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How to light a cigarette His voice seems to have just arrived here, to have come into the room in the loose slack of a pause when the air had nothing to do but gather around him as if he were the hero in a Russian novel,leaning against the mantelpiece with his hands in his pockets and the mirror loving him from behind. Look how he bends his neck,how he cups his hand as he lights his cigarette before he answers.Look at her watching the blue grey smoke unravel into a scurry of notes running across a stave as she listens to the way he stresses his consonants,softens his vowels as he talks of the war in his perfect French. 4
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and Pierre? With his ripe face like one of those pale freckled pears you hold in your hand and his mind shuddering across it like a bruise – he’s legible to all the world.With his great legs, broad and strong as the trees,he walks in and out of chapters smelling of eau de cologne,or an animal that sleeps in a barn. With his long fingers running across the stubble on his jaw, he listens to the black Russian rain before he picks up his pen. With his eyes so blue you’d think he’d drunk the sky down with all that champagne,he watches the soldiers, (red epaulettes and high boots) drag that boy to the place where they shoot him. He watches the boy pull his loose coat tight before he sags and slides down the post.And when it’s all over,he watches them roll him gently into the hole with the others and before he can look away, he sees, there in the earth,the boy’s shoulder still moving. 5

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How to light a cigarette

His voice seems to have just arrived here, to have come into the room in the loose slack of a pause when the air had nothing to do but gather around him as if he were the hero in a Russian novel,leaning against the mantelpiece with his hands in his pockets and the mirror loving him from behind. Look how he bends his neck,how he cups his hand as he lights his cigarette before he answers.Look at her watching the blue grey smoke unravel into a scurry of notes running across a stave as she listens to the way he stresses his consonants,softens his vowels as he talks of the war in his perfect French.

4

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