had just appeared at the door. "What do you think you're doing, throwing filth about?" he said angrily, pointing his finger at the bone that had landed near my plate. "No supper tonight! You can clean the corridor outside the 'Lenin Room.' I don't want to see a speck of dirt left there!"

In the solitude of this long corridor that led to the "Lenin Room" (part museum, part treasure house, which honored the great man's memory in every school in the country), I felt almost happy. With that happiness that follows the extinguishing of all hope and teaches us that in the end every grief is bearable. The wet floorboards reflected the light of the single lamp at the end of the corridor. Dazed by the to-ing and fro-ing of the floorcloth, it was as if, beneath the dark, watery surface, my gaze were discovering the illusory depths of a secret world.

The task finished, I lugged the bucket along to the bathrooms. As I washed my hands I noticed brown stains on the wall around the faucet. They were the dried specks of my blood, traces of the fight three days before. There I had bled and with wistful tenderness had thought about the woman massaging her left breast… I threw water over the soiled place, rubbing it hastily, as if someone might have been able to divine its mystery.

I remained for a while in the storage room where the cleaning women kept their brushes and where I had put away my bucket. I liked this place: boxes of brown soap that gave off a pleasant, musky smell, a narrow transom open onto a freezing night, my body pressed against the radiator that warmed my knees through the cloth of my pants… My personal space. It was precisely on that evening that I became aware of it: a tiny island where the world was not an open wound. Away from it, everything hurt. In a claustrophobic reflex, no doubt, I was racking my brains for an escape, a continuation of these moments of tranquillity, an archipelago of brief joys. I recalled one of the last readings at Alexandra's house. I had come across an unfamiliar French word, "estran," meaning "foreshore." She had explained its meaning to me in French. I had pictured this strip of sand liberated by the waves, and, without ever having seen the sea, I had a perfect sense of being there, studying everything the ocean leaves behind on a beach as it retreats. I now understood that this "estran," for which I did not know the word in Russian, was also my life, just like the fifth floor of that ancient apartment building where Madeleine Brohant lived.

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.

She read it both badly and well. Badly, because her voice was monotonous and evidently concerned by the somnolence of one camp and the giggling whispers of another. Well, because the banality of this voice enabled me to forget it, to forget this tall woman with her angular frame, to forget this classroom, and to enter into the nocturnal world of these stanzas, finding myself on an island lost in the middle of an ocean beside a stone tomb that opens once a year, at midnight on the anniversary of the emperor's death. The dead man arises and climbs aboard the ghost ship, which sets sail for "that beloved France where he had left his glory, his throne, his son and heir, and his faithful Guard." He lands by night and rouses the deserted shore with a powerful call that reverberates into the very depths of the country. But his native land remains deaf: "The mustachioed grenadiers are all asleep now, on the plain where the Elbe's waters flow, beneath the snows of cold Russia, in the burning sands of the pyramids." Then he summons his marshals: "Ney! Lannes! Murat…" No one comes to his side. "Some have fallen in battle, others have betrayed him and sold their swords." With a despairing cry he calls out to his son, but in reply hears only the deathly silence of the void. Dawn compels him to leave his native land. He boards the ghost ship, and it carries him back to his remote island.

I had never before had such a feeling of freedom in the face of reality. The beauty of this nocturnal voyage rendered the so-called real world all around me so insignificant that I wanted to laugh: the walls of this classroom, decorated with strips of red calico bearing quotations from Lenin and the last Party Congress; the orphanage building; the chimneys of a vast factory beyond the icebound river. The man who stood on the deck of that spectral ship, this figure in its tricorne hat, had nothing to do with the Bonaparte whose adventures we learned about from our history books, nor with the "literary personage" analyzed by our teacher, nor with that fat little man with his legs apart portrayed in the illustration. The exile returning to the shores of Brittany, sending out his calls to his marshals, was a reality divined by the poet. More true than History itself. More believable, because beautiful.

I knew the voyager on the ghost ship belonged to the land of the four noblemen from Aquitaine, and that he could, like them, encompass it in a single look, from the forests of the east to the dunes beside the ocean. When the hinged lids of our old desks came clattering down at the end of the lesson, I reflected that it might somehow be possible never to lose contact in my mind with this dreamed-of land.

According to the logic of my adolescent quest, I should have plunged into an increasingly disdainful and untamed solitude and adopted the posture of the young king in exile.

A being torn between his dreams of France and reality. A logic both novelistic and romantic. But it all turned out differently. It was reality that suddenly produced a dramatic twist in the plot.

At first it was just a rumor, so improbable that, talking about it during the New Year vacation, we treated it as a bizarre hoax. Our vacations, in any case, were not like those of normal schoolchildren. We would be sent out to clear railroad tracks, often blocked by snowstorms, or else, from time to time, we were lined up in a guard of honor on the occasion of some official visit. Our city's glorious past attracted foreign delegations. Lining the perimeter of a monument to the fallen, we represented "Soviet youth, assembled in evergreen commemoration of the war." It was especially during vacations that they had recourse to us, because at such times normal children were difficult to mobilize. Or when it was particularly cold, too, since parents would refuse to expose their little ones to snowstorms at twenty-five below.

That December it was indeed very cold. Despite being ordered to stand at attention, we jumped up and down in our ranks, the soles of our ancient shoes thumping on the ice, and to warm the cockles of our hearts while waiting for the official procession to pass we discussed this stupid rumor. What joker could have started it?

When lessons resumed the news broke – the rumor was true: next fall the orphanage was going to close.

In the months that followed we learned the details: the pupils would be transferred to ordinary boarding schools, the older ones to professional schools and factories, possibly even in distant towns. But we only really believed it all in June, when after lessons had finished, they ordered us to drag our old desks over to the boiler room. Right up to that day we went on clinging to the hope that it was all a false alarm. And yet each one of us, in his own way, was getting ready to leave.

The orphanage, the equivalent of the prison into which our fathers had vanished, suddenly took on a different character, revealing its hospitable, almost familial side to us. The lives led by other people, whose freedom we had always envied, now alarmed us. We were like the prison inmate who counts the hours at the end of a long sentence and at the same time dreads going outside, often escaping just before the great day, allowing himself to be caught, and settling down to a new number of days to be crossed off.

In outward appearance, our daily life remained the same. The most noticeable change was a kind of solidarity that imposed itself of its own accord, canceling the former hierarchies of weak and strong. Strength, hostile and unknown, now lay outside our walls.

One Saturday evening in January I went up to the sealed-off room where I had almost finished sorting through the books. In the half-light, their worlds came to life, their words resonated softly in my ears. On one of the boxes lay the blade of the future dagger, Misericordia… Alexandra called to me from the landing. I took a last look around me, thinking that I would soon have to leave these books behind for a long time, perhaps forever, and that I would try to carry away within me the land their pages had brought to life.