A. Sample questions (You may type your answer in the box; your answer will erase when you leave this page, or you may click on the "remettre" button. You may check your answer by scrolling the box.) :
1. Il y en a un qui veut te voir. Noreddine regarda la vieille Aïni, toute cassée, le visage desseché.
2. Il se retourna, vit l'officier et, comme au moment précédent, pour sa femme, il resta à observer l'inconnu sans dire un mot.
3. Quand il se penchait en avant, sa grosse tête blonde, aux cheveux déjà clairsemés, entrait dans le rayon de soleil qui passait par l'étroite fenêtre.
B. Translation of the Passage
«The Nightingale of Kabylia»
As the noises, outside, were getting l;ouder, Noreddine Aït Kaci woke up. His wife was coming back from the courtyard. Some sun was coming though the wide open door.
"Some soldiers," said Aïni. "There is one who wants to see you." Noreddine looked at old Aïni, all tired and worn, with her withered face. He was thinking, his mind still drowsy.
"Are they French?"
"French, certainly . . ."
She seemed worried. Noreddine got up, flung off the burnoos that covered him and looked for his sandals. He found them at the end of the mat on which he had slept.
He was trembling while putting on his shoes, but it was the fever, for he suffered from malaria. Through the window he caught sight of the Djurjura all covered with snow, blue and white, topped with a ring of clouds.
At that instant, there was a knock at the door. He turned around, saw the officer, and, as a moment earlier, with his wife, he stood looking over the stranger without saying a word. He was trying to guess the visitor's intentions.
"Lieutenant Humez," said the latter. "May I?"
"Humez . . . Are you the boxer?" said the old man, scratching the back of his hand.
"No, no . . . They just sound alike. We have the same name. That's all. but I'm from the north, too. From the north of France . . . From Tourcoing . . . .
"Ah, Tourcoing," said Noreddine, to whom that name suggested something familiar. I think I have a friend who worked in Tour . . . well, in that city."
"Yes, the Kabyles are numerous in Tourcoing . . . ."
At a sign from Noreddine, he had sat down cross-legged on the mat.
Without his cap, he appeared shorter, as if he had grown smaller. When he leaned forward, his large blond head, with hair already sparse, entered the ray of sunlight which came through the narrow window.
"We stopped in the village," said the officer. "And I thought . . . . I want to meet you. You know, I bought your record . . . ."
Noreddine had clapped his hands to order tea. Aïni, in the courtyard, was stoking the fire. She turned half way around to call out that it was coming.
Noreddine was wondering what the officer was trying to get at. Certainly, he was going to ask him questions about the guerillas, but he didn't know anything. And the little he did know, he wouldn't tell him.