The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme

6

That summer when Alexandra told me about the French pilot I was thirteen. The questions I asked were about the maximum speed of the Bloch aircraft, the operating range of the bomber Jacques Dorme had shot down, the type of pistol the man in the black leather greatcoat was armed with, the gas mask that allowed you to talk on the telephone (the ones we used during paramilitary exercises at the orphanage offered no such possibility). She smiled, confessing her ignorance of such matters.

Years later I would come to know what her smile had left unspoken: the infinite distance between what aroused my curiosity and her life of a few days with Jacques Dorme. She could not tell me about their love. Because of my age, I would at first think, lamenting the stupidity of that age, focused as it is on the minutiae of warfare and bold strategic thrusts. Because of her old-fashioned modesty, I would later tell myself, regretting the elusiveness of those few furtive moments in May 1942 that her story had scarcely allowed me to glimpse. And then one day I would come to realize that nothing more could have been said about that love. And that those moments ("She talked to me about what the weather was like," I more than once thought bitterly), those random recollections of rain or of a misty morning, were enough and told the essential truth about this brief and simple love affair. As the years passed, I learned to read them better, to conjure up their light, to hear the wind and the hiss of the rain coming in through the gap in the wall, transmitting its chill right over to the bed. This love, never referred to, came to reveal itself and ripen in me as I grew older. As did the moment when the old amber bead necklace snapped, which had at first been merely evocative of a night of rain and wind.

The wind banishes the sultry, resinous heat of the steppes, the smell of burning oil, the dense breath of human beings crammed into hundreds of rail cars. As the raindrops begin pattering down on the floor through the gap, they suddenly blend in with the clatter of the beads from the broken necklace. For a moment, the bodies pause in their amorous struggle, their breathing stilled, then all at once they fuse again, lost in a tempo quickened by desire, letting the beads beat time as they slip from the thread.

I needed to have lived to understand both the rain and the blissful weariness which permeated the woman's movements as she got up, went over to the gap, lingered in the warm, fluid embrace of the storm. To understand the measured pace of the remarks obliterated by the downpour's noisy torrent, to perceive that what was important was precisely this measured pace and not the sense of the words spoken. To understand that these lost remarks, the bliss of these slow movements, the wild cherry's scent, mingled with the acidity of the lightning flashes, all these elements, not retained in any memory, amounted to the essence of a life, one that the two lovers had truly lived, which was the first thing doomed to disappear into oblivion.

Also hidden behind those recollections of "what the weather was like," there was that other night, the hypnotic stillness of the air, the static density of a storm that does not break. They go down, cross the tracks, walk out from the township, which lies unmoving in the darkness, like scenery in a closed theater, and set out along a sandy path across the steppe. The silence lets them hear the rustle of every footfall and, when they stop, the faint crackling of bone-dry plants. The heat casts a veil over the stars; they seem more alive, less severe toward human brevity. At one moment an antitank obstacle raises its crossed steel girders. They finger these sections of rail rearing up in the darkness. The metal is still hot from the day's sunlight. In the torpor of the night these metal crosses, strung out in a line, look like the relics of some ancient, forgotten war. They say nothing, knowing the thought is unavoidable: a line of defense on the far side of the Volga, a willingness to envisage the war crossing the Volga, engulfing its left bank, strangling Stalingrad. They think this and yet the soldered steel seems to derive from a past history with no relevance to this night. They walk on in silence, with a physical sense that the ties binding them to the houses of the township, to the labyrinth of tracks in the switch yard, and their lives back there are growing weaker. There is only the chalky gleam of the path, the darkness tinged with blue by the silent flickering of lightning flashes, and suddenly, there at their feet, the abyss of this night sky, the stars floating on the black surface of the water.

It is one of the seasonal oxbow lakes that appear in the spring with the melting of the snows, only to be swallowed in a few gulps by the steppe during the summer drought. Its fleeting existence is for the moment at its most abundant. The water fills its ephemeral banks to the brim, the clayey smell seems as if it has always hung there. And the body, as it dives in, is tickled by the long stems of yellow water lilies, solidly rooted.

They remain for a whole hour in this sluggish flow, scarcely moving, starting to swim, then lingering at the center of the water's shallow expanse. The silent flashes of lightning last long enough for them to see each other, for him to see this woman with wet hair, her hands smoothing a face upturned toward the stars. To see the woman's closed eyes. To see her stretched out on the shore, where the fine, smooth soil seems to be heated deep down.

"If it had not been for this war I should never have met you…" The man's voice is at once very close, like a whisper in the ear, and lost in the remoteness of the steppes. It must be audible even over there, on the horizon where the summer lightning glimmers. "No, that's not what I meant to say," he corrects himself. "You see, this plain, this water, this night. All this is so simple and, in fact, this is all we need. This is all anyone needs. And yet the war will come all the way here…" He falls silent, feels the woman placing her hand on his arm. A bird flies by, they can hear the hushed stirring of the air. It feels to them as if the war, now so imminent, has already passed over these steppes, bringing destruction and death, and has finally evaporated into the void. They are going to live through it soon, to be sure, and yet one part of them is already beyond it, already in a night where the recently erected steel obstacles are nothing more than rusting relics. Where there is nothing left but the soundless glittering of the horizon, this star in a footprint filled with water, the face of the woman, leaning over him, the caress of the damp ends of her hair. A postwar night, endless.

In their life of just over a week together, there was also that morning blinded with fog. Not a plane in the sky, no risk of air raids, trains advancing at a sleepwalker's slow pace. The women who worked with Alexandra had allowed her to go, had almost forced her to take this morning off, for they had learned or guessed that it was her last.

It was cold, more like an autumn morning. A cool, misty day in May. They walked along beside a meadow, passed through a village from which the inhabitants had just been evacuated. The presence of the river was revealed in the fog by the dull echo of the void and the scent of rushes. One of the mornings in their life… They sensed that it was the moment to speak grave, definitive words, words of farewell and hope, but what came to mind seemed heavy and pointless. What needed to be admitted was that this single week had been a long life of love. During it time had vanished. The pain to come, absence, death, would leave this life unblemished. This needed to be said. Yet they held their peace, certain it was a sentiment they shared, down to the tiniest nuance.

Invisible, in the cotton-wool blindness of the fog, a boat passed, close to the bank, they could hear the oars slipping lazily into the water, the rhythmic groan of the rowlocks.

During the hours they lived through together, Alexandra had told Jacques Dorme the story I was to hear as a child. A young Frenchwoman's arrival in Russia in 1921 as a member of a Red Cross mission, a temporary visit, or so she had thought, which became more and more irreversible as the country very rapidly cut itself off from the world.

What they talked about, in fact, was four different countries: two Russias and two Frances. For the Russia Jacques Dorme had just traveled through, a Russia broken by defeat, was hardly known to Alexandra. As for her France, that of the days following the Great War and the start of the twenties, her memories had long since blended with the sweet and often illusory shade of the homeland she dreamed of. He had known a quite different country.

One day, thanks to a news bulletin they happened to hear on the radio, these two Frances came into collision.

They had lunch together that day. When there was a break in the flow of trains beneath the windows and the hum of the aircraft died away, they could imagine they "were lunching in peacetime on a sunny day in spring… They were just about to part when, with a mysterious air, Alexandra murmured: "This evening I shall need your help. No, no, it's very serious. You must put on a white shirt, shine your shoes, and have a good shave. It's a surprise…" He smiled, promising to come dressed to the nines. It was then that they heard the radio announcer's voice, reporting in grim, metallic tones that the town of Kerch had fallen and speaking of fierce fighting in defense of Sebastopol… They knew this news implied the impending loss of the Crimea and a German breakthrough to the south, which would open a route to the Volga. The radio also reported that the Allies were in no hurry to open a "second front." Perhaps these were the words that set the match to the powder keg.

Alexandra spoke in harsh, mocking tones that were new to him. She affected amazement at the casual attitude of the Americans and the caution of the English, sitting tight on their battleship island. And, with still more bitterness, she declared herself sickened by France, by the spinelessness of her military leaders, by the treachery of her government. No doubt she carried in her mind a memory of the army, bled white but triumphant, at the victory parade of 1919. As for that of 1940… She spoke of cowardice, evasion, an easy life paid for by shifty compromises. "But we fought…" Jacques Dorme did not raise his voice as he said it. He spoke in the tones of one who accepts the other's arguments, merely seeking to bear witness to the facts.

How a French soldier like him might have replied to her I shall never know. Did he describe the battle of the Ardennes? The fight for Flanders? Or perhaps the air battles in which his own comrades in the squadron had perished? In any event, he appeared to be justifying himself. Alexandra cut him short. "At least let me picture a country that rises up as a whole and drives out the Boche, instead of making pacts with them. Yes, a country that fights back. What the Russians are doing. It's already clear that the Germans are not unbeatable. But of course if people don't want to put up a fight…"

"You're saying what they'll say after the war. What people will say who didn't fight in it." Jacques Dorme's voice remained calm, a little drier perhaps. Infuriated, Alexandra was almost shouting: "And they'll be right to say it! For if the French had really decided to fight…"

"If they had really decided to do so, here's what you'd have had where France is now…"

Jacques Dorme took the map of the world from a shelf, spread it out on the table among the plates from lunch, and repeated: "Here's what you'd have had…" He held a box of matches in his hand and the box covered the purple hexagon of France almost completely, with only the western tip of Brittany and the Alpine fringe showing. Then the matchbox flew over Europe and landed on the USSR, on the territory conquered by the Nazis. There was room on this for four matchboxes. "Four times the size of France…" he said in grim tones. "And I'll tell you something. I've seen every one of these four Frances devastated, towns razed to the ground, roads covered in corpses. I've traveled across them, these four lands of France. That's just to tell you what the Boche army can do. As for the Russians, I've seen all kinds. I've even seen one whose arms had been cut to ribbons by shrapnel and who had his teeth clamped around a broken telephone cable, copper against copper, wrapped in a scrap of cloth, in accordance with instructions. And he died with his teeth clenched… They're going to lose ten million men in this war, maybe even more. Lose them, do you understand? Ten million… That's the total number of able-bodied men France had to give."

He folded up the map, put it back on the shelf. And in a voice once more calm, no longer judgmental, he added: "And, by the way, we didn't have a 'second front' in May 1940 either.

That evening he arrived dressed in a white shirt, his cheeks smooth, his shoes well polished. They smiled at each other, and, when they spoke, avoided any return to the subject of their quarrel. "It's a little surprise. You'll see," she told him again as they set out. The previous day the director of the military hospital had asked her to take part in a concert that was being organized prior to the evacuation of all the wounded, now that the front was getting nearer. Several women would be singing, he explained, and then a couple would dance a waltz – he was counting on her for this. The concert hall had been set up, not in the hospital, which was too cluttered with beds, but in an engine shed, from which the locomotives had been withdrawn for the evening.

As they made their way inside, she recoiled in shock. The surprise was greater for her than for him. Hundreds of pairs of eyes were focused on the still-empty platform, countless tightly packed rows of men sitting there, each unique and yet all alike. The living mass of them extended right to the back of this long brick building and was lost in the darkness, giving the impression of stretching away, row upon row, to infinity. She was accustomed to seeing them divided up into separate wards, overcrowded of course, but where the multiplicity of their injuries and suffering was matched by individual faces. Here, in this vast parade of pain, all the eye could see was an undifferentiated mass of tissue in torment. Studded with pale heads, white with bandages.

Half a dozen women sang in chorus, unaccompanied. Their voices sounded naked; even in the cheerful songs they tugged at the heartstrings, too close to tears. The applause was muted: many arms in slings, stumps where arms should be.

Now it was their turn. A nurse placed a chair at the side of the stage. Two soldiers came on and set down a legless amputee, a young man with bright red hair and a dashing look. They brought him an accordion. As if in a dream, Alexandra and Jacques Dorme stepped up onto the boards that smelled of fresh timber.

Their bodies' memories quickly overcame the fear of not recalling the steps. The accordion player played with an imperceptibly delayed waltz tempo, as if he would have liked to see them dancing for as long as possible. As they revolved, they saw the blaze of his hair and this devastating contrast: a broad smile, gleaming teeth, and eyes brimming with distress. Briefly and intermittently, they also noticed the looks of the wounded men, lines of sparks burning into their bodies as they danced. Nothing remained now of their lunchtime argument. All talk was charred to a cinder by these looks. An aircraft passed very low overhead and drowned out the music for several seconds. They continued revolving amid this hubbub, then, as one dives into a wave, fell back into the melody as it returned.

They felt in the end as if they were alone, dancing in an empty hall, each one's face reflected in the other's eyes. Several times she lowered her eyelids to drive away her tears.

Two days later there came that cold, misty morning, and in the evening, his departure. Before boarding the train, he had already mingled with the members of what would be his squadron now, his new life. The train moved off, the men talked louder, more cheerfully, it seemed. She just had time to catch sight of his face once more, alongside the grinning countenance of a big fellow who was waving to someone on the platform, then the night blended the cars into a single dark wall… On the way home she listened within herself to the words he had spoken that morning as they walked beside the river. "After the war, you know, you must think about coming back to the old country… Of course they'll let you leave. You'll be a Frenchman's wife. That's if you'll agree to marry me, naturally. That means you'll become a Frenchwoman again and I'll show you my hometown and the house where I was born…"

S SPOKE SLOWLY, BREAKING OFF TO LISTEN TO THE WIND as it scoured the steppe or to let her gaze follow a bird across the July sky. Or did these pauses, perhaps, correspond in her memory to the long months that brought no news of Jacques Dorme? I allowed my eyes to travel along the narrow stream that cast a cooling veil about us, beyond the foliage of the willows and alders that sheltered us beneath their restless network. The banks were cracked in the heat, and the almost unmoving brook seemed to be dwindling before our very eyes, sucked dry by the sun. In its place I pictured a broad stretch of water one May long ago, a nocturnal lake and the figures of the two swimmers silhouetted against the blue light of a silent thunderstorm.

There were few things left for her to tell me. She did not talk about the fighting at Stalingrad, knowing that they told us tales of it every year at school, backed up by eyewitness accounts from old soldiers. Nor about the hell behind the lines, in townships transformed into vast field hospitals.

After Jacques Dorme's departure and in the course of the three years of his flights across Siberia, she had received four letters. Passed from hand to hand, thanks to servicemen on the move: the only means of sending mail from the Arctic wastes where his squadron was based and, especially, of thwarting the vigilance of the spy catchers.

The work of the pilots on the "Alaska-Siberia" line, the "Alsib," was doubly secret. During the war it had to be concealed from the Germans. After the war from the Soviet people themselves: the cold war had just begun and it was vital for the people not to know that the American imperialists had supplied their Russian ally with over eight thousand aircraft for the Eastern Front. All Alexandra ever learned came from those four letters, a single photo, and conversations with a comrade Jacques Dorme had asked to look her up, a task the men of the squadron used to undertake on one another's behalf, with their nearest and dearest in mind. There was also the journey she was to attempt at the beginning of the fifties, in the hope of finding the place where he had died. She brought little back from this: the memory of a barely accessible region, crisscrossed here and there by the barbed-wire fences of the camps, and, in response to her questions, prudent silence, ignorance either real or feigned.

Yet she succeeded in making me picture – almost relive – the era of this air bridge hidden from the world. Among the routes I have traveled or dreamed of in my life, that of the Alsib was one of the first to imprint its vertiginous space within me. Three thousand miles from Alaska to Krasnoyarsk in the heart of Siberia, a score of airfields located on the permafrost of the tundra, and their names as mysterious as those of staging posts on a quest: Fairbanks, Nome, Uelkal, Omolon, Seymchan… The violence of the Arctic winds that knocked men over, dragging them across ice where the hand could find nothing to hold on to. The air, at sixty below, a mouthful of which was like biting into a volley of razor blades. Squadrons that relieved one another from one airfield to the next, without days of rest, with no right to weakness, never using the excuse of bad weather, magnetic storms, or the overloading of aircraft. The landing runways built by the prisoners from the camps, the areas around them studded with their frozen corpses, which nobody bothered to count. The only count kept related to the number of aircraft flown by each of the pilots: more than three hundred by Jacques Dorme, according to his letter dated September 1944. And a more discreet addendum: the tally of pilots killed in crashes – over a hundred deaths, to which, on New Year's Day 1945, was added his own.

Alexandra had probably guessed a good deal more than the letters and conversations revealed. Moreover, she had not joined in the New Year's Eve celebration with railway colleagues on December 31, 1944. A patient, sly prescience was choking her. It was as if a voice had fallen silent over there within the icy confines of Siberia, a voice that was no longer responding. When, some months later, a friend of Jacques Dorme came to her house and told her the truth, she did not dare mention that presentiment, afraid lest he see it as mere "women's superstition." When she came to tell me about it, it was with a sad little smile and I would blush, not daring to tell her how much I believed her, believed every single word, especially about that foreboding, which proved to me how deeply they had loved one another.

In those days I did not have a better definition of love (and I do not know if I have now) than that of a kind of silent prayer which continuously bonds two human beings, sepa-

rated by space or by death, into an intuitive sharing of the sorrows and moments of joy each experiences.

Sorrow, for him one day, came from examining a heavy Douglas C-47 they had managed to track down, as one does a wounded animal, following a trail of blood: despite a snowstorm on the rocky slope the plane had smashed into, there was this long, tawny streak, the color of fuel, standing out in the middle of the endless white. A warm color in this world of ice. Warm lives, suddenly destroyed, whose faces and voices Jacques Dorme still remembered… Shaking hands with the pilot, who, before he climbed into the aircraft, had been telling him about his three-year-old son back in Moscow. A warm handshake.

In cold like this all liquids froze within the bowels of the aircraft. Oil solidified into jelly. And even steel became fragile as glass. The air strove to dissolve the planes into its own crystalline substance. The pilots traveled very close to the zone that broke all records for cold on earth. "Seventy-two degree below zero," Jacques Dorme had announced to his Russian mechanic, with a touch of pride.

Joy was discovering a technique for combating the encrustation of ice, which grew thicker in flight and little by little coated the entire aircraft. You had to alter the engine speed regularly: as it varied, the vibrations shattered the crust of ice.

Joy was the idea that another ten planes were on their way to Stalingrad, where the outcome of the battle might depend on the arrival of these ten aircraft in the nick of time. Or even that of the single fighter plane he himself was flying, this Airacobra, weighed down, thanks to Siberian distances, by a one-hundred-and-sixty-gallon drop tank beneath the fuselage. He was no fool, he knew that in the monstrous hand-to-hand struggle between two armies, between the millions of men killing one another at Stalingrad, this scrap of sheet metal with a propeller could hardly tip the scales. And yet on each flight an irrational conviction returned: this is the plane that will prevent the destruction of an old wooden house with wild cherry boughs beneath its windows.

In April 1944 he became what in the pilots' language they called a "leader." Now at the controls of a bomber – a Boston or a Boeing 25 – he was guiding ten or fifteen Airacobras, with quite a different sense of the weight of this little squadron in the scales of the war.

Joy resided in the confidence others had in him, by the resurgent light of the polar sun, which was now showing itself for longer and longer periods. In the devotion of the people on the ground, who would mark out the runways with fir branches when there were blizzards. And also in the thought that these missions at the end of the world were bringing the liberation of his native land closer.

One day he had occasion to suffer a shock such as no brush with death would have administered. He had just landed, and, still numb from several hours of flying, saw a column of prisoners walking along beside the airfield. Over the course of a week, these men had been breaking the ice from dawn until dusk, installing steel plates and covering them with gravel for new runways. That evening they were moving off in single file through the snowdrifts. The guards surrounded them, training their submachine guns on this mass of human beings, chilled to the bone and staggering with weariness. Jacques Dorme watched their progress and tried to catch the other pilots' eyes, but the latter turned away, in a hurry to settle down out of the wind, to eat… A submachine gun spat just at the moment when he, too, was about to step inside. He had seen what happened prior to this gunshot. A prisoner had slipped and, to avoid falling, had moved out a little from the line of walking men. With no hesitation a guard fired, the guilty man fell, the column froze for a second, then continued its jolting progress. Jacques Dorme rushed up to the guard, shook him, gave shouted vent to his anger. And heard a level voice: "Just following the rule."

Then, more quietly, in tones of hate-filled contempt: "I'll give you a couple in the balls, too, if you like." One of the pilots took Jacques Dorme by the arm and led him firmly toward the rest of the squadron personnel.

During the meal he sensed a strain in their voices, thanks both to the impossibility of admitting to what had happened and to shame. Shame that a foreigner had seen it. The only true fact he would learn over supper that evening would be the "rule," the words repeated automatically by the guards before the column of prisoners sets off: "One step to the left, one step to the right, and I shoot without warning."

That night, inside the dark cabin of the Douglas transport plane that was taking them back to their base, he stayed awake, his thoughts constantly returning to this strange country, whose language he already spoke well, which he believed he knew so well and which he failed to understand, which he sometimes refused to understand. Comparing it to France, he had a notion that left him even more perplexed: this country, too, was occupied. Like France. No, worse than France, for it was occupied from within by the regime that governed it, by the spirit of that rule – "One step to the left, one step to the right…"

The memory of that death stood in the way of the easy joy he had experienced before: in the soft bluish luminescence of the Bostons' instrument panels, so much more agreeable than the harsh lighting in Russian aircraft, the almost excessive comfort of the cockpit, and, upon landing, a system that responded perfectly Now, when he climbed out onto the runway, the memory of the prisoners in their single file and the man who had stumbled on an icy path came back to him.

At the end of August 1944, he recalled this man, but in a new way. That day he was feted by all his comrades, the pilots and the mechanics, from the morning onward: they had just learned of the liberation of Paris. As he responded to their congratulations, Jacques Dorme wondered what they knew about France. Interspersing their excited cries were references to the Paris Commune and Maurice Thorez – along with the name of Marshal Pétain, uttered with contempt and distorted by the lack of nasal sounds in Russian. He did not even try to explain, feeling himself to be relieved at last of the burden of the fall of France, for which, in conversation, they had sometimes seemed to reproach him. Now they were laughing, remarking that once Hitler had been driven out, the French people would settle the capitalists' hash and embark upon the building of Communism. A little dazed by their voices, he tried to imagine what kind of books they might have read about France. Alexandra's tale returned to his memory: the volume she had unearthed in the public library in a Siberian town, the domicile assigned to her. A collection of texts by French authors, translated into Russian, among them a poem that was a veritable "Hymn to the GPU"…

During his monotonous flights he pictured Paris, the popular jubilation, windows open to a fine summer sky.

And, more than anything, the café terraces, a life spent at tables, garrulous, carefree, made up of snatches of words, exchanged glances, the complicity of bodies brushing against one another… Through a fine layer of cloud, beneath the Boston's wings, bristled the peaks that arose from the endless Kolyma plateau, still tinged with green and gleaming with watercourses. "In a few days' time," he thought, "all this will be white. Devoid of life…" All that remained would be the rows of rectangles, the barrack huts and watchtowers of a camp, reliable beacons for the pilots in the midst of this mountainous vastness with no landmarks. The only point of reference the thousands of human lives concentrated together here in this nothingness. In his mind's eye he again pictured the little round tables on the café terraces and reflected that the author of the "Hymn to the GPU" might well be sitting at one of those tables at that very moment, talking to a woman, ordering coffee or wine, commenting on the past, criticizing the present, celebrating the future. Jacques Dorme suddenly realized that you could never make that poet understand the infinity that now lay beneath the wings of the plane, nor the rule: "One step to the left, one step to the right," nor the death of the prisoner who stumbled… No, impossible. He felt something like a muscular spasm locking his jaws. Down there, at their café table, what they were speaking was a different language.

In the course of that flight Jacques Dorme saw himself for the first time as a foreigner in the land of his birth.

He did not immediately recognize the man in black leather. Indeed, this one bore scant resemblance to the little inquisitor who had killed Witold. Still less to the second one, the fat, hysterical one with his orders for an overloaded plane to take off. Those two had spread terror when the war seemed lost, they were more afraid than the servicemen they threatened. The man Jacques Dorme beheld in December 1944 already had a victor's self-confidence. He was short and thin, like the first one, but his leather coat was lined with thick fur. He shook its lapels when a little frost fell on them from a propeller, the specifications of which, no one could understand why, were the subject of his inquiries. His curiosity was disconcerting. The pilots felt as if they were undergoing an interrogation in which the excessively simple questions were merely a way of confusing the person interrogated. Occasionally he smiled, and Jacques Dorme noticed that at once the smile would vanish from other people's faces.

The man inspected the aircraft, asked his strange questions that would have been considered stupid if they had not contained hidden catches, never listened to the complete answer, and smiled. Everyone realized he had come because the war was about to end and back in Moscow they needed to issue a reminder of who was master. However, what the pilots could not yet guess was that soon the Americans, who were supplying these countless Douglases, Boeings, and Airacobras, were going to become enemies again and that all those who had taken part in this air bridge would come under suspicion. The man in black leather was already there to spot the lost sheep, to guard against ideological contagion.

At the end of his inspection he summoned those in charge of the base and the "leaders" of the squadrons. He talked about the slackening of Communist discipline, the lowering of class vigilance, and in particular castigated them over the organization of flights. "The command staff have tolerated total anarchy," he rapped out. "Bombers have been flying in the same groups as fighter aircraft and transport planes. I advise you to put an end to this chaos. Fighter planes must fly with fighters and bombers with…"

The pilots exchanged furtive glances, scratching their heads. They were secretly hoping that the man in leather would suddenly burst out laughing and exclaim in jocular tones: "I had you fooled for a moment!" But his voice remained accusatory and steely. When he spoke of flight plans being incorrectly drawn up, one of the pilots spoke up, belatedly, as if it had taken him time to bring himself to do so: "But, Comrade Inspector, a Boston has means of communication that are much more…" What he intended to say was that a bomber was better equipped with navigational aids than a fighter. The man in black leather lowered his voice almost to a whisper, and it was this menacing hiss that stopped the pilot short, better than a shout would have done: "I see, Comrade Lieutenant, that your contacts with the capitalist world have not been wasted on you…"

For several moments of heavy silence all that could be heard was the lashing of the blizzard unleashing its fury against the windows and the crunch of the gravel the prisoners were spreading over one of the runways. Quite physically, in his bones, Jacques Dorme sensed how fine the line was in this country that separated a free man, this flying officer staring in silence at his big hands as they lay on the table, from those prisoners whose only identity was a number stitched onto their padded jackets.

"Well, as for these contacts of yours, we'll see about that after the victory," the inspector resumed. "What's needed now is to bring some order into this shambles. Here is the map showing you the most direct routes between airfields. From now on you will travel via Zyryanka and not via Seymchan. This will cut out hundreds of kilometers, with a consequent saving on fuel. I wonder why the squadron commanders haven't thought of it before. But perhaps the longer route was recommended to them by American government representatives…"

This time no one said anything. On the map, a straight line, drawn with scholarly application, traced a route that started in Alaska and crossed Siberia. In its geometric logic it passed closer to Zyryanka, one of the auxiliary airfields, far to the north of the normal route. This was more of an emergency runway, envisaged for days when those at Seymchan disappeared beneath snowstorms. The man's pencil had drawn a line right across the terrible Chersky mountain chain, Arctic wastelands, even less explored than the areas currently overflown by the Alsib route… Left alone, the pilots stared long and hard at the map with its stubborn pencil line. The absurdity of it was too evident to be worth mentioning. "The Party line…" murmured the flying officer who had spoken earlier.

They knew the inspector could not return to Moscow without reporting on the subversive activities he had unmasked, the errors he had corrected. That was how the whole country functioned, by denouncing, criticizing, breaking records, and exceeding plans. And even at the People's Commissariat of State Security, to which the inspector belonged ("the GPU…" thought Jacques Dorme), plans had to be exceeded, you had to arrest more people than in the previous month, shoot more than your colleagues…

They talked briefly about the makeup of the flights for the next day then went to get some sleep. Outside, in the darkness of the polar night, the prisoners went on digging the frozen earth for the new runway.

After an hour in the air, Jacques Dorme transmitted this message to the group of aircraft he was leading: "Take the second route. Landing at Z impossible. Divert S." During the previous night he had managed to persuade the men in his squadron that the best solution was to go, as usual, to Seymchan. He alone would go to Zyryanka, from where he would call the base. The inspector, who was due to leave the following day, would not have time to hold an inquiry.

He veered slowly off to the right and in the ashen gloaming that passed for daylight saw the lights of the Aira-cobras turning toward the south.

As the minutes slipped by the man gradually became one with his aircraft, the shuddering of the steel matching the rhythm of his blood. The pilot's body yielded to the life of the machine, disappearing into the rhythm of the engine at his back as the throbbing of its vibrations varied from time to time. His gaze was lost in the gray light of this day on which the sun would not rise, then returned to the luminous specks on the instrument panel. The man was at once profoundly involved in the motion of this flying cockpit and utterly absent. Or rather present elsewhere, far from this ashen sky and these Chersky mountains that were beginning to pile up tier upon tier of their icy wastes. An elsewhere made up of a woman's voice, a woman's silences, the stillness of a house, of a time he felt he had always inhabited. This time unfolded quite separately from what was happening in the aircraft, around the aircraft. The violence of the wind made it necessary to maneuver, the icing-over reduced visibility. At a given moment it became clear that the runways of Zyryanka lay still farther to the northeast and that, at the risk of colliding with one of the mountain peaks, he was going to have to fly at a lower altitude, watch, concentrate, not give way to panic. The remoteness he sensed within himself gave him the strength to remain calm, to avoid going into a spin (that curse of the Airacobras), to stop checking the fuel at every moment. Not to sink to the level of being a man anxious to save his own skin at all costs.

He was to hold on to the sensation of that elsewhere right up to the end, right up to the purple luminescence of the northern fire that set the sky ablaze.

Alexandra finished her story as we walked back home. Dusk was already falling over the steppe. She spoke about the journey she had made to the former Alsib airfields, most of them abandoned after the war, and the peak at the southern end of the Chersky chain, three crags clustered together, which the local inhabitants called "the Trident," that she had failed to reach.

I walked beside her upon the dry grass, an endless rippling expanse that dazzled the eye as, stirred by the wind, it alternated between mauve and gold. The details of her journey stuck in my mind (and this would help me, a quarter of a century later, to locate the places she had told me about) but the astonishment I experienced was caused by something else. A man who had been quite unknown to me a week ago stood before me now, fully realized. Jacques Dorme, whose life story I perceived as a living and luminous whole.

Everyone's perception of mankind and the world has its share of truth. That of a thirteen-year-old boy walking on the steppe beside the Volga was no less true than my judgment as an adult. It even had a certain advantage: being innocent of psychoanalysis, probings into the mind, or sentimental rhetoric, it operated by entities, blocks.

Such was the Jacques Dorme who had appeared to me in the blaze of that sunset. A man hewn from the very stuff of his native land, that France I had discovered, thanks to my reading and my conversations with Alexandra. He was a combination of those qualities that reminded me of "the finest and purest soldier in old France," the warrior in "The Last Square," the exiled emperor returning to his native soil on board the ghost ship, and the "four gentlemen of Aquitaine." The grain of this human substance was yet more subtle; what I perceived was not the characters and their actions but rather the dense aura of their lives. The spirit of their earthly undertakings. Their soul.

No proofs existed of the accuracy of such a vision. My certainty was enough for me. That and also the photo Alexandra showed me when we reached home. A rectangle with yellowed edges but still retaining the crisp clarity of black and white. A score of pilots, clad in jackets lined with sheepskin and heavy reindeer-skin boots. American airmen recognizable by their lighter clothing, more elegant, more "pilot as film star." The photo had probably been taken after a ceremonial parade, for in its corner the metallic glint of a military band could be seen. No doubt the Soviet and American national anthems had just been played… Guided by Alexandra, I located Jacques Dorme. He stood out from the others in neither physique nor clothes (the same three-quarter-length jacket, the same boots). But I could have recognized him without Alexandra's help. Among the pilots who were beginning to break rank after standing at attention, as required by the anthems, he alone had remained still, his face marked by a certain seriousness, his gaze directed far away. It was as if he could hear a music inaudible to the others, an anthem the band had forgotten to play.

It took me some time to grasp that Jacques Dorme's solitude, evident even as he was surrounded by a crowd, gave him a kinship with the old giant I had seen in front of a monument to the dead, the French general who had broken off in the middle of his speech and allowed his gaze to stray into the immensity of the steppe.

The following evening I left Alexandra's house. I had to return to the orphanage, now half emptied of its past, to prepare myself for a new life. After boarding a crowded local train, I managed to catch a glimpse of Alexandra upon the platform teeming with vacationers. She did not see me, her eyes flitting anxiously along the row of windows. With a hesitant hand she was waving a farewell to someone she could not locate among all these faces. To me she looked younger and at the same time somehow defenseless. I thought of another departure, of the train carrying Jacques Dorme toward the east in May 1942.

It suddenly struck me that this woman's life was like a weighty accusation. Or at least a severe reproach, a silent reproach to the country that had so cruelly ravaged her life. A country that had caught up a very young woman in its toils and now disgorged onto this dirty platform a bemused old lady, lost among these tanned faces. For the first time in my life I believed that this reproach was directed at me as well, and that I, too, in ways it was hard to formulate, had a responsibility for this elderly, solitary existence, reduced to great deprivation, forgotten there in an ancient building, in a township carved up by railroad tracks, on the edge of the empty steppes. After all that she had done, given, suffered for this country… The people who surrounded me on the train, packed close together, laden with crates of vegetables they were bringing back from their kitchen gardens, had placid faces, tinged with routine, natural contentment. "The simple contentment she has never had," I thought, observing them. Not some copybook bliss, just a simple, contented, daily routine, a family life, in the pleasant and predictable round of the little facts of existence.

It was from that evening onward that I would embark upon the reinvention of her life, as if by dreaming it differently I could expiate the wrong my country had done her. The habit we had at the orphanage of remaking the life stories of our disgraced fathers would stand me in good stead. It would have taken little for her husband not to have been shot (how many times had I heard tales of condemned men saved by a miracle during the Stalin era), for them to have had children, for her to be living not in that old, dark house but over there, for example – I looked across at a handsome façade with balconies surrounded by pretty moldings. She would have been reading books not to the young barbarian I was, but to a refined and sensitive child, to her grandson and her granddaughter too, perhaps, two children who would have listened to her wide-eyed.

Reality often swept these daydreams away. But I set great store by them, telling myself that at least in this renascent life I could give Alexandra back her real Christian name. And her language, too, which sometimes, when she was speaking to me in French, lost a word or an expression, for which she would desperately rack her brain, with a mild look of distress in her eyes. This was not a case, I sensed, of banal forgetfulness or a failing in her aging memory. No, this was an absolute loss, the disappearance of a whole world, her native land, that was being obliterated, word by word, in the depths of the snow-covered steppes, where she had no one to talk to in her own language.