Jacques Dorme walked around the aircraft and asked to see the cargo. The pilot sighed and opened the door, and they climbed into the dark cabin of the Junkers. The interior was taken up with big wooden crates and piled high with scrap metal: thick cast-iron slabs, tank tracks… This test flight had no doubt been devised to measure the maximum load. They climbed out. A crowd formed around Jacques Dorme. There was a steely silence. Gusts of wind could be heard hissing against the blades of the propeller. "It can be done," stated Jacques Dorme, "but there's one thing I shall need…"

The man in leather grimaced mistrustfully. "What more do you want? An auxiliary engine, perhaps?" Jacques Dorme shook his head: "No, not an engine. Two bars of soap…"

There was such a violent explosion of laughter that a flock of rooks clattered up from the roof of a hangar and wheeled off over the fields, as if borne away by a storm. The lieutenant was laughing, bent double, the pilot with his face resting against the fuselage of the Junkers, the staff sergeant with his fists pressed to his eyes, the others spinning around, their legs shaking, as if drunk. A cap rolled in the snow, their eyes wept tears. The man in leather danced around among them, thumping them on the back and shoulders with the butt of his pistol… In vain – their laughter sprang from being too close to death. When the spasms finally calmed down, when the officers had stopped pretending to soap their necks and chests, the laughter took hold of the man in leather. He could not help himself, he forced his voice to seem threatening, froze the muscles on his face, but the eruption burst forth from his clenched lips, twisted his waxen mask, he was squealing. The others looked at him in silence, with preoccupied, almost distressed expressions. It was probably in order to save face that, between two of his squeals, he shouted: "Get him what he wants!"

The aircraft gathered speed, taxied back to the start of the runway, and braked. Jacques Dorme jumped to the ground and went around to join the man in the flying suit, who had remained with the crates. At the other end of the field the inspector could be seen running toward them, waving his pistol… They lifted up one end of a long crate that loomed large there, right in the middle of the cabin. Jacques Dorme slid the two pieces of soap under its wooden base, one at each side. "If you can manage to push it forward," he said to the man, who was beginning to understand, "we're saved…" And he explained the precise moment when the center of gravity should be manipulated.

The aircraft began its takeoff run, passing a few yards away from the man in leather, and lifted clear of the earth, just grazing the rim of ice. And began to lose height.

From the ground they could see that the left wing was tilting down; it was losing speed, grinding to a halt, it seemed to them. "It's a goner!" murmured the staff sergeant. Suddenly, with an abrupt roll, the plane tilted the other way, the right wing now plunging downward, but less dangerously and losing less momentum. And once more it limped to the left, then once again to the right… Thus it gained height, now swaying less and looking more and more like an ordinary aircraft. "He tossed it!" exclaimed one of the pilots in the group on the runway. And several voices took up the cry, admiringly: "He tossed the pancake!" The maneuver was known to them as a way of getting overloaded aircraft off the ground, but only real aces could bring it off.

In the cargo area sat the man in the flying suit, leaning his back against a long crate arranged at an angle. His eyes were reddened and he was panting jerkily. When he recovered his breath, he got up and crawled over to a window. Down below lay the winding course of a river, gray beneath the ice, the airfield no longer visible. He opened the door and began throwing out pieces of scrap metal, then, shoving it along the soapy floor, a whole crate. "That way we've a better chance of landing, with that madman…" He pricked up his ears. The pilot was singing. In a language unknown to him.

At the end of April Jacques Dorme learned that he was going to be posted to a completely new squadron, a special unit that would fly American planes from Alaska across Siberia. He was disappointed. He had hoped to be taken on as a fighter pilot, to go and fight at the front. One detail consoled him: flying this route, over three thousand miles long, was considered to be much more dangerous than operating over enemy lines.

During those weeks of waiting he often found himself thinking again about the impossibility of explaining the war: telling himself that after the event everyone would talk about it, publish commentaries, accusations, justifications. Everyone, and, above all, those who had not fought in it. Everything would be crystal clear at last: enemies, allies, the righteous and the monsters. The years of fighting would be recorded, day after day, in terms of troop movements and glorious battles. The essential truth would be forgotten: that the whole of wartime was made up of myriad moments of war, and that sometimes behind the vast turmoil of the fronts there lurked a sunlit courtyard, a March day, with a man in black leather killing another man because he felt like killing. And that on the very same day there would be a certain Colonel Krymov, a naked man, quickly satisfying his lust for the flesh of a woman before being cut to pieces by machine-gun fire. And also that young man, his jaws clenched around the telegraphic cable… He soon lost his way among his recollections, and this led him to conclude that the vital thing was to keep all these fragments of war in one's memory, all these tiny wars fought by soldiers now forgotten.

At the start of May he crossed the Volga at Stalingrad and recalled Witold's words: "For the Russians, the Volga is like…" He got off the train too soon by mistake and spent a long time walking along the tracks at a switch yard. Through the smoke from a tank car set on fire by incendiary bombs, he saw a woman directing the chaotic traffic. "Here is yet another war," he thought. "This woman, so beautiful, so poorly clad, so soon forgotten…" He did not immediately grasp that he was the one the woman was shouting at.

That summer when Alexandra told me about the French pilot I was thirteen. The questions I asked were about the maximum speed of the Bloch aircraft, the operating range of the bomber Jacques Dorme had shot down, the type of pistol the man in the black leather greatcoat was armed with, the gas mask that allowed you to talk on the telephone (the ones we used during paramilitary exercises at the orphanage offered no such possibility). She smiled, confessing her ignorance of such matters.

Years later I would come to know what her smile had left unspoken: the infinite distance between what aroused my curiosity and her life of a few days with Jacques Dorme. She could not tell me about their love. Because of my age, I would at first think, lamenting the stupidity of that age, focused as it is on the minutiae of warfare and bold strategic thrusts. Because of her old-fashioned modesty, I would later tell myself, regretting the elusiveness of those few furtive moments in May 1942 that her story had scarcely allowed me to glimpse. And then one day I would come to realize that nothing more could have been said about that love. And that those moments ("She talked to me about what the weather was like," I more than once thought bitterly), those random recollections of rain or of a misty morning, were enough and told the essential truth about this brief and simple love affair. As the years passed, I learned to read them better, to conjure up their light, to hear the wind and the hiss of the rain coming in through the gap in the wall, transmitting its chill right over to the bed. This love, never referred to, came to reveal itself and ripen in me as I grew older. As did the moment when the old amber bead necklace snapped, which had at first been merely evocative of a night of rain and wind.