The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 43

After an interminable wait of three hours which had done nothing to appease her anger, Aurélie was seen by a member of the consular staff. The dig was finished, they had not found Augustine’s cathedral but there was so much still to do, one day they would find it and once again the marble of the apse where the bishop of Hippo had lain dying, surrounded by praying clerics, would gleam in the sunlight. Aurélie had invited Massinissa Guermat to come and spend a couple of weeks with her at the village and he had just told her he had been refused a visa. Outside the embassy walls covered in barbed wire stretched a line three hundred yards long in which men and women of all ages were stoically waiting their turn to be told that the sets of papers they had in their hands were not acceptable, for want of some item they had never been asked for. Aurélie went straight to the security door and asserted her status as a Frenchwoman to gain access but the receptionist had made her pay for the privilege by asking her to go and sit in an armchair where she had taken good care to forget all about her. The staff member was wearing a striped, short-sleeved shirt and a hideous tie and within a few minutes it became clear to Aurélie that she was not going to be given the explanation she had come for, no one was going to agree to reexamine Massinissa’s file, for their only concern here was to take a loathsome delight in wielding a power manifested only through arbitrary capriciousness, the power of the weak and pathetic, of whom this individual in his short-sleeved shirt was the perfect representative, with the smug, idiotic smile he directed at her from the impregnable citadel of his own stupidity. At the next desk an old woman in a hijab was clutching a little girl to her, and wilting beneath a deluge of contemptuous reproaches, her papers were a total shambles, they were filthy and illegible, good only for the garbage can, while Aurélie stubbornly pursued her fruitless struggle, employing the inoffensive weapon of reason, Massinissa was a doctor of archaeology, he held a post at Algiers University, did they think his situation was so unsatisfactory as to make him dream of abandoning it for the honor of working illegally on a building site in France? She herself was a university lecturer, did they think she spent her spare time setting up clandestine immigration networks? It was simply a matter of a few days of vacation, after which Massinissa would return to Algeria in a proper manner, this she would vouch for, but the individual in the short-sleeved shirt remained impassive and she longed to jab him in the arm with the pair of scissors that lay on the leather blotter on his desk. She left the consulate in a state of unspeakable rage, she wanted to write to the consul, to the ambassador, to the president, to say that she was ashamed to be French and the attitude of the staff she had had dealings with was a disgrace both to them and to the country they were supposed to represent, but she knew it would serve no purpose and she resolved to go to the village on her own, for a week, at least, before meeting up with Massinissa in Algiers in August. She needed to see her mother and, even more, her grandfather. She could not abandon him. However distressed she was by her father’s death, she was certain that Marcel was still more distressed by it, beyond what she herself could imagine, for it was in the normal