The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme Read online

  THE

  EARTH AND SKY

  OF JACQUES DORME

  Also by Andreï Makine

  A Hero’s Daughter

  Confessions of a Fallen Standard-Bearer

  Once Upon the River Love

  Dreams of My Russian Summers

  The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

  Requiem for a Lost Empire

  Music of a Life The Woman Who Waited

  THE

  EARTH AND SKY

  OF JACQUES DORME

  A Novel

  ANDREÏ MAKINE

  Translated from the French

  by Geoffrey Strackan

  Arcade Publishing • New York

  Copyright © 2003 by Mercure de France

  English-language translation copyright © 2005, 2013 by Geoffrey Strachan

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  First published in French under the title La terre et le ciel Jacques Dorme by Mercure de France, Paris

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-61145-803-9

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Carole and Laurent

  Translator’s Note

  Andrei Makine was born and raised in Russia, but like his other novels, The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme was written in French. The book is set in Russia and France, and I have kept some of the Russian words the author uses in the French text in this translation. These include shapka (a fur hat or cap, often with earflaps); izba (a traditional wooden house built of logs); and taiga (the virgin pine forest that spreads across Siberia south of the tundra).

  The text contains a number of references to Russian historical figures, including Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin, Catherine the Great’s administrator for newly acquired lands in the south, who reputedly gave orders for sham villages to be built for her tour in 1787, and Mikhail Harionovich Kutuzov, commander in chief of the Russian forces at Borodino in 1812. There are also a number of references to institutions from the Communist era in Russia. A kolkhoz was a collective farm. The Pioneers were junior members of the Young Communist youth movement. The GPU (later OGPU) was the agency for investigating and combating counterrevolutionary activities in the USSR from 1922 to 1934. The NKVD, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, were the police charged with maintaining political control during the years of Stalin’s purges from 1934 to 1946.

  References to French history include allusion to the new calendar established in the early years of the French Revolution, starting with Year I in 1793. Ventose, one of the newly named months, corresponded to late February and early March. Year II was one of many political executions, as the Terror continued.

  1

  THE SPAN OF THEIR LIFE TOGETHER is to be so short that everything will happen to them for both the first and the last time.

  Early in the night, in the violence of their lovemaking, he snapped the thread of the old necklace that she never removed. The little amber beads clattered onto the floor, and as the rain began to fall, it mimicked at first this gentle buckshot-like patter, then changed its tune, turned into a downpour, torrents of water, and ultimately, an ocean surge that flooded into the room. After a blazing hot day, the dry wind rustling like insect wings, this tidal wave reaches their naked bodies, filling the sheets with the damp aroma of leaves and the bitter freshness of the plains. The wall facing the bed does not exist, only gaps in the charred timbers, the havoc wrought by the fire of two weeks ago. Beyond this space, the purple, resinous flesh of the stormy sky swells heavily. The first and last May storm of their shared life.

  * * *

  She gets up; draws the table toward the corner that is most sheltered from the deluge; then pauses beside the gaping wall. He stands up, goes to join her, slips his arms around her, his mouth buried in her hair, his gaze lost in the seething darkness outside the gap. A long, soaking wet ribbon of wind clings to their skin; the man shivers and murmurs in the woman’s ear: “So you never feel the cold, then . . .” She laughs softly: “I’ve been out here on the steppes for over twenty years. And you . . . a year? There you are . . . You’ll get used to it. You’ll see . . .”

  A train shakes the track heavily very close to the house. The puffing of the engine cuts into the darkness, through the rain. The mass of cars comes to a halt beneath the windows, the beam from a lamp rakes through the room. The man and woman are silent, pressed close together. From the train there arises a blend of sibilant voices, groans, a long gasp of pain. Men, wounded beyond repair for the front, being evacuated into the depths of the country. It is strange to feel his own body so alive and still stirred by pleasure. This woman’s shoulder held in his fingers’ caress, the slow, warm throb of the blood there in the hollow of his groin. The slithering of an amber bead beneath his foot. And the thought that tomorrow they will have to gather them all up, repair the necklace . . .

  Most stunning of all is the very idea of tomorrow, and of hunting for those tiny spheres . . . Here, in a house barely seventy miles from the front line, in this country foreign to the woman and still more foreign to the man . . . The train moves off below the windows and begins its rhythmic drumming on the steel. They listen as the jolting sounds fade beneath the swish of the rain. The woman’s body is burning hot. “Out here on the steppes for over twenty years . . . ,” the man recalls and smiles in the darkness. Since they met the day before yesterday he has had time to talk to her about what has occurred in France during those twenty years. As if it were possible to remember everything, as if he could reel off all the events one after the other, starting in 1921, right up to June 1940, when he left the country . . .

  The rain bounces off the floor; they feel a veil of dampness over their faces. “Do you think he’ll really be able to prevail? Get the people to accept him?” she murmurs. “Without an army, without money. It’s all very well his being a general. . .” He does not reply at once, struck by the strangeness of these moments: a woman who for so many years had not heard herself called by her true given name (“Shura” is the name they use here when speaking to her, Shura, or sometimes Alexandra); his having become a Russian pilot; this house gutted by an explosion; this township on the banks of a great river, in the middle of the steppes, where preparations are under way for a gigantic battle . . .

  A bird frightened by the storm hurtles into the room, weaves a jerky flight through the darkness, and makes its escape through the gap.

  “It’s true that he has very few people around him,” murmurs the man. “And, as for the English, I don’t know if we can count on them . . . But you know, it’s like a battle in the air. It’s not always the number of planes that decides it, nor even how good they are. It’s. . . How to explain it? It’s the air. Yes, the air. Sometimes you feel the air is supporting you, playing on your side. The air or heaven itself. You just have to have great faith in it. For him, too, it’s heaven
that will play a greater part in this than anything else . . . That’s what he believes.”

  OVER THE COURSE OF THIS JOURNEY I have often calculated the years that separated me from those two lovers.

  “Fifty years, give or take a month or two . . .” I tell myself once more, watching through the aircraft’s window the monotony of the night hours over Siberia. Fifty years . . . The number ought to impress me. But instead of amazement, I have a vivid sense of the presence of those two beings within me, of their deep connection to what I am.

  Outside, one can only walk by thrusting a pike or a ski pole into the carapace of snow swept clean by the blizzard. Indoors, in the izbas long mess hall, the steel stove is red hot. The air smells of burning bark, dark brown tobacco, and ninety-proof alcohol laced with cranberry syrup. It is scarcely an hour since I arrived, the goal has been reached, I am there in the house that is known as “the Edge.” (“Its right at the edge,” a local inhabitant told me, as he showed me the way. “At the edge of what?” “Just at the Edge. That’s what they call it. It’s the last house. You’ll see. There’s a helicopter pad over there. Mind you, in this blizzard you won’t see a thing now. Whatever you do, don’t let go of the cable!”) I began walking, bent double under the snow squalls, my knapsack swaying around on my back, one hand gripping an old ski pole, the other sliding along a thick rope stretched between one house and the next.

  Now, in the warmth of this kitchen, there is nothing more for me to do but wait for the journey’s pitching and tossing, still active in my body, to calm down. Several days on the train, then the aircraft, and finally the terrible tracked vehicle that brought me here across the icy wastes. And the last stage: the interminable hike along that cable swathed in frost, stumbling painfully to arrive at the Edge. At the edge of what? At the edge of everything. Of inhabited land, of the Arctic, of the polar night. The rope ended there, nailed to the timbers of the very last house.

  I manage to move my feet in my boots. My hands, my finger joints, are coming back to life, obeying me. I can grip the cup without spilling it, as happened just now. “The goal has been reached,” I think with a smile. I am here, in the terrain Jacques Dorme once flew over. Tomorrow I shall see the place where a life I have carried inside of me since childhood was ruptured. His life and that of the woman who had loved him. In the blissful drowsiness of my exhaustion, those lives of long ago come awake behind my eyelids, revive that tale of a day, a city, the imagined memory of a night. That night when the rain mimicked the staccato rattle of the amber beads. . .

  “Tell me, my friend, have you heard the one about the young man from Moscow, a bit like you, who arrives in the taiga of Yakutia? Listen. I’ll tell you . . .”

  One of my hosts is speaking. There are three of them in the house on the Edge. Two are these geologists who shook hands with me, both, by a comic coincidence, proffering the same name: Lev. Two Leos, two lions, I said to myself, suppressing a smile. The first of them, tall, with broad shoulders, evidently read my mind and sought to clarify matters. “Now see here. I’m the real lion. He’s only a cub . . .” The other, short and with a face marked by chilblains, exclaimed: “Shut your mouth, Trotsky!” By way of a welcome I had joined them in a glass of that inhuman brew, alcohol barely sweetened with cranberry syrup, and then, with almost magical ease, succeeded in getting myself accepted to join their next day’s expedition. “But of course, my friend. All we have to do is say the word to the pilot and it’s as good as done. While we’re blowing the mountain to smithereens he’ll take you wherever you like.” I took a bottle of brandy I had brought from Paris out of my knapsack and we poured it into three good-sized thick glass tumblers. They drank, exchanged doubtful glances. Russian custom forbids the criticism of fare that is a gift. “It’s . . . good,” Big Lev concluded. “Yes, not bad,” Little Lev agreed. “It’s like the wine they give you in church. I expect women like it. Would you care for a drop, Valya?”

  Valya, the cook, shook her head. Her arms white with flour up to the elbows, she was kneading dough on a big table at the other end of the room. An enormous woman: a heavy, rounded bosom thrusting out beneath her thick sweater, a broad backside that, when on a stool, covered the seat completely. Her eyes slanted like those of the Yakut, but her skin was very white. A carnal robustness reminiscent of the women of the Ukraine. “What man could take on such a giantess?” I thought with a mixture of fear and admiration.

  Now I am listening to Little Lev telling the story on which he has embarked. “. . . So there you are. He lands in the middle of the taiga all the way from Moscow. He has no idea about anything, but he’s a bit like all of you, full of energy. And, right away, the old Siberians say to him, ‘If you want to be one of us there are three things you’ve got to do: first, down a bottle of vodka in one gulp; second, screw a Yakut woman; and third, go out into the taiga and shake a bear by the paw.’ Well, your man jumps up, grabs a bottle, and presto, downs it in one gulp! Then he runs out into the taiga. An hour later he comes back, all covered in scratches, and yells at the top of his voice: ‘Right. Now show me a Yakut woman and I’ll shake her paw.’ Ha-ha-ha. . .”

  They choke with laughter, as do I, infected by their mirth, above all because of the comic pantomime Little Lev starts acting out — the young novice knocking back a pint of spirit, running into the taiga, and raping a bear. At this moment Valya approaches, bearing a dish of steaming potatoes. Little Lev, still in the middle of his performance, rushes up to her, grabs her from behind, his hands clinging to the woman’s hips, his chin digging into her broad back. A female bear assaulted by a Muscovite simpleton. She turns with a smile on her lips but eyes ablaze with fire: how dare he, this midget? Her hand lands a blow on Lev’s head, just the way a bear’s paw would, with nonchalant power. The man is hurled against the wall, his face smeared with flour.

  That night the howling of the blizzard forms the single background to all the other noises: the snoring of the two Levs, the crackle of wood in the stove, and from time to time, the rustle of a page. In the other room, Valya is reading the thick book I noticed on a windowsill when I arrived. One of those novels of the sixties where love took its course against a background of vast electricity-generating stations under construction, the conquest of the taiga, the glorious exploits of the mother country A fiction not too far removed, actually, from this woman’s life or her dreams? Who knows? I do not notice the moment when she turns out the light.

  Toward the middle of the night, the lashing of the squalls drowns out anything else the ear could still hear. I think about the tiny dot of my presence in this corner of the world. What point of reference can one find? The icy fringe of the Arctic Ocean? The Bering Strait? The Victory Peak, nine thousand feet high, to the west of this house?

  I tell myself that, when it comes down to it, nothing better evokes this landscape for me than the memory of Jacques Dorme’s life.

  JACQUES DORME’S STORY HAD KEPT ME COMPANY all along my route. The intensity of it turned any given town I was passing through, any railroad station, into a blur; it isolated me in the midst of crowds. From Paris I traveled to Warsaw, reached the Ukraine (which had recently proclaimed its independence) without difficulty, and was then held up for several hours at the brand-new border of Russia. When pronounced in front of a small hut darkly stained with damp snow, the words “border” and “visa” seemed to come out of one of Chekhov’s satirical short stories. As did the uniforms of the border guards, which were of a strangely effeminate cut, and the eagles on their shapkas, cheap gold braid reminiscent of Christmas tree decorations. And, even more so, the document I offered them. This stateless persons passport, authorizing me to visit “any country except the USSR.” The USSR no longer existed, and this prohibition had now taken on a disturbing, almost metaphysical meaning. Poorly covered in plastic by an old Algerian on the Boulevard Barbès, the document had suffered from the damp, and the thin, buckled cardboard, with its blurred stamps, was bound to provoke suspicion. Taking pity on my innocence, a tru
ck driver finally explained to me the amount of alcohol required to cross the border. I had two bottles of brandy with me. In his view one of these would suffice. A flat bottle, which the boss of the border patrol slipped into his greatcoat pocket before breathing onto a little indigo ink pad.

  It was the first time I had gone back to Russia and I was returning in secret. However, the strangeness of my arrival was soon eclipsed by the bizarre nature, now comic, now painful, of the new state of things. The monument in a Ukrainian town . . . two figures shaking hands and the legend in letters of gold: “Long live the Union of the Ukraine with . . .” The rest of it (“. . . Russia”) had been torn off. My “visa,” paid for with a bottle of brandy. Then one evening in Moscow, a gathering of men at the back of an ugly restaurant building. They were shuffling around in early March’s muddy snow, grinning and winking at one another; but their grins were tense, their gaze fixed on two broad windows open on the first floor. Inside, in a halo of fluorescent light, could be seen a white-tiled wall, two mirrors, and a hand dryer buzzing in the void. A woman appeared in front of one of the mirrors, unbuttoned her coat, and, unconcerned by the presence of the spectators, exposed the naked whiteness of her body. She even spun lightly around on her high heels, revealing very full breasts with brown nipples, the well-rounded triangle of her belly. Another hitched up her foot onto the sill and began tugging at the zipper of her boot. Beneath her miniskirt her leg was exposed right up to the hip, her broad thigh enclosed in red tights . . . This parade, improvised by prostitutes in a restaurant bathroom, bore witness to an undeniable liberalization. Less hypocrisy than before, more imagination. “Progress. . .” I reflected, as I continued on my way.

  I was to echo this thought two days later, in a large city on the Volga. To kill time while waiting for my train, I let myself be carried along by the crowd and found myself in a park. Amid gaudily painted booths, noisy festivities were under way, some kind of “town celebration,” or quite simply a fine Sunday, the previous night’s snowfall reflecting the dazzling sunlight. I walked along, stumbling over deep drifts, intoxicated by the snows sharp freshness, bonding with the laughter, the glances, the language I no longer needed to translate. This homecoming was like a dream where everything is instantly comprehensible, where physical contact — all hearts beating as one — is wonderfully palpable. Drunk with the sunshine and the gaiety around me, I even had this exalted and sanctimoniously patriotic thought: “They may only have three rubles in their pockets, but here they are, laughing and celebrating just the way they always did. A country in desperate straits, but what a gift for happiness! Whereas in the West, they would have . . .” My wits dulled by the merriment, I was about to pursue this analytical comparison of mine between the Slavic soul and the soulless West, when suddenly the happiness found its perfect expression in the face of a child. A little girl of nine or ten, almost preternaturally beautiful, walking along holding a woman’s hand, her grandmother’s no doubt. They stopped a few yards away from me, and the child looked at me inquiringly I smiled at her. And suddenly I realized that this incredibly beautiful little face was made up. Discreetly, and by an expert hand, an adults. Not daubed with a carnival mask, but transformed into the thrillingly angelic face of a doll-woman. I also noticed that dusk was beginning to fall, that the booths had closed. My head was still ringing with laughter and sunlight. . . The first streetlights were flickering with a mauve glow. The woman turned and stared at me with an appraising eye. Then, fondling the child’s chin, murmured: “The fair’s over. You won’t get your candy now . . .” The child looked hard at me. At the last moment I bit back the words that were already on the tip of my tongue: “You have a very pretty granddaughter. . .” I thought I had guessed what was afoot. The woman tugged at the child’s hand and I saw them making their way toward a great prefabricated shed, the “beer bar.” In a hissed conversation behind my back, two market women were heaving outraged sighs: “Did you see that? The old woman’s back again with the kid.” “Well, what do you expect? That child’s her meal ticket. . .” “I’d hang them, the bastards who do that . . .”