Half a dozen women sang in chorus, unaccompanied. Their voices sounded naked; even in the cheerful songs they tugged at the heartstrings, too close to tears. The applause was muted: many arms in slings, stumps where arms should be.
Now it was their turn. A nurse placed a chair at the side of the stage. Two soldiers came on and set down a legless amputee, a young man with bright red hair and a dashing look. They brought him an accordion. As if in a dream, Alexandra and Jacques Dorme stepped up onto the boards that smelled of fresh timber.
Their bodies' memories quickly overcame the fear of not recalling the steps. The accordion player played with an imperceptibly delayed waltz tempo, as if he would have liked to see them dancing for as long as possible. As they revolved, they saw the blaze of his hair and this devastating contrast: a broad smile, gleaming teeth, and eyes brimming with distress. Briefly and intermittently, they also noticed the looks of the wounded men, lines of sparks burning into their bodies as they danced. Nothing remained now of their lunchtime argument. All talk was charred to a cinder by these looks. An aircraft passed very low overhead and drowned out the music for several seconds. They continued revolving amid this hubbub, then, as one dives into a wave, fell back into the melody as it returned.
They felt in the end as if they were alone, dancing in an empty hall, each one's face reflected in the other's eyes. Several times she lowered her eyelids to drive away her tears.
Two days later there came that cold, misty morning, and in the evening, his departure. Before boarding the train, he had already mingled with the members of what would be his squadron now, his new life. The train moved off, the men talked louder, more cheerfully, it seemed. She just had time to catch sight of his face once more, alongside the grinning countenance of a big fellow who was waving to someone on the platform, then the night blended the cars into a single dark wall… On the way home she listened within herself to the words he had spoken that morning as they walked beside the river. "After the war, you know, you must think about coming back to the old country… Of course they'll let you leave. You'll be a Frenchman's wife. That's if you'll agree to marry me, naturally. That means you'll become a Frenchwoman again and I'll show you my hometown and the house where I was born…"
S SPOKE SLOWLY, BREAKING OFF TO LISTEN TO THE WIND as it scoured the steppe or to let her gaze follow a bird across the July sky. Or did these pauses, perhaps, correspond in her memory to the long months that brought no news of Jacques Dorme? I allowed my eyes to travel along the narrow stream that cast a cooling veil about us, beyond the foliage of the willows and alders that sheltered us beneath their restless network. The banks were cracked in the heat, and the almost unmoving brook seemed to be dwindling before our very eyes, sucked dry by the sun. In its place I pictured a broad stretch of water one May long ago, a nocturnal lake and the figures of the two swimmers silhouetted against the blue light of a silent thunderstorm.
There were few things left for her to tell me. She did not talk about the fighting at Stalingrad, knowing that they told us tales of it every year at school, backed up by eyewitness accounts from old soldiers. Nor about the hell behind the lines, in townships transformed into vast field hospitals.
After Jacques Dorme's departure and in the course of the three years of his flights across Siberia, she had received four letters. Passed from hand to hand, thanks to servicemen on the move: the only means of sending mail from the Arctic wastes where his squadron was based and, especially, of thwarting the vigilance of the spy catchers.
The work of the pilots on the "Alaska-Siberia" line, the "Alsib," was doubly secret. During the war it had to be concealed from the Germans. After the war from the Soviet people themselves: the cold war had just begun and it was vital for the people not to know that the American imperialists had supplied their Russian ally with over eight thousand aircraft for the Eastern Front. All Alexandra ever learned came from those four letters, a single photo, and conversations with a comrade Jacques Dorme had asked to look her up, a task the men of the squadron used to undertake on one another's behalf, with their nearest and dearest in mind. There was also the journey she was to attempt at the beginning of the fifties, in the hope of finding the place where he had died. She brought little back from this: the memory of a barely accessible region, crisscrossed here and there by the barbed-wire fences of the camps, and, in response to her questions, prudent silence, ignorance either real or feigned.
Yet she succeeded in making me picture – almost relive – the era of this air bridge hidden from the world. Among the routes I have traveled or dreamed of in my life, that of the Alsib was one of the first to imprint its vertiginous space within me. Three thousand miles from Alaska to Krasnoyarsk in the heart of Siberia, a score of airfields located on the permafrost of the tundra, and their names as mysterious as those of staging posts on a quest: Fairbanks, Nome, Uelkal, Omolon, Seymchan… The violence of the Arctic winds that knocked men over, dragging them across ice where the hand could find nothing to hold on to. The air, at sixty below, a mouthful of which was like biting into a volley of razor blades. Squadrons that relieved one another from one airfield to the next, without days of rest, with no right to weakness, never using the excuse of bad weather, magnetic storms, or the overloading of aircraft. The landing runways built by the prisoners from the camps, the areas around them studded with their frozen corpses, which nobody bothered to count. The only count kept related to the number of aircraft flown by each of the pilots: more than three hundred by Jacques Dorme, according to his letter dated September 1944. And a more discreet addendum: the tally of pilots killed in crashes – over a hundred deaths, to which, on New Year's Day 1945, was added his own.
Alexandra had probably guessed a good deal more than the letters and conversations revealed. Moreover, she had not joined in the New Year's Eve celebration with railway colleagues on December 31, 1944. A patient, sly prescience was choking her. It was as if a voice had fallen silent over there within the icy confines of Siberia, a voice that was no longer responding. When, some months later, a friend of Jacques Dorme came to her house and told her the truth, she did not dare mention that presentiment, afraid lest he see it as mere "women's superstition." When she came to tell me about it, it was with a sad little smile and I would blush, not daring to tell her how much I believed her, believed every single word, especially about that foreboding, which proved to me how deeply they had loved one another.
In those days I did not have a better definition of love (and I do not know if I have now) than that of a kind of silent prayer which continuously bonds two human beings, sepa-
rated by space or by death, into an intuitive sharing of the sorrows and moments of joy each experiences.
Sorrow, for him one day, came from examining a heavy Douglas C-47 they had managed to track down, as one does a wounded animal, following a trail of blood: despite a snowstorm on the rocky slope the plane had smashed into, there was this long, tawny streak, the color of fuel, standing out in the middle of the endless white. A warm color in this world of ice. Warm lives, suddenly destroyed, whose faces and voices Jacques Dorme still remembered… Shaking hands with the pilot, who, before he climbed into the aircraft, had been telling him about his three-year-old son back in Moscow. A warm handshake.
In cold like this all liquids froze within the bowels of the aircraft. Oil solidified into jelly. And even steel became fragile as glass. The air strove to dissolve the planes into its own crystalline substance. The pilots traveled very close to the zone that broke all records for cold on earth. "Seventy-two degree below zero," Jacques Dorme had announced to his Russian mechanic, with a touch of pride.