Nearly twenty years of wars: he had learned how to deal with such nightmares. So, this morning, he applied the learned techniques. He waited quietly, until the pounding of his heart slowed. He concentrated on the details of his immediate environment, this bed, this room. Sometimes he might begin on a silent recital, a multiplication table, the list of his appointments for that day.

This morning the dream lingered longer than was usual. It clung with a cobwebby tenacity to the corners of his mind. He began to recite silently some lines of poetry taught to him by his father. Still the dream clung, leaving him with a paralyzing sense of misery. He persevered, and slowly the room began to reassert itself. The details of the dream shimmered, surged back, and then were gone. He had remembered that he was back in London again, that he was with Gini, that his arm was mended now and his fingers once again deft and strong. He sat up, listening, touching the sheets beside him, which felt cool. He could hear the sound of Gini’s movements below, the quietness of footsteps, the opening and closing of a door.

He felt an immediate, bounteous, and immeasurable relief: his first instinct was to call out to her, but he waited, then lay back and closed his eyes. For a few moments he wanted to listen to this relief, to the sound of hope, because it had not been easy to achieve, and there had been moments, those past weeks in Paris, when he had feared it would never return.

While he remained in the hospital, spending night after long night alone, he had believed that they could remake their life together, and reaffirm their love, because this was what they both passionately desired. Their difficulties could be surmounted. It was, he had told himself then, a question of determination, of will.

Released from the hospital finally, and reunited with Gini in that borrowed apartment belonging to friends, he had embarked—in a way he knew was very characteristic of him—on a program of reconciliation. At first he trusted in words. They would talk their way around every obstacle and past every evasion. Every one of those difficult topics: his work, her work, the nature of fidelity, the possibility of a child. He would resist the jealousy he still felt; they would both resist indulging in accusation; they would talk themselves back to truth, and they would become not less, but more than before.

Almost at once, however, they both sensed these conversations were leading them astray. However much they fought it, their words took on a dry, therapeutic tone, as if they were discussing the marital problems of two strangers. The more clinically truthful their language, the more strained these conversations became: Pascal felt they spoke across a chasm—and it was a chasm good intentions could not bridge.

What they needed, Pascal felt, was some fiercer link. They did not need some careful, engineered construct, but some invisible power that could arc between them. But to search for this power, to coax it back to flickering life, made them both fearful. Once upon a time, as they were both bitterly aware, this electricity had simply been there. Words had not been needed then to galvanize them; the current of communication had flowed from the simplest glance, or touch.