The thought fades as I pull the camel-hair blanket a little higher and cover Marie-France with it. The nights are very chilly in Wau. My desire to kiss her has passed. I vaguely regret not making love to her but also feel relieved.

Two days later we fly to Paris, where our ways part in transit. I feel another surge of wistfulness as I watch Marie-France cross the large, bright marble slabs of the terminal floor with quick strides and then stop at baggage claim. Lost in thought, she runs her hand over her flat stomach.

I feel discontented, empty, cheated of something beautiful and bright. I don’t understand my mood but put it down to the difference in temperature and to Wau.

I think of Nelson. The Blue Helmets recovered his body and took it to his family. How quickly life can end, and how mysterious are the paths leading to death and life. An accumulation of tiny decisions. A few small gestures and life will take a very different course from the one it would have taken an hour or a day ago.

And what about me? Should I have kissed Marie-France? Slept with her? Would that decision have brought me closer to death or distanced me from it? I try to shake these thoughts out of my head, but they cling on, like fear-sucking leeches.

Survive, from one moment to the next. Do everything right. But how do you know what’s right?

I look around for Marie-France once more, but what would I do with her? I don’t particularly like her or her cruelty, born of a vulnerable ego, which unleashes her aggressive libido. Nor do I like the feeling of having to console her, as though consolation would make her a good person.

Nevertheless . . . My feeling intensifies that our brief encounter might have opened a door through which I could have stepped, and that by slamming that door I have missed out on something.

I go to the Hilton bar, get drunk, and then, out of anger and spite, board the next plane to Kabul with a sickening feeling that I’m wasting my life for no good reason.

I fall asleep. My dreams are aggressive and confused. I dream that I’m lying silent and numb in a hospital bed. Nobody will meet my eye. I want to scream but discover I have no tongue.

I resurface briefly from my slumbers and press my forehead to the cool window of the plane. I’m thirsty. My head is aching. My throat too. I doze off again, and just below the threshold of waking, I find myself back at the hospital, with strange faces bending over me but not looking at me. One of them belongs to a woman with piercing eyes. She seems vaguely familiar, but then she disappears and I have an unmistakable feeling that I’m going mad.