Leather flying jacket

The leather flying jacket is more than part of the narrator’s military clothing: in key moments it marks the boundary between belonging and exclusion, serves as a protective outer layer, and becomes an object of attachment whose loss leaves him feeling stripped of security. The narrator’s changing relation to it runs from a trainee’s alertness to military rules, through its presence at his mother’s bedside, to the empty peg he finds before leaving Meknès.

A military marker

At the station headquarters, the jacket first draws the narrator’s attention as a sign of who is entitled to wear it. Lying on his cot after being denied an officer’s commission, he sees Corporal Piaille—whose surname he cannot remember with certainty—standing before him in a leather jacket. The corporal is an administrative worker, not flying personnel. The narrator silently registers that the garment is reserved for flyers. The detail makes the jacket a visible badge of military status even as the narrator himself is confronting a barrier to advancement.

That barrier is explained as a nationality rule: because he was born in Russia and had been naturalized only three years earlier, he was deemed ineligible for a flying officer’s commission; the stated requirement was French parentage or more than ten years since naturalization. The rule, the corporal says, was being applied again despite prior objections that it was discriminatory. The jacket does not cause the refusal, but its appearance in this exchange sharpens the contrast between the flying identity the narrator sought and the institutional limits placed on him. The garment signifies access to a role that the young trainee has been told he cannot hold.

Worn at his mother’s bedside

Later, the jacket accompanies the narrator to the Saint-Antoine Clinic, where he finds his mother gravely ill. He arrives in his leather outerwear and cap, with a cigar stub between his teeth, and keeps the jacket on while sitting beside her. The bedside scene is marked by silence: after she asks him to draw the curtains, he understands what she wants and raises his eyes toward the light without requiring her to ask further. He remains in the chair beside her for forty-eight hours, still wearing the jacket and cap, the dead cigar stub in his mouth.

The narrator describes needing friendship during this vigil. The jacket is not presented as a cure for fear or grief, and it does not bridge the silence between mother and son. Instead, it remains a familiar thing he can keep on while facing a situation he cannot change. His mother asks whether he has news of Ilona, and tells him that he needs a woman by his side; he answers that all men do. Around this brief exchange, the jacket is part of the narrator’s effort to endure the bedside vigil without surrendering the outward shape of himself.

A protective carapace

The narrator later explains the jacket’s personal function explicitly. After leaving money with Ma Zoubida and borrowing bus fare to Casablanca, he cannot bring himself to leave Meknès without making one last, furtive visit to the air base. Leaving the garment behind feels especially painful. He describes it as a familiar, protective carapace that gave him a sense of security and toughness. Its appearance helped him seem menacing and resolute, discouraging others from looking too closely; beneath that exterior, the lost little boy could feel safe and pass unnoticed.

This account makes the jacket’s meaning double-edged. It offers comfort, but also helps the narrator conceal vulnerability behind a harder appearance. The protection is not merely practical: he has come to rely on the garment as part of the way he carries himself. On reaching his former hut, he finds only a bare peg where the jacket had been. He sits on the bed and cries, unable to say how long he remains there. The narrator connects the missing garment to a larger sense of deprivation, concluding that he has now lost everything.

Loss and what remains

The jacket does not return. After sleeping for sixteen hours from nervous and physical exhaustion, the narrator leaves the camp and sets out for Casablanca. On the way, an itinerant vendor’s glass jars offer an unexpected comfort: the narrator buys Pickled cucumbers, eats six, and later boards the bus with more wrapped in newspaper, holding them close. This small episode follows directly on the heels of the empty peg. The jacket’s absence is not undone, but the passage moves from acute grief toward a modest, material consolation that lets him continue his journey.

Across these episodes, the leather flying jacket changes from a regulated sign of military identity into a personal safeguard and, finally, a measure of the narrator’s exposure when that safeguard disappears. Its significance lies in the precise circumstances of its appearances: the trainee who notices who may wear one, the son who keeps his on through a silent hospital vigil, and the fugitive who returns to find it gone. The empty peg gives physical form to a loss he describes as total, while the subsequent bus journey shows him continuing with another small object of comfort in his hands.