The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme

5

On that day any distance between the painful duty of living and the calm acceptance of death vanishes.

A day in May 1942, some twenty miles from Stalingrad, the heat as dense as tar, the railroad tracks littered with dirty bandages, fragments of bombs, trash. A train has been hit. The railroad workers are trying to disconnect the burning tank car so as to shunt it onto a siding. The oil in it is ablaze, plunging the surrounding area into a night shot through by a purple sun. The rest of the train traffic advances tentatively now, but does not come to a halt – the only thing that matters. Westbound trains: soldiers, shells, arms, armaments. Eastbound trains: mangled flesh, the residue of battles. The monstrous culinary process of war, an immense cauldron that has to be fed at every moment with tons of steel, oil, and blood.

Alexandra finds herself caught between the wall of immobilized tank cars and the line of coaches moving forward on the neighboring track. If the fire spreads, the rail junction will become an inferno over half a mile long. She ought to fall to the ground, crawl under the train, emerge on the other side, escape. She does not stir, and stares at her reflection in the tank car's side, which glistens with oil. Mute. Suddenly her name rings out within her, her real name, and her French surname. Her life, lost here in this noonday twilight, in a foreign land that is in its death throes all around her. The brownish air, the cries of the wounded, her own body melting in the heat, stained, exhausted with her efforts, asphyxiated. She tells herself death could never sweep her away at a moment of greater anguish. At the end of the train the smoke grows thicker, the track is no longer visible…

Her reflection begins to slip away, then disappears. They have succeeded in cutting the train in two, and towing away the burning portion. Life can resume. A life that could so easily be mistaken for death.

Through the pounding of the wheels she hears a voice calling her: "Shura!" She returns to her Russian life, gets back to work. Day after day, together with other women, she unravels the tangle of the trains, the comings and goings of the locomotives. It all happens with the tension of raw nerves, in a melee of yelling and oaths, oblivious of tiredness, of hunger, of oneself. An engineer swears at her, her fierce response is curt and effective. A colleague helps her to lift a dead man down from the train that carries the wounded. They take hold of him, set him down on a pile of old ties. The man's eyes are open, seem animated, in them you can see the smoke rising from the fire. Two more trains squeeze her between their walls, one traveling westward (the plaintive sound of an accordion, the smiling face of a soldier cupping his hands and asking her to marry him), the other eastward, silent (at a window a head entirely swathed in bandages, a mouth trying to snatch a little air). And for her, between these two moving walls, the illusion of solitude and repose. And this thought: "Why do I cling to this hell?" She studies her right hand, her fingers injured in an air raid. Great soldier's boots on her feet. Without seeing it, she senses the dried-up and aged mask of her face.

The two trains clear at almost the same moment. A man comes walking along, stepping over the tracks, calmly swinging a little suitcase, careless of the chaotic maneuvering of the trains. He is dressed in a bizarre outfit, part military, part civilian. His unfettered gait, the glances he throws all around him, make him look like someone taking a peaceful Sunday walk who has landed by chance in this day of war. For several seconds he remains hidden behind the coils of smoke, then reappears, dodges a locomotive by a hair's breadth, and continues his stroll. "A German spy…" Alexandra says to herself, mindful of the countless posters that call for the unmasking of these enemies, who are being dropped in by parachute behind the lines in vast numbers, or so it appears. Shielding his eyes, the man observes the rapid flight of a fighter plane above the flames, then heads toward the switch box. No, too clumsy for a spy. This one is going to end up under the wheels of a handcar or of the train that now materializes, cleaving through the smoke. Alexandra starts running toward the man, signaling to him to move away, trying to make her cry heard above the grinding wheels on the track. She catches up with him, pushes him, they both stumble, lashed by the draft from the train. The words she hurls at him also hiss like lashes. Rough, coarse words that turn her voice into a man's voice. She knows the words are ugly, that she herself must be very ugly in the eyes of this errant vacationer, but she needs this revulsion, she seeks this pain, this inescapable torment. The stroller screws up his eyes, as if in an effort to understand, a smile on his lips. He replies, explaining calmly, with the incongruous politeness of another age. His speech is correct but this very correctness stands out. "He's speaking with an accent," she says to herself, and suddenly, dumbfounded, incredulous, she thinks she has guessed what the accent is.

They still have time to exchange a few words in Russian, but already the recognition is occurring, or rather a rapid series of acts of recognition: the timbre of the voice, the body language, a gesture that a Russian would make differently. They start speaking French and she now feels as if it is she who speaks with an accent. After twenty years of silence in this language.

The same hell still surrounds them, the same restless labyrinth of trains, the same grating of steel, crushing the tiniest grain of silence on the track, the same aircraft propellers shredding the sky above their heads, and this smoke that throws the shadow of unknown days across their faces.

They notice none of this. When the noise obliterates their voices they guess at words simply from the movement of lips. He gathers she is a nurse but was wounded three weeks ago and has been assigned to this signal box. She knows he mistook his direction at Stalingrad station and has so far failed to meet the squadron he has been posted to. But for the moment it is the sound of the words more than the meaning that matters, the simple possibility of recognizing them, of hearing these French words come to life. Of speaking the name of the town near Paris where she was born, that of another, his own hometown, near Roubaix, in the north. Names that resonate, like passwords.

It will feel to them as if they have not been parted all day. At three o'clock in the morning, they will still be talking, sitting in a room with no light, their tea cold in front of them. At a certain moment they will notice that the night has grown pale and daybreak has made its appearance through the shattered wall. They did, of course, go their separate ways after their brief encounter in the middle of the tracks: he to continue his search, she running toward the firemen's handcar. They had just enough time to arrange this rendezvous for very late in the evening. But from now on a different time exists for them, uninterrupted, invisible to other people, as fragile as the pallor slipping in through the hole in the wall, as the freshness of a wild cherry tree beneath the open window.

They should not have told each other the things they did; he, talking about the squadron he was to join (military secret!), she, admitting her fear (defeatism!): "If the Germans cross the Volga the war is lost…" But they spoke in French, with the feeling that they were using a coded language, designed for confidences, one that made them remote from the smoke engulfing the railroad tracks.

Particularly now, at around three in the morning, she takes stock of this remoteness. The first pallor in the sky, the scent of the wild cherry, a cool breeze blowing over from the Volga. The face of the man opposite her, the very strong tea in their cups, tea he had brought with him, whose taste she had long since forgotten. Even the moments of silence between them are different from the silence she normally hears. Yet the inferno is very close, just a few hundred ties' distance from this house. By five o'clock she will be plunging back into it. The man will go and join his unit. She listens to him talking about the last days before the war, days he spent in Paris in August 1939. He was coming out of the cinema (he had just seen Toute la Ville Danse… "Not bad… Nice music") when through an office window he saw this fair-haired woman rigged out in a gas mask, talking on the telephone. A training exercise… They laugh.

There is no order to the things they tell each other. They have too many years, too many faces, to conjure up. In the darkness it costs her less pain to tell him about the grief she carries within her, which was choking her the previous day, when they met. Seven years before she had experienced the same desolation. Her husband ("My Russian husband…" she explains) had just been arrested and shot after a trial that lasted twenty minutes. At that time she had longed for death, had thought of death with a kind of gratitude, but had also pictured another solution: to escape from the Siberian town to which they had banished her and return to France. This idea had kept her alive. She had hunted down the slightest item of news coming from Paris. One day she had come upon a collection of texts: ten French writers translated into Russian. The first one was called: "Stalin, the Man Who Shows Us the New World." Then there was a poem that bore the title: "Hymn to the GPU." Lines in celebration of the secret police who had killed her husband, among millions of others… She had read the collection to the end – unable to imagine what kind of human beings these Frenchmen could be, eyes that chose such ignoble blindness, mouths that dared utter such words.

She tells Jacques Dorme that now this notion of getting back to France seems even more improbable than ever. Not on account of the French poets hymning the GPU but on account of the war, this one war that reaches from the Volga to the Seine. On account of all the trainloads of wounded, who must be sent to the rear.

He talks about the house where he spent his childhood and youth, the German units now marching down the street past the drawing room windows. On the wall in this room there is a photo of his father, still very young, who went away to the war, the "Great War," and came back from it an old man, to await his death in 1925. He does not know if the memory he retains of his father derives solely from this portrait or from the few seconds during which a three-year-old child sees a man on the front steps, with a knapsack slung across his shoulder, then the silhouette of this man walking away up the street and disappearing.

The next evening they are to meet again, once more with the feeling that they have not been parted from each other for a single moment.

"No Pretender, I. I am…"

Many years afterward, when I thought about Jacques Dorme, it would be those words that best evoked for me the nature of the man, the unspoken credo of this pilot, this stranger who materialized out of the smoke from a blazing train. Words once uttered by a king of France.

In my youth I wanted to see him as a shining hero, his life as a series of glorious exploits. A habit of mind doubtless left over from our childish daydreams at the orphanage. But from the start of the story Alexandra told me, my yearning for grand gestures was stilled by the simplicity of what I heard. A life in no way concerned to be molded into a predestined course, one that lagged behind events and sometimes even came to a standstill, as it did during the nights spent in a room where one of the walls, stove in, was open to the sky, admitting the tart fragrance of a wild cherry. Far away from the timekeeping of men.

He touched down in Spain too late (my desire to see him at the head of an international brigade proved to be vain). It was January 1939, two months after the fall of Madrid. Had he hoped to join the battle against Franco's air force and the German fighter planes, to fly a Dewoitine or a Potez, such as he had piloted in France? In any event, the reality was different. He did not fight but retrieved the debris of lost battles: arms, the wounded, the dead. And he flew not a dashing fighter aircraft but a heavy three-engined transport plane, a Junkers 52 captured from the Nazis.

He had certainly dreamed of aerial dogfights and little stars marked on the side of the cockpit, the tally of victories. But the suffering of crowds seeking refuge, the cunning multiplicity of sufferings devised by war, gave him a humbler notion of his pilot's task: it was to move people from a place of great suffering to a place where there would be less suffering.

He even ended up reconciling himself to his Boche aircraft. At first he had told himself that in the event of war with Germany, familiarity with it would be useful for knowing how best to shoot down planes of this type. In time the aircraft's patient reliability warmed their relationship into an almost human friendship, grudging but forgiving at critical moments. "I have reeducated her," he would say to the Russian pilots he often came across, who had taught him a smattering of their language. He could not yet guess at the importance these two details, insignificant in themselves, would one day assume: knowing this old

Junkers aircraft and the ability to string together a dozen sentences in Russian.

Another thing he learned was that war memories tended to lie in ambush for a pilot, especially on the brink of sleep, where the skies they wove for him were cluttered with steel beams, fragments of cable, and the branches of trees, through which his plane had to steer a tortuous, unbearably slow course. He often woke up, suffocating in these tangles. And in the morning it was the empty space that surprised him. This deserted alleyway in Port-Vendres (just over the border), a few hours after the firing of the last shots in the war, a few miles away from bombed towns and howling crowds, this first-floor window open, a woman ironing linen, her daughter out in the street holding up a doll and placing it on the windowsill, the soft hiss of the water beneath the iron, the steam with its poignant aroma of a happy life. It would take him several months to get used to these oases of happiness and routine, the snares of forgetfulness.

In Paris he tried to people this void with the glib excitement of the cinema, went to see all the latest movies and at one performance noticed a woman in the audience weeping: the screen heroine was sobbing her heart out, her face immaculate as she looked up from a letter. He lost track of the plot, thinking back to the streets of Barcelona, a distraught mother with a dead child in her arms… On the way out he was amused to notice a young fair-haired woman through an office window talking on the telephone, her head rendered monstrous by a gas mask. It was funny and also upsetting to him because the young woman strongly resembled his fiancée. He had just received a letter from her, breaking off their engagement, reproaching him for his involvement in Spain, for his by now intolerable absence, and for what she called "your vagabond streak." He smiled wryly Inside the window a man was adjusting the gas mask on the blonde woman's head. She turned her tapir's muzzle toward him. It was funny after all. He promised himself to tell his family about it; he was due to see them at the beginning of September.

The day he reached the family home was the day war was declared. His sixteen-year-old brother could hardly contain his delight: he dreamed of becoming a ship's captain. Jacques Dorme even heard him exclaim: "Let's hope it lasts for a while!" He said nothing, knowing that to really fear and hate war you had to have fought in one. At the moment of his departure his mother doubtless uttered almost the same words she had addressed to her husband in 1914. The portrait of his father was still in the same place in the drawing room, only now this man, photographed a year before he went off to the front, struck Jacques Dorme as astonishingly young. And indeed, he really was younger than his son.

During the course of that sleepless night at Stalingrad in May 1942, he recalled the incident of the fair-haired girl in the gas mask and recounted it to the woman he had just met among the trains. They laughed at the thought of the strange grunting sounds her lover might have found himself listening to at the other end of the line. And, in a moment of vertigo, he had a vision of everything that lay between him and that day in Paris, everything that in less than two years had turned him into another being, all the density of life and death that he had had to ingest. From an August day in Paris, coming out of the cinema, to this great wooden house, half destroyed by bombing, this woman, a stranger but suddenly so close to him, this township beyond the Volga, the terrible convulsions of a country preparing to fight for its life, and the boundless calm of these moments, of that star in the break in the wall, of the scent exhaled by those white clusters in the darkness. And this giddiness at the thought of what had brought him all the way to this spot.

He would try to talk of it that night, from the chaos of his memories, of things forgotten, of admissions that took him by surprise. From time to time, there would be a silence, they would look at each other, bonded by the awareness of the extreme inadequacy of words.

The silences also covered up his reluctance to admit that he had more than once gambled with his life. He spoke of "blazing streamers," to describe bursts of tracers on the nights of the air battles in May and June of 1940. After mentioning that the pilots in his squadron had been fighting one against five, he checked himself at once, afraid to sound boastful, and described the ribbons of blazing streamers in which the German fighter force entangled them. As if at a carnival ball…

As for his last engagement, again Jacques Dorme told her about it in few words, mainly to explain that his presence there, at a switch yard in a Russian city, was ultimately due to his stubborn determination to catch up with a German bomber, a Heinkel, that had unloaded its two tons of death and was simply returning to base, as one goes home after work. On a fine afternoon in June… The advantage in speed his Bloch had over the German was minimal; he knew the chase would take time. He had little ammunition left: he would have to approach prudently, avoiding the bomber's many machine guns, maneuver faultlessly, fire without counting on a second chance. It took him an interminable time to close in and refine the angle of attack so that by the end it was as if he had known the Heinkel's pilot for a long period of time and could guess at the thoughts of this man within the glinting cockpit… Even as he shot him down he still had this strange feeling of a personal bond, which generally did not have time to form in the frenzy of brief duels with fighter planes. Alongside his satisfaction at the task accomplished, this barely formulated notion crossed his mind: that pilot's life and those of the men in the crew, the final seconds of their lives… At this very moment he came under attack, as if by way of a stinging reprimand. No daydreaming! The transparency of the window became iridescent with streaks of oil, fanning out, the wind whistled into his pierced shell, and the outline of a Messerschmitt slowly appeared in a steep, vertical dive. He managed to climb out onto the fuselage, lost consciousness, and came to as a prisoner.

His account of this last battle is interrupted by the dull, rhythmic throb of a heavy train passing in the dark. A train traveling eastward. Jacques Dorme falls silent and they both pause to listen to the panting sound and, from one car to the next, a groan of pain, a cry, an abusive response to that cry The freshness of the air is mingled now with the brackish residue of wounds.

"In any case I don't think I'd have had enough fuel for the return flight. I was already operating a long way behind enemy lines, I'd gotten carried away…" She senses that he is smiling in the darkness. As if to excuse himself for having spoken about his victory, the contortion he went through to wrest his plane out of a spin, his fainting. For having talked about it in the proximity of these railroad cars packed with thousands of soldiers hovering on the brink of death. He smiles.

If love has a beginning, it must, for Alexandra, have been that slight invisible smile in the darkness.

During the months of captivity his thoughts often went back to those days in May and June of 1940, and what struck him every time was the vast amount of sky. There had been nothing else during those weeks of dogfights, no recollection of what was happening on the ground, no encounters in the town streets, just this blue. Shattered archipelagoes of cloud, a blue infinity from which the earth had vanished. His memory was not deceiving him: with several sorties a day, and brief periods of sleep all haunted by these same sorties, it was a simple fact that he rarely had the leisure to find himself on solid ground.

Now, in the confined space of the camp, the earth's clinging gravitational pull dragged at the soles of his feet. And by night the smell of fresh clay stagnated in their hut, pricking his nostrils with its humid acidity. And yet they were privileged, he and the three Polish pilots with whom he shared this low building beside a farm, now transformed into a prisoner-of-war camp. He had spent time in various other places, first of all in Germany, before ending up here, on the eastern frontier of defeated Poland. Everyone sensed that another war was already brewing. These captive pilots could be useful. The German officers who came to inspect them from time to time gave them to understand that henceforth they all had a common enemy and that, as between civilized people, it would always be possible to reach an understanding. So they were entitled to the same food as the guards and to this dwelling where, instead of bunks, each of them had a bed at his disposal. They were free to come and go throughout the camp without special authorization.

In the course of these wanderings Jacques Dorme saw the ordinary prisoners' huts on the far side of the road and, one day, for the first time in his life, an execution by hanging. One of the hanged men was very tall: his toes stuck into the earth like the point of a top, his body spun round upon itself several times, before growing slack… Jacques Dorme experienced a vague feeling of shame, resenting this status of military aristocracy the pilots enjoyed.

It was in that camp across the road, during the summer of 1941, that he noticed a long column of Russian soldiers and thus learned that the other war, the one everyone had been waiting for, had just broken out.

One night the earth smell that dogged him was unbearable. He got up, crossed the room in the darkness, 'went to open the door, and suddenly noticed a glimmer of light behind the pile of old crates, then the silhouette of one of the Poles. That was where the smell came from. Seeing themselves caught in the act, the men made no further attempt at concealment. At the corner of the house a hole opened out into the ground. A head appeared there, eyes blinking in the aura of a match. The Poles looked at one another. Without exchanging any words, as if it was quite simply his turn, Jacques Dorme began helping them to shift the earth from the tunnel.

They escaped on a night of torrential rain at the beginning of autumn. The guards did not dare to set foot outside, the searchlights looked like the glaucous lights of some bathyscaphe, smells and footprints were swallowed up in the mud. One of the pilots, Witold, knew the area well. The next day they reached a village, where they spent two days hidden in a peasant's cellar. It was he who warned them that a search was being organized to retrieve the fugitives. They had time to get away, but on entering the forest had an argument: Witold wanted to press on toward the east, the other two proposed to mark time, wait, and prepare for winter. Jacques Dorme went with Witold, and that is how after several nights' march, they crossed the Russian frontier, without at first being aware of it, and found themselves in the unstable and deceptive world of the land just behind the front line.

They came upon villages where the orchards were heavy with fruit but the streets were peopled with corpses, like that hamlet in the Kiev region where a dozen women who had been shot looked as if they were resting after a day of harvesting. They skirted the towns – during the night – and would sometimes hear German songs, drunken voices. One day they found themselves in a stretch of surrounded territory, and passed by Russian units but did not attempt to make contact with them: they were no longer an army, but fragments of human flotsam – clinging to one another, pushing one another aside into the mud, snatching each other's food, falling, shot down by officers striving to halt the retreat, and shooting back at the officers to clear a path for themselves. Amid this disorderly torrent there were pockets of astonishing stability: detachments, isolated and without hope of assistance, that dug shelters, gathered arms, and prepared their defense.

When the running noose was drawn tight and every direction became equally dangerous to take, they hid among the dead on a battlefield. The German regiments passed by just a few yards from them – sometimes the mocking laughter of a harmonica floated over on the breeze – but there were so many bodies strewn across the plain, in the trenches, behind the shattered timbers of a fortified position, that it would have taken a whole army to flush out these two living men: the tall red-haired Pole, stretched out in a shell crater, and the dark-haired Frenchman, watching the trucks drive past with half-closed eyes. At night, to forget about the rustling of the wings ceaselessly flapping above the corpses, they talked at length in their habitual mixture of Polish, Russian, German, and French. They were both amazed to see the Germans already thrusting so deeply into the heart of Russia. "If they continue like this," observed Witold, "they'll cut off the Volga. And for the Russians the Volga is like…" He drew the edge of his hand across his throat, by the carotid artery. They also noted that for weeks now there had no longer been any Russian planes to be seen in the sky.

At the start of the winter they were captured, and then adopted, by a group of partisans living in an encampment hidden away in the forest and marshland. Once the period of suspicion had passed, their involvement was accepted, and Jacques Dorme now discovered an invisible war, tucked away beneath the humus of the forest; an often clumsy struggle, since it was waged by elderly peasants armed with ancient rifles, but which in the long term wore down the enemy more than conventional attacks would have done. He also noted that in this war an infinitely more violent hatred prevailed than he had experienced in the air. On one occasion they succeeded in driving the Germans out of a village and found a crowd of naked women and children standing upright at a crossroads under falling snow: transformed beneath a stream of water into a cluster of frozen bodies. This was, no doubt, the response to what could sometimes be seen at roadsides: a German soldier stripped bare, an ice statue as well, with an uplifted, frozen arm pointing in the direction marked on a sign hung about his neck: "Berlin." Or had the idea for this come first from the occupying power? Catching the look of a peasant who had recognized his wife in the group turned to ice, Jacques Dorme perceived that this question had by now become meaningless.

In March 1942, an aircraft that came to deliver arms to the partisan camps took the two pilots on board. As the plane became airborne, they started singing for joy. Jacques Dorme no longer knew what language he was singing in.

Here was how they had pictured the end of their odyssey: an airfield, a row of fighter planes, mechanics busying themselves with the aircraft, and a squadron commander asking them to show what they could do, before accepting them.

What happens to them is not totally remote from what they had hoped for. There is a terrain suggestive of an airfield but empty; all that can be seen is the outline of a Russian Pe-2 bomber without its undercarriage, its fuselage riddled with holes. A few wooden huts, which serve as hangars, but not a single mechanic at work there. There is, however, a bustle of soldiers, who seem to be preparing to evacuate the area. And planes can be heard in the sky above the town. The pilots recognize them: "Junkers 87. Yes, dive-bombers…" They are then locked up in one of the hangars and try not to interpret this as a bad sign. The door opens: flanked by two soldiers, the person whom they had hoped would be the squadron commander appears. He is a thin little man, dressed in black leather, with a shoulder belt. His greatcoat and boots gleam in the sun. He does not greet them, announces that they will be interrogated separately, points at Witold, and says to the guards: "Bring him…"

Jacques Dorme watches what happens through a broad crack between the planks of the wall. In the middle of the courtyard a wooden table and two benches can be seen. The man in black leather sits down, Witold prepares to do the same but the soldiers seize him and force him to stand. The place suddenly begins to look like one of those indeterminate backyards we wander through in our nightmares. There is that table, in bright sunlight, on the trampled snow. Soldiers carry crates, cans of gasoline, cooking pans; they cross the courtyard, paying no attention to the interrogation, and disappear at the other end. The roar of the aircraft sometimes becomes deafening, then stops for a moment, and one can hear the noisy trickle of drops sliding off the roof, still heavy with ice. The man in leather shouts an order and the scurrying of the carriers comes to a halt. All that can be seen now is the interrogation table and an army truck parked under a tree.

When the aircraft noise fades, Jacques Dorme manages to catch certain words but senses that, more than the words, it is the difference between these two men that tells and will determine the outcome: the pilot, tall, with an open face and a firm voice; the man in black, very neat, despite the springtime mud, staring at the Pole with unconcealed hatred. At one moment their voices are raised. To overcome the droning of the dive-bombers, Jacques Dorme tells himself. But the tone continues to harden even when silence returns. He sees the man in black leather stand up, his two fists leaning on the table. Witold shouts and waves his hands, the soldiers poke him in the ribs with their submachine guns. Jacques Dorme hears the Pole yelling Stalin's name in a contemptuous outburst. The man in black stands up again, his mouth twists, hisses, "You filthy spy…" several times, and he suddenly starts to draw his revolver. The seconds become unbelievably long. Witold and the two soldiers watch him doing it, unmoving. To Jacques Dorme it seems as if this fixity of stares lasts for at least a minute. The man grasps the gun, everyone has time to realize what is happening, Witold has time to lick his lips. And the shot is fired, then another.

Jacques Dorme knows it is impossible. A man is not killed like this without a trial. It must be a blank cartridge, to inspire fear. You cannot kill a man in front of this table, in this sunlight… Witold falls. The man in black leather puts away his pistol, and the solders drag the body in through the open door of one of the barrack huts.

When he finds himself out there on the bench, Jacques Dorme has the strange sensation of not having left his observation post behind the hangar wall, of continuing to observe the scene, of there being quite simply this other man, himself, who will now talk for several minutes, then die. The one looking through the crack ought to do something: hurl himself at the man in black leather, wrest his pistol from him, shout, alert a commanding officer. The man repeats his question; one of the soldiers thrusts the barrel of his submachine gun into the back of Jacques Dorme's neck, prompting him to speak. He replies, is amazed at the automatic correctness of what he is saying, realizes he is speaking Russian and that it is the first time this language has been quite as useful as this to him. He also has enough presence of mind to appreciate the strangeness of this first time. To appreciate that his replies will not ward off what awaits him and that this knowledge of Russian is the gravest charge against him, against this "spy," parachuted in by the Germans, and trying to pass himself off- a likely story! – as a French pilot. In particular, he believes he has identified the man in black leather, not him but the men of this type, whom he came across in Spain. Men in black leather. The Russian airmen, he recalls, used to break off their conversations when one of these men approached, and Jacques Dorme could not for the life of him understand this fear in pilots who confronted death ten times a day. They would stiffen and the only explanation they gave was a combination of letters: GPU – or else NKVD…

The scream of planes going into a nosedive obliterates all words. They face one another in silence, staring into one another's eyes. Suddenly Jacques Dorme senses that the man in leather is very frightened, that these narrow brown eyes are squinting with fear. An aircraft flies over the hangars, dives down on the infantrymen in the next street who are preparing to pull out. There are shouts, the stampeding of a crowd. Jacques Dorme looks up, notices the notched silhouette of another plane, and in an automatic and instant computation, assesses the angle, the distance, the approach speed… He has an impulse to warn the man in leather, but the latter is already running, running slowly, caught up in the stiff panels of his greatcoat, his hand gripping the holster of his revolver. He ought to get down, throw himself behind a wall, beneath this bench under which Jacques Dorme slides, but the dive-bomber is already passing overhead, bursting their eardrums with its roar, firing.

There is still the same table in the middle of the courtyard, the same sunlight, the ice melting into long, iridescent drops. And now, close to the truck's running board, this body in its black leather, huddled up, the smashed head fallen forward on its chest. "The man who wanted to kill me…" Jacques Dorme says to himself, without yet grasping the sense of his words – "The man I wanted to save…"

He has no time to realize what is happening to him. A cross-country vehicle pulls up in the courtyard, and the officer who escorted them this morning gets out and claps him on the shoulder. "So that's it. He's checked you over, our spy catcher?" Jacques Dorme indicates the truck with a jerk of his chin. The officer emits a long whistle, followed by a torrent of oaths. He goes to look at the corpse, stoops, retrieves the pistol and explains with a wink: "He's killed more Russians than Germans with this. Only don't tell anyone I said so…" Jacques Dorme tells him about Witold. The same whistle, a bit less long-drawn-out, the same oaths: "Poor goddamn Polack! Just his luck… No, we haven't time. The Fritzes will be here before nightfall. Get in quick. We need to see Colonel Krymov." Jacques Dorme refuses, argues. The officer insists, becomes angry, waves the pistol he has just taken from the dead man. Jacques Dorme smiles: "Go ahead. Shoot. At least that'll be one who's not Russian." In the end they load Witold's body into the vehicle and drive off, weaving a path between the bomb craters and the skeletons of burning trucks.

Colonel Krymov is nowhere to be found. At the command post they shrug their shoulders; his aide-de-camp advises them to wait. They decide to inspect all the houses, few in number, where lights are visible. The last one they visit is this izba where the windows sparkle with a flickering radiance. Before knocking they go up to the window and look in. The room is lit by the ruddy glow from the fire in the big stove. A hefty, naked man can be seen heaving about on the bed, apparently alone; he lets himself fall, full length, rears up again, falls back once more. Suddenly his hand plunges into the hollow of the bed, extracts from it a heavy female breast and kneads it between his fingers. The bed is very deep, much sunken by the weight of the lovers, and the woman's body is buried in the depths of this nest. The man collapses, emerges. This time his hand fishes out a broad thigh, pink from the fire. It is a bed on casters; at each thrust it moves forward, then backward, but not as far. A military greatcoat looks as if it is sitting bolt upright on a chair.

They see Krymov at the command post an hour later. He shows them the road to take the next day and advises them to set off very early, because "We'll be in for a merry time here soon." The dour melancholy with which he says this surprises Jacques Dorme. Merry… He does not understand. "My Russian doesn't stretch to it," he says to himself.

The frost that night is very light and there is soft earth in the corner of an orchard. When the grave is filled in Jacques Dorme sinks a cross into it: two planks of wood fastened together with wire. "At long last," sighs the officer, "that was well done," and fires three shots into the air with his pistol.

The pulsing of this new life, saved as it was in the nick of time, keeps him from sleeping. One thought is uppermost: he will never be able to explain to anyone that the war was part of all this too.

MORE ECHOES OF THE WAR COULD BE HEARD the next day in the tones of his latest escort. (Jacques Dorme was getting the feeling that his successive mentors simply did not know how to get rid of him.) This lieutenant informed him with a little dry laugh: "By the way, Krymov's regiment… Mincemeat. Not a single one got away. And the village. Not a single house left standing. It was a meat grinder." A gesture emphasized his words.

The day after, they traveled back through the same village – since then recaptured from the Germans – and came upon a young signalman lying dead on the road, close to the length of wire, severed in an explosion. His arms torn to pieces by shrapnel, he had clamped the two ends of the wire together in his teeth. What seemed to amaze the lieutenant more than anything was the soldier's ingenuity.

This nimbleness, too, was war.

As was the hallucinatory reappearance, the following morning, of the man in black leather…

They had reached the end of a field covered in snow, and recognized the airfield they had spent four days searching for. There, beside a heavy three-engined aircraft, the interrogation scene was being repeated, as if in a wounded man's delirious dream. There was this man clad in a long black leather coat, a man taller than and substantially different from the first, but acting out the same role. Pistol in hand, he was pacing up and down in the middle of a group of officers, uttering threats coupled with oaths, pointing at the aircraft and from time to time tapping on the fuselage. He did not seem to notice the arrival of Jacques Dorme and his guide, the flying officer.

"I know all about your sabotage!" he was yelling. "I've caught you red-handed. I know you're trying to undermine the decisions of the Supreme Commander…" Intermingled with oaths as they were, these accusations had a bizarre ring in Jacques Dorme's ears, with the Supreme Commander, Stalin, finding himself sandwiched between a "shit!" and a "fuck-your-mother!" An officer in a pilot's flight suit spoke up in the tones of a schoolboy seeking to excuse himself: "But, Comrade Inspector, we can't load twice its capacity…" There was a further procession of "fuck-your-mothers" and "shits," coupled, this time, with "the Party": "If the Party decides this aircraft can carry three tons that means it can carry three tons! And anyone who opposes the decisions of the Party is a fascist lackey and will be liquidated!" The barrel of the pistol jabbed at the pilot's cheek. He swallowed his saliva and whispered: "I'm willing to give it one more try, but…" The man in leather lowered the pistol: "But it will be your last. The Party will not tolerate the presence of fascist agents in the ranks of our squadrons."

The pilot and another officer took their places in the aircraft. Jacques Dorme felt as if he were going in with them, imitating each move they made in the cockpit, studying the instrument panel… He had recognized the aircraft as soon as he set eyes on it, despite the state it was in: it was a Junkers 52, the very type he had flown in Spain. The machine gun had been removed and the turret dismantled (perhaps so that it could carry the famous three-ton load decided on by the Party). And the outer surface of the fuselage and the wings had been painted a murky blue.

The runway was long enough, but the aircraft began to taxi sluggishly, the jolting of the run pulled it down against the ground. A hundred yards before the line of snowdrifts at the edge, the aircraft reared, raised its nose, then clung to the runway, began to veer around, and swerved off toward the virgin snow. The engines fell silent.

The man in leather drew his pistol and began running toward the plane. Everyone followed him but with hesitant steps, not knowing how to avoid the cowardice of involvement. The pilot had climbed out and was standing close to the plane, his eyes on the running man. His comrade was hiding behind it, pretending to examine a propeller.

His voice raw with rage and the cold, the man in leather barked out: "Not content with disobeying the orders of the Party, you also attempt to destroy military equipment. For this you will all be court-martialed. You too!" He swung round at a staff sergeant who was standing on the sidelines.

At this moment the lieutenant intervened, introduced himself, introduced Jacques Dorme. The man in leather stared at them disdainfully, then cried out in shrill tones: "So what's he waiting for? Let him get in. Let him prove he's a pilot and not a spy parachuted in during the night!"

Jacques Dorme walked around the aircraft and asked to see the cargo. The pilot sighed and opened the door, and they climbed into the dark cabin of the Junkers. The interior was taken up with big wooden crates and piled high with scrap metal: thick cast-iron slabs, tank tracks… This test flight had no doubt been devised to measure the maximum load. They climbed out. A crowd formed around Jacques Dorme. There was a steely silence. Gusts of wind could be heard hissing against the blades of the propeller. "It can be done," stated Jacques Dorme, "but there's one thing I shall need…"

The man in leather grimaced mistrustfully. "What more do you want? An auxiliary engine, perhaps?" Jacques Dorme shook his head: "No, not an engine. Two bars of soap…"

There was such a violent explosion of laughter that a flock of rooks clattered up from the roof of a hangar and wheeled off over the fields, as if borne away by a storm. The lieutenant was laughing, bent double, the pilot with his face resting against the fuselage of the Junkers, the staff sergeant with his fists pressed to his eyes, the others spinning around, their legs shaking, as if drunk. A cap rolled in the snow, their eyes wept tears. The man in leather danced around among them, thumping them on the back and shoulders with the butt of his pistol… In vain – their laughter sprang from being too close to death. When the spasms finally calmed down, when the officers had stopped pretending to soap their necks and chests, the laughter took hold of the man in leather. He could not help himself, he forced his voice to seem threatening, froze the muscles on his face, but the eruption burst forth from his clenched lips, twisted his waxen mask, he was squealing. The others looked at him in silence, with preoccupied, almost distressed expressions. It was probably in order to save face that, between two of his squeals, he shouted: "Get him what he wants!"

The aircraft gathered speed, taxied back to the start of the runway, and braked. Jacques Dorme jumped to the ground and went around to join the man in the flying suit, who had remained with the crates. At the other end of the field the inspector could be seen running toward them, waving his pistol… They lifted up one end of a long crate that loomed large there, right in the middle of the cabin. Jacques Dorme slid the two pieces of soap under its wooden base, one at each side. "If you can manage to push it forward," he said to the man, who was beginning to understand, "we're saved…" And he explained the precise moment when the center of gravity should be manipulated.

The aircraft began its takeoff run, passing a few yards away from the man in leather, and lifted clear of the earth, just grazing the rim of ice. And began to lose height.

From the ground they could see that the left wing was tilting down; it was losing speed, grinding to a halt, it seemed to them. "It's a goner!" murmured the staff sergeant. Suddenly, with an abrupt roll, the plane tilted the other way, the right wing now plunging downward, but less dangerously and losing less momentum. And once more it limped to the left, then once again to the right… Thus it gained height, now swaying less and looking more and more like an ordinary aircraft. "He tossed it!" exclaimed one of the pilots in the group on the runway. And several voices took up the cry, admiringly: "He tossed the pancake!" The maneuver was known to them as a way of getting overloaded aircraft off the ground, but only real aces could bring it off.

In the cargo area sat the man in the flying suit, leaning his back against a long crate arranged at an angle. His eyes were reddened and he was panting jerkily. When he recovered his breath, he got up and crawled over to a window. Down below lay the winding course of a river, gray beneath the ice, the airfield no longer visible. He opened the door and began throwing out pieces of scrap metal, then, shoving it along the soapy floor, a whole crate. "That way we've a better chance of landing, with that madman…" He pricked up his ears. The pilot was singing. In a language unknown to him.

At the end of April Jacques Dorme learned that he was going to be posted to a completely new squadron, a special unit that would fly American planes from Alaska across Siberia. He was disappointed. He had hoped to be taken on as a fighter pilot, to go and fight at the front. One detail consoled him: flying this route, over three thousand miles long, was considered to be much more dangerous than operating over enemy lines.

During those weeks of waiting he often found himself thinking again about the impossibility of explaining the war: telling himself that after the event everyone would talk about it, publish commentaries, accusations, justifications. Everyone, and, above all, those who had not fought in it. Everything would be crystal clear at last: enemies, allies, the righteous and the monsters. The years of fighting would be recorded, day after day, in terms of troop movements and glorious battles. The essential truth would be forgotten: that the whole of wartime was made up of myriad moments of war, and that sometimes behind the vast turmoil of the fronts there lurked a sunlit courtyard, a March day, with a man in black leather killing another man because he felt like killing. And that on the very same day there would be a certain Colonel Krymov, a naked man, quickly satisfying his lust for the flesh of a woman before being cut to pieces by machine-gun fire. And also that young man, his jaws clenched around the telegraphic cable… He soon lost his way among his recollections, and this led him to conclude that the vital thing was to keep all these fragments of war in one's memory, all these tiny wars fought by soldiers now forgotten.

At the start of May he crossed the Volga at Stalingrad and recalled Witold's words: "For the Russians, the Volga is like…" He got off the train too soon by mistake and spent a long time walking along the tracks at a switch yard. Through the smoke from a tank car set on fire by incendiary bombs, he saw a woman directing the chaotic traffic. "Here is yet another war," he thought. "This woman, so beautiful, so poorly clad, so soon forgotten…" He did not immediately grasp that he was the one the woman was shouting at.