I saw you smiling, realized what an absurd expression I had used, and laughed as well. "Bodyguards" had just slipped out.

Later on we often found ourselves picturing this military novelty: the intrepid American warrior flanked by a dozen bodyguards, a new method of going to war. And, in truth, the United States was terrified of the idea of having to send body bags back to America, especially during presidential elections.

These long underground passages of our remembered past would often open out onto the smiling banality of the present and, on that day, onto a reception room and a woman trying unsuccessfully to dislodge a tiny pastry, a petit four topped with a drop of cream, which she was being offered by a waiter. While tormenting this pastry, which was stuck to the others, she went on talking to me and her voice, already smoothed off by the triviality of social conversation, became completely automatic: "It was, you know, so moving. And awfully well documented… All those clips from the archives…" What brought me back from the past was not her words but the glass in her left hand that was tilting and on the brink of spilling its contents. I grasped her hand. She smiled at me, finally succeeding in capturing the petit four. "You know, there's a great deal in what he says. It's, you know, incredibly powerful!" Her mouth rounded as she spoke, and her tongue slipped out delicately and captured a morsel from the petit four. At last I realized where I was, in this room next to a woman praising a film that had just been shown in preview. Back in the underground tunnel of my memories I was still seeing the soldier who had been shot a moment before and whom we covered with a tablecloth; the smell of that African city in flames was still in my nostrils; and in the deepest galleries, in the most remote years, other cities appeared, other faces frozen by death. The woman seemed to be waiting for me to reply. I agreed with her, echoing her last remark. I must return to the present.

To get my bearings again in this Parisian present, all I needed to do was to identify old acquaintances in their new guise. The blond woman talking to me about the film was always the same blonde. I had encountered her a hundred times at gatherings like this, where I hoped to discover traces of you. Since our previous encounter she had simply grown ten years younger, altered the color of her eyes and the oval of her face, lengthened her nose, altered her name and profession. She was a different person, of course, but still a perfectly formed specimen of this golden feminine type, smiling and so vacuous as to be almost agreeable. A little farther off, in a polite scramble around the tables, I saw the ex-ambassador, that massive, graying man who on this occasion was an ex-minister. He had less hair and had adopted a more nasal, but still ironic, voice. Making deft use of a pair of tongs, he was serving his wife as she held out her plate. He was making jokes and the people around him were smiling, even as they struggled to slip their forks through the bobbing and weaving of arms to obtain their slice of cake or their portion of salad.

I once again located the young man of fifty, the intellectual with a hot line to the truth. He was now older than a couple of weeks ago and, instead of the black curls he had last time, he had chosen a sleek ash gray hairstyle, but what he was saying could have been said, word for word, by his double who had held forth about the "phantom country." He had already filled his plate and was in conversation now with a very corpulent man sporting a ponytail and dressed in black, the maker of the film that had just been screened. Sitting in a little circle of guests, the two of them unintentionally formed a variety double act, the thin one and the fat one, and their remarks corresponded to this physical difference: the thin one, the intellectual, modulated and elaborated on the fat one's deliberately crude remarks based on his "gut feelings." The fat one, the artist, was apt to begin his sentences by saying, "Personally, I don't give a damn for the official history" before going on to explain how "you have to swallow the archives raw." It was a remark from a woman that drew me toward their circle. Tall, bony, with a masculine profile (I recalled the literary journalist who had played the role of this Parisian type last time), that evening she was an official of the Ministry of Culture. "You should show your film in Moscow. They ought to know these facts as well," she said to the filmmaker with the authority of one who provides subsidies.

"In Moscow…" I was used to picking up these Russian references. But more crucial still than this reflex was the desire to see the face of the person who could have made that film. From where I was I could only see his very broad back and the ponytail dangling over his black silk shirt. I went up to them.

The film was called The Price of Delay and was black and white, for it consisted mainly of archive film from the Second World War. During the opening minutes it showed Soviet soldiers, eating, coming and going, laughing, sitting and smoking, dancing to the sound of an accordion, washing in a river. Then Stalin loomed up, tugging at his pipe, looking both jovial and cunning, and, in the tones of a verdict being delivered, the commentary declared that this man was guilty of… (here there was a pause)… slowness. The advance of his armies was much less rapid than it could and should have been. The result: thousands and thousands of deaths in the camps, which could have been liberated much sooner by this army that had moved at a snail's pace. The archive film moved on to piles of bodies, lines of barbed wire, squat buildings with their chimneys belching out black smoke. And again, without transition, one saw the soldiers with their broad laughing faces, a close-up of a smoker blowing elegant white smoke rings in the air, another of a soldier, with his fur shapka pulled well down over his eyes, sleeping under a tree. And a few images further on we again saw the living skeletons in their striped pajamas, their eyes distended with suffering, naked, emaciated bodies which no longer looked like human beings. The commentary began adding up figures: the delay accumulated by these lazy soldiers, the number of victims who could have been saved… There were several ingenious technical devices in the film. At one moment the screen was split in two. On the right-hand side the scenes were shown in slow motion, focusing on the soldiers moving at a sleepwalker's pace. And the left-hand side, with speeded-up film, showed a mass grave being rapidly filled with corpses in striped clothing. In the final sequence these two juxtaposed realities faded and the image came through of the armored vehicles and the American soldiers sweeping in, as liberators, through the gateway to a camp.

I should not have intervened. All the more because I knew how useless it would be. Or at least I should have done it differently. I talked about the front that extended well over a thousand miles between the Baltic and the Black Sea, about the forced march offensives Stalin launched to save the American troops defeated in the Ardennes, about the crude arithmetic of the numbers of soldiers who had to die in their thousands every day just to shift the front line a few miles farther west.

At this moment the fat filmmaker, deeply ensconced in his armchair, crossed his legs and knocked over the glass the woman next to him had put on the floor. He roared with laughter and apologized, the woman gave him a paper napkin with which he patted his splashed pants bottoms, and everyone stirred, as if liberated by this interlude. And it was in the tones of a cocktail party argument that he exclaimed to me, gruff and ironic, "Look, I don't give a damn for all that official history, Stalin, Zhukov, and all that claptrap. What I do is open an archive like a can of beans. I wolf it all down. And then I spit it out onto the screen, just as it stands."