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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 ru
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 begi
I break off, seeing his lips painfully stretched, attempting an unsteady smile. His voice is pitched higher than before, almost shrill: "To France? To the town of his birth?
What for? To bury him in that cemetery that's become a garbage dump? In this town where people don't dare leave their homes anymore? For him to listen to that racket?"
A car drives along the street; the torrent of chanting, backed by a rhythmic drumbeat, rips into the house. The noise of scooters cuts through the rap. The Captain says, or rather shouts, something, but I do not hear him. He realizes I have not heard him. I catch only the last few words: "… to be spat upon…"
Time stands still. I watch his face as swift shudders pass across it and his chin trembles. He is an old man fighting off tears with all his strength. I remain motionless, mute, totally incapable of any gesture or word that might break the deadlock of grief confronting grief. The wretched Parisian critic, who will later refer to me as an immigrant, will be right: I shall never be French, for I do not know what should be said in a situation like this. In Russian I know. In French I shall never know and, indeed, shall never want to know what to say… His eyes remain dry, and simply grow red.
With an abrupt tensing of his jaws he succeeds in gaining control of his face, which now looks hollow, as if after a long period of mourning. In a dull, jaded voice he chokes more than he says: "No, no, there's no point… The press, speeches… Too late… And besides, you know, Jacques was a very private person…" I see his lips twitching again. He gets up, turns toward the photos hanging on the wall. He needs to be unobserved for a few moments. I get up, too, and stand behind him, listening to his commentary. On one of the photos the two of them are on the front steps of the house. Of this house. On this street. The tone of his remarks is still uneven, often sliding up into high registers it is painful to hear.