Everyone's perception of mankind and the world has its share of truth. That of a thirteen-year-old boy walking on the steppe beside the Volga was no less true than my judgment as an adult. It even had a certain advantage: being innocent of psychoanalysis, probings into the mind, or sentimental rhetoric, it operated by entities, blocks.
Such was the Jacques Dorme who had appeared to me in the blaze of that sunset. A man hewn from the very stuff of his native land, that France I had discovered, thanks to my reading and my conversations with Alexandra. He was a combination of those qualities that reminded me of "the finest and purest soldier in old France," the warrior in "The Last Square," the exiled emperor returning to his native soil on board the ghost ship, and the "four gentlemen of Aquitaine." The grain of this human substance was yet more subtle; what I perceived was not the characters and their actions but rather the dense aura of their lives. The spirit of their earthly undertakings. Their soul.
No proofs existed of the accuracy of such a vision. My certainty was enough for me. That and also the photo Alexandra showed me when we reached home. A rectangle with yellowed edges but still retaining the crisp clarity of black and white. A score of pilots, clad in jackets lined with sheepskin and heavy reindeer-skin boots. American airmen recognizable by their lighter clothing, more elegant, more "pilot as film star." The photo had probably been taken after a ceremonial parade, for in its corner the metallic glint of a military band could be seen. No doubt the Soviet and American national anthems had just been played… Guided by Alexandra, I located Jacques Dorme. He stood out from the others in neither physique nor clothes (the same three-quarter-length jacket, the same boots). But I could have recognized him without Alexandra's help. Among the pilots who were beginning to break rank after standing at attention, as required by the anthems, he alone had remained still, his face marked by a certain seriousness, his gaze directed far away. It was as if he could hear a music inaudible to the others, an anthem the band had forgotten to play.
It took me some time to grasp that Jacques Dorme's solitude, evident even as he was surrounded by a crowd, gave him a kinship with the old giant I had seen in front of a monument to the dead, the French general who had broken off in the middle of his speech and allowed his gaze to stray into the immensity of the steppe.
The following evening I left Alexandra's house. I had to return to the orphanage, now half emptied of its past, to prepare myself for a new life. After boarding a crowded local train, I managed to catch a glimpse of Alexandra upon the platform teeming with vacationers. She did not see me, her eyes flitting anxiously along the row of windows. With a hesitant hand she was waving a farewell to someone she could not locate among all these faces. To me she looked younger and at the same time somehow defenseless. I thought of another departure, of the train carrying Jacques Dorme toward the east in May 1942.
It suddenly struck me that this woman's life was like a weighty accusation. Or at least a severe reproach, a silent reproach to the country that had so cruelly ravaged her life. A country that had caught up a very young woman in its toils and now disgorged onto this dirty platform a bemused old lady, lost among these tanned faces. For the first time in my life I believed that this reproach was directed at me as well, and that I, too, in ways it was hard to formulate, had a responsibility for this elderly, solitary existence, reduced to great deprivation, forgotten there in an ancient building, in a township carved up by railroad tracks, on the edge of the empty steppes. After all that she had done, given, suffered for this country… The people who surrounded me on the train, packed close together, laden with crates of vegetables they were bringing back from their kitchen gardens, had placid faces, tinged with routine, natural contentment. "The simple contentment she has never had," I thought, observing them. Not some copybook bliss, just a simple, contented, daily routine, a family life, in the pleasant and predictable round of the little facts of existence.
It was from that evening onward that I would embark upon the reinvention of her life, as if by dreaming it differently I could expiate the wrong my country had done her. The habit we had at the orphanage of remaking the life stories of our disgraced fathers would stand me in good stead. It would have taken little for her husband not to have been shot (how many times had I heard tales of condemned men saved by a miracle during the Stalin era), for them to have had children, for her to be living not in that old, dark house but over there, for example – I looked across at a handsome façade with balconies surrounded by pretty moldings. She would have been reading books not to the young barbarian I was, but to a refined and sensitive child, to her grandson and her granddaughter too, perhaps, two children who would have listened to her wide-eyed.
Reality often swept these daydreams away. But I set great store by them, telling myself that at least in this renascent life I could give Alexandra back her real Christian name. And her language, too, which sometimes, when she was speaking to me in French, lost a word or an expression, for which she would desperately rack her brain, with a mild look of distress in her eyes. This was not a case, I sensed, of banal forgetfulness or a failing in her aging memory. No, this was an absolute loss, the disappearance of a whole world, her native land, that was being obliterated, word by word, in the depths of the snow-covered steppes, where she had no one to talk to in her own language.
7
When I arrived in Jacques Dorme's native town I
felt no disorientation. In Paris I had lived in the rue Myrha, which cuts across the African bustle of the Boulevard Barbes. I had also lodged in the suburbs at Aubervilliers, later on in the outskirts of Montreuil, and subsequently in the Belleville district, where I had ended up no longer noticing the strangeness of this new country.
This little town in northern France was very much a part of that country.
The town hall, in a neat and tidy square, was reminiscent of those elderly Parisian ladies I used to pass occasionally near the Boulevard Barbes: survivors from another era, with carefully groomed clothes and hair, trotting along intrepidly amid this human cocktail squeezed from pulverized continents…
The safe island on which the town hall stood was indeed very tiny. The main street, elegant at the start, rapidly ran out of steam, disintegrating into rough façades, their windows filled in with cinderblocks. The window of a confectioner's was fractured in a number of places and patched with plywood. A little notice announced: "Closed. Owner has had enough." I consulted my street map and turned left.
On the telephone Jacques Dorme's brother had advised me to take a taxi from the train station: "It's quite a long way. We're at the edge of the town…" But I needed to walk, to see this town, to sense what it must have been like half a century earlier. I could not reconcile myself to the idea of climbing out of a taxi, ringing the front doorbell, and going in like someone who knew the area.
A motor scooter passed at full speed, brushed against me, swerved in and out of overturned garbage cans. A beer bottle rolled under my feet, I was not sure if it had been aimed at me or not. The sign bearing the street name was daubed with red. It took me a moment to decipher it: rue Henri Barbusse. Beneath a broken window, dangling from a clothes dryer, scraps of cloth blew back and forth. The glass had been replaced by a blue plastic bag, an unexpected patch of color on a gray-brown wall. Another window on the first floor looked almost bizarre with its little vase of flowers and neat, pale curtains. And in the wan December air an aged hand was closing the shutters, a wrinkled face and the gleam of white hair, eyes that met mine: a woman who might have lived here in Jacques Dorme's time.