Seeing my confusion, Alexandra thought I had been unable to follow the spoken French or that the content of the speech was too complex for a boy of my age. It was doubtless in order to rescue me from my predicament that, in tones of a very distant reminiscence, she said: "He came here to the city once before. In forty-four. Yes, in the autumn of forty-four. I didn't see him. The hospital was full to bursting. Everyone was working day and night. But we had already talked about him for the first time long before that…"
"Who is 'we'?" I asked, emerging from my torpor. "'We' is myself and… Jacques Dorme." My "sunstroke" lasted for less than a week. But Jacques Dormes life story, the fragmentary sketch of this life story, had time to knit itself forever into what I was. The tale Alexandra told me that July 1966 was one of those you only hear once in a lifetime.
Four years and a few months after that ceremony on the broad plain, I learned of the tall old man's death. The gaze that embraced the steppe beyond the Volga, the moment of silence he had spun out that day, all this had just vanished into eternity. I can still see the newspaper kiosk near the Anichkov Bridge in Leningrad, the page with his picture on it, the report of his death. "The Lilliputians have won," I thought as I bought the paper. I could not yet guess how accurate this phrase was. But I was already grown up enough to know that prior to this death there had been betrayal by some, cowardice by others. Above all the ingratitude of a country whose honor he had once saved.
In my memory, however, he would remain unchanged: an old giant in the middle of a former battlefield, paying homage to fallen warriors. Just one sentence of his, which I was to come across much later in a book, would be added to this vision of him, as if in reply to Alexandra's question as to what he had spoken about: "Now that baseness is in the ascendant it is they who can look upon Heaven without turning pale and upon Earth without blushing."
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.