Henri Raczymow is a novelist (Contes d’exil et d’oubli — Tales of Exile and Forgetting; Un cri sans voix — A Cry Without a Voice; Ninive — Nineveh; …) and an essayist (Le cygne de Proust — Proust’s Swan, and most recently La mort du grand écrivain — The Death of the Great Writer).
Jonah is half asleep. He thinks he is still dreaming. He gets up, he staggers, he runs as in a dream. He will not take the time to eat breakfast. He says to himself: I am going to Tarshish. I understand nothing of this affair. Nineveh, what an idea! All I ask for is peace — everyone knows it, ought to know it. And I am still sleepy. But I must move, otherwise I am in for serious trouble, and who goes looking for trouble? Me, less than anyone. I must go somewhere, no doubt about it. The east, the west. Let us go and lie down. Let us play for time. Let us let time slip by. It may well be that, at some point, going to Nineveh will turn out to be an obligation past its expiry. Tomorrow will see the question vanish as if by magic, dissolve into the desert of my quiet, walled-up life. Some timely event of planetary importance will arise, and this Ninevite chore will drop of its own accord like a dead leaf. To slip forever through the tight mesh of life’s net. Unfathomable death. Sly little thing, little fish. But that telephone call this morning, unforeseeable. I had not thought to switch on my answering machine, fatal error. Otherwise, I could have claimed a convenient mechanical failure. But no: I did pick up the receiver, I did hear the message, I said yes or I said hello, in any case I spoke; of that I am certain. It is recorded like a deposition under oath. On high they will be patient, forced to be, perhaps they will change their minds. I shall plead a misunderstanding, I was not properly awake. They will forget me, they will let me drift in peace upon the waves that will carry me gently to Tarshish, toward the west, toward rest.
Jonah hails a taxi that was passing down his street just as he was crossing the carriage gateway, stepping over a vagrant who was asleep. He tells the driver the port of Jaffa. The driver flashes a broad smile, the fare is worth it.
At the port Jonah at once finds a vessel bound for Tarshish. What luck. But the captain is waiting for other passengers to make up his numbers. Jonah cannot wait. He will pay the price, the full price, there is no time to lose. He embarks. Day has not yet broken. He thinks of his bed. He closes his eyes. His heart beats very fast. A member of the crew offers him a cup of coffee, it comes with the fare.
Ah, this wind all of a sudden. The sailors do not look too worried. But yes, they are pulling odd faces, and the engine is making a no less odd noise. They are clearly professionals. They must have weathered a thousand storms. Why these nervous gestures, these shouts, this frenzy, these disorderly comings and goings? Hang on tight. Close my eyes. Wait for it to pass. Their bellowing is perhaps cursing. I do not understand their language. Do they, for that matter, all speak the same language? I would just as soon, to tell the truth, that they not be my own people. I shall have no confidences to make to them, should they by chance question me, want to know who I was, where I came from, where I was going, who my parents were. They have, in any case, far better things to do than to come and chat with me. It is better this way. I pay them, they sail, and that is all. We never tended the sacred cows together. The sailors sing while clapping their hands,
monstrous cacophony. Suddenly, they rise, and the one whom Jonah has spotted to be the captain orders them to throw the cargo overboard. On high they can do nothing more for Jonah now. Send out a radio message? Quite the contrary, the point is to be forgotten. I am going to sleep, let them manage on their own, it is their job. I was the man least suited to carrying out such a task. So, off to the Hold to bye-byes.
And now here is the whole crew forming a circle around Jonah. He had been delighting in his anonymity, and here he is at the center of the circle, the epicenter of the imminent catastrophe, the focal point, the sheepish object of all debate. The sailors are in the urgency of a decision. For them, no maybe: they do not want to die before their time. They are going to draw lots to find the scapegoat through whom the misfortune arrived, through whom a greater misfortune threatens to follow. This calamity does not fall on us from the sky, by God! It comes to us from within, from this very place, from the bosom of our skiff. One of us carries the curse. Look at the other vessels to port and to starboard, serenity seems to be their lot, there is only us…
Hearing this, Jonah persuades himself that the lot will fall on his own head. He knows him well, the guilty one, the goat of pestilential stench who has brought the curse to this watery place. And he draws the bad lot. He would have sworn it. They are going to call me to account, who, what, why, where, when. Trouble.
As if to convince themselves that they really do see what they see, the sailors have drawn lots several times over. The result has not varied. But what wrong have I then done to the good Lord? Singing, hazy, dumbfounded, stupid, drunk with foolishness, his head in the sand of the bad awakening, ever since he was born. But was he born? I was told: Arise, this morning, on the telephone… These people are no brutes, far from it. Take me, throw me into the sea, let us have done with it, heave me over. But no, the seamen are reluctant, they are decent folk. Now they are rowing to regain dry land, laboring as if they were digging a tunnel. And they row, the sailors. And the more they row the less they advance. They even seem, it appears, to drift ever further from the shore. This tunnel is impossible to dig. The storm redoubles in violence. And so, they seize hold of him. Jonah is the man too many. The lot has designated him. And so Jonah is heaved into the blue waters. And the sea grew calm. And while he sinks, Jonah has time to tell himself that it was pointless to go to Tarshish, since 1. no one was asking him to. 2. He had strictly nothing to do there. I really understand nothing of this affair. We do not want to understand. Might as well die. At least be dead. Dying is another matter.
A fish was standing there, like a bus stopped at its halt awaiting passengers. Jonah climbs into the bus. Seaweed coils about his head, encrusted things cling to his skin with all their suckers. The fish’s entrails resemble a darkened room with a double bed, facing which stand two twin television screens broadcasting the same images. There one admires the depths of the sea. They are the fish’s eyes! Jonah breathes, his blood circulates, his senses are alert as before. The screens light the room sufficiently. In a corner, a small pedestal table on which rests a pen case of old-fashioned make. Jonah turns away from it. He stretches out on the bed, hands crossed beneath his head, and watches the television program. He reflects that he is at peace here. It is comfortable and no telephone… And yet, there is no question of his remaining forever in this cellar. Will this belly where I reside not be my tomb if I linger here? And what if up above my death were programmed? This hospitable fish might one day or another cut off my supplies, wish for my death, sever the cord of life that binds me to its own nourishing life. Nineveh is not on the seashore, but inland. One must go there alone. He will go. But that is another story. Every man is a little prophet.□