Fear grips us and drives us out into this all-too-real world. The only thing we have in common in this lawless warring environment is our horror, like a terrible disease from which neither of us will recover.

THAT NIGHT Marie-France doesn’t want to sleep alone under a camel-hair blanket on the camp bed in the press tent lit by two thin candles.

“I want to make love one last time before I die,” she says.

“You’re not going to die here,” I reply.

“So don’t you want me, you arrogant prick?”

I don’t know why love is so important to people that it comes to their minds when they’re in mortal fear. I’d rather have a bulletproof vest and a bottle of whiskey. I say that, and Marie-France hits me. She slaps me in the face and punches me in the chest until I grab her wrists and clasp her body to mine. Marie-France starts to weep. There’s so much misery and hatred in the look she gives me that I end up kissing her.

It’s one of those moments. What moments?

The thought fades as Marie-France’s lips respond to mine. She kisses me, and it seems as if every kiss makes it easier for her to breathe. I answer her kiss and take her in my arms. I stroke her back and it begins to relax at my touch. I put my mouth to her ear and hum into it, and I kiss her neck. Just as I’m about to stop because her sobbing has ceased, her hands seize me and pull me closer.

“Make love to me,” she whispers.

And because her caresses tear open my loneliness and communicate hers to me, because I don’t want to hurt her and humiliate her again, and because I have the same furious urge to live, I obey.

I feel her body relax, feel her relent and forget herself in lust. I kiss away her fear, I move very gently inside her, I hum and, cheek to cheek, sing “Somewhere over the Rainbow” to her. She lets go. Sensing this softness, the enticing, inviting lust between her legs, I glimpse Marie-France’s soul. For a second I am ineffably close to her.

“Don’t go!” she says when she feels my body pulling away from hers after no more than a minute. Her hot hands push on my lower back to bring our bodies together again. There’s something comforting about resting inside her like this, but I nevertheless feel an urge to withdraw before I lose myself completely. It’s a reflex and we’re unprotected in three senses: we’re naked, we’re young, and . . .

“Come,” she whispers. “Come inside me!”