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.