The trembling passed into her body. She had amalgamated his anxieties, she had absorbed his delicate skin, his dazzling eyes.

The moment of ecstasy had barely ended when he moved away and he murmured: Life is flying, flying.

"This is flying," said Sabina. But she saw his body lying there no longer throbbing, and knew she was alone in her feeling, that this moment contained all the speed, all the altitude, all the space she wanted.

Almost immediately he began to talk in the dark, about burning planes, about going out to find the fragments of the living ones, to check on the dead.

"Some die silent," he said. "You know by the look in their eyes that they are going to die. Some die yelling, and you have to turn your face away and not look into their eyes. When I was being trained, you know, the first thing they told me: 'Never look into a dying man's eyes.'"

"But you did," said Sabina.

"No, I didn't, I didn't."

"But I know you did. I can see it in your eyes; you did look into dying men's eyes, the first time perhaps..."

She could see him so clearly, at seventeen, not yet a man, with the delicate skin of a girl, the finely carved features, the small straight nose, the mouth of a woman, a shy laugh, something very tender about the whole face and body, looking into the eyes of the dying.

"The man who trained me said: 'Never look into the eyes of the dying or you'll go mad.' Do you think I'm mad? Is that what you mean?"

"You're not mad. You're very hurt, and very frightened, and very desperate, and you feel you have no right to live, to enjoy, because your friends are dead or dying, or flying still. Isn't that it?"

"I wish I were there now, drinking with them, flying, seeing new countries, new faces, sleeping in the desert, feeling you may die any moment and so you must drink fast, and fight hard, and laugh hard. I wish I were there now, instead of here, being bad."

"Being bad?"

"This is being bad, isn't it? You can't say it isn't, can you?" He slipped out of bed and dressed. His words had destroyed her elation. She covered herself up to her chin with the sheet and lay silent.

When he was ready, before he gathered up his shoes, he bent over her, and in the voice of a tender young man playing at being a father he said: "Would you like me to tuck you in before I leave?"

"Yes, yes," said Sabina, her distress melting. "Yes," she said, with gratitude not for the gesture of protectiveness, but because if he considered her bad in his own vision, he would not have tucked her in. One does not tuck in a bad woman. And surely this gesture meant that perhaps he would see her again.