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  The next morning I found C. in her usual frenzy. She was leaving on a mission to the other side of the country; having already lost twenty-four hours, her natural impatience had been exacerbated, and the office resounded with her orders and her movements. I found her sitting down for a minute, thinking, and I took her hand; she was smiling, and mechanically stroked my palm. I had to leave, she was running down a hallway, also in a hurry: she kissed me quickly on the mouth and disappeared.

  The airport was a complete mess. Six huge military cargo planes had landed one after the other, no one could point mine out to me; I limped furiously from one to the other, grinding my teeth in pain as the sun beat down on me, winding my way between the sacks of food and the crates of supplies being unloaded, the pickup trucks weaving across the tarmac, the furious soldiers, the lines of haggard people waited to be evacuated, I called out in Russian to the Ukrainian or Lithuanian pilots to ask their destination, they themselves often weren’t sure. I actually came close to getting on the wrong plane and landing in the wrong country. I found C. under the wing of an Endover, crouching down with two colleagues, making plans and issuing last-minute instructions. She greeted me distractedly, everything was so confused that I didn’t pay much attention to it. I climbed into the Endover; she was taking one of the big cargo planes heading west.

  I had counted on seeing her the following week; but it would be over a month. The day before my return to K — , a doctor friend examined my foot and formally forbade me to travel. I was dismayed, but there was nothing to be done: the infection was far advanced, it was threatening the bone, I needed surgery right away. The country where we were didn’t have adequate infrastructure; he advised me to go to the capital of a nearby country, where there was an excellent hospital. Appalled by the idea of not being able to join C. again, I had to resign myself to it. In K — , C.’s favorite perfume had disappeared; a friend had quickly shipped me a bottle; unable to go offer it to her in person, I packed it up and, before my departure, asked her office to forward it to where she was. I added a magnificent card, a Vermeer showing a girl sitting at a table in front of a window, her face in full light, holding a glass and smiling at a proud soldier shown from behind. I found this girl’s face luminous, and I wrote a brief message on the back of the card: I tried for a charming, ironic tone, I don’t know, maybe I succeeded. I was too unsure of what was happening really to express what was overwhelming me, but I also didn’t want to seem cold, indifferent, as my letters so often are, incapable of expressing true emotions. Still in doubt, I sealed the card and handed it and the perfume over to a colleague of C.’s, who promised me they’d be forwarded.

  He would not keep his promise; but then nothing would happen as planned. C. in fact still hadn’t returned to K — : this news, which had wrenched my heart when I learned it, consoled me a little now for my forced departure, and I hoped that my return from convalescence would coincide with hers. Such was not to be the case, of course. The Fates, those teases, reveled in scrambling up our movements. The operation went very well, my surgeon turned out to be an old and admirably eccentric German, who livened up the procedure by holding forth, as he cut away at me, on the history of the medical use of cocaine from 1875 to the present. I thus learned that the invention of cocaine derivatives, preserving the anesthetic properties of the product while suppressing its euphoric aspects, had been stimulated by the excessive love the greatest doctors and surgeons of the time had for this drug, a love that motivated them to empty their shelves of it in order to consume it through the nose, the veins, and even, at that time, through the eyes. This problem, quite embarrassing for the reputation of the medical profession, came to an end in 1919 with the appearance of Novocain, a distant and coarse ancestor of the miraculous molecule that now made it possible that only the unpleasant scraping sound of the scalpel carving through my flesh distracted me from the surgeon’s eloquence. I had to keep to my bed for a few days; once I was, precariously and painfully, on my feet again, I inquired about departing flights. I was booked on a Friday light for G — , the city where most of the flights leaving for K — originated. I had a lot of work to catch up on elsewhere, but I wasn’t worried about taking the not very professional liberty of adjusting my travel plans this way. I called K — : C. was neither there, nor even in the city in the West where she had stayed to work (the city of M — ), but had returned to G — to report on her activities. I was delighted: I could, without any qualms, spend the weekend in her company in G — , then see to my affairs elsewhere and join her again later on. Then the people who controlled the airplanes canceled my booking: there was freight, they explained, that was more important. There were no planes before Monday, I was in despair, I knew that C. would have gone back to M — by then. For some time now, I realized, this woman had completely occupied my life, and at bottom I even delighted at the suffering that the impossibility of seeing her again caused me, so strong was the emotion. I decided to call her in G — (I was very anxious about how she would welcome such an importunate step): she seemed delighted to hear from me; her voice pierced my soul. She was leaving Saturday for K — , then from there for M — . I asked her to wait for me before going to K — , she couldn’t, but promised to meet me again a little later. “See you soon, dear child,” she said as she hung up; torn between the pleasure these words gave me and the frustration of not being able to see her again, I spent the afternoon trying every way possible to find a plane. Another organization had chartered one, I contacted a friend there, he promised to find me a seat on it; two hours later, he called me back to explain that his boss had vetoed it (I learned later on that another woman, whom I only barely knew, but who for a reason I never found out heartily detested me, had struck my name from the list). I thus spent several hours oscillating between the most violent hope and the blackest rage. I stormed, limping from one office to the other, I drove the secretaries mad with my obstinacy, I forced them to chase down leads whose uselessness was obvious, but which made them lose their time and their patience. At six in the evening, a miracle occurred: the first carrier, whom I had called back as a last resort, calmly informed me that he not only had room for me, but also for some two hundred kilos of freight that I was supposed to bring back. This was a call to action, since of course the freight wasn’t ready, the customs papers were missing, the freight forwarder was closed for the day: by eight o’clock, though, everything was in order. I had to be at the airport at six in the morning, I was there at 5:30, it didn’t open till 6:30, and at 7:00 they came to tell me that the plane had broken down and wouldn’t fly that day. My despondency was so profound that I was only barely aware of the appalling comedy of the situation. In the afternoon I called C. again: she was still leaving the next day and couldn’t delay her trip, but hearing her comforted me a little. I did indeed leave the next day. The plane was flying on to the city where I was supposed to work,there was no point for me to get out at G — , now that C. was no longer there. On the flight, I devised the mad hope of meeting her for a few minutes on the tarmac in G — , of being able to speak to her even if only for a moment, see her eyes and her smile, kiss her. Her plane, of course, had left hours earlier.

  I spent a week working with my colleagues, and I planned then on returning to K — : I had in fact to settle some debts there, which justified a trip that my sense of duty would not otherwise have permitted. I had to go back through G — , the planes for K — were canceled several days in a row; but C. was still in M — , so I was patient. C.’s superior then told me that she was supposed to return to K — on Wednesday, the day of my own departure. I was happy, but terrified at the idea of another unforeseen occurrence. The plane I was supposed to take would fly on from K — to M — and then return to K — ; before I learned she would be on the return trip, I had decided to make this additional journey and bring her a flower, even if only to see her for half an hour. So I modified this plan somewhat: I would get off at K — , but would still send her the flower, without telling her from w
hom it came, to greet her in the plane. The spitefulness of an office manager, who also seemed to hate me, nearly made me miss this plane: whereas I had booked my seat days before, my name didn’t appear on the list, and the employee in charge of boarding refused to let me get on. I must have looked quite a sight in my wretchedness, standing on the tarmac holding a big yellow flower, so incongruous in this context that I hesitated for a long time before daring to take it with me. But a friend showed up at the right moment, one who supervised the flights directly, and he put me on the plane. On board there was a Swede who was continuing on to M — : I gave him the flower, with precise instructions. The flight was horrible, we were caught for half an hour in a violent storm; I reassured myself by telling myself that such bumps must be normal for such a small plane, but when we arrived in K — , I saw that the pilots were livid. I soon came across C.’s superior, with whom I was developing a strong camaraderie; C. was supposed to arrive a few hours later.

  I found her that afternoon in the offices, amazed that there hadn’t been any additional mishaps, that she hadn’t, for instance, returned to G — without stopping in K — . “So, you didn’t want to make the round trip to accompany me,” she scolded. “Ah, but I sent you a flower in my place.” She hadn’t received it, the Swede had forgotten it on the plane. She had seen it when boarding and wondered who it could be for, where it could have come from. Even for that, I was happy of the gesture. As for the perfume, she told me later, it had never been sent on to M — , but she had picked it up during her trip to G — , and it had made her very happy, these last few weeks, to be able thus to fight the abominable stench of the people she had to take care of.

  She had kissed me in a friendly way when I arrived; everything, from that moment on, would become more difficult. I said so earlier, I had gone too far forward, I had too hurriedly opened a door that my instincts, in general quite good, usually kept firmly closed.

  Her withdrawal, from that moment on, slowly tore me apart. In the days that followed, she remained immersed in her frantic activities; from time to time, she granted me a moment of conversation, but right away some work-related thought would distract her and she would set off again. She was at the end of her contract and was about to leave the country; she had received several offers, one, from her present employer, involving the city where I was usually posted (but that didn’t interest her at all), another to return to M — for a different organization, and still others for different countries. She couldn’t make up her mind, she discussed it with everyone, and also carried on endlessly about all the problems she had encountered in M — . At the time, wounded by her indifference, I thought I had been terribly mistaken, that I had radically misinterpreted signs that for her must have been only those of friendship; later on, I came to think that her time in M — , which had visibly exhausted her, must have touched a certain point in such a way that she, who always seemed so sure of what she was doing and of where she was going, had in fact completely lost her bearings, and now could only focus on her concrete problems, an ultimate refuge. She remained friendly; but whatever the reason, she had shifted away from the brief contact that had formed between us, and this disengagement quickly broke me apart. The hardest thing was the nights: she invited me to stay with her, she refused to let me sleep on the couch, she insisted on putting me in her room, in a separate bed. Thus, she slept a meter away from me, almost naked, and it was impossible for me to touch her. I myself was exhausted by my work of the last few months, by my disgust with the country in which I was working, by my nagging uncertainty about the usefulness of the actions I was organizing; the indifference of C., or simply her absence, finished plunging me into misery. I always drink a lot, I drank even more. I almost didn’t sleep, and every night, as I went to bed with this separation between our bodies, I felt as if I were skewering myself on a knife. I would wake up with a start, sometimes went back to sleep; in the morning, I was emptied out, exhausted, and the extremely unpleasant matters I had come to settle in K — only added to my disarray. Once my eyes were used to the darkness, at night, I could clearly see her shape; sometimes her sheet slid off, and I would gaze for a long time at her white back, her sharp little breasts. Rarely have I felt a more violent yet less physical desire: what my body sought wasn’t so much to make love with her as simply to press itself against her. I was distraught, in an extreme state, I was losing my grip; when we spoke, my conversation was often flat, tense, and it was impossible for me to express what was gnawing away at me. She too was a little ill and wasn’t sleeping well. Thus strange moments would occur that I still don’t understand. Once, I remember, caught in our respective insomnias, our eyes met, and we looked at each other for a long time, without smiling, without speaking. Another time, in a similar moment, where the loss of sleep seemed to make her suffer almost as much as me, I held my hand out from one bed to the other, and she took it until she fell back asleep. The last night of our stay in K — , she had gone to bed before me, I sat on the edge of my bed, facing her, and took her hand; overwhelmed with fatigue and sadness, I kissed that hand, I caressed it, and finally placed my head on it for a long while. I don’t know if we spoke, or if I simply surrendered to that hand. She finally took it back. Mad with suffering, almost in tears, I leaned over her and kissed her on the lips, gently. Then I went to bed. That night was as bad as the others. I can’t manage to grasp the significance of these moments when, if she wasn’t encouraging me at all, she certainly wasn’t pushing me away either. But something very strong prevented me from pushing, from provoking her to a rejection that would at least have had the merit of being clear. Perhaps she herself was in a form of despair that floated along next to mine without being able to meet it. In our conversations, she certainly didn’t imply this: she spoke only about the positive aspects of her life, or else about her concrete problems, which corresponded to her aggressive, determined character. She had a child, I haven’t mentioned that, she wanted to see him again and spoke to me passionately about him. As for her husband, he had vanished from the picture some time ago. I suspect something must have been eating away at her, something fundamental that pushed her among other things to live such an unstable life, but she must have been incapable, by her very nature, of recognizing it. That must be the great difference between us. On the last day, as I was watching her pack, she asked me some questions about me. I could only answer superficially: it seemed impossible, from her questions and her tone, for her to understand or accept true answers, even if I had been capable of formulating them. “Are you suffering?” she asked me point-blank; once again, I evaded the question. The conversation didn’t go much further and left me confused. I didn’t know if I had said too much or too little. Her reaction was illegible, once again she was elsewhere, caught up in her departure. We were all taking, along with her colleague D., a commercial flight for G — . She didn’t want to stop in G — but was forced to for administrative reasons. The boarding, at the airport, was extremely chaotic, but the flight was quick. I had hoped to take a room in the same hotel as she: one last chance, I said to myself, to resolve this story one way or another. Then, on the plane, as she was chatting away with D., despair overwhelmed me completely, I felt soiled, and I was overcome with the desire to just drop the whole thing, to leave her at the airport in G — and never to see her again, never to expose myself again to this indifference whose profound ambiguity was tearing me apart. My weakness got the upper hand, I went to that hotel: there were no more rooms. Good, I said to myself, at least that’s settled for me. We agreed to meet at eight that evening; I came, but she wasn’t there anymore. She had left a note at the reception for another man, whom she had to see for professional reasons: for me, nothing. Later that evening, I found her in a restaurant with all her colleagues. She was immersed in conversation with her boss, she barely looked at me. Taking advantage of a pause, I made a date with her for the next afternoon, for lunch. She offhandedly agreed and told me to come find her at the office. They all left soon afterward
s and she barely said goodbye to me. She was far, very far away. The next day, around noon, I found her at the office with D., settling their administrative problems. She was exasperated and paid almost no attention to my presence. I waited for an hour, asking her two or three times if she planned on lunching with me: “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she replied, “I have to go back to the hotel.” I was sitting in the lobby of the office where she was with the administrator when a little black and white bird flew in. It began walking around with disjointed but calm steps, surprised at the closed door. Then it turned on a little moth that was sleeping there and attacked it with its beak. The moth struggled, but in vain, and the bird swallowed it in a cloud of scales, a fine white dust of torn off wings forming a luminous halo around its head. C. was chatting with D., they were waiting for the administrator to pay them, they were talking animatedly about incidents of their work, laughing. I sat down near them, useless. Then the administrator returned. Once again, I asked C. if she wanted to come have lunch: her answer remained vague, it was obvious that her problems had completely absorbed her, I was only disturbing her. I left with barely a word, she did nothing to hold me back. The next day, the flight that was supposed to carry me away from there was canceled because of a holiday.