The Sheltering Sky

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 Ain 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.

The truck roared on and on. Fortunately the back was completely open, or the exhaust fumes would have been troublesome. As it was, she caught a sharp odor now and then, but in the following instant it was dissipated in the cold night air. The moon set, the stars were there, she had no idea how late it was. The noise of the motor drowned out the sound of whatever conversation there may have been in front between the driver and the mechanic, and made it impossible for her to communicate with them. She put her arms about Port’s waist, and hugged him closer for warmth. “Whatever he has, he’s breathing it away from me,” she thought. In her moments of sleep she burrowed with her legs beneath the sacks to keep warm; their weight sometimes woke her, but she preferred the pressure to the cold. She had put some empty sacks over Port’s legs. It was a long night.

XXII