I telephoned the Captain several times without ever hearing either his voice or that of Li En. Silent, too, was the ritornello of their answering machine, with its ironic politeness, that had always made me smile. If I had had to invent such moments in the plot of a novel, I would probably have spoken of growing unease, imagining the worst… In reality my first thought was simply of death. And the most intense response provoked by this thought was not sadness nor even remorse at having delayed and wasted time on all those trivialities that generally go with a book's publication. No, I felt afflicted with muteness. It was as if the language in which I had spoken with the Captain was no longer spoken by anyone else.
In the train I told myself that this feeling of speaking a dead language was one that Alexandra must have experienced throughout her life in Russia.
In the Allée de la Marne, there were no signs of death. There was simply a sense of absence, emptiness behind the closed shutters of number sixteen. The garage door was covered in fluorescent scrawls that had lost their aggressiveness with the passage of time. The lengths of wire fastening the "For Sale" sign to the gate were rusty. But there were no papers spilling out of the mailbox. I turned around on hearing the voice I knew: it was the neighbor from number eleven, whom I had supposed to be a retired professional singer. "I'm the one who collects all the junk mail. You have to do that, otherwise they set fire to it. That's what they did to my neighbor across the road…" She opened the box, took out a leaflet. She had spoken of "them" without any rancor, with resignation, rather, the way they talk about the weather in those northern lands.
"Li En has gone to Canada. She's thinking of settling down over there, near her sister…" We walked diagonally across the road, from number sixteen to number eleven.
Thinking I was up to date, the "singer" did not say much more, just a few words about Li En going away, taking her husband's ashes.
Left alone in the Allée de la Marne, I pictured those last moments before her departure very intensely. Lien's face, that pale, impassive mask and the force of that Asian stare that spoke of her pain better than a face distorted with grief would have done. I saw her walking down the steps, closing the gate, taking the steering wheel…
At the crossroads she had passed over I stopped. In the opaque humidity of dusk the streetlights were becoming suffused with a milky blue. In a telephone booth with broken doors a receiver dangled, and there was a sound of whispering voices, just as if someone could still be making a call there. The wind ruffled the charred pages of a telephone directory.
At the center of the row of houses beside the Allée de la Marne I could just make out the gate of number sixteen. I decided that to understand Jacques Dorme's country, those hundred yards were enough, the distance between the house a man has just left to go to the war and this crossroads, where he turns back to take a last look at those who will remain behind to wait for him.
As it takes off, the helicopter banks steeply and I have time to glimpse the house on the Edge, the glow from the kitchen windows. It seems to me as if the pilot is also glancing at this radiance. Perhaps the very last glimmer of light between here and the Arctic Ocean, I say to myself, and I find it difficult to get the measure of this white infinity opening up before us and ingesting our frail cockpit, like a bubble of warm air, in a huge, icy inhalation.
The untouched emptiness of the Chersky mountain chain.
The height of the peaks is increasing imperceptibly, as can be judged from the disappearance of the little dark stripes, the trunks of the dwarf trees, that until a few moments ago were still managing to find a foothold at this extreme limit of the tundra. Higher up there are only two textures, ice and rock. And two kinds of surface: the granite-hard snowfields and the naked crags of the pinnacles.
It was on one of these snowfields that we landed, after an hour of flight. Seen from above, the ground appeared quite vast, but as we descended it became enclosed between two white walls, revealing itself to be a long hanging valley flanked by steep, icy slopes. I help the two Levs to unload their equipment and balance it on a small, flat sled.
"How many firecrackers have you got?" the pilot asks them. Big Lev gets muddled up trying to count them. Little Lev calls out with the zealous air of a Boy Scout: "Twelve, Chief. We'll start when the sun's up and we'll be finished before it sets. After that, just time to get back on board." The sun has not yet risen. Today it will be there for an hour and thirty-five minutes, the pilot explains to me… The geologists move off in the direction of a slope that rises in uneven terraces. Extending his arm toward a hollow in the rock, the pilot shows me the way. I'll have to skirt the obstacle of a glacier, leave the valley, traverse a narrow saddle until the moment when the summit, which will at first look like a vast monolith, divides up into three bare peaks: the Trident… "They have twelve charges today, our bombardiers. So you'll hear twelve explosions. Count them carefully At the last one turn back immediately. They'll still have their rocks to gather up. Then we'll take off at once. We won't be able to wait for you…"
I set off, glancing several times at the crenellation of the mountains all around our landing ground, trying to take note of a few features. Already the sky is almost light; the sun will rise in half an hour… Just as I am making my way around a rock with an icy fissure gouged out of it and losing sight of the landing ground, I hear the first explosion.
The echo of the seventh, multiplied by the mountain, reaches me at the very moment when a huge, rocky peak with a silvery density comes into view. Its shape is suggestive of a great milky flint, coarsely sculpted by the winds. I consult my watch. The sun has already been up for twenty minutes. "Been up" means it slips onto the level of the horizon, invisible behind the peaks, before disappearing for a night more than twenty hours in duration.
As with all mountains, the summit seems to recede as one draws closer. My progress is engulfed in a time that pushes me back and slows me down, like the hard snow on which I slither about. The eighth explosion is followed almost immediately by the ninth, just as if it were its echo. And the summit is still monolithic in form. Perhaps, after all, it is not the Trident. I look about me: there are three or four other peaks all towering up in much the same location. The echo of the tenth explosion catches up with me, already a dull, matte sound that gives a measure of the distance it has traveled. The sun, invisibly, has been in the sky for three-quarters of an hour. I lengthen my stride, try to run, and fall. The snowy ground I push against to raise myself has the dry roughness of emery.
Suddenly, narrow blades of light slice into the summit. Its surface, which seemed flat, molds itself into facets, slopes, grooves where deep violet shadows slumber. The sun has burst through some hidden crevice, an aperture that brings this brief luminous vision to life. The next explosive charge detonates a very long way off. The sequence of reverberations is longer than before. The eleventh? Or already the twelfth, the last one? I do not know anymore if I have counted correctly I remember the pilot's words: "We won't wait for you. Otherwise I'll be hacking all this loose rock to pieces in the dark with my propeller." I begin to run, my eyes on the summit, slip several times, the ground is no longer firm, the wind drives long ribbons of spindrift before it. At every step, however, the change is perceptible. The rays of light grow broader, break up the summit, dividing the mountain into three immense crystals. This looks less like a trident than a bird's broken wing. I stumble into a slope, stop, my breathing flayed raw by the cold. The grayish mass of a glacier bars the way. I study the three illuminated sections of the mountain: the rock is barely whitened with frost, the snow, rare in these lands with dry winters, fails to cling to the smooth walls. Vertical buttresses, ravines, high cols where frozen snow accumulates, scarcely reshaped by the millennia. And the rays of light already beginning to fade. Nothing else. Nothing…