Joy was discovering a technique for combating the encrustation of ice, which grew thicker in flight and little by little coated the entire aircraft. You had to alter the engine speed regularly: as it varied, the vibrations shattered the crust of ice.
Joy was the idea that another ten planes were on their way to Stalingrad, where the outcome of the battle might depend on the arrival of these ten aircraft in the nick of time. Or even that of the single fighter plane he himself was flying, this Airacobra, weighed down, thanks to Siberian distances, by a one-hundred-and-sixty-gallon drop tank beneath the fuselage. He was no fool, he knew that in the monstrous hand-to-hand struggle between two armies, between the millions of men killing one another at Stalingrad, this scrap of sheet metal with a propeller could hardly tip the scales. And yet on each flight an irrational conviction returned: this is the plane that will prevent the destruction of an old wooden house with wild cherry boughs beneath its windows.
In April 1944 he became what in the pilots' language they called a "leader." Now at the controls of a bomber – a Boston or a Boeing 25 – he was guiding ten or fifteen Airacobras, with quite a different sense of the weight of this little squadron in the scales of the war.
Joy resided in the confidence others had in him, by the resurgent light of the polar sun, which was now showing itself for longer and longer periods. In the devotion of the people on the ground, who would mark out the runways with fir branches when there were blizzards. And also in the thought that these missions at the end of the world were bringing the liberation of his native land closer.
One day he had occasion to suffer a shock such as no brush with death would have administered. He had just landed, and, still numb from several hours of flying, saw a column of prisoners walking along beside the airfield. Over the course of a week, these men had been breaking the ice from dawn until dusk, installing steel plates and covering them with gravel for new runways. That evening they were moving off in single file through the snowdrifts. The guards surrounded them, training their submachine guns on this mass of human beings, chilled to the bone and staggering with weariness. Jacques Dorme watched their progress and tried to catch the other pilots' eyes, but the latter turned away, in a hurry to settle down out of the wind, to eat… A submachine gun spat just at the moment when he, too, was about to step inside. He had seen what happened prior to this gunshot. A prisoner had slipped and, to avoid falling, had moved out a little from the line of walking men. With no hesitation a guard fired, the guilty man fell, the column froze for a second, then continued its jolting progress. Jacques Dorme rushed up to the guard, shook him, gave shouted vent to his anger. And heard a level voice: "Just following the rule."
Then, more quietly, in tones of hate-filled contempt: "I'll give you a couple in the balls, too, if you like." One of the pilots took Jacques Dorme by the arm and led him firmly toward the rest of the squadron personnel.
During the meal he sensed a strain in their voices, thanks both to the impossibility of admitting to what had happened and to shame. Shame that a foreigner had seen it. The only true fact he would learn over supper that evening would be the "rule," the words repeated automatically by the guards before the column of prisoners sets off: "One step to the left, one step to the right, and I shoot without warning."
That night, inside the dark cabin of the Douglas transport plane that was taking them back to their base, he stayed awake, his thoughts constantly returning to this strange country, whose language he already spoke well, which he believed he knew so well and which he failed to understand, which he sometimes refused to understand. Comparing it to France, he had a notion that left him even more perplexed: this country, too, was occupied. Like France. No, worse than France, for it was occupied from within by the regime that governed it, by the spirit of that rule – "One step to the left, one step to the right…"
The memory of that death stood in the way of the easy joy he had experienced before: in the soft bluish luminescence of the Bostons' instrument panels, so much more agreeable than the harsh lighting in Russian aircraft, the almost excessive comfort of the cockpit, and, upon landing, a system that responded perfectly Now, when he climbed out onto the runway, the memory of the prisoners in their single file and the man who had stumbled on an icy path came back to him.
At the end of August 1944, he recalled this man, but in a new way. That day he was feted by all his comrades, the pilots and the mechanics, from the morning onward: they had just learned of the liberation of Paris. As he responded to their congratulations, Jacques Dorme wondered what they knew about France. Interspersing their excited cries were references to the Paris Commune and Maurice Thorez – along with the name of Marshal Pétain, uttered with contempt and distorted by the lack of nasal sounds in Russian. He did not even try to explain, feeling himself to be relieved at last of the burden of the fall of France, for which, in conversation, they had sometimes seemed to reproach him. Now they were laughing, remarking that once Hitler had been driven out, the French people would settle the capitalists' hash and embark upon the building of Communism. A little dazed by their voices, he tried to imagine what kind of books they might have read about France. Alexandra's tale returned to his memory: the volume she had unearthed in the public library in a Siberian town, the domicile assigned to her. A collection of texts by French authors, translated into Russian, among them a poem that was a veritable "Hymn to the GPU"…
During his monotonous flights he pictured Paris, the popular jubilation, windows open to a fine summer sky.
And, more than anything, the café terraces, a life spent at tables, garrulous, carefree, made up of snatches of words, exchanged glances, the complicity of bodies brushing against one another… Through a fine layer of cloud, beneath the Boston's wings, bristled the peaks that arose from the endless Kolyma plateau, still tinged with green and gleaming with watercourses. "In a few days' time," he thought, "all this will be white. Devoid of life…" All that remained would be the rows of rectangles, the barrack huts and watchtowers of a camp, reliable beacons for the pilots in the midst of this mountainous vastness with no landmarks. The only point of reference the thousands of human lives concentrated together here in this nothingness. In his mind's eye he again pictured the little round tables on the café terraces and reflected that the author of the "Hymn to the GPU" might well be sitting at one of those tables at that very moment, talking to a woman, ordering coffee or wine, commenting on the past, criticizing the present, celebrating the future. Jacques Dorme suddenly realized that you could never make that poet understand the infinity that now lay beneath the wings of the plane, nor the rule: "One step to the left, one step to the right," nor the death of the prisoner who stumbled… No, impossible. He felt something like a muscular spasm locking his jaws. Down there, at their café table, what they were speaking was a different language.
In the course of that flight Jacques Dorme saw himself for the first time as a foreigner in the land of his birth.
He did not immediately recognize the man in black leather. Indeed, this one bore scant resemblance to the little inquisitor who had killed Witold. Still less to the second one, the fat, hysterical one with his orders for an overloaded plane to take off. Those two had spread terror when the war seemed lost, they were more afraid than the servicemen they threatened. The man Jacques Dorme beheld in December 1944 already had a victor's self-confidence. He was short and thin, like the first one, but his leather coat was lined with thick fur. He shook its lapels when a little frost fell on them from a propeller, the specifications of which, no one could understand why, were the subject of his inquiries. His curiosity was disconcerting. The pilots felt as if they were undergoing an interrogation in which the excessively simple questions were merely a way of confusing the person interrogated. Occasionally he smiled, and Jacques Dorme noticed that at once the smile would vanish from other people's faces.