"I've had five years of war as a rear gunner. Been to India a couple of years, been to North Africa, slept in the desert, crashed several times, made about one hundred missions, saw all kinds of things... Men dying, men yelling when they're trapped in burning planes. Their arms charred, their hands like claws of animals. The first time I was sent to the field after a crash...the smell of burning flesh. It's sweet and sickening, and it sticks to you for days. You can't wash it off. You can't get rid of it. It haunts you. We had good laughs, though, laughs all the time. We laughed plenty. We would steal prostitutes and push them into the beds of the men who didn't like women. We had drunks that lasted several days. I liked that life. India. I'd like to go back. This life here, what people talk about, what they do, think, bores me. I liked sleeping in the desert. I saw a black woman giving birth... She worked on the fields carrying dirt for a new airfield. She stopped carrying dirt to give birth under the wing of the plane, just like that, and then bound the kid in some rags and went back to work. Funny to see the big plane, so modern, and this half naked black woman giving birth and then continuing to carry dirt in pails for an airfield. You know, only two of us came back alive of the bunch I started with. We played pranks, though. My buddies always warned me: 'Don't get grounded; once you're grounded you're done for.' Well, they grounded me too. Too many rear gunners in the service. I didn't want to come home. What's civilian life? Good for old maids. It's a rut. It's drab. Look at this: the young girls giggle, giggle at nothing. The boys are after me. Nothing ever happens. They don't laugh hard, and they don't yell. They don't get hurt, and they don't die, and they don't laugh either."

Always something in his eyes which she could not read, something he had seen but would not talk about.

"I like you because you hate this place, and because you don't giggle," he said taking her hand with gentleness.

They walked endlessly, tirelessly, along the beach, until there were no more houses, no more cared-for gardens, no more people, until the beach became wild and showed no footsteps, until the debris from the sea lay "like a bombed museum," he said.

I'm glad I found a woman who walks my stride as you do," he said. "And who hates what I hate."

As they bicycled homeward he looked elated, his smooth skin flushed with sun and pleasure. The slight trembling of his gestures had vanished.

The fireflies were so numerous they flew into their faces.

"In South America," said Sabina, "the women wear fireflies in their hair, but fireflies stop shining when they go to sleep so now and then the women have to rub the fireflies to keep them awake."