Lost in the Russian steppes, where his Waffen regiment was pulverized and scattered and he became an animal, eating raw horseflesh and sleeping in the snow, he’d seen no sliver of home, only a landscape blanketed in whiteness and death. He’d won a “frozen meat” medal, but he’d as soon eat actual frozen meat than fight Bolsheviks again. He understood painfully well that you couldn’t re-create a moment of ignorance that preceded misery, a luminous winking bubble. Ten thousand soldiers setting off to make fortunes, or one man in his Citroën driving toward the Bavarian town of Wildflecken for elite Waffen officers’ training, his papers stamped with a wet, inky swastika, a profound and electric violation of Frenchness. Confessing publicly, after the war, had meant coming to terms with the stark fact that his luminous winking bubble had floated in a tide of darkness. And yet he still yearned for a luminous bubble, for an impossible time of privilege and turmoil. All he could do was keep going until he found a bubble somewhere on the map.