The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme by Andreï Makine

Author:Andreï Makine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2012-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

5

ON THAT DAY ANY DISTANCE between the painful duty of living and the calm acceptance of death vanishes.

A day in May 1942, some twenty miles from Stalingrad, the heat as dense as tar, the railroad tracks littered with dirty bandages, fragments of bombs, trash. A train has been hit. The railroad workers are trying to disconnect the burning tank car so as to shunt it onto a siding. The oil in it is ablaze, plunging the surrounding area into a night shot through by a purple sun. The rest of the train traffic advances tentatively now, but does not come to a halt — the only thing that matters. Westbound trains: soldiers, shells, arms, armaments. Eastbound trains: mangled flesh, the residue of battles. The monstrous culinary process of war, an immense cauldron that has to be fed at every moment with tons of steel, oil, and blood.

Alexandra finds herself caught between the wall of immobilized tank cars and the line of coaches moving forward on the neighboring track. If the fire spreads, the rail junction will become an inferno over half a mile long. She ought to fall to the ground, crawl under the train, emerge on the other side, escape. She does not stir, and stares at her reflection in the tank cars side, which glistens with oil. Mute. Suddenly her name rings out within her, her real name, and her French surname. Her life, lost here in this noonday twilight, in a foreign land that is in its death throes all around her. The brownish air, the cries of the wounded, her own body melting in the heat, stained, exhausted with her efforts, asphyxiated. She tells herself death could never sweep her away at a moment of greater anguish. At the end of the train the smoke grows thicker, the track is no longer visible . . .

Her reflection begins to slip away, then disappears. They have succeeded in cutting the train in two, and towing away the burning portion. Life can resume. A life that could so easily be mistaken for death.

Through the pounding of the wheels she hears a voice calling her: “Shura!” She returns to her Russian life, gets back to work. Day after day, together with other women, she unravels the tangle of the trains, the comings and goings of the locomotives. It all happens with the tension of raw nerves, in a melee of yelling and oaths, oblivious of tiredness, of hunger, of oneself. An engineer swears at her, her fierce response is curt and effective. A colleague helps her to lift a dead man down from the train that carries the wounded. They take hold of him, set him down on a pile of old ties. The man’s eyes are open, seem animated, in them you can see the smoke rising from the fire. Two more trains squeeze her between their walls, one traveling westward (the plaintive sound of an accordion, the smiling face of a soldier cupping his hands and asking

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