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.