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Translated from French by Carol Cosman
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 had the look of a sulky faun. At every bump in the road, she felt him bounce against her. Then he let his torso fall with its weight 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 on 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...