There was a long silence. It was obviously the end of the story. Port looked at Marhnia; she was still nodding her head, her eyes fixed on him. He decided to hazard a remark. “It’s very sad,” he said. She immediately inquired of Smaïl what he had said. “Gallik merhmoum bzef” translated Smaïl. She shut her eyes slowly and continued to nod her head. “Ei oua!” she said, opening them again. Port turned quickly to Smaïl. “Listen, it’s very late. I want to arrange a price with her. How much should I give her?”
Smaïl looked scandalized. “You can’t do that as if you were dealing with a whore! Ci pas une putain, je t’ai dit!”
“But I’ll pay her if I stay with her?”
“Of course.”
“Then I want to arrange it now.”
“I can’t do that for you, my friend.”
Port shrugged his shoulders and stood up. “I’ve got to go. It’s late.”
Marhnia looked quickly from one man to the other. Then she said a word or two in a very soft voice to Smaïl, who frowned but stalked out of the tent yawning.
They lay on the couch together. She was very beautiful, very docile, very understanding, and still he did not trust her. She declined to disrobe completely, but in her delicate gestures of refusal he discerned an ultimate yielding, to bring about which it would require only time. With time he could have had her confidence; tonight he could only have that which had been taken for granted from the beginning. He reflected on this as he lay, looking into her untroubled face, remembered that he was leaving for the south in a day or two, inwardly swore at his luck, and said to himself. “Better half a loaf.” Marhnia leaned over and snuffed the candle between her fingers. For a second there was utter silence, utter blackness. Then he felt her soft arms slowly encircle his neck, and her lips on his forehead.
Almost immediately a dog began to howl in the distance. For a while he did not hear it; when he did, it troubled him. It was the wrong music for the moment. Soon he found himself imagining that Kit was a silent onlooker. The fantasy stimulated him—the lugubrious howling no longer bothered him.
Not more than a quarter of an hour later, he got up and peered around the blanket, to the flap of the tent: it was still dark. He was seized with an abrupt desire to be out of the place. He sat down on the couch and began to arrange his clothing. The two arms stole up again, locked themselves about his neck. Firmly he pulled them away, gave them a few playful pats. Only one came up this time; the other slipped inside his jacket and he felt his chest being caressed. Some indefinable false movement there made him reach inside to put his hand on hers. His wallet was already between her fingers. He yanked it away from her and pushed her back down on the mattress. “Ah!” she cried, very loud. He rose and stumbled noisily through the welter of objects that lay between him and the exit. This time she screamed, briefly. The voices in the other tent became audible. With his wallet still in his hand he rushed out, turned sharply to the left and began to run toward the wall. He fell twice, once against a rock and once because the ground sloped unexpectedly down. As he rose the second time, he saw a man coming from one side to cut him off from the staircase. He was limping, but he was nearly there. He did get there. All the way up the stairs it seemed to him that someone immediately behind him would have hold of one of his legs during the next second. His lungs were an enormous pod of pain, would burst instantly. His mouth was open, drawn down at the sides, his teeth clenched, and the air whistled between them as he drew breath. At the top he turned, and seizing a boulder he could not lift, he did lift it, and hurled it down the staircase. Then he breathed deeply and began to run along the parapet. The sky was palpably lighter, an immaculate gray clarity spreading upward from behind the low hills in the east. He could not run very far. His heart was beating in his head and neck. He knew he never could reach the town. On the side of the road away from the valley there was a wall, too high to be climbed. But a few hundred feet farther on, it had been broken down for a short distance, and a talus of stones and dirt made a perfect stile. He cut back inside the wall in the direction from which he had just come, and hurried panting up a gradual side hill studded with the flat stone beds which are Moslem tombstones. Finally he sat down for a minute, his head in his hands, and was conscious of several things at once: the pain of his head and chest, the fact that he no longer held his wallet, and the loud sound of his own heart, which, however, did not keep him from thinking he heard the excited voices of his pursuers below in the road a moment later. He rose and staggered on upward over the graves. Eventually the hill sloped downward in the other direction. He felt a little safer. But each minute the light of day was nearer; it would be easy to spot his solitary figure from a distance, wandering over the hill. He began to run again, downhill, always in the same direction, staggering now and then, never looking up for fear he should fall; this went on for a long time; the graveyard was left behind. Finally he reached a high spot covered with bushes and cactus, but from which he could dominate the entire immediate countryside. He sat down among the bushes. It was perfectly quiet. The sky was white. Occasionally he stood up carefully and peered out. And so it was that when the sun came up he looked between two oleanders and saw it reflected red across the miles of glittering salt sebkha that lay between him and the mountains.
VI
Kit awoke in a sweat with the hot morning sun pouring over her. She stumbled up, closed the curtains, and fell back into bed. The sheets were wet where she had lain. The thought of breakfast turned her stomach.
There were days when from the moment she came out of sleep, she could feel doom hanging over her head like a low rain cloud. Those were difficult days to live through, not so much because of the sensation of suspended disaster of which she was acutely conscious then, but because the customary smooth functioning of her system of omens was wholly upset. If on ordinary days on her way out to go shopping she turned her ankle or scraped her shin on the furniture, it was easy to conclude that the shopping expedition would be a failure for one reason or another, or that it might be actually dangerous for her to persist in making it. At least on those days she knew a good omen from a bad one. But the other days were treacherous, for the feeling of doom was so strong that it became a hostile consciousness just behind or beside her, foreseeing her attempts to avoid flying in the face of the evil omens, and thus all too able to set traps for her. In this way what at first sight might seem a propitious sign could easily be nothing more than a kind of bait to lure her into danger. Then, too, the turned ankle could be a thing to disregard in such cases, since it had been brought upon her so that she might abandon her intention of going out, and thus might be at home when the furnace boiler exploded, the house caught on fire, or someone she particularly wanted to avoid stopped by to see her. And in her personal life, in her relationships with her friends, these considerations reached monstrous proportions. She was capable of sitting all morning long, attempting to recall the details of a brief scene or conversation, in order to be able to try out in her mind every possible interpretation of each gesture or sentence, each facial expression or vocal inflection, together with their juxtapositions. A great part of her life was dedicated to the categorizing of omens. And so it is not surprising that when she found it impossible to exercise that function, because of her doubt, her ability to go through the motions of everyday existence was reduced to a minimum. It was as if she had been stricken by a strange paralysis. She had no reactions at all; her entire personality withdrew from sight; she had a haunted look. On these days of doom friends who knew her well would say: “Oh, this is one of Kit’s days.” if on these days she was subdued and seemed most reasonable, it was only because she was imitating mechanically what she considered rational behavior. One reason she had such a strong dislike of hearing dreams recounted was that the telling of them brought straightway to her attention the struggle that raged in her—the war between reason and atavism. In intellectual discussions she was always the proponent of scientific method; at the same time it was inevitable that she should regard the dream as an omen.