The Outbreak of the Gulf War enters the narrator’s unfinished account not merely as a historical interruption but as a sharp test of its private reality: the war’s unanswered threats recall the anxiety of waiting for A, while its actual violence leaves no room for the fantasies that once filled that wait. On the war’s first Sunday, A calls and returns to her; their hurried reunion ends with the narrator recognizing that she can hope for nothing more.

A manuscript reopened by events

In February 1991, the narrator considers ending the book as though nothing in the world or in her life could affect its text. But the pages are still personal and within her reach, so writing remains open to change. She decides that recent developments matter more than adjusting an adjective: the manuscript cannot honestly be treated as timeless while history is unfolding around it.

The interval she marks runs from the previous May, when she stopped writing, to 6 February 1991. In that time the expected conflict between Iraq and the Western coalition has broken out. The narration thus turns from the retrospective record of passion to a present tense of public uncertainty, making the act of writing answerable to events beyond the affair.

War, information, and the limit of fantasy

The war is called “clean” by propagandists, but that description is set against the report that Iraq has already received “more bombs than the whole of Germany during the Second World War.” The narrator also relays eyewitness claims that children in Baghdad stagger through the streets as if drunk, deafened by explosions. These contrasting accounts make the language of cleanliness collide with the reported bodily consequences of bombardment.

What follows is not certainty but anxious anticipation. The narrator waits for forecast disasters that have not yet occurred: a land offensive by the Western coalition, a chemical attack by Saddam Hussein, or a bomb outrage at the Galeries Lafayette department store. The prospect of events still to come produces the same anxiety and frustrated desire to know the truth that she experienced while living through her passion. Yet she draws a decisive boundary between the two states: in the war, there is no room for fantasy or imagination. Private longing could elaborate uncertainty into dreams; the threatened public violence cannot be transformed in that way.

A’s call during the war

On the first Sunday of the war, A’s voice comes over the telephone in the evening. For a split second the narrator panics, then repeats his name and cries. He tells her slowly that it is him and says he wants to see her immediately; he will take a taxi. In the half-hour before his arrival, she dresses and puts on makeup in a frenzy, then waits in the hallway in a shawl he has never seen, staring at the door in disbelief.

A enters without knocking, as he used to. He appears to have been drinking: he sways as he embraces her and stumbles on the way upstairs to the bedroom. The scene briefly restores familiar gestures and physical closeness, but it is framed by the shock of his unexpected return and by the war’s unsettled present. The reunion is not presented as a renewal of their former relationship; its brevity and the narrator’s closing recognition give it the force of an ending.

Aftermath and significance

Afterwards, A wants only coffee. He says that his life in the East is no different: he has the same job as in France, and still no child, although his wife would like one. At thirty-eight he remains youthful in appearance, but looks more tired; his nails are less tidy and his hands less smooth, probably because of the cold climate where he lives. The narrator tells him off for not keeping in touch. He responds with amusement, questioning what a routine call to ask how she is would have led to. He has not received the postcard she sent from Denmark to his former workplace in Paris.

They dress, collecting their clothes tangled on the tiled floor, and the narrator drives him to his hotel near the Etoile. They kiss and touch at traffic lights between Nanterre and Pont-de-Neuilly. On her way back through the La Défense tunnel, she asks herself where her story is, then concludes that she can hope for nothing more. The war does not cause A’s return, but it supplies the historical present in which their last encounter occurs; the passage sets public danger beside private longing and refuses to let their resemblance erase the difference between imagined uncertainty and real violence.