This round of more or less identical sentences left me the leisure to feel the texture of the words I was translating, as one fingers the grain of the pages of an old book. The diplomat must have been aware of this subterranean translation and spoke in a more and more personal style, abandoning the eroded vocabulary one uses when faced with an interpreter whose command of the language is in doubt. For me, some of his words were more than twenty years old, dating from the period when I had learned them and they had lodged themselves in memory, very rarely used. As they rang out in this low-ceilinged, overheated room, barricaded with plates of steel, the sound of them opened up long, bright, windswept vistas. Mingled with this recollection, there was even a sense in me of childish pride, still intact, at mastering this uncommon language. During a further break in the negotiations the Frenchman referred ironically to a "navicert," the navigation certificate the counsellor and I would need in order to leave the city by sea. Hearing this word, I felt a child's comical triumph, for I knew the term thanks to Pierre Loti, and what the sound of it introduced into the stifling heat of the room was both the sea breezes of his novels and the chill of a long snowy evening cadenced by the rustling of turned pages.

From time to time the discussion broke off because of the Frenchman. He would close his eyes for a few seconds, then open them wide in sockets that were becoming increasingly hollow: they were sightless, or at least did not see us. Beneath the trickles of sweat his face resembled a fragment of quartz, now milky, now translucent. I would treat him, knowing only too well that all these injections only served to prolong this absurd bargaining by one more round. I said this to him. His face of quartz lit up with the ghost of a smile: "You know, here in the Orient they often practice expectant medicine…" Again I had the impression of being face to face with a man from another era. Not so much because of his French, which was that of my books, but because of the calm, at once ironic and haughty, with which he confronted the cruel farce of the present, as if he were observing it from the height of a long and great history filled with victories and defeats.

He resisted to the last, until the final accord late in the evening. Sensing that the game was won, he sat up a little in his armchair and even hurled a little dart at "Monsieur le conseiller" (who was promising several extra mortars to the Yemeni chief), "Your generosity will be your undoing, my dear colleague." The counsellor flashed a smile at him before listening to my translation, as if to show that they no longer needed to conceal their true professions beneath diplomatic covers, or to feign ignorance of the language.

Next day a French helicopter from Djibouti took away the three released hostages (a couple of Germans and a Frenchwoman, a volunteer) and the body of the diplomat, who had died in the night. A slight distance away from this we witnessed the preparations. Waiting for takeoff, the rescued hostages exchanged addresses, invited one another to stay on vacation in France and Germany, then wanted at all costs to have a photo taken together with the crew of legionnaires. The body wrapped in a canvas sheet had already been loaded on board.

"Our whole life is no more than expectant medicine, wouldn't you say?"

The counsellor said it in French and fell silent, watching the passengers as they climbed into the helicopter uttering little admiring laughs. I examined his face turned in profile for a moment. No desire to impress could be read in it.

"So why all that charade about an interpreter?"

I deliberately adopted an emphatic, almost aggrieved tone.

"Well, to begin with, you weren't just the interpreter! And in bargaining of this type it's sometimes useful to plead an error in translation… But, above all, think of this as a first step that could lead to other things, if you feel ready for a change in your life. You'll have time during the voyage to reflect on my proposal."

The helicopter took off, sweeping away the footprints on the powdery soil. We followed it with our eyes for a moment. As it moved away, what the machine seemed to be drawing across the sky was a heavy blanket of tawny cloud that was coming up rapidly from the direction of the ocean.

"One of the last of the Mohicans of the old school, that Bertrand Jansac," said the counsellor, turning away from the helicopter above the waters. "Or rather one of the last of the Mohicans, period… As for you and me, our boat will soon be leaving under full sail but, alas, without the protection of a… what did he call it? a 'navicert.' Am I right?"

Amid the torrent of actions and words of that last day a single phrase stuck in my mind and the temptation it presented gave a rhythm to all my thoughts: "If you feel ready for a change in your life…"

I was twenty-eight. My life, with all its weight of human flesh and death, could have been that of a much older man. And yet the child within me would still wince whenever someone asked, either idly, or with real curiosity, "So, where were you born? What do your parents do?" I had long since learned to respond with lies or evasion, or by turning a deaf ear. But this made no difference. The childish shudder slipped in, like a blade between loose-fitting plates of armor. All that had changed was that, as a boy, I was afraid people would discover the truth: to this fear and shame was now added the certainty that I had no means of making people understand the truth, and that I should never meet anyone to whom it could be confided.

I experienced this unease on finding myself in a cramped cabin on a ship that, while it was still secured, was already pitching under the first lashes of the storm. As we lay face to face on our narrow bunks our heads were so close that we could have whispered in one another's ears. At once my childish reflex was aroused: I pictured the counsellor questioning me about my early life. A moment later I called myself a fool, realizing that he knew everything. I faced a man who, although our situation lent itself to an exchange of confidences, would not seek to delve into my past. It was then that his proposal for "a change" in my life struck me as an offer that would liberate me. Indeed this thrilling liberation had already begun taking place with the speed of a blissful dream. Stepping aboard the ship I had been liberated from my name and the passport that documented it. In exchange, the counsellor had furnished me with another one: my first false papers, and a name that I was repeating inwardly in order to make it mine, along with a few notes on my new biography that I must learn by heart. I was perfectly well aware that the ease with which this metamorphosis was embarked on was simply a well established recruitment technique and that there was nothing improvised about his proposal to "change my life." At each fresh step in this direction the counsellor provided a kind of brief waiting time, to give me the opportunity to draw back-to refuse to exchange passports, not to embark with him on this dubious-looking little cargo ship, not to accept the pistol he handed me. I later came to understand that, for him, an approach of this kind and this change of identity was a sequence of almost automatic maneuvers, a routine he went through without paying any attention to my excitement. But at the time his actions appeared to me like the deft arrogance of a conjuror who, disdaining all acknowledged appearances, was liberating me by means of his shell game artist's legerdemain of the thing that weighed most heavily upon me: myself

When he left the cabin for a few minutes I took out my new passport and spent a long time studying this face, my own, made unrecognizable by the information on the previous page. The man in the photograph seemed to be eyeing me with disdain. I felt passionately envious of his liberty.