The town soon flattened out beneath the roofs of empty warehouses and abandoned garages and disintegrated into moribund little houses. Modern residential dwellings now made their appearance, having waited for the town to lose heart before thrusting up their towers, interspersed with four- or five-story apartment buildings. Subconsciously, I was just comparing them to the suburbs of Moscow, finding the housing here much better designed and with a more humane architecture, when at that moment I noticed a burned-out front door, like the mouth of an enormous furnace, and a line of mailboxes thrown down on a patch of grass covered in garbage bags. The people I saw seemed in a hurry to get home and avoided me when I tried to stop them and ask the way. Two women, one of them very old, her face marked with blue ink, the other young and veiled, listened to me, staring at me in perplexity, as if the place I was looking for were the subject of some kind of taboo. The young woman showed me the direction with a vague gesture and I saw her look back at me, still with that incredulous air.
The low-rise housing zone was separated from the new buildings by the Avenue de l'Egalité, which ran along a blackish, porous wall. I only realized there was a cemetery here when I reached the entrance. One of the gates had been ripped off and hung from the upper hinge. I went in without really going in, just glancing at the first of the graves. "The Verdun sector," one could read on a little pillar. The crosses took the form of swords: all of them too rusty for one to be able to read the names, some of them broken, lying there among broken bottles, old newspapers, dog shit.
Outside a car drove past, blaring out rhythmic chanting, a singer's protesting cries. The silence returned, mellowed by the rustling of bare branches in the wind.
I saw the other car as I was following the cemetery wall, about to turn down into the residential streets. A car surrounded by five or six youths, or rather cornered by them at an intersection. It was not, properly speaking, an assault. They were kicking the sides of the car, laughing and climbing onto the hood, tugging at the door handles. The driver, who was trying to get out to push them away, was forced to remain stooped, neither sitting nor standing, for they had trapped his leg in the door. One of them, a can of beer in his hand, was gargling and spitting out the froth into the car.
It may have been this spitting that propelled me toward the group. I noticed the driver's foot, a fine black shoe, a long sock, and the very pale skin revealed beneath the trouser leg, which the edge of the door had rolled back, an old man's skin, crisscrossed by dark veins. There was nothing heroic about my impulse, just a sudden inability to tolerate the sight of this old foot, comically pawing the asphalt. And probably the outcome of my intervention would have been quite different had it not been for two motor scooters that suddenly emerged around the cemetery wall and began pursuing one another in and out of the narrow alleyways. Four of the young men clinging to the car ran off to watch the chase. The other two remained, finding that harassing the driver was more entertaining.
One of them continued spitting and choking with laughter. The other was leaning against the door with all his weight and drumming on the car roof with his fists, as on a tom-tom… I hit the spitting youth as hard as I could, with a blow designed to knock him down. He swayed, his back planted against the car, and I had time to see a flash of surprise in his eyes, the astonishment of one who had thought himself unassailable. He dodged the second blow and began running, shouting that he would come back with his "brothers." I grasped the other one, in an attempt to free the door. He twisted around, spewing out a mouthful of the French I most detested: that new French, made up of verbal filth and acclaimed as the language of the young. The old man's leg was still trapped by the door. I saw a hand feverishly trying to wind up the window, and on the passenger seat the figure of a woman, with very delicate fingers folded over a box of pastries. The next few seconds of struggle seemed predictably ugly and drawn out. As ugly as this handsome young face ("a handsome face combined with a foul mouth," I was to think later). As long-drawn-out as the maneuvering of the young man, unable to pull a switchblade out of his pocket. He pressed the button too soon and the blade at once cut through the cloth of his jeans. I leaned my arm harder against his throat. His voice hissed, then fell silent. For a moment his mouth opened dumbly, then suddenly his eyes grew cloudy and at all once flickered in a basic animal refusal to suffocate. His body collapsed like that of a puppet. I loosed my grip, pushed him toward the sidewalk. He staggered away, stumbling, rubbing his throat and hissing threats in his broken voice.
The door slammed, the car drove off and turned in to an avenue.
Now several minutes spent wandering around with a feeling of nausea, compounded with useless anger and belated fear, fear arriving in sickening gusts that corresponded to the buzzing of the scooters in the streets. But most of all, a vivid awareness of the total futility of my intervention. I could at this very moment have been lying in the gutter with a switchblade between my ribs. And it would have changed nothing and surprised no one, for there are so many small towns like this, so many old men attacked. Now my anger turns against the driver, who had had the stupidity to stop and parley instead of putting his foot down and driving home. I feel more remote than ever from this country. What am I doing interfering in its life, reprimanding young armed gorillas, playing the good citizen, with my stateless person's identity card in my pocket…?
The burning sensation from these words delays my search. I finally find the Allée de la Marne but number sixteen appears to be nonexistent. I cross the road twice, study each of the houses, feeling certain I have recognized Jacques Dormes, without being able to see the number. But the number, precisely, is missing. I walk along the street in the other direction: a sequence of two-story houses, with bare gardens. In the depths of a room, a feeling of expectation that goes back a long way. An open garage door and on the other side of the street, at number eleven, an old woman thrusting her hand into the mailbox, finding nothing, taking advantage of these moments to observe me. Or rather, she pretends to look for letters while scrutinizing this strange passerby who is now retracing his footsteps. So as not to alarm her I call out from some way off: "Number sixteen, Madame?" Her voice is strangely beautiful, strong, the voice of an elderly singer, one might think: "Why, it's over there, Monsieur. Just behind you…" I turn, take a few steps. The open garage door hides the ceramic circle with the number on it. Inside a man is cleaning the windshield of his car with a sponge. I recognize him immediately: the old man with elegant black shoes. Jacques Dorme's brother, "Captain," as I called him, in accordance with Alexandra's stories.
I tell him my name, remind him of our conversations on the telephone, my letters. His smile does not entirely succeed in obliterating the hint of sourness lurking in his wrinkles. I do not know if he recognizes me as the man who intervened just now. It seems as if he does not. He closes the garage, invites me to come up into the house, and on the front steps asks me this question, which ought to be utterly banal. "Did you find it easily? Did you come by taxi?" It is not banal, a tiny quaver in his voice betrays the secret tension with which these words are uttered. So he has recognized me… Settled in the drawing room, we talk about the town and succeed in avoiding the slightest allusion to what has just happened in the Avenue de l'Egalité. His wife enters, offers me her hand, those fragile fingers I saw clutching a beribboned cardboard box. Her face, with its Asiatic impassivity (she is Vietnamese), shows no trace of emotion. "I'll bring tea," she says with a slight smile and leaves us alone.
I have nothing new to tell him. In my first letter, thirty pages long, I set down with the assiduity of a chronicler everything I knew about Jacques Dorme, about the Alsib, about the week the pilot spent in Stalingrad. No, not everything, far from that. Like an archaeologist, I simply wanted this history to be added to the history of their country, like a national art object discovered abroad and repatriated. I talk about my journey to Siberia, to the house on the Edge, about the Trident mountain… That journey, made at the beginning of the year (we are now in December), is still vividly present, with the sounds of the wind, voices made clear by the cold. However, my enthusiasm in recounting it seems to embarrass the Captain. He senses my purpose: the repatriation of a parcel of history that got lost in the snowy wastes of eastern Siberia. I feel his face growing tense, his eyes see me without seeing me, peering into a past that suddenly reappears in front of us, in this drawing room, on this December afternoon. I interpret his emotion incorrectly and lay my cards on the table: I am writing a book that will rescue the French pilot from oblivion, the press will be interested in him, and, as I know the place where he died, it will be possible to bring his mortal remains back to France, to the town of his birth…