“At some point during the summer of 1944 she started wearing two plaits instead of one, and sometimes wore her hair loose. It was … indescribable. That hair, a dark firefall, a molten mass, I would have given everything—everything!—to run my fingers through it, to have a taste of the girl, nothing else was important, you could have shown me thousands of similar creatures or even brought them to me, she was the one I wanted, no one else, only her, and wholly, entirely, with everything.

And yet: my love could have lighted on any girl, on any one of all the pretty girls this side of death.”