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By Root 6391 0

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.

“One moment,” he said, going behind a curtain into a room beyond. He returned presently with a small parcel. Behind the counter he resumed the anonymous air of a shopkeeper. He handed the parcel across to her, saying quietly: “You said you wanted to give your husband milk. Here are two cans. They were the ration for our baby.” He raised his hand as she tried to interrupt. “But it was born dead, last week, too soon. Next year if we have another we can get more.”

Seeing Kit’s look of anguish, he laughed: “I promise you,” he said, “as soon as my wife knows, I will apply for the coupons. There will be no trouble. Allons! What are you afraid of now?” And as she still stood looking at him, he raised the parcel in the air and presented it again with such an air of finality that automatically she took hold of it. “This is one of those occasions where one doesn’t try to put into words what one feels,” she said to herself. She thanked him saying that her husband would be very happy, and that she hoped they would meet again in a few days. Then she went out. With the coming of night, the wind had risen somewhat. She shivered climbing the hill on the way to the fort.

The first thing she did on arriving back in the room was to light the lamp. Then she took Port’s temperature: she was horrified to find it higher. The pills were no longer working. He looked at her with an unaccustomed expression in his shining eyes.

“Today’s my birthday,” he murmured.

“No, it isn’t,” she said sharply; then she reflected an instant, and asked with feigned interest: “Is it, really?”

“Yes. This was the one I’ve