Exile and the Kingdom

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The Adulterous Wife A fly circled feebly for a moment toward the raised windows of the bus. Oddly, it came and went in silence, in exhausted flight. Janine lost sight of it, then saw it land on her husband's motionless hand. It was cold. The fly trembled at every gust of sandy wind that scratched against the windows. In the meager light of the winter morning, with a great screech of sheet metal and shock absorbers, the vehicle rolled and pitched, scarcely advancing. Janine looked at her husband. With tufts of graying hair sprouting on a low brow, a large nose, an uneven mouth, Marcel looked like a sulky faun. At every bump in the road, she felt him bounce against her. Then he let his torso sink heavily on his spread legs, his eyes glazed, once again inert, absent. Only his thick, hairless hands seemed to move, looking even shorter in the gray flannel that hung below his shirtsleeves and covered his wrists. They squeezed a little canvas case, set between his knees, so tightly that they appeared not to feel the hesitant course of the fly. Suddenly they heard distinctly the screaming of the wind, and the mineral fog that surrounded the bus became even thicker. The sand now hurled itself at the windows in fistfuls, as if thrown by invisible hands. The fly waved a frail wing, flexed its legs, and flew off. The bus slowed down and seemed about to stop. Then the wind appeared to grow calmer, the fog cleared a little, and the vehicle sped up again. Holes of light were opening in the landscape drowned in dust. Two or three palm trees, delicate and whitened, as though cut from metal, surged at the window only to disappear an instant later. "What a country!" Marcel said. The bus was full of Arabs who seemed to be asleep, buried in their burnooses. Some had put their feet up on the benches and swayed more than others with the movement of the vehicle. Their silence, their impassiveness, weighed on Janine; she felt she had been traveling for days with this mute escort. Yet the bus had left at dawn from the railway station, and for two hours in the cold morning it had been advancing over a rocky, desolate plateau that, at least at the outset, had extended its lines straight to the reddening horizon. But the wind had risen, and little by little it had swallowed the vast expanse. From that moment, the passengers could see nothing; one by one they had fallen quiet and had navigated in silence in a kind of sleepless night, sometimes rubbing their lips and eyes, irritated by the sand that had filtered into the car. "Janine!" She jumped at her husband's summons. She thought once more what a ridiculous name she had, tall and strong as she was. Marcel wanted to know where to find the sample case. She felt around the empty space under the bench with her foot and encountered an object she thought must have been the case. She could not bend down without coughing a little. In high school, though, she was first in gymnastics, never out of breath. Was it so long ago? Twenty-five years. Twenty-five years were nothing; it seemed to her only yesterday that she was hesitating between a free life and marriage, only yesterday that she had felt such anguish at the thought that perhaps one day she would grow old alone. She was not alone, and that law student who never wanted to leave her was now at her side. She had accepted him in the end, although he was a little short and she did not much like his hungry, sudden laugh, or his dark protruding eyes. But she loved his courage to live, which he shared with the French of this country. She also loved his downcast air when events or men belied his expectations. Above all, she loved being loved, and he had flooded her with attentions. Making her feel so often that she existed for him, he made her existence real. No, she was not alone . . . The bus, with great warning honks, found its way through invisible obstacles. Inside, however, no one moved. Janine sud