The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme

4

The sky white with heat, the timeless lethargy of the steppes, a bird flapping its wings, unable to make any progress in a void that was too dense. Like the bird, we moved forward with no other point of reference than the vastness of the plains and a horizon made molten by the flow of overheated air. The gigantic excavator advancing in front of us ripped open the earth's crust with its bucket wheel, tracing an endless straight line. Covered in dust, deafened by the roar of the machine and the grinding of crushed rocks, we dragged along lengthy slabs of pine which the workmen used to reinforce the sides of this future irrigation canal. As if in the mad hope of containing the changeless surge of the infinite with this ephemeral casing… In the evening our weariness could be gauged by the buzzing of a bee that beat against the walls of the barrack hut and which no one had the strength left to chase away. That would have meant getting up, stepping over bodies stretched out on their bunks, flapping a shirt, steering the insect toward the door… But we were already asleep and its hum was blending into the beginnings of our dreams.

To melt into this desert of light was the best way to forget, the best way to mourn, the best way to forget mourning. We talked a good deal less than in previous years, when we had still viewed this summertime penal servitude as a purgatory with promise. Now we knew that the future would not be very different from this daily trudge of ours behind the disemboweling machine, from the absurdly stubborn line of this ditch, whose sides must unremittingly be strengthened.

One day, along with scoops of earth, the digger began hurling out human remains, skulls, soldiers' boots, helmets from the last war. On another occasion there were much older bones, ancient helms, swords brown with rust… possibly a millennium lay between these warriors and the others. A thousand years of sleep. Ten centuries of nothingness. The next day when the machine plowed on, away from these ransacked graves, we saw archaeologists moving into the area. A handful of black specks lost amid the sunlit void of the plain.

As in previous summers, our work was often interrupted: they would disguise us in white short-sleeved shirts and clean pants and take us to appear as extras on vast esplanades, where important visitors were making speeches in front of commemorative monuments and concrete obelisks. In this way we were privileged one day to see a certain North Korean leader, from a distance, as always. He spent a long time reading from a sheaf of papers that the warm breeze, very strong that day, threatened to snatch away from him at every moment. This man, puny and with a slight stoop, was battling to control the flapping sheets, like a seaman unable to master a shivering sail… There was also an African statesman, who decided to hold forth in Russian and spoke very slowly, detaching each syllable from the next and getting the stresses all wrong. The tip of the monument showed greenish white against a dark sky heavy with a storm. The lazy rumbling of thunder beyond the river sounded like muffled laughter someone was trying to repress. But we did not flinch: the photographers needed us in unmoving ranks, with faces all turned in the same direction… Many years later, when I chanced to meet my former comrades, we would regret not having paid more attention to all those V.I.P. guests. As time went by we would have been able to identify them, some still active in political life, some having passed into the pages of history books. But in those days we were simply waiting for the moment when our patience would be rewarded with a dip in the Volga. That summer, however, even these swims did not give rise to the shouting enthusiasm of past times.

The narrow transom window in our barrack hut was broken, and every evening before we went to sleep we would see a beautiful rainbow of light spawned by the crack in the glass, a long peacock's tail suddenly flooding the cluttered interior of our dwelling for a few minutes, slipping along toward the nails where our earth-stained clothes hung. One evening this solar spectrum did not materialize. We were at the end of June, the angle of the sun's rays had changed. Nobody said anything, but I frequently saw glances straying toward our "cloakroom," now left in shadow. Having been completely forgetful of time, that salutary forgetfulness the steppe bestowed on us, we suddenly remembered that this was the last summer we would spend together.

The next morning, very close to the line of the canal, we came upon a wooden cross with a helmet hanging from one of its arms. We gathered around it, intrigued by the anonymity and loneliness of this tomb amid the immensity of these plains blinded by the sun. What we were used to seeing were mountains of concrete celebrating death, gilded inscriptions, effigies of heroes. Here, just two lengths of birchwood with cracked bark, a mound long since leveled by the winds. Strangely enough, the sight of this tomb provoked no distress, offered no invitation to share pain. There was even something light and ethereal, almost carefree, about the cross. Its presence at this spot (why just here and not two hundred miles to the north or south?), the human randomness of its presence, seemed to indicate that what really mattered was happening somewhere other than beneath this rectangle of earth…

On the other side of the channel a supervisor called out to us: "Look alive! We're off now! There's a ceremony…" It was the hallowed formula for our work as extras.

It got off to a bad start this time. We took five hours to reach the site, and, disguised as Pioneers bold and true in our red neckerchiefs, we began to wait, cooped up in the bus at the side of a road. Evidently they were not certain whether they would need us or not. In the old days we would have hatched a rebellion, demanded bread, simulated a collective attack of diarrhea. That day each of us remained alone with his thoughts, some trying to sleep, others taking refuge in the memory of a special day, a special smile. The supervisors seemed more than usually on edge. Yet, according to the rumors, all that was involved was the visit of a general. And we had seen field marshals, even a cosmonaut…

An official in a dark suit suddenly climbed onto the steps of the coach and uttered a kind of whispered shout: "Quick! Get out! They're coming. Quickly! Fall in!" He had a red face, seemed panic-struck.

They led us on the double up to a broad terrain at the top of a hill that was already surrounded by several detachments of young extras. One corner of this living frame appeared to be empty; they filled the breach with our troops. When we were installed there I glanced behind us. In the distance, the empty window frames of a half-finished building were clearly visible. So we were there to hide it from the visitors… What we had to do now, as we all knew from past experience, was to sink as rapidly as possible into a torpid state that would make us impervious to the burning heat of the sun, thirst, and the absurd duration of the ceremony. To concentrate on the shape of a cloud that was gradually, very gradually, growing longer…

Suddenly a swift tensing of muscles around me jerked me out of my drowsy state. Thanks to our communal existence, we had synchronized reflexes. I brought my eyes into focus, observed the open space. A crowd of notables, doubtless the town's administrators, was already present, looking toward the other end of the field, where there was a break in the surrounding line of white shirts, leaving a broad way in. All my comrades' eyes were fixed on this opening. Quite a large group of people was approaching at a steady pace, as always happened in ceremonies of this kind; so far there was nothing extraordinary about this procession…

All at once I saw what was extraordinary.

My first impression was the most unlikely and yet the most accurate: "The Lilliputians leading the captured Gulliver…" The man walking at the center of the group was at least a head taller than all the others. Or rather, his head and shoulders were visible above the bobbing motion of the faces surrounding him. I looked for the glint of a general's gold braid, a cap with the kind of insignia I imagined from the generals' uniforms in our army. But the giant who, from the very first moment, was at the heart of the ceremony, wore a dark suit devoid of any hint of rank. Only perhaps in his gait, in his rather stiff way of planting his feet on the ground, in the firm carriage of his body, was there something military about him. Moreover, as he drew closer, I perceived that it was not his exceptional height that gave him his central position, but his way of shaping the space around him.

I could already see his face, with an expression reminiscent of a wise and disenchanted old elephant, and eyelids that lifted slowly to reveal a penetrating gaze of surprising vitality. Very close to me I suddenly heard someone murmur with admiring apprehension: "Did you see the nose on him?" This powerful eminence was a source of fascination in the land of the steppes, where the flat faces of Asia prevailed. But the enthusiastic whisper in fact portended something else: the arrival of such a man was bound to give rise to something of a sensation.

And the sensation was forthcoming. A man with a kolkhoz director's banal features emerged from the group of town notables and walked toward the old giant, who had stopped with his entourage in the middle of the space. Although we were standing at attention I had a sense of a slight creaking of vertebrae: all necks were being craned toward an incredible spectacle.

For the director of the kolkhoz, or the man who looked like one, was carrying an enormous sturgeon, holding it by its gills. It looked rather as if he were dancing with the monstrous fish, whose mouth was poking into his face and whose tail was trying to wrap itself around the calves of his legs. The creature's weight compelled the dancer to lean his body backward and walk with jerky steps, as if in a strange, swaying tango. He was already drawing close to the giant. Everyone held their breath.

When they were a few paces apart, an optical illusion occurred. The sturgeon began to shrink, to seem less long, less heavy. Finally, when the gift took its place in the guest's hands, the silvery body of the fish seemed almost slender. It was displayed to the audience as a fine fishing trophy, held aloft without apparent effort. The beaming giant's strength was applauded. Then a top administrator, all the way from Moscow, stepped up to the microphone and began speaking, his eyes fixed on the typewritten sheets.

I saw neither the speaker nor the crowd of notables. I had just solved the tall old man's real mystery. At that moment, having entrusted the fish to one of his aides, he had taken advantage of the noise of the ovation, and with a conjuror's dexterity, all the while approving with his head the words his entourage were addressing to him, which he was not listening to, he had slipped his right hand into his jacket pocket, taken out a handkerchief, and rapidly wiped his fingertips, which were no doubt sticky from the sturgeon's slime. I was possibly the only person to have observed his action, and this detail, once noted, gave me the feeling that I had discovered his secret: it was his solitude. He was surrounded, acclaimed, lent himself with grace to all these diplomatic games, he even accepted the slimy monster and knew, by instinct, for how many seconds he should show the gift before handing it to his aide-de-camp. He was utterly present. And yet very much apart, in a profound, pensive solitude.

Now he was listening to the speech, with one ear cocked toward the interpreter, who had to stand on tiptoe. The more pompous the words became, the more remote was his expression. At intervals a look flashed out from beneath his heavy eyelids. Like a tracer it would target the crowd of notables, reach the ranks of the white shirts, land upon the speaker. At one moment his eyes rested on our square, and his eyebrows went up slightly, as if speculating about something that he would like to have had confirmed. But already the speaker was folding up his papers to the sound of obedient applause from the audience. With a measured tread, his head bowed in a gesture of concentration, the old giant made his way over to the microphone, which a technician hastily adjusted upward. He produced no sheet of paper and among the Party officials there was a little flutter of anxiety: words spoken off the cuff were by their very nature subversive.

He spoke. And I was certain I was the only one who understood the language he gave voice to. It was the one I had believed dead. French.

The impression I had of being his only audience was not, by and large, false. The notables were incapable of listening to speeches not written down. The giant's entourage thought they knew in advance what was going to be said. The young extras with their red neckerchiefs were aware of the fine, powerful, occasionally somewhat strident music of his sentences, but not of their meaning. The interpreters were concentrating on the syntax.

He said what had to be said at such a ceremony, in the ponderous presence of a concrete monument upon soil heavy with steel and the mortal remains of fighting men. But now, initiated into his secret, I believed I could hear a silent voice, hidden behind the ringing tones of his speech. He spoke of thousands of heroes, but the hidden voice brought to mind not these nameless, faceless thousands but the one who, perhaps, lay beneath our feet. He spoke of the gratitude of peoples, but a perceptible bitterness made it possible to sense that he knew how ungrateful a people can reveal itself to be toward those who have given their lives to it…

At one moment there was a brief stirring among his entourage. A mouth whispering in an ear, a discreet glance at a watch… The diplomats had no doubt noticed that things were running behind schedule for the visit. Like a hardened orator, the giant ignored this distraction, merely turning his head a little in the direction of their confabulations, with one eyebrow arched, as if to say: "Silence in the ranks!" The sight of these people in their elegant suits irritated him. The rhythm of his words did not change. But his silent voice suddenly became even more audible to me, perceptible as he spoke. "Look at them, these bureaucrats! Already counting the time until the banquet. But do they know how much time it took a company to secure this hill? And how many lives it cost to hold it? Do you know how many eternities each second lasts as you force yourself up from the ground and run out under fire?"

Suddenly he fell silent. Someone thought the speech was finished. Two or three hesitant handclaps rang out. Then everyone froze, their eyes riveted to this man in the middle of the space. His stillness turned him into a tall monolith, indifferent to human emotion. Amid this silence that had fallen from the sky – or so it seemed to us – the hot wind's mighty blast could be heard sweeping across the plain.

For several moments the old giant directed his gaze into the distance, over our heads, beyond the unfinished building they had sought to hide from him, beyond the Volga, and into the endless solitude of the steppes. And I believed he could even see the cross, made from two branches of birchwood above an unknown grave.

This minute of silence (in reality six or seven seconds) was very likely involuntary, but it altered the whole sense of the ceremony. The giant roused himself, and in a final coda, throatier than his earlier words, he spoke of victory, of honor, of the mother country. He lifted up his arms and our hearts went with them. The applause, perhaps for the first time ever at such a ceremony, was sincere.

The officials surrounded him, reforming their Lilliputian escort, and began guiding him toward the downward slope. But, with his art of making space pliant to his will, he broke through their circle and walked with giant strides along the line formed by the young. The extras in their white shirts smiled broadly; each one waved the carnation he had been issued for the occasion. The giant passed by, eyeing them with just a tinge of disappointment. In front of our square he halted. We had no flowers and were not smiling, and remained at attention. I do not know if he understood who we were, with our peeling faces and our cropped hair, the minimal difference between the boys and the girls. I think he did. He must, at all events, have realized that we came from another era, the era they were trying to bury beneath the concrete of the memorial. The era that was dear to him. He looked at us, nodded his head, and screwed up his eyes, as if to say: "Chin up!" And we saw him walking away, not with his entourage, but with an elderly army officer. The two of them had no need of the interpreter weaving his way between them. The military man was making broad gestures, no doubt explaining troop movements, the deployment of artillery pieces, breakthroughs of armored divisions. The old giant approved, making up with his hands for the hesitations of the interpreter, now trailing behind…

I spoke to the supervisor, who was waiting for us beside the bus, in the manner of a condemned man formulating his last request: "There's someone in the city I must see. My aunt… If I'm not allowed to go, I'll run away all the same." He gave me a searching look, gauging the unstable frontier between the unlimited submissiveness we normally displayed and a rebellion that might erupt at the most unexpected moment. At that very moment indeed, just as we were being promised a whole morning of bathing in the Volga the following day. As a good psychologist, he sensed that here was an exceptional case. "If you don't show up tomorrow I'll set the militia on you as a fugitive. It'll be a reeducation colony for you. Don't say I didn't warn you. Now, beat it. You can still catch the last train. Hold on: take this as your ticket."

The following morning Alexandra telephoned him and, on the pretext of sunstroke and a high fever, won for me the handful of days I was to spend with her that came to count for more in my life than some whole years.

I had arrived at about ten o'clock at night and, without explaining anything, told her everything in such breathless haste that it could indeed have been taken for fever or the early stages of drunkenness. The window overlooking the railroad tracks was open, and you could hear the heavy clanking of a train on its way from the Urals. She made tea, lit the lamp. It was only when she asked in a very calm voice, too calm: "So what did he speak about?" that I sensed her emotion.

I took a deep breath and suddenly felt utterly tongue-tied. I could tell her about the handkerchief wiping away the slime from the sturgeon. I recalled the smallest of the giant's gestures. I had even had a memory of the moment when he used the past historic tense of a verb that sounded old-fashioned to my ear (some "naquit" or quite simply "fut") that had struck me like the sighting of a prehistoric reptile. I could easily have said: "He spoke about the war and the victory and the debt all peoples owe to their heroes…" But the real essence of it was not there. It was in that silent voice I believed I had heard, in the gaze he directed toward the forgotten cross in the middle of the plain… Yet how to speak of that? And indeed, was it real or had I dreamed it?

Seeing my confusion, Alexandra thought I had been unable to follow the spoken French or that the content of the speech was too complex for a boy of my age. It was doubtless in order to rescue me from my predicament that, in tones of a very distant reminiscence, she said: "He came here to the city once before. In forty-four. Yes, in the autumn of forty-four. I didn't see him. The hospital was full to bursting. Everyone was working day and night. But we had already talked about him for the first time long before that…"

"Who is 'we'?" I asked, emerging from my torpor. "'We' is myself and… Jacques Dorme." My "sunstroke" lasted for less than a week. But Jacques Dormes life story, the fragmentary sketch of this life story, had time to knit itself forever into what I was. The tale Alexandra told me that July 1966 was one of those you only hear once in a lifetime.

Four years and a few months after that ceremony on the broad plain, I learned of the tall old man's death. The gaze that embraced the steppe beyond the Volga, the moment of silence he had spun out that day, all this had just vanished into eternity. I can still see the newspaper kiosk near the Anichkov Bridge in Leningrad, the page with his picture on it, the report of his death. "The Lilliputians have won," I thought as I bought the paper. I could not yet guess how accurate this phrase was. But I was already grown up enough to know that prior to this death there had been betrayal by some, cowardice by others. Above all the ingratitude of a country whose honor he had once saved.

In my memory, however, he would remain unchanged: an old giant in the middle of a former battlefield, paying homage to fallen warriors. Just one sentence of his, which I was to come across much later in a book, would be added to this vision of him, as if in reply to Alexandra's question as to what he had spoken about: "Now that baseness is in the ascendant it is they who can look upon Heaven without turning pale and upon Earth without blushing."