this is the story of a man marked by an image of his childhood

beginning:The violent scene which upset him, and whose meaning he was to grasp only later, happened at the main pier at Orly, Paris Airport, some time before the outbreak of World War III. Sunday. There the parents used to take their children to watch the departing planes. Of this particular Sunday, the child whose story we are going to tell was bound to remember the sight of a frozen sun, of a stage setting at the end of the pier, and of a woman's face. Nothing tells memories from ordinary moments. Only afterwards do they claim rememrance, on account of their scars. That face which was to be a unique image of peacetime to carry with him through the whole wartime, he often wandered if he had ever seen it, or if he had dreamed a lovely moment to catch up with the crazy moment that came next: the sudden roar, the woman' s gesture, the fall of a body, shrieking people. Οnly later did he realize that he had seen a man dying.
End: once again at the main pier at Orly, in the middle of this hot pre-war Sunday afternoon where he was now able to settle, he thought in a rather dizzy way that the child he had been was due to be there too, watching the planes. But first of all he looked for a woman's face at the end of the pier. He run toward her. And when he recognised the man who had trailed him since the camp, he knew there was no escape out of Time, and he knew that this haunting moment he had been granted to see as a child was the moment of his own death.