The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme

The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme
1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, in the warmth of this kitchen, there is nothing more for me to do but wait for the journey's pitching and tossing, still active in my body, to calm down. Several days on the train, then the aircraft, and finally the terrible tracked vehicle that brought me here across the icy wastes. And the last stage: the interminable hike along that cable swathed in frost, stumbling painfully to arrive at the Edge. At the edge of what? At the edge of everything. Of inhabited land, of the Arctic, of the polar night. The rope ended there, nailed to the timbers of the very last house.

I manage to move my feet in my boots. My hands, my finger joints, are coming back to life, obeying me. I can grip the cup without spilling it, as happened just now. "The goal has been reached," I think with a smile. I am here, in the terrain Jacques Dorme once flew over. Tomorrow I shall see the place where a life I have carried inside of me since childhood was ruptured. His life and that of the woman who had loved him. In the blissful drowsiness of my exhaustion, those lives of long ago come awake behind my eyelids, revive that tale of a day, a city, the imagined memory of a night. That night when the rain mimicked the staccato rattle of the amber beads…

"Tell me, my friend, have you heard the one about the young man from Moscow, a bit like you, who arrives in the taiga of Yakutia? Listen. I'll tell you…"

One of my hosts is speaking. There are three of them in the house on the Edge. Two are these geologists who shook hands with me, both, by a comic coincidence, proffering the same name: Lev. Two Leos, two lions, I said to myself, suppressing a smile. The first of them, tall, with broad shoulders, evidently read my mind and sought to clarify matters. "Now see here. I'm the real lion. He's only a cub…" The other, short and with a face marked by chilblains, exclaimed: "Shut your mouth, Trotsky!" By way of a welcome I had joined them in a glass of that inhuman brew, alcohol barely sweetened with cranberry syrup, and then, with almost magical ease, succeeded in getting myself accepted to join their next day's expedition. "But of course, my friend. All we have to do is say the word to the pilot and it's as good as done. While we're blowing the mountain to smithereens he'll take you wherever you like." I took a bottle of brandy I had brought from Paris out of my knapsack and we poured it into three good-sized thick glass tumblers. They drank, exchanged doubtful glances. Russian custom forbids the criticism of fare that is a gift. "It's… good," Big Lev concluded. "Yes, not bad," Little Lev agreed. "It's like the wine they give you in church. I expect women like it. Would you care for a drop, Valya?"

Valya, the cook, shook her head. Her arms white with flour up to the elbows, she was kneading dough on a big table at the other end of the room. An enormous woman: a heavy, rounded bosom thrusting out beneath her thick sweater, a broad backside that, when on a stool, covered the seat completely. Her eyes slanted like those of the Yakut, but her skin was very white. A carnal robustness reminiscent of the women of the Ukraine. "What man could take on such a giantess?" I thought with a mixture of fear and admiration.

Now I am listening to Little Lev telling the story on which he has embarked. "… So there you are. He lands in the middle of the taiga all the way from Moscow. He has no idea about anything, but he's a bit like all of you, full of energy. And, right away, the old Siberians say to him, 'If you want to be one of us there are three things you've got to do: first, down a bottle of vodka in one gulp; second, screw a Yakut woman; and third, go out into the taiga and shake a bear by the paw.' Well, your man jumps up, grabs a bottle, and presto, downs it in one gulp! Then he runs out into the taiga. An hour later he comes back, all covered in scratches, and yells at the top of his voice: 'Right. Now show me a Yakut woman and I'll shake her paw.' Ha-ha-ha…"

They choke with laughter, as do I, infected by their mirth, above all because of the comic pantomime Little Lev starts acting out – the young novice knocking back a pint of spirit, running into the taiga, and raping a bear. At this moment Valya approaches, bearing a dish of steaming potatoes. Little Lev, still in the middle of his performance, rushes up to her, grabs her from behind, his hands clinging to the woman's hips, his chin digging into her broad back. A female bear assaulted by a Muscovite simpleton. She turns with a smile on her lips but eyes ablaze with fire: how dare he, this midget? Her hand lands a blow on Lev's head, just the way a bear's paw would, with nonchalant power. The man is hurled against the wall, his face smeared with flour.

That night the howling of the blizzard forms the single background to all the other noises: the snoring of the two Levs, the crackle of wood in the stove, and from time to time, the rustle of a page. In the other room, Valya is reading the thick book I noticed on a windowsill when I arrived. One of those novels of the sixties where love took its course against a background of vast electricity-generating stations under construction, the conquest of the taiga, the glorious exploits of the mother country. A fiction not too far removed, actually, from this woman's life or her dreams? Who knows? I do not notice the moment when she turns out the light.

Toward the middle of the night, the lashing of the squalls drowns out anything else the ear could still hear. I think about the tiny dot of my presence in this corner of the world. What point of reference can one find? The icy fringe of the Arctic Ocean? The Bering Strait? The Victory Peak, nine thousand feet high, to the west of this house?

I tell myself that, when it comes down to it, nothing better evokes this landscape for me than the memory of Jacques Dorme's life.

JACQUES DORME'S STORY HAD KEPT ME COMPANY all along my route. The intensity of it turned any given town I was passing through, any railroad station, into a blur; it isolated me in the midst of crowds. From Paris I traveled to Warsaw, reached the Ukraine (which had recently proclaimed its independence) without difficulty and was then held up for several hours at the brand-new border of Russia. When pronounced in front of a small hut darkly stained with damp snow, the words "border" and "visa" seemed to come out of one of Chekhov's satirical short stories. As did the uniforms of the border guards, which were of a strangely effeminate cut, and the eagles on their shapkas, cheap gold braid reminiscent of Christmas tree decorations. And, even more so, the document I offered them. This stateless person's passport, authorizing me to visit "any country except the USSR." The USSR no longer existed, and this prohibition had now taken on a disturbing, almost metaphysical meaning. Poorly covered in plastic by an old Algerian on the Boulevard Barbès, the document had suffered from the damp, and the thin, buckled cardboard, with its blurred stamps, was bound to provoke suspicion. Taking pity on my innocence, a truck driver finally explained to me the amount of alcohol required to cross the border. I had two bottles of brandy with me. In his view one of these would suffice. A flat bottle, which the boss of the border patrol slipped into his greatcoat pocket before breathing onto a little indigo ink pad.

It was the first time I had gone back to Russia and I was returning in secret. However, the strangeness of my arrival was soon eclipsed by the bizarre nature, now comic, now painful, of the new state of things. The monument in a Ukrainian town… two figures shaking hands and the legend in letters of gold: "Long live the Union of the Ukraine with…" The rest of it ("… Russia ") had been torn off. My "visa," paid for with a bottle of brandy. Then one evening in Moscow, a gathering of men at the back of an ugly restaurant building. They were shuffling around in early March's muddy snow, grinning and winking at one another; but their grins were tense, their gaze fixed on two broad windows open on the first floor. Inside, in a halo of fluorescent light, could be seen a white-tiled wall, two mirrors, and a hand dryer buzzing in the void. A woman appeared in front of one of the mirrors, unbuttoned her coat, and, unconcerned by the presence of the spectators, exposed the naked whiteness of her body. She even spun lightly around on her high heels, revealing very full breasts with brown nipples, the well-rounded triangle of her belly. Another hitched up her foot onto the sill and began tugging at the zipper of her boot. Beneath her miniskirt her leg was exposed right up to the hip, her broad thigh enclosed in red tights… This parade, improvised by prostitutes in a restaurant bathroom, bore witness to an ude-niable liberalization. Less hypocrisy than before, more imagination. "Progress…" I reflected, as I continued on my way. I was to echo this thought two days later, in a large city on the Volga. To kill time while waiting for my train, I let myself be carried along by the crowd and found myself in a park. Amid gaudily painted booths, noisy festivities were under way, some kind of "town celebration," or quite simply a fine Sunday, the previous night's snowfall reflecting the dazzling sunlight. I walked along, stumbling over deep drifts, intoxicated by the snow's sharp freshness, bonding with the laughter, the glances, the language I no longer needed to translate. This homecoming was like a dream where everything is instantly comprehensible, where physical contact – all hearts beating as one – is wonderfully palpable. Drunk with the sunshine and the gaiety around me, I even had this exalted and sanctimoniously patriotic thought: "They may only have three rubles in their pockets, but here they are, laughing and celebrating just the way they always did. A country in desperate straits, but what a gift for happiness! Whereas in the West, they would have…" My wits dulled by the merriment, I was about to pursue this analytical comparison of mine between the Slavic soul and the soulless West, when suddenly the happiness found its perfect expression in the face of a child. A little girl of nine or ten, almost preternaturally beautiful, walking along holding a woman's hand, her grandmother's no doubt.

They stopped a few yards away from me, and the child looked at me inquiringly I smiled at her. And suddenly I realized that this incredibly beautiful little face was made up. Discreetly, and by an expert hand, an adult's. Not daubed with a carnival mask, but transformed into the thrillingly angelic face of a doll-woman. I also noticed that dusk was beginning to fall, that the booths had closed. My head was still ringing with laughter and sunlight… The first streetlights were flickering with a mauve glow. The woman turned and stared at me with an appraising eye. Then, fondling the child's chin, murmured: "The fair's over. You won't get your candy now…" The child looked hard at me. At the last moment I bit back the words that were already on the tip of my tongue: "You have a very pretty granddaughter…" I thought I had guessed what was afoot. The woman tugged at the child's hand and I saw them making their way toward a great prefabricated shed, the "beer bar." In a hissed conversation behind my back, two market women were heaving outraged sighs: "Did you see that? The old woman's back again with the kid." "Well, what do you expect? That child's her meal ticket…" "I'd hang them, the bastards who do that…"

I saw their two figures at the end of the alleyway, the big one and the little one, silhouetted against the lights of the "beer bar." I should have caught up with them. Given them all the money I had. Warned the police. Carried off the child… But could all this really be a figment of my imagination? All along the alleyway the shutters of the booths were already closed, rays of light filtered out from inside. One could sense the silent presence of the stallholders. The fairground in darkness, these little wooden huts, each with its own secret, the child in her makeup, who had given me a smile… I preferred to believe it was a misunderstanding…

The only places where I truly felt at home once more were the subway passages and the pedestrian tunnels, now transformed into bazaars of poverty. Old men were offering objects for sale that shouted out their rupture from apartments or rooms where their absence now left gaps impossible to fill. This was not the cheerful jumble of a flea market, but the debris of lives destroyed by the new times. I recognized the worn china of a cup, the shape of the heels on a pair of shoes, the trademark on a transistor radio… These relics dated from my childhood. A whole era on sale in these old hands, blue with cold.

More than all the other changes, more even than the obscene flaunting of the new wealth, it was this dispersal of a human past that struck me. The feverish speed with which it was being made to disappear. This dispersal and also the beauty of the child in her makeup. And my ignorance of what ought to be done in these new times to protect that child.

Siberia made me forget my botched homecoming. Here nothing had changed as of yet. The handful of new republics, arisen from the collapse of the empire, had done no more than add colors to the geographers' maps. The earth remained the same: endless, white, indifferent to the rare appearances of men. Here, in the torpor of winter, they were watching out not for the latest upheavals in world news, but for the russet streak of sunlight that would graze the horizon in a few days' time, after a long polar night.

Listening to the two geologists in the izba at the Edge, I told myself that they came from the same era as those objects being sold by the old men in the subway passages. They lived as if the five thousand miles of snow that lay between them and Moscow had slowed the passage of time. The sixties? The seventies? Everything in the way they lived, the way they talked, was twenty or thirty years out of date. That joke about the new arrival having sex with a bear – I had heard it more than once in my youth. Time here was twenty years slow. No, it was more like a time apart from time, a flow of days that took its tempo from the hissing of snow squalls against the window, the wheezing of the fire, the breathing of these three sleeping people, each so different and all so close. The two men, their faces burned by the Arctic, the huge woman with slanted eyes, asleep in the room next door. (What are her dreams? Dreams where all is snow? Or on the contrary, filled with southern sunlight?) A nocturnal time, its rhythm derived from the throb of our blood in the arm crooked beneath the head, a warm pulse, adrift in the endless white, in the depths of this cosmic darkness, turned iridescent by the Arctic phosphorescence.

Morning did not come. I was awakened by a storm hurling flurries of snowflakes against the windows and filling the house with a dull vibration. It took me several seconds to grasp that this was due to a helicopter landing close beside the Edge. I saw light behind the kitchen door and heard the clatter of aluminum plates and mugs. The geologists got up in a hurry and even, it seemed to me, in a kind of panic. Big Lev scrubbed his face furiously under the faucet. Little Lev hastily geared up the spring of his wind-up razor…

The door yielded with a noisy crunch of shattered ice, and now I believed I could guess the reason for their disarray. The man had to stoop as he made his way into the house, and when he paused at the center of the room, his face was level with the glowing lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. He wore a black jacket of reversed sheepskin, and boots of reindeer hide. From his great height he studied the room, noting the disorder left by the previous night's bender, but said nothing, waiting for the two Levs to come to him. This they did, greeting him with assumed nonchalance, but with shifty eyes. "Hi there, Chief!" "Just five minutes, Captain, and we're ready!" Big Lev almost looked small. Little Lev had to reach up with his arm to shake the pilot's hand. The man eyed them in silence, then picked up the empty brandy bottle. "I see you've been ready since yesterday," he said in a deep voice that sounded like the clutch being let in on an army four-wheel drive on a bitterly cold day. "I'm warning you, if I hear the slightest hiccup during the flight, I'll throw you out, along with your firecrackers…"

The kitchen door opened, and Valya came in carrying a huge kettle from which a wisp of steam emerged. I recalled my earlier astonishment: "What man could make love to her?" Now her body seemed to take on normal proportions, the pilot's presence made her feminine, even seductive. "Would you like a bite to eat?" she asked him. Smiling, he replied rather gruffly: "No, we don't have time. They've forecast heavy winds late in the day… Just dose these two boozers with a bit of brine, otherwise they'll foul up the plane and half the Arctic…" He waved the brandy bottle and growled, still smiling: "Look at this. They get themselves drunk on imported hooch these days. Goddamn aristocrats…"

Then Little Lev intervened, trying to be conciliatory, and indicating me with one hand: "This bottle, Chief. You see, it's our comrade from Moscow who brought it for us. But it's not strong, no way! The thing is, if he could come with us this morning? He's a journalist…" The last sentence 'was uttered in ever fainter tones and disappeared into a concluding stammer.

The pilot turned to me and took me in with a hard look, though without hostility "The comrade from Moscow…" he murmured. "First you get them drinking and now they're going to blow their own asses sky-high instead of dynamiting the mountain." He bent his head to go into the kitchen and added over his shoulder, as if the matter were settled, "As for coming with us, very sorry. I don't do guided tours."

Big Lev followed close behind him, avoiding my eye. Little Lev made a contrite face at me, spreading his arms in a gesture of helplessness.

I went out. The day was just beginning to dawn: an ashen gray light enabled one to make out the line of the mountains, and at my feet a dwarf tree reached up toward the sky, its delicate, twisted branches reminiscent of barbed wire. In the half-light the helicopter was stirring up a slow flurry of flakes. I was an hour's flight away from my long journey's goal. Since leaving Paris I had traveled more than seven thousand miles. Up there was the spot where Jacques Dormes aircraft lay, somewhere at the heart of that icy mountain chain. I could feel the cold (minus thirty-five? minus forty? the same as yesterday…) raking my face, breaking up my vision through the facets of tears. I suddenly grasped that it was essential to see that spot, that a writer's curiosity had nothing to do with it, that life had been secretly leading me toward this place, and if I did not see it now my own life would be totally different.

The door creaked. The two Levs emerged, laden with crates, and made for the helicopter. I heard Valya's voice. The pilot paused on the threshold. I accosted him awkwardly, standing in his path: "Listen, perhaps I could…" I saw the expression in his eyes, did not finish my sentence ("pay you?"). He gave me a pat on the shoulder and advised me, in more friendly tones: "If I were you, I'd head straight for the village. There won't be another tractor until this evening…"

It was then that, in a lackluster voice, reconciled to the setback and no longer asking for anything, I talked about Jacques Dorme. I managed to tell the story of his life in a few brief, spare sentences. I was in such a state of dejection that I scarcely heard what I was saying. And it was only in the state I was in that I was able to convey all the grievous truth of that life. A pilot from a remote country meets a woman from the same country and for a very few days, in a city that will soon be reduced to ruins, they are lovers; then he goes off to the ends of the earth to fly airplanes destined for the front and dies, crashing into an icy hillside under the pale sky of the Arctic Circle.

I told it differently. Not better but still more briefly, closer to the essence of their love.

The pilot took his hand off the door handle and murmured, as if in an effort of memory: "Yes, I recall it now… It was that air bridge between Alaska and Siberia. The Alsib… They were real aces. They've almost been forgotten these days. That plane, it's not the one you can see on the Trident?" I nodded. The Trident, a mountain with three peaks…

"This is the last one, Chief. We're ready to go!" Little Lev was coming down the front steps, a crate balanced on his shoulder.

The pilot gave a slight cough. "And this woman. She was your…? Did you know her?" I spoke very softly, as if there were no one listening to me in this white desert. "To me she was like a kind of… Yes, like a mother…"

"We're O.K., Captain!" Big Lev's voice was cut off by the slamming of a door.

"Do you have any papers on you?" asked the pilot, rubbing his nose. I thought about my passport written in a language he would not be able to read, and the note on it: "To any country except the USSR."

"No, I'm… No. No papers…" He shook his head, and spread his hands wide, as if to say: "In that case, there's nothing I can do for you." Then suddenly he indicated his helicopter with a jerk of his chin, sighed, and smiled: "All right, come on, then. Get in!"

As it took off, the aircraft banked and for the space of a second I saw the house on the Edge, the light in the kitchen window. It seemed to me as if the pilot had his eye on that window too.

TWO AND A HALF YEARS AFTER THAT SECRET JOURNEY my manuscript was complete. A much fictionalized account, for at the time I believed that only a novel could render the improbabilities of real life readable.

It was turned down by several publishers and then embarked on that ghostly but heady existence undergone by all texts that are repeatedly rejected: the life of a stillborn child or that of a specter. Periods in limbo interspersed with renewed hopes, with nights of feverish rereading, with ultimate disgust at the written word. The feeling of preaching in an all too crowded wilderness. A dead-end street whose extremity recedes, the farther down it you travel. An endless cul-de-sac.

I was halfway along this course when the receding of the dead-end street seemed to come to a halt. I was in the office of an editorial director at one of the big Paris publishing houses, listening to such fervent praise that I feared a trap. In fact, everything about this meeting was suspicious. I had expected to be confronted by a man of letters with thinning white hair, a hacking cough, his clothes steeped in tobacco, his body half buried beneath manuscripts, a real publishing animal. Yet here was a woman, seated with a lizard's elegance at a table where my text and nothing else occupied the place of honor. Petite, dark, with very intense, shining eyes, she was perched upon a tall, old-fashioned chair, so hard that a cushion was needed. Hers was the charm that a man may find provocative in a woman who is not his type but in whom he can see precisely what it is that might inspire passionate love in another man, the man he is not. This notion came to me later on. All I saw at the time was the movement of her lips, voicing a wildly enthusiastic opinion without any publisher's reserve. I doubtless believed in the miracle of the preacher in the wilderness who is heard at last. This was my undoing.

I interrupted her (she was saying: "What's so great is the two of them, the child and the old Frenchwoman telling him about her country and teaching him her language…"). I began to reveal the true story that lay behind the fiction. Odd scraps of life experience that only the plot of a novel could link together, scraps of love that only imagination could fashion into a love story, and a vast throng of men and women who had had to be cast aside into oblivion…

"You see, the old Frenchwoman and her grandson were not actually…" I pressed on with what was, in spite of myself, fast becoming a work of demolition. I must have noticed this from the slight expression of pique that came over the woman's face. "But all the characters are real people!" I concluded, as if offering the authentication of a vintage.

I do not know if she was aware that it was her eulogies that had lured me into this absurd outpouring. Her disappointment was that of a numismatist, ecstatic over some old coins a ditchdigger has brought in, who holds forth elegantly about the time and place of their minting and suddenly sees the workman pick up a precious ducat and mark it with his tooth, to show that it is, indeed, gold.

Her tone did not change. "Fine. But what I'm trying to say is that, in the last part especially, where you talk about the pilot… there are too many raw facts that have not been imaginatively reworked at all. And then there's the character of that general. That random encounter…"

"But it's all true."

"Which is precisely my point. And that's what jars. It's too true for a novel."

I left, having been given a polite but firm ultimatum to the effect that I should rewrite the section in question.

The late retort, the esprit de l'escalier, occurred to me, not on the staircase, which was too narrow and hazardous for thoughts about literature, but on the curve of the sidewalk as I walked toward the rue du . Amid a torrent of belated arguments, what came to mind was the debate about truth and fiction unleashed by War and Peace. Murderous criticism, historians finding more than a thousand errors in the book, and one newspaper's verdict: "Even if this author had a shred of talent, he must still be condemned." But especially the opinion of the old academician, Narov, who could not forgive Tolstoy for the degrading portrayal of Kutuzov, the commander in chief of the Russian forces. For on the eve of the decisive battle against Bonaparte at Borodino we see the savior of Russia lounging in an armchair, a somewhat relaxed and extremely unmilitary posture, and to add insult to injury, immersed in a French novel! Les Chevaliers du Cygne (The Knights of the Swan) by Madame de Genlis… "What kind of perverse imagination would create so false a scene?" thundered the academician. "At that fateful hour Kutuzov would have been engaged in poring over battle maps – or at the very least, reading Caesar's Commentaries." Difficult to gainsay Narov, who took part in the battle and even lost an arm there. And yet… After Narov's death a good many French novels are actually found in his own library, among them Les Chevaliers du Cygne, with this note in handwriting on the flyleaf: "Read in the hospital, where I was nursing my wounds, after being taken prisoner by the French."

For several seconds I regretted not having recounted this anecdote to the editorial director. But did the story, in fact, prove anything? Battle maps or Madame de Genlis? Perhaps, quite simply, the melancholy of an old man with only one year left to live, a man who has seen so many wars, so many victories, and so many defeats and who at "that fateful hour" lets his gaze stray into the serenity of a fine day in early September. He knows that tomorrow this calm will vanish beneath explosions that turn the earth upside down, beneath the tramp of hundreds of thousands of men impatient to slit one another's throats, beneath the torrents of blood shed by the expected fifty to a hundred thousand victims. Then sometime later the same calm will reign once more, the same sun will shine, the same gossamer threads will float on the air.

As I continued along the rue du , I thought that to escape from this childish equation, balancing the real against the imaginary, one should probably merely write down those utterly simple moments of human presence. Old Kutuzov's gaze at a window open onto the September sky… Nothing else.

I knew in advance that it would be impossible to touch up Jacques Dormes life story. To make it more "literary"? To what end? Impossible, too, to tamper with the figure of the general, the man for whom, according to the pilot, heaven would "play a greater part than anything else." That was the way those words had been reported to me, out of context, as a simple matter of fact. This French general was no more than a vague figure mentioned in a more or less chance conversation on a night rescued from oblivion thanks to a broken amber necklace. Why should it be necessary to tell it differently?

So I sacrificed these two men, tightened up the narrative, thinking somewhat ruefully as I did so of those group portraits in Stalin's era, from which – thanks to expert brushwork – the faces of leaders who had been shot used to disappear.

Wasted effort, because the text was rejected anyway, later accepted elsewhere, published, enjoyed great success, exposed me to fleeting renown and to a surprisingly more tenacious resentment ("Do these immigrants think they can teach us how to write in French?" ruminated one Parisian critic), and finally relegated me to a new anonymity, infinitely preferable to the previous one, stripped as it was now of any illusions.

Toward the end of this whirlwind, however, I had an encounter indirectly linked to the two characters who had been sacrificed. A May evening in Canberra, autumn in Australia, a discussion with my readers (their irrepressible desire to know what is "true" and what is fiction in the book). Then a conversation with a man in his thirties, the French cultural attaché, who has had the tact not to carry on over dinner where my readers left off, as people from embassies generally do; he lets me catch my breath and also talks very little about himself. Only after dinner, when we find ourselves under the sky, with its strange array of constellations, does he talk, very simply, about the day of the general's death (he is his great-great-nephew and bears the same name, but has no reason to suppose what this name signifies in my own life). In any case he had not seen much that day, he was too young. An armored personnel carrier, with the turret removed, bore the coffin up to the little church, a sober ceremony… Later, in school, the teacher asked them to write what they thought about the dead man. As he talks to me, he evinces no desire to fire my imagination, recognizing that, being a child, he has remembered only details, often trivial ones. I sense that I could add my own tale to his, but that to do so I would have to go back to the boy listening to the story of the snapped necklace and the pilot who flew over endless icy wastes, the boy who had seen the French general in the middle of the steppes beyond the Volga. For a moment I am on the point of coming out with it, and he seems to sense this past in me… Then we both remark on the beauty of the Southern Cross, particularly glorious on this autumn night, and part company.