In their life of just over a week together, there was also that morning blinded with fog. Not a plane in the sky, no risk of air raids, trains advancing at a sleepwalker's slow pace. The women who worked with Alexandra had allowed her to go, had almost forced her to take this morning off, for they had learned or guessed that it was her last.
It was cold, more like an autumn morning. A cool, misty day in May. They walked along beside a meadow, passed through a village from which the inhabitants had just been evacuated. The presence of the river was revealed in the fog by the dull echo of the void and the scent of rushes. One of the mornings in their life… They sensed that it was the moment to speak grave, definitive words, words of farewell and hope, but what came to mind seemed heavy and pointless. What needed to be admitted was that this single week had been a long life of love. During it time had vanished. The pain to come, absence, death, would leave this life unblemished. This needed to be said. Yet they held their peace, certain it was a sentiment they shared, down to the tiniest nuance.
Invisible, in the cotton-wool blindness of the fog, a boat passed, close to the bank, they could hear the oars slipping lazily into the water, the rhythmic groan of the rowlocks.
During the hours they lived through together, Alexandra had told Jacques Dorme the story I was to hear as a child. A young Frenchwoman's arrival in Russia in 1921 as a member of a Red Cross mission, a temporary visit, or so she had thought, which became more and more irreversible as the country very rapidly cut itself off from the world.
What they talked about, in fact, was four different countries: two Russias and two Frances. For the Russia Jacques Dorme had just traveled through, a Russia broken by defeat, was hardly known to Alexandra. As for her France, that of the days following the Great War and the start of the twenties, her memories had long since blended with the sweet and often illusory shade of the homeland she dreamed of. He had known a quite different country.
One day, thanks to a news bulletin they happened to hear on the radio, these two Frances came into collision.
They had lunch together that day. When there was a break in the flow of trains beneath the windows and the hum of the aircraft died away, they could imagine they "were lunching in peacetime on a sunny day in spring… They were just about to part when, with a mysterious air, Alexandra murmured: "This evening I shall need your help. No, no, it's very serious. You must put on a white shirt, shine your shoes, and have a good shave. It's a surprise…" He smiled, promising to come dressed to the nines. It was then that they heard the radio announcer's voice, reporting in grim, metallic tones that the town of Kerch had fallen and speaking of fierce fighting in defense of Sebastopol… They knew this news implied the impending loss of the Crimea and a German breakthrough to the south, which would open a route to the Volga. The radio also reported that the Allies were in no hurry to open a "second front." Perhaps these were the words that set the match to the powder keg.
Alexandra spoke in harsh, mocking tones that were new to him. She affected amazement at the casual attitude of the Americans and the caution of the English, sitting tight on their battleship island. And, with still more bitterness, she declared herself sickened by France, by the spinelessness of her military leaders, by the treachery of her government. No doubt she carried in her mind a memory of the army, bled white but triumphant, at the victory parade of 1919. As for that of 1940… She spoke of cowardice, evasion, an easy life paid for by shifty compromises. "But we fought…" Jacques Dorme did not raise his voice as he said it. He spoke in the tones of one who accepts the other's arguments, merely seeking to bear witness to the facts.
How a French soldier like him might have replied to her I shall never know. Did he describe the battle of the Ardennes? The fight for Flanders? Or perhaps the air battles in which his own comrades in the squadron had perished? In any event, he appeared to be justifying himself. Alexandra cut him short. "At least let me picture a country that rises up as a whole and drives out the Boche, instead of making pacts with them. Yes, a country that fights back. What the Russians are doing. It's already clear that the Germans are not unbeatable. But of course if people don't want to put up a fight…"
"You're saying what they'll say after the war. What people will say who didn't fight in it." Jacques Dorme's voice remained calm, a little drier perhaps. Infuriated, Alexandra was almost shouting: "And they'll be right to say it! For if the French had really decided to fight…"
"If they had really decided to do so, here's what you'd have had where France is now…"
Jacques Dorme took the map of the world from a shelf, spread it out on the table among the plates from lunch, and repeated: "Here's what you'd have had…" He held a box of matches in his hand and the box covered the purple hexagon of France almost completely, with only the western tip of Brittany and the Alpine fringe showing. Then the matchbox flew over Europe and landed on the USSR, on the territory conquered by the Nazis. There was room on this for four matchboxes. "Four times the size of France…" he said in grim tones. "And I'll tell you something. I've seen every one of these four Frances devastated, towns razed to the ground, roads covered in corpses. I've traveled across them, these four lands of France. That's just to tell you what the Boche army can do. As for the Russians, I've seen all kinds. I've even seen one whose arms had been cut to ribbons by shrapnel and who had his teeth clamped around a broken telephone cable, copper against copper, wrapped in a scrap of cloth, in accordance with instructions. And he died with his teeth clenched… They're going to lose ten million men in this war, maybe even more. Lose them, do you understand? Ten million… That's the total number of able-bodied men France had to give."
He folded up the map, put it back on the shelf. And in a voice once more calm, no longer judgmental, he added: "And, by the way, we didn't have a 'second front' in May 1940 either.
That evening he arrived dressed in a white shirt, his cheeks smooth, his shoes well polished. They smiled at each other, and, when they spoke, avoided any return to the subject of their quarrel. "It's a little surprise. You'll see," she told him again as they set out. The previous day the director of the military hospital had asked her to take part in a concert that was being organized prior to the evacuation of all the wounded, now that the front was getting nearer. Several women would be singing, he explained, and then a couple would dance a waltz – he was counting on her for this. The concert hall had been set up, not in the hospital, which was too cluttered with beds, but in an engine shed, from which the locomotives had been withdrawn for the evening.
As they made their way inside, she recoiled in shock. The surprise was greater for her than for him. Hundreds of pairs of eyes were focused on the still-empty platform, countless tightly packed rows of men sitting there, each unique and yet all alike. The living mass of them extended right to the back of this long brick building and was lost in the darkness, giving the impression of stretching away, row upon row, to infinity. She was accustomed to seeing them divided up into separate wards, overcrowded of course, but where the multiplicity of their injuries and suffering was matched by individual faces. Here, in this vast parade of pain, all the eye could see was an undifferentiated mass of tissue in torment. Studded with pale heads, white with bandages.