Shapes of cloud, colours and smells in the street, voices of people, all these he thought he was experiencing for the last time. On the Place de la Concorde a great tricolour was flapping in the wind, high up on a gable-top, its sound was like the crackling of a wet log on a hearth. Tigor stopped in his tracks and listened to it for minutes. When he leaned against the trunk of the elm in the Luxembourg Gardens again, he scratched open the soil, dug deeper, tore through roots, deeper, opened the earth with his bare hands, shoved his arm up to the elbow in the hole.