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would get off at K — , but would still send her the flower, without telling her from whom 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