From the train there arises a blend of sibilant voices, groans, a long gasp of pain. Men, wounded beyond repair for the front, being evacuated into the depths of the country. It is strange to feel his own body so alive and still stirred by pleasure. This woman's shoulder held in his fingers' caress, the slow, warm throb of the blood there in the hollow of his groin. The slithering of an amber bead beneath his foot. And the thought that tomorrow they will have to gather them all up, repair the necklace…

Most stunning of all is the very idea of tomorrow, and of hunting for those tiny spheres… Here, in a house barely seventy miles from the front line, in this country foreign to the woman and still more foreign to the man… The train moves off below the windows and begins its rhythmic drumming on the steel. They listen as the jolting sounds fade beneath the swish of the rain. The woman's body is burning hot. "Out here on the steppes for over twenty years…," the man recalls and smiles in the darkness. Since they met the day before yesterday, he has had time to talk to her about what has occurred in France during those twenty years. As if it were possible to remember everything, as if he could reel off all the events one after the other, starting in 1921, right up to June 1940, when he left the country…

The rain bounces off the floor; they feel a veil of dampness over their faces. "Do you think he'll really be able to prevail? Get the people to accept him?" she murmurs. "Without an army, without money. It's all very well his being a general…" He does not reply at once, struck by the strangeness of these moments: a woman who for so many years had not heard herself called by her true given name ("Shura" is the name they use here when speaking to her, Shura, or sometimes Alexandra); his having become a Russian pilot; this house gutted by an explosion; this township on the banks of a great river, in the middle of the steppes, where preparations are under way for a gigantic battle…