The Sheltering Sky

All at once she decided she must get out of the room for a while before dark-even if just for a few minutes. A change of air. She waited until he had closed his eyes. Then without looking at him again for fear she would see them open once more, she got up quickly and stepped out into the wind. It seemed to have shifted a little, and there was less sand in the air. Even so, she felt the sting of the grains on her cheeks. Briskly she walked out beneath the high mud portal, not looking at the guards, not stopping when she reached the road, but continuing downward until she came to the street that led to the market place. Down there the wind was less noticeable. Apart from an inert figure lying here and there entirely swathed in its burnous, the way was empty. As she moved along through the soft sand of the street, the remote sun fell rapidly behind the flat hammada ahead, and the walls and arches took on their twilight rose hue. She was a little ashamed of herself for having given in to her nervous impatience to be out of the room, but she banished the sentiment by arguing with herself that nurses, like everyone else, must rest occasionally.

She came to the market, a vast, square, open space enclosed on all four sides by whitewashed arcades whose innumerable arches made a monotonous pattern whichever way she turned her head. A few camels lay grumbling in the center, a few palm-branch fires flared, but the merchants and their wares were gone. Then she heard the muezzins calling in three distinct parts of the town, and saw those men who were left begin their evening prayer. Crossing the market, she wandered into a side street with its earthen buildings all orange in the momentary glow. The little shop doors were closed—all but one, in front of which she paused an instant, peering in vaguely. A man wearing a beret crouched inside over a small fire built in the middle of the floor, holding his hands fanwise almost in the flames. He glanced up and saw her, then rising, he came to the door. “Entrez, madame,” he said, making a wide gesture. For lack of anything else to do, she obeyed. It was a tiny shop; in the dimness she could see a few bolts of white cloth lying on the shelves. He fitted a carbide lamp together, touched a match to the spout, and watched the sharp flame spring up. “Daoud Zozeph,” he said, holding forth his hand. She was faintly surprised: for some reason she had thought he was French. Certainly he was not a native of Sba. She sat on the stool he offered her, and they talked a few minutes. His French was quite good, and he spoke it gently in a tone of obscure reproof. Suddenly she realized he was a Jew. She asked him; he seemed astonished and amused at her question. “Of course,” he said. “I stay open during the hour of prayer. Afterward there are always a few customers.” They spoke of the difficulties of being a Jew here in Sba, and then she found herself telling him of her predicament, of Port who lay alone up in the Poste Militaire. He leaned against the counter above her, and it seemed to her that his dark eyes glowed with sympathy. Even this faint impression, unconfirmed as it was, made her aware for the first time of how cruelly lacking in that sentiment was the human landscape here, and of how acutely she had been missing it without realizing she was missing it. And so she talked on and on, even going into her feeling about omens. She stopped abruptly, looked at him a little fearfully, and laughed. But he was very serious; he seemed to understand her very well. “Yes, yes,” he said, stroking his beardless chin meditatively. “You are right about all that.”

Logically she should not have found such a statement reassuring, but the fact that he agreed with her she found deliciously comforting. However, he continued: “The mistake you make is in being afraid. That is the great mistake. The signs are given us for our good, not for our harm. But when you are afraid you read them wrong and make bad things where good ones were meant to be.”

“But I am afraid,” protested Kit. “How can I change that? It’s impossible.”

He looked at her and shook his head. “That is not the way to live,” he said.

“I know,” she said sadly.

An Arab entered the shop, bade her good evening, and purchased a pack of cigarettes. As he went out the door, he turned and spat just inside it on the floor. Then he gave a disdainful toss of his burnous over his shoulder and strode away. Kit looked at Daoud Zozeph.

“Did he spit on purpose?” she asked him.

He laughed. “Yes. No. Who knows? I have been spat upon so many thousand times that I do not see it when it happens. You see! You should be a Jew in Sba, and you would learn not to be afraid! At least you would learn not to be afraid of God. You would see that even when God is most terrible, he is never cruel, the way men are.”

Suddenly what he was saying sounded ridiculous. She rose, smoothed her skirt, and said she must be going.