Of all the NATO trainees, the Turks were the most unhappy. Older and more senior than the young Canadian instructors, they mustered no more than a few words of English between them. They pooled their pay and bought a secondhand Ford from a Moose Jaw dealer, only to find that there was nowhere to go. They sat silently around the mess tables in their green, American-style uniforms, gold bars gleaming on their shoulders, as the blizzards swept horizontally past the windows. When the snow ceased they stared at the watery skies and the triple suns, as if these optical illusions produced by the vast mists of ice crystals were a signal to some desperate action.

Unable, perhaps, to cope with this Arctic world of snow and mirages, Captain Artvin had disappeared on a training flight. Every Canadian instructor took to the air and searched the wintry landscape within a hundred-mile radius. His fellow Turks refused to assist the enquiry, but none showed the slightest surprise. Curiously, Artvin had taken with him all his possessions, his spare uniforms, his newly purchased electric razor and American radio. Everyone assumed that Artvin had defected to the Russians, but I was convinced that he had simply had enough of RCAF Moose Jaw and decided to fly home.

But the captain’s Harvard was never found. Had he managed to land on isolated airfields in Alberta and the Northwest Territories, refuel with the help of Soviet sympathisers, and somehow make his way across Alaska to the Bering Strait? It seemed unlikely, and I preferred to think that Captain Artvin had set off towards the east, ignoring his fuel gauges, and flown on into his own dream.

“Artvin? Poor bugger,” David commented when I told him of the possible sighting. The submerged cabin with its yellow roof had certainly resembled a Harvard. “Are you going to report it?”

“Naturally. ‘Sorry, Group Captain, just happened to be over Deer Lake, all these damned Canadian lakes look the same, you know…’”

“What about the Turks?”

We were changing out of our flying suits, and David passed me the bottle of bourbon he kept in his parachute locker. I watched Captain Hamid stowing his boots, overall, and helmet in the same neat way that I imagined Artvin packing his radio and electric razor. These impressive and overcontrolled men reminded me of the Japanese, hovering perpetually on the edge of a mental crisis. The Danes and Norwegians were self-contained, the British blurry with drink, in the air as on the ground. The French, for their part, were forever staging mutinies, refusing to obey their senior officers until the French military attaché flew in from Ottawa and arranged some concession that briefly calmed them down. North American cooking, the waffles and turkey drumsticks and jugs of milk, was a constant intellectual challenge.