The Sheltering Sky (17 page)

“I can’t leave here,” said Kit, looking about the filthy cubicle. “Move your hand!” It lay on some camel dung, but he left it there. “Go on, please. Now,” he said. “I’ll be all right until you get back. But hurry. Hurry!”

She cast a last anguished glance at him and went out into the court, followed by the Arab. It was a relief to her to be able to walk quickly in the street.

“Vite! Vite!”
she kept repeating to him, like a machine. They panted as they went along, threading their way through the slow-moving crowd, down into the heart of the city and out on the other side, until they saw the hill ahead with the fort on it. This side of the town was more open than the other, consisting in part of gardens separated from the streets by high walls, above which rose an occasional tall black cypress. At the end of a long alley there was an almost unnoticeable wooden plaque painted with the words:
Hotel du Ksar
, and an arrow pointing left. “Ah!” cried Kit. Even here at the edge of town it was still a maze; the streets were constructed in such a way that each stretch seemed to be an impasse with walls at the end. Three times they had to turn back and retrace their steps. There were no doorways, no stalls, not even any passersby—only the impassive pink walls baking in the breathless sunlight.

At last they came upon a tiny, but well-bolted door in the middle of a great expanse of the wall.
Entrée de l’Hotel,
said the sign above it. The Arab knocked loudly.

A long time passed and there was no answer. Kit’s throat was painfully dry; her heart was still beating very fast. She shut her eyes and listened. She heard nothing.

“Knock again,” she said, reaching up to do it herself. But his hand was still on the knocker, and he pounded with greater energy than before. This time a dog began to bark somewhere back in the garden, and as the sound gradually came closer it was mingled with cries of reproof.
“Askout!”
cried the woman indignantly, but the animal continued to bark. Then there was a period during which an occasional stone bumped on the ground, and the dog was quiet. In her impatience Kit pushed the Arab’s hand away from the knocker and started an incessant hammering, which she did not stop until the woman’s voice was on the other side of the door, screaming:
“Echkoun? Echkoun?”

The young Arab and the woman engaged in a long argument, he making extravagant gestures while he demanded she open the door, and she refusing to touch it. Finally she went away. They heard her slippered feet shuffling along the path, then they heard, the dog bark again, the woman’s reprimands, followed by yelps as she struck it, after which they heard nothing.

“What is it?” cried Kit desperately.
“Pourquoi on ne nous laisse pas entrer?”

He smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “Madame is coming,” he said.

“Oh, good God!” she said in English. She seized the knocker and hammered violently with it, at the same time kicking the base of the door with all her strength. It did not budge. Still smiling, the Arab shook his head slowly from side to side.
“Peut pas,”
he told her. But she continued to pound. Even though she knew she had no reason to be, she was furious with him for not having been able to make the woman open the door. After a moment she stopped, with the sensation that she was about to faint. She was shaking with fatigue, and her mouth and throat felt as though they were made of tin. The sun poured down on the bare earth; there was not a square inch of shadow, save at their feet. Her mind went back to the many times when, as a child, she had held a reading glass over some hapless insect, following it along the ground in its frenzied attempts to escape the increasingly accurate focusing of the lens, until finally she touched it with the blinding pinpoint of light, when as if by magic it ceased running, and she watched it slowly wither and begin to smoke. She felt that if she looked up she would find the sun grown to monstrous proportions. She leaned against the wall and waited.

Eventually there were steps in the garden. She listened to their sound grow in clarity and volume, until they came right up to the door. Without even turning her head she waited for it to be opened; but that did not happen.

“Qui est la?”
said a woman’s voice.

Out of fear that the young Arab would speak and perhaps be refused entrance for being a native, Kit summoned all her strength and cried:
“Vous êtes la propriétaire?”

There was a short silence. Then the woman, speaking with a Corsican or Italian accent, began a voluble entreaty:
“Ah, madame, allez vous en, je vous en supplie! . . . Vous ne pouvez pas entrer ici!
I regret! It is useless to insist. I cannot let you in! No one has been in or out of the hotel for more than a week! It is unfortunate, but you cannot enter!”

“But, madame,” Kit cried, almost sobbing, “my husband is very ill!”

“Aïe!”
The woman’s voice rose in pitch and Kit had the impression that she had retreated several steps into the garden; her voice, a little farther away, now confirmed it.
“Ah, mon dieu!
Go away! There is nothing I can do!”

“But where?” screamed Kit. “Where can I go?”

The woman already had started back through the garden. She stopped to cry: “Away from El Ga’a! Leave the city! You cannot expect me to let you in. So far we are free of the epidemic, here in the hotel.”

The young Arab was trying to pull Kit away. He had understood nothing except that they were not to be let in. “Come. We find fondouk,” he was saying. She shook him off, cupped her hands, and called: “Madame, what epidemic?”

The voice came from still farther away. “But, meningitis. You did not know?
Mais oui, madame! Partez! Partez!”
The sound of her hurried footsteps became fainter, was lost. Around the corner of the passageway a blind man had appeared, and was advancing toward them slowly, touching the wall as he moved. Kit looked at the young Arab; her eyes had opened very wide. She was saying to herself. “This is a crisis. There are only a certain number of them in life. I must be calm, and think.” He, seeing her staring eyes, and still understanding nothing, put his hand comfortingly on her shoulder and said: “Come.” She did not hear him, but she let him pull her away from the wall just before the blind man reached them. And he led her along the street back into the town, as she kept thinking: “This is a crisis.” The sudden darkness of a tunnel broke into her self-imposed hypnosis. “Where are we going?” she said to him. The question pleased him greatly; into it he read a recognition of her reliance upon him. “Fondouk,” he replied, but some trace of his triumph must have been implicit in the utterance of his word, for she stopped walking and stepped away from him.
“Balak!”
cried a voice beside her, and she was jolted by a man carrying a bundle. The young Arab reached out and gently pulled her toward him. “The fondouk,” she repeated vaguely. “Ah, yes.” They resumed walking.

In his noisy stable Port seemed to be asleep. His hand still rested on the patch of camel dung—he had not moved at all. Nevertheless he heard them enter and stirred a little to show them he was conscious of their presence. Kit crouched in the straw beside him and smoothed his hair. She had no idea what she was going to say to him, nor, of course, what they were going to do, but it comforted her to be this near to him. For a long time she squatted there, until the position became too painful. Then she stood up. The young Arab was sitting on the ground outside the door.

“Port has not said a word,” she thought, “but he is expecting the men from the hotel to come and carry him there.” At this moment the most difficult part of her task was having to tell him that there was nowhere for him to stay in El Ga’a; she determined not to tell him. At the same time her course of action was decided for her. She knew just what she would do.

And it was all done quickly. She sent the young Arab to the market. Any car, any truck, any bus would do, she had said to him, and price meant nothing. This last enjoinder was wasted on him, of course—he spent nearly an hour haggling over the price three people would pay to be taken in the back of a produce truck that was going to a place called Sba that afternoon. But when he came back it was arranged. Once the truck was loaded, the driver would call with it at the New Gate, which was the gate nearest to the fondouk, and would send his mechanic-copain to let them know he was waiting for them, and to recruit the men necessary for carrying Port through the town to the vehicle. “It is good luck,” said the young Arab. “Two times one month they go to Sba.” Kit thanked him. During all the time of his absence Port had not stirred, and she had not dared attempt to rouse him. Now she knelt down with her mouth close to his ear and began to repeat his name softly from time to time. “Yes, Kit,” he finally said, his voice very faint. “How are you?” she whispered.

He waited a good while before answering. “Sleepy,” he said.

She patted his head. “Sleep a while longer. The men will be here in a little while.”

But they did not come until nearly sunset. Meanwhile the young Arab had gone to fetch a bowl of food for Kit. Even with her ravenous appetite, she could hardly manage to swallow what he brought her: the meat consisted of various unidentifiable inner organs fried in deep fat, and there were some rather hard quinces cut in halves, cooked in olive oil. There was also bread, and it was of this that she ate most copiously. When the light already was fading, and the people outside in the courtyard were beginning to prepare their evening meal, the mechanic arrived with three fierce looking Negroes. None of them spoke any French. The young Arab pointed Port out to them, and they unceremoniously lifted him up from his bed of straw and carried him out into the street, Kit following as near to his head as possible, to see that they did not let it fall too low. They walked quickly along the darkening passageways, through the camel and goat market, where there was no sound now but the soft bells worn by some of the animals. And soon they were outside the walls of the city, and the desert was dark beyond the headlights of the waiting truck.

“Back. He goes in back,” said the young Arab to her by way of explanation, as the three let their burden fall limply on the sacks of potatoes. She handed him some money and asked him to settle with the Soudanese and the porters. It was not enough; she had to give him more. Then they went away. The chauffeur was racing the motor, the mechanic hopped into the front seat beside him and shut the door. The young Arab helped her up into the back, and she stood there leaning over a stack of wine cases looking down at him. He made as if to jump in with her, but at that instant the truck started to move. The young Arab ran after it, surely expecting Kit to call out to the driver to stop, since he had every intention of accompanying her. Once she had caught her balance, however, she deliberately crouched low and lay down on the floor among the sacks and bundles, near Port. She did not look out until they were miles into the desert. Then she looked with fear, lifting her head and peering quickly as if she expected to see him out there in the cold wasteland, running along the trail behind the truck after her.

The truck rode more easily than she had expected, perhaps because the trail was smooth and there were few curves; the way seemed to lie through a straight, endless valley on each side of which in the distance were high dunes. She looked up at the moon, still tiny, but visibly thicker than last night. And she shivered a little, laying her handbag on her bosom. It gave her momentary pleasure to think of that dark little world, the handbag smelling of leather and cosmetics, that lay between the hostile air and her body. Nothing was changed in there; the same objects fell against each other in the same limited chaos, and the names were still there, still represented the same things. Mark Cross, Caron, Helena Rubinstein. “Helena Rubinstein,” she said aloud, and it made her laugh. “I’m going to be hysterical in one minute,” she said to herself. She clutched one of Port’s inert hands and squeezed the fingers as hard as she could. Then she sat up and devoted all her attention to kneading and massaging the hand, in the hope of feeling it grow warmer under her pressure. A sudden terror swept over her. She put her hand on his chest. Of course, his heart was beating. But he seemed cold. Using all her energy, she pushed his body over onto its side, and stretched herself out behind him, touching him at as many points as possible, hoping in this way to keep him warm. As she relaxed, it struck her that she herself had been cold and that she felt more comfortable now. She wondered if subconsciously part of her desire in lying beside Port had been to warm herself. “Probably, or I never should have thought of it.” She slept a little.

And awoke with a start. It was natural, now her mind was clear, that there should be a horror. She tried to keep from thinking what it was. Not Port. That had been going on for a long time now. A new horror, connected with sunlight, dust. . . . She looked away with all her power as she felt her mind being swept into contact with the idea. In a split second it would no longer be possible not to know what it was. . . . There! Meningitis!

The epidemic was in El Ga’a and she had been exposed to it. In the hot tunnels of the streets she had breathed in the poisoned air, she had nestled in the contaminated straw at the fondouk. Surely by now the virus had lodged within her and was multiplying. At the thought of it she felt her back grow stiff. But Port could not be suffering from meningitis: he had been cold since Aïn Krorfa, and he had probably had a fever since the first days in Bou Noura, if they only had had the intelligence between them to find out. She tried to recall what she knew about symptoms, not only of meningitis, but of the other principal contagious diseases. Diphtheria began with a sore throat, cholera with diarrhea, but typhus, typhoid, the plague, malaria, yellow fever, kala azar—as far as she knew they all began with fever and malaise of one sort or another. It was a toss-up. “Perhaps it’s amoebic dysentery combined with a return of malaria,” she reasoned. “But whatever it is, it’s already there in him, and nothing I do or don’t do can change the outcome of it.” She did not want to feel in any way responsible; that would have been too much to bear at this point. As it was, she felt that she was holding up rather well. She remembered stories of horror from the war, stories whose moral always turned out to be: “One never knows what a person is made of until the moment of stress; then often the most timorous person turns out to be the bravest.” She wondered if she were being brave, or just resigned. Or cowardly, she added to herself. That, too, was possible, and there was no way of knowing. Port could never tell her because he knew even less about it. If she nursed him and got him through whatever he had, he doubtless would tell her she had been brave, a martyr, and many other things, but that would be out of gratitude. And then she wondered why she wanted to know—it seemed rather a frivolous consideration at the moment.