I was allowed to get off the train at midnight, finding myself in a small square littered shamelessly with pus-covered and blood-drenched bandages.

That’s when we met. She asked me for a light. I lit the thin white tube in her trembling little hand, and for a while we just stood there without uttering a word, watching the little white smoke clouds rising up to the star-studded sky.

I wanted conversation. I started it with a poem. I have many pretty-sounding lines stored in my head, about stars, and men and women being together, and so forth. That night, though, only one piece sprang immediately to mind. It was this:

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art —
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors . . .

– Hey, are you clairvoyant? – her voice was soft, and laced with overtones. – I was just thinking of that sonnet, and thinking that maybe watching us from up there may not be a very pleasant thing right now. Gutters have no use for ablution.

– The war scares you, doesn't it?

– Back home, I lived in fear. I'm freer now than I've ever been in my life.

– Death is too close to be afraid of life.

– And so we can sing and dance around Life, and whisper tons of pretty-sounding gibberish into her ear, in amongst her confused, yellow, foolish tresses.

Stars danced in her eyes as she glanced at me.

And so we stayed on, blurting out in chorus all of our wretched ideas and borrowed thoughts. I felt something I had never felt before, a deep warm feeling of meeting someone who fits perfectly into your world with all its precious peaks and hollows. I basked in this feeling until the harsh voice of the train rubbed out the divine thrill, dragging me back to reality.

– Same time the day after tomorrow! Meet me here! Right here! I command you!

– Thy wish is my command, Captain! – she replied.

She smiled. She spun around and walked away. The darkness wiped her out.

The following night there was a raid. Even though our courageous fighters repelled the enemy quickly, a few bombs managed to get through. One of them went off near the hospital, damaging it, though not very badly. A number of people inside were injured. She was the only one dead.