“And you are going out, darling? You are seeing people? Your arm—you’re sure it’s healed?”

Yes, she would lie, she’d been to the theater, the movies, she had seen Lindsay, her arm was fine now that the stitches were out. How well she could act on the telephone! How well she could deceive when she wrote! The last thing she should do now, she knew, was burden Pascal with worries on her behalf, and so she would inject warmth, amusement, conviction into her voice. He was surprised, she suspected, but he was gradually convinced. He was lulled into postponing his return, when that return was the thing she most desired in life. Yes, she acted well, but she had had six months in Bosnia to practice—and she knew it was easier to convince someone who was himself working under great stress.

Some of what she said was true: her arm had healed; but Gini, walking the London streets, knew her mind had not. How long did it take for a mind to cure itself, she wondered. Six months, a year, a decade?

Nine weeks had achieved very little. The normality of London made it worse. Here, not surprisingly, people continued with their day-to-day lives, and Gini, trying to communicate with them, remained locked in some other private place. There she was, on the other side of a glass panel, gesticulating, trying to speak, trying to fight her way out of her mental war zone—and failing. Days passed: weeks passed: friends became impatient with her, and her sense of dislocation increased.

Now, alone in their lovely apartment, alone in their lovely bed, she was beset with fears. She would begin weeping for children she wanted to save, and whom she knew were months dead. She would hear bombs and mortar fire, think of snipers, and remember that Pascal, said to lead a charmed life, could become a statistic like anyone else. There could be a telephone call, a somber visit from a stranger: Pascal might never come back.

Fearing for his safety, she would open the closets and touch his clothes, take down his books from the bookshelves. She would read his letters, then reread them, until she knew them by heart, all these reassurances of his love. She would write, careful words that hid her despair, and she would make sure that no tears ever fell on the ink. At Christmas—she had been sure he would return for Christmas—she began to hope again. It would be their first Christmas together. She rushed out, bought a tree and tinsel and stars to decorate it. She bought him presents, and—rationing her joy—wrapped one present only each night so her happiness and excitement might last for an entire week.

But Pascal did not return as planned; the opportunity suddenly came for him to get through to a zone in the north to which no journalists had had access in months. “You must take it—you must go,” Gini said on the telephone—and after some persuasion, he did.