I began to think of leaving for France and though the thought of not seeing her each day froze my heart more cleanly than any zero winter, I remembered words of hers, words she had used when Patrick and she and I lay in a Russian hut drinking evil spirit...

There's no sense in loving someone you can only wake up to by chance.

They say this city can absorb anyone. It does seem that every nationality is here in some part. There are dreamers and poets and landscape painters with dirty noses and wanderers like me who came here by chance and never left. They are all looking for something, travelling the world and the seven seas but looking for a reason to stay. I'm not looking, I've found what it is I want and I can't have it. If I stayed, I would be staying not out of hope but out of fear. Fear of being alone, of being parted from a woman who simply by her presence makes the rest of my life seem shadows.

I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean?

It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like genius, she is ignorant of what she does.

I was a bad soldier because I cared too much about what happened next. I could never lose myself in the cannonfire, in the moment of combat and hate. My mind ran before me with pictures of dead fields and all that had taken years to make, lost in a day or so.

I stayed because I had nowhere else to go.

I don't want to do that again.

Do all lovers feel helpless and valiant in the presence of the beloved? Helpless because the need to roll over like a pet dog is never far away. Valiant because you know you would slay a dragon with a pocket knife if you had to.

When I dream of a future in her arms no dark days appear, not even a head cold, and though I know it's nonsense I really believe we would always be happy and that our children would change the world.

I sound like those soldiers who dream of home...

No. She'd vanish for days at a time and I'd weep. She'd forget we had any children and leave me to take care of them. She'd gamble our house away at the Casino, and if I took her to live in France she'd grow to hate me.

I know all this and it makes no difference.

She'd never be faithful.

She'd laugh in my face.

I will always be afraid of her body because of the power it has.

And in spite of these things when I think of leaving, my chest is full of stones.

Infatuation. First love. Lust.

My passion can be explained away. But this is sure: whatever she touches, she reveals.