The following morning we left Castel Benito in the rain and flew to the war, the squalls harrying us all the way. When we reached our destination south of the Mareth Line we had to wait on the ground for orders, watching Bostons and Baltimores fly overhead on their way to the German lines while our landing ground turned to mud around us. Then the barrage finally opened and we fought and waited and fought. In April I met my match in the form of a 109 that stitched bullets along my fuselage and ruptured my oil line. The engine seized, caught fire, and I bailed out as the cockpit filled with smoke.

I tripped over on landing, knocking myself out on a stone. That did for me, that and the windless weather. The air was so still that my ’chute canopy settled right on top of me. By the time I came to and tried to struggle free, a small party of Germans was approaching, all badly sunburned as I recall, looking about sixteen. One of them pointed a gun at me. Somewhere out of sight my Hurricane exploded with a big boom and the young German was so startled he nearly shot me.

A captive, I was taken north to Germany. The journey was long and increasingly cold. I had time to reflect on the end of my war, and I found that I was glad I’d killed no one on that last flight and therefore not added to my bloodstained tally of the previous days and indeed years.

She walks toward me over the sand and small stones of the desert at Amiriya. It is just after the war, I have come from England and we don’t immediately recognize each other. I am still a ghost of myself, she a uniformed silhouette in the heat haze.

She gets closer, becomes clearer, the light strikes her face under the peak of her cap. I can’t see her eyes but her lips are parted as if at any moment she will speak.

“So you kissed him?” I ask her. “And what then? What happened?”

She shakes her head, she’s too young to know. She holds out her arms.

—

The light strengthens, dims the bare bulb hanging from my bedroom ceiling. The notebook falls from my hand. Yvette Haddad. La Biologie.

The book is filled to the last page.

The other two notebooks lie on the floor in front of me. I have searched everywhere, swept my room and Tom’s, upended the packing boxes and rummaged through the heaps of contents. But there are no more books to be found, nothing more to be read. In the spring of 1951 she climbed up a chalk hill in the south of England, a hill I can see for myself should I go up to the roof of my house, and there she kissed another man. That is all I know.

That alone is impossible to think about.