The story tells of a young man and woman, without names, who meet casually in Paris and proceed to have a passionless affair. Except when they go to bed together, they talk only of "Islam and the Bible." Or, rather, he talks; she, mostly bored, listens. Though he doesn't believe in God (neither does she) he has a lifelong obsession with scripture — Jewish, Christian, Muslim. He is buying a 16th-century Hebrew Bible on layaway! That is his only dream.
The story's last paragraph packs a wallop:
He bought her a pair of stockings; he was a kind man. But since they’d begun sleeping together, she had no joy in her life. One night, she understood why. I am not made for him, she told herself. All her strength, her youthful joie de vivre seemed to shrivel in his presence; she couldn’t help it. Still, she was flattered. In a sense, she was lucky; she told herself that she learned things when she was with him. But those things brought her no pleasure. It was as if she had already known them, so small was her need to learn them. But she did try to please him; in the evening she read the Gospels, as he had asked her to. What Christ said to his mother made her want to cry. That he had been crucified so young, before his mother’s eyes, was even more revolting. But—it wasn’t her fault—she couldn’t go beyond a certain level of emotion. She did not think that he was God, this man. She thought that he was a man who’d had very noble plans; his death gave him back his humanity, which meant that she was unable to read his story without thinking of that of her own father, who had died the year before, crushed by an industrial wagon, one year before his retirement. He’d been the victim of an injustice that had begun long ago. That injustice had never ceased to exist on earth—it continued through the generations of man.
At the risk of ruining its literary delicacy, I take the passage to suggest that the nameless heroine, like so many of us, can make no strong connection between the religion of the Bible and her sense of "an injustice that had begun long ago," that "had never ceased to exist on earth," and that had "continued through the generations of man." Even the injustice committed at Calgary bears, for her, faint resemblance to her own immediate experience of her father's untimely and excruciating death.
It seems to me that the Bible is the story of our humanity: of that unceasing, pervasive injustice, and its eventual remedy.
It seems to me that there is no book that takes the injustice of the world more seriously than the Bible does.
And it seems to me that we have grown tone deaf to the story, as has Duras' heroine ... and her Bible-besotted hero, as well. He can quote Ecclesiastes from memory, yet it is but a vanity to him, a feat. In all his fetishistic obsession with the Koran and the Old and New Testaments there is no comprehension. There is no passion. There is no humanity.
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