“The problem with leave,” Wilfred says softly, “is you have to face what you’re missing. All you’ve lost. In France, on the front, you can just about bear it. Home is just a dream, it’s another life, it’s like heaven. You can’t touch it. Then suddenly you’re back. You think, I don’t deserve this. I should be with my men, getting killed, instead of making love to my wife. I should be back in hell. I’m no longer fit for heaven.”

Elfriede absorbs the green smell of the river, the faint perfume of the night jasmine. A pair of tears rolls away from her left eye, quick quick, drip drip. Then a single one from the right. She wipes them away.

“Then you know,” she says. “You know what it’s like.”

“It?”

“The blackness.”

“Elfriede. Darling love. I’ve always known. I’ve felt your blackness in my own heart, believe me. When you were sick, I took it inside me. But now it’s mine, isn’t it? It’s my own blackness.”

Wilfred’s legs stretch out past hers. His long, awkward legs, the same as ever. The body, yes, the body’s all Wilfred. How she’s adored this flesh! Oh God, how many times, over the years, how many countless times she’s strained to unite herself so perfectly with this man’s body that—for an instant, anyway, for that moment of union—she might share his soul. And yes, at certain times she has felt this communion, she knows that sublime fragile existence as a part of Wilfred, Wilfred as a part of Elfriede, each inhabiting the other at the same time. And isn’t this the supreme bliss of which humans are capable? Not the physical gratification, however pleasurable, but the spiritual one. You wake up the next morning and it’s still there, you feel as if you’re waking from a shared dream, and then the light intrudes and separates you. If you’re lucky, when the night returns, you’ll find it again. When the night returns, and you can’t see his legs properly—they’re just shadows—but in the knob of his knee, you recognize yourself. Yes, you! Your own self, in the knob of his knee, and it’s so beautiful you can’t look away from this thing you don’t really even see.

“Elfriede,” he says, “I swear before God—”

“Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t matter? A moment ago it was the only thing that mattered!”

“It’s just—oh, never mind—I was thinking—”

“Well, it matters to me, by God! It matters to me that I’ve kept myself for you, when—”

“Do you remember Florida?”