JONATHAN

or The Crossing of the Red Sea

A short story by Rolland Doukhan

1

At the end of his strength, Jonathan was waiting to feel beneath his bare feet the reassuring roughness of the sand. With each of his strokes, the shore seemed by turns to recede or to draw nearer without his being able to find the slightest scientific explanation for it, all the more so since the waves breaking over there on the shore made no sound at all. Breathless and streaming, in one last effort, he nonetheless finished his crossing of the Red Sea, gripping with his hands sand mingled with pebbles, and emerged, staggering… onto the rue des Rosiers, in Paris. At least, that was how it happened each time in this dream he had at daybreak, just before waking. But this time… this time… had he really been asleep? He would have sworn, though, that…

Come back, he had come back! Jonathan looked around him at the faces of the passersby, the shop windows, the shabby little stalls where they sold anything and everything — that is, whatever was important for the minute in which one needed it. The rain would not stop, one of those fine, ungainly rains that have no manners. A pride inhabited him, mingled nonetheless with incredulity: “I made it! I made it! I crossed the Red Sea!” Why was it the Red Sea that kept coming back in his dream, and not some other sea? Why this absurd pride? He wondered by what obscure reminiscence, by what mysterious pathways of time, this picture-book imagery of his childhood rose up in him. Well, picture-book… He searched for another word, another city name, that would be closer to the reality of his dream, closer at the same time to history and to geography, something like Thebes or Akhenaten, or slavery; he searched for an image of desert, of a sea split into two liquid walls. But nothing came to mind. All right, the Exodus from Egypt it is!

“But did I myself come out of Egypt? Let’s see, my name is indeed Jonathan… Jonathan… Good God, Jonathan what?” Impossible to recover his own name. These gropings, these stammerings of his memory had begun some time ago already. A fortnight? Twenty days? Three months? He no longer knew. Stretches of emptiness, of grey, settling within him — those famous anxieties he sensed were leading him slowly but surely toward delirium. Delirium… well, the delirious episode, said… said… Who was it who spoke of a “delirious episode”?

He began to run. As the rain had grown heavier, this did not surprise people — all those others who ran like him, but who were hurrying, they, toward an apartment, toward a moment inhabited by a man, or a woman, or children. And he, he had begun to run in order to do as they did. To act as if. It had little by little become for him a mode of functioning. Nothing very original, he reflected, all people without work must have acquired this kind of attitude. Then, as the day before, as the day before that, the long howl of hunger passed through him. To eat. Ah! there it was, the bad habit, the obsession, the new danger: to have nothing left but sensations, needs. He forced himself to repeat: “Let’s see, my name is indeed Jonathan… Jonathan…” And the three syllables of his first name became a rhythm of breathing, a rhythm of running, of life. Jo - na - than… Jo - na - than… Jo - na - than… He forced himself to think of abstract terms, of sounds that had once had a meaning: responsibility, dignity, self-respect, productivity. What were they, these noises in his mouth? Trinkets for decorating his interior? The world had disappeared, one day, just like that. The world had disappeared. Work. The house. Anna. Anna? Who was this Anna whose name had come so naturally to his lips? And yet there was a face behind that name. He kept running, although the rain had stopped. Anna. Come now, he was still playing with himself, he was pretending to be afflicted, to have those famous stretches of absence, of emptiness. Anna had always, must always have, her “upside-down” smile, as he called it when she wielded irony in their conversations. Anna had a face, eyes from which he had drunk, lips he had bitten, a body he had traveled over. Anna. No nonsense, he knew Anna well. He knew her by heart. And it was indeed Anna who had spoken one day of a delirious episode. But about whom? About what? And it was so far back from this street, from this moment in which he ran beneath an absent rain. All right, he had had a wife named Anna. But where did she live today? Where did she move about? And had her voice become grave? Light? Singing? Assured? And her hands? My God, were her hands still soft, tender? He brushed invisible flies from his sweating face. The torment — he was struggling in a torment that no one perceived, that no one felt.

Noise around him, that sensation one has when walking down a narrow street. The shops too close, the sidewalks crowded. And he noticed that he was trying to decipher the letters of the signs, signs in which Hebrew and French were curiously mingled. “But yes, of course, I’m on the rue des Rosiers, I’m among the Jews! I’ve come back.”

The word, suddenly, struck him. “Come back,” he had pronounced it almost in a low voice. And already the word drew in its wake a whole connotation of ideas and images… “one always returns to the scene of one’s…” What am I saying? I haven’t committed any crime! Come back. All right, it’s true that I was Jewish, there was… there was… What is this formulation? What does this “I was” mean? I am, I have always been Jewish, I still am, despite the chasm, the distance, the new habits, the way of life. I am Jewish! And the meaning of his dream suddenly appeared to him. Well, the meaning. A kind of explanation, at most, concerning the “choice” of the Red Sea. Egypt must have been fair and good to his ancestors, and yet, one day, they had left it. Phrases like that, strange, confused, floated in his head. “They too, my ancestors, they had left behind them their goods, their memories, their Annas. They had carried away only their faith, just their faith in their meager baggage.”

Faith. He, Jonathan, had never had it. Never had it touched him, this certainty, this reassuring way of sharing with others, the conviction of being one among all. And yet, what else did he feel, in that instant, in the midst of the flood of passersby, in the hearty hubbub that came out of those butcher shops opening onto the street like bellies? He had worked, worked, had known how to do nothing but that, beneath the absent gaze of his father, frozen in the large painting he had lost the habit of looking at above his desk. It was true, my God, it was true that, as a small child, he would touch with a timid and respectful finger the welts that marked the old man’s left forearm after the tefillin, after the morning prayer. Disturbing traces of the passage of an unknown being, signature in the flesh of some strange and even maleficent pact, he had sometimes thought. It was true that, on the days of the great festivals, the rumble of the chants intoned in chorus, when they rose beneath the vault of the little synagogue, filled him almost with an unreasoning terror. It was true that he had lived through those moments as if he were not part of them. And yet, he had been kneaded, woven from them. These gestures, these words whose meaning he did not know, had constituted him as surely as “free and compulsory public education,” as the physics lessons, later, or the math. And it was true too that, imperceptibly, this world, this music of himself, had left him. A secondary era, it was like a secondary era, an earlier life. Faith, the trappings of ritual, the gestures, the prohibitions, a way of walking through life — all that, once his father was dead, he had little by little forgotten. He had become that man who works toward a precise goal, who builds and plans his future and that of his own, the one who manages his life like a business. The one who had met Anna, who had loved her. And the one who had not been able to make a fruit with her, a child. He had even become Monsieur Jonathan Guédy, and not Guedj. Why, yes, he was the one who had gone so far as to transform his father’s name. And now… now…

For a while already, he had been walking more calmly, forcing himself to a correct bearing. With a gesture that had become efficient, he had flattened the lapels of his jacket, pulled at the crease of his trousers, wondering whether he was the object of curiosity, of suspicion, whether he stood out in this street. “All the same, all the same, the Red Sea, that was something!” No accident if this story came back regularly in his dream, like a resurgence, a remnant of the feast from before, crumbs left on the table after the drinking and the eating. The feast. For he had had a name, he, a social heft, and then… He held himself back from thinking further. What good would it do? A day had come that had seen the sun go down. One always believes that great catastrophes announce themselves in advance, with great reinforcements of signs, of rumors. But no, there had only been that letter at the usual hour of the mail. Six clear, concise lines, explaining the end of the Société Parisienne d’Informatique Divisée, the S.P.I.D., that is. And the S.P.I.D., quite simply, had run its course. Filing for bankruptcy. And he, Jonathan, one of the pillars of the edifice, had found himself free, with that terrible freedom of days without schedules. Money, of course, he had not lacked immediately. The severance check had been comfortable. But three, then four years had gone by. And his fiftieth birthday had arrived, just like that, without warning. The classified ads, the innumerable résumés, the steps taken, the interviews had followed one another… And then, without it raising any great clamor in the street, there had come the time when he had had to count the coins for transport tickets, for telephones, for the little black coffees at the counters, for bread itself. Everything, he had had to count everything. And in the same movement, without his being able to draw from it any conclusion of cause and effect, things, gently, the ideas, the hours, between Anna and him, had come undone. The sharing of a moment, of an image. The gaze, cast together, upon a little Greek temple, somewhere in the Peloponnese, in the blaze of a setting sun. The hand on the shoulder that no longer gives rise to the shiver. Yes, things had come undone. A flour, an impalpable dust that they had not known how to hold in their loosened fingers. And the child that did not come. Ah, no, no! he did not want to relive, nor to recover the images, the words that had been born between them. Anna. The world, the world quite simply had gone under.

Someone bumped into him, a still-young woman, laden with bags filled with provisions. “Oh! excuse me, monsieur, there’s so little room on these sidewalks!” It was only an anonymous woman’s voice. But the tonality of Anna’s voice, its very texture, exploded in his memory. A wave of blood flooded his heart. In a second, he had become again that other Jonathan who walked in another life. He recovered the blondness of Anna’s hair, its silk. He wanted to take her arm, but his hand brushed the window of a jewelry shop. The dagger-thrust of hunger struck him again. To eat. He saw again the image of a sandwich from which spilled, almost obscenely, a thick slice of ham. But it was when, good God! it was when? Words danced before his eyes. He had stopped before a delicatessen. The storefront, with its names of enticing dishes inscribed in white chalk, seemed to deform, to sag gently. The time from before, almost with tenderness, surfaced gently into his consciousness, hesitated, then went away like a little cloud pushed by the wind. Black hole. Bliss of unconsciousness.

He had fallen flat without even realizing it. Noises, though, around him, mingled voices. He sensed, or rather guessed at, a whole little curious crowd, eager for moments of exception, avid to give its opinion. But an opinion on what? He had fallen, that was all.

“It’s the heart, it’s surely the heart!” said someone.

“No, it’s a drunk,” said another voice, “that’s where drinking gets you!”

“I haven’t drunk, I haven’t drunk anything. I’m hungry, I’m simply hungry.”

He thought he had spoken, perhaps shouted. But the words had not even formed on his tongue, they stayed stuck like flies at the back of his head.

“The firemen, better call the firemen, that’s the fastest thing!” said someone again.

“No, you just have to give him a little water and a lump of sugar… I’m sure this man hasn’t eaten!”

Jonathan perceived in this new voice an accent that was familiar to him, and a warmth, almost a friendship. His eyes still closed, he smiled.

“You see? what did I say, he’s taking in everything we say! He’s not very young anymore, but he’s not an old man all the same!”

Who were all these people talking about? Couldn’t they see that he was little Jonathan grappling with the prohibitions of the Sabbath that he had transgressed? Couldn’t they see that he was terrified at the idea that his father was going to be told about this business of the sandwich? “The first sandwich, I swear, Papa, it’s the first ham sandwich I’m eating!” Couldn’t they see, all these others, that he was fifteen? Sixteen at most. The age of the first questions, of the first doubts. Philosophy. But yes, that was it. This way of asking questions, it was already the wonder of philosophy. Logic, reason. To doubt was to think, said Ravenoux, the philosophy teacher. God no longer carried any weight. An unargued theory. Before his father, all right, Jonathan still pretended. Respect for authority, respect for all that had been acquired, for the rites, for the music. Respect too for his mother’s efforts, for the purity of her gestures, for the power of this tranquil woman without questions.

The cold, he felt the cold gaining his legs, his belly. Something was gripping his arm violently. He thought: blood-pressure cuff. Why were they taking his blood pressure? He was barely sixteen, for heaven’s sake! At sixteen, health is unshakable. He quickly understood that there had been no apparatus for blood pressure, but that he was being seized forcefully by the arms and the legs. The air was growing scarce. There were too many shoes around his head. The words reached him more and more blurred. He felt his body rise, rise. The incredibly rich sensation of leaving the earth through the air. Better than a bird, he was better than a bird. He was a light and intelligent feather, endowed with memory, with possibilities of associating, of understanding. Then he knew that two, perhaps three men had carried him as best they could, and that they had laid him down in a cool, almost cold place, on an old blanket thrown directly on the ground. Why did he think it was a hall, the entrance of some public room? A smell of cold tobacco floated in the air. He thought again, without any valid reason, that this place must be dirty. He felt something like a disappointment at it. “The Red Sea, all the same, the Red Sea…”

Imagery from a very old Haggadah (Barcelona Haggadah)

Literature

2

He felt the taste of coffee in his mouth, the warmth. The cold disappeared as if by enchantment, the sound of the voices changed. Something had happened in his life, something essential. Everything was becoming relative, secondary. He was elsewhere, but in an elsewhere that had been familiar to him from all eternity. Faces, gestures, laughter. A persistence. He knew very well what each expression meant, each joke. The scents, the noises, he had already heard them, already smelled them. There was a kind of strange hammering in the air. But this hammering was strange only to the others. He, he knew well that it was the clicking produced by the players snapping their dominoes one against another. The dominoes? But then… he really had come back!

In thought, he saw again the hot hours of midday. Rare passersby, shops more or less closed. The streets, lined with houses with peeling façades, were almost empty; crooked little lanes with their gutters full of refuse, of stones, of uncertain things, descended toward shadowy crossroads, with the air of sick children. The whole had the somewhat ghostly aspect of one of those movie sets across which passes the artificial wind come from an invisible blower, and a few dried thistles fly and whirl in the dust, a dog passes by… It must be said that in the cities of the Mediterranean, even at the hour of full heat, the streets are never entirely deserted. “Now then, I thought Mediterranean,” he said to himself, “and not Algeria, I’m making progress, I must have come a little way out of it.”

At what moment he had abandoned the street and its sun to enter the tavern, he could not have said. Strange, this feeling he had, half-dream, half-reality. He knew, though, with all his reason, that he had been walking in the Jewish quarter of Paris, that famous 4th arrondissement between the rue de Rivoli and the rue des Francs-Bourgeois, when he had had this faint spell. He knew that it was the ninth of February of the year 1994, and that the day was grey and rainy. He knew all that. But, at the same time, he was drinking, in cautious sips, a little black, scalding coffee, somewhere in a bygone summer, behind him, behind his elapsed life. And people he knew well were smoking around him, and playing dominoes. Bursts of voices, laughter, streaked across his consciousness, his present. Someone was leaning over him.

“A game, Jonathan?”

Had he left such traces in this city, that they called him by his first name? That they recognized him though thirty or thirty-five years had gone by? Had he even really spent in this city the months, the years of his youth? And when was it? And who was it? And where was it?

“I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming!” But, deep within him, he knew well that it was not true. And that it was true too. How to understand? How to sort the wheat from the chaff?

The noises of this city seemed real, although muffled, modified, transformed, as if adapted to his situation, to his inner climate. Despite the dazzling light of day, a yellowish bulb lit the little room. A hum filled it, made of the clinking of glasses, of the murmur of crossed voices, and of the famous snapping of the dominoes, too. A veritable cloud of smoke floated between the tables. An incredible smell of tobacco impregnated things and people, and even the walls themselves. He was blinking to grow accustomed to this false half-light, surprising in view of the intense light there was outside. So much so that he did not at once make out the features of the man who had leaned over him to propose a game. When the latter laid his hand on the sleeve of his garment, Jonathan started and finally examined him. A rough grey beard ate at his hollow cheeks without managing to mask the intensity of the gaze, two black pupils sparkling with intelligence that breathed a kind of youth into this face nonetheless marked by the years. No, that wasn’t it, it was rather as if an ancient youth had lingered on this man, a remnant of sun at the end of a day. Jonathan, intrigued, saw the stranger smile. The eyes reminded him of something or someone, but what? but whom? A jacket too large and that must have been a fine bottle-green fell down to his thighs, leaving side pockets gaping, overloaded with newspapers and dog-eared books. A tramp, he was certainly a tramp begging for some alms…

A bizarre music floated in the tavern with the cigarette smoke, diluting the talk of the drinkers in a kind of sonorous syrup. It was the kind of music that would have been more in its place in those films come from India, with funerals on the Ganges, saffron-colored saris and bonzes with smooth skulls. “But no, wake up,” Jonathan said to himself, “you’re going off the rails, it’s a malouf, a marvelous malouf, violin and lute mingled.”

The looks that had turned toward Jonathan on his entrance into the café, the light dispensed with parsimony, the face of this curious and slightly disquieting man, all that left him perplexed and uncertain. And something else too, something else that, insidiously, gently, was beginning to terrify him: the total absence of women.

“Good day,” said the man.

Then, before Jonathan’s silence:

“Good day,” he repeated, with something like irritation in his tone.

His voice seemed to come from so far away that Jonathan searched at the very back of the café, in the half-light, for who could have greeted him thus.

Politely, but with some distance, he ended up answering:

“Good day, old fellow!”

And he set to searching with his eyes for a free table where he might settle.

“It’s the rush hour, the hour of the battle against boredom,” said the man tranquilly, “the whole town takes refuge here to exchange the words of the present for the images of the past, for the mirages of the future. You won’t find a place. Come to my table, it’s in that corner there.”

He had an affable, almost polished manner of speaking, surprising in a tramp probably in search of a drink to be stood.

“Thank you,” said Jonathan, “but…”

The man interrupted him:

“You’re mistaken, it’s I who am inviting you. At this table, I am at home, it’s my castle, it’s my drawing room, my office, my place of work. It’s there that I live, what! at my place, it’s too hot, and there isn’t enough noise. Come, come! And besides, it’s been so long that I’ve been waiting for you.”

Stupefied, Jonathan stammered:

“You… you… were waiting for me?”

“Oh! don’t panic, it’s simply that I know very well how to recognize… the returners.”

There was something imperious in the gesture of his hand when he drew him behind the pillar. A sort of exasperated impatience, too.

“My name is Ruben,” he began, as soon as they were seated, “Ruben Narboni.”

He had spoken in a very low voice, as one apologizes. This surname and this first name sounded in Jonathan’s memory with a surprising familiarity.

— Ruben… Ruben… Narboni? could you by any chance be the…

— Yes, I am the…

He burst out laughing, a fresh, young laugh that seemed grafted, out of place on this old man’s face. Jonathan wanted to introduce himself in turn.

— My name is…

With a gesture, the other stopped him:

— No need, you are… you are Jonathan Guedj. You were in the fifth form with Monsieur Renauehot in Latin, then in the fourth form A, I believe, and there, you had Madame Fitoussi; in the third form A, after that, with Lenterri — that one, he doesn’t deserve the “Monsieur” — and finally, from the second form on, with… with…

He stopped, as one helps a child to give the right answer, repeating the last word.

— With…?

— With Monsieur Narboni, said Jonathan, dumbfounded, with… you!

Again, the laugh full of youth, so contagious that Jonathan began to laugh in turn. He was as if struck with stupor.

— Why, yes, letters, Livy, Seneca, Cicero, you weren’t bad, but you were far from being the best. And if I remember rightly, in math, in Physics-Chemistry, in History even, ah, there! yes, you were brilliant, so brilliant that I was annoyed by it, vexed for my own teaching.

The noises of the players, the voices, seemed gently to fade. Once again, Jonathan was cold. He drew the panels of his coat tighter across his chest. What did all this mean? So that was it, then, a delirious episode! He shook his head in an absurd denial since no one was asking him any question. A child’s gesture, struggling in its sleep. He simply wanted to come out of this dream without head or tail, to get up, to reintegrate his reality of the Paris of 1994. But his legs had no more strength. The cold numbed him. Again the voice of the old teacher reached him:

“Here, start already by eating this! You’ll see, it’ll set you right, better than all their drugs and their injections!”

And Jonathan found himself with one of those enormous Israeli sandwiches that one finds on the rue des Rosiers, two little round rolls, not so little as all that, and filled with a thousand things impossible to name. He set to chewing with an ineffable happiness, and, his mouth full, managed nonetheless to speak while at last gazing closely at the man’s face. Had Ruben Narboni come out of his dream? Had he crossed time and the sea? Was it indeed he who stood there, before him, the face, the head, the eyes even, strewn in all directions with hairs, a veritable white crown, a sumptuous bush that was the magnificent prerogative of great age, and like his royalty?

— Monsieur Narboni! you are indeed Monsieur Narboni! So I wasn’t dreaming? And I who thought I had crossed the…

— Hush! don’t talk nonsense! foreign ears are listening to us. Ears that understand nothing of the substance of things. If you start talking about the Red Sea again, they’ll all take you for a madman. Because, you know, few people know that the Red Sea sometimes leaves Geography to come and undulate in cities without beaches, to refresh hours, moments like this one. And besides, I who know you well, I can even tell you that it’s probably not the Red Sea that you crossed.

— Why, well, if anyone had told me! But, for real, Monsieur Narboni, at this precise moment, here, where are we?

Literature

“For real,” you see, you’re recovering your language from before. Why, well, we are in Paris, rue des Écouffes, and brace yourself, we are in the entrance of a very small synagogue. You found a way to collapse almost in front of its door. So, quite naturally, they had you brought in here. Soon, the cops will be here, the ambulance men, the whole business. And you’re going to find yourself nice and warm in the bosom of the Assistance Publique. Probably at Saint-Antoine. There’s the whole story!

— But the café, just now, full of the noise of the dominoes, the smell of anise, the tobacco smoke, and the voices, all those voices…

— You are incorrigible. I’ve already told you not to make any more allusions to all that. Otherwise, it’s not at Saint-Antoine that you’ll find yourself, but at Sainte-Anne!

Jonathan closed his eyes. The swallowed sandwich gave him an appeasement, a veritable drowsiness that had nothing to do with the state of half-waking in which he had been since his coming out of… the Red Sea. A synagogue, he was in a synagogue. To think that he hadn’t set foot in one since… since… He calculated. My God, since the ceremony that had marked the end of the first month of his father’s death. So… so… since eighteen years now. He perceived a confused murmur, that cantillation he knew well, and searched his memory for the name given to the evening prayer, on weekdays. An impossible and familiar word, which he could not, however, manage to recover. Then fatigue numbed his limbs, his mind, and he fell asleep like a child.

The ambulance arrived, of course, and almost at the same time, the police car. And there were the obligatory questions and answers. And everyone gave his opinion, in one of those disorders that only life knows how to contrive. And just then, the evening service over, the faithful were beginning to come out, adding to the confusion in the entrance of the little synagogue. And everyone asked, everyone wanted to know. But Jonathan, once again, had entered into his dream. Once again, he was walking down a white street beneath the sun, once again he was mingling with the domino players, agreeing to play a game. Jonathan, once again, had come back, was guilty, was happy. Someone, a hat screwed onto his head, the rabbi perhaps, asked:

— What’s going on? But this is a synagogue here, not a hospital! What is that man doing, lying on the ground? Is he a Jew?

Jonathan knew that these questions did not belong to the world of sun and warmth in which he was. Monsieur Narboni, in any case the voice of Monsieur Narboni, answered that yes, he was a Jew. At that instant, the policeman who was finishing transcribing Jonathan’s papers asked:

— Does anyone know this Monsieur Guédy?

— Guédy? said the voice of the one who was perhaps the rabbi, Guédy, that’s not quite Jewish, that!

— I, I know him, said the one who had been Monsieur Narboni, and I tell you that he is a Jew.

All this over the head of Jonathan, nestled in the warmth of his dream. He listened, he listened. Were all these people talking about him? Monsieur Narboni, who understood everything, would surely know how to explain to them. He, Jonathan, was so tired, so well in the warmth of the tavern, a double-six in his hand. And during this time, the young intern was bustling about, and even beginning to panic. “Good God, the pulse is weakening,” he said to a nurse near him, “set me up an IV, quick!”

Jonathan, tranquilly, kept inhabiting his dream. Monsieur Narboni had told them all, the doctor, the policeman, the rabbi, he had told them that he was a Jew. What importance did all that have? Deep within himself, Jonathan knew, however, that the god in whom all these people believed, pell-mell in the entrance of the little synagogue, all these good folk bustling about to help his body, he, Jonathan, knew that this god did not exist. No, it would be more accurate to say that he knew that this god no longer existed at the bottom of his own convictions, at the bottom of his logical reason, of his life story, of his course. And yet, he knew too that he was that Jew without god or tallit, a man the color of a Jew, as one would have said a man of medium height. He knew, by instinct, that he had fewer points in common with the young intern who was treating him than with any one whatever of those noisy faithful who crowded the entrance where he found himself, with their accents, their smells, their little portable universes. Even if he had not sung with them, in unison, their music had nonetheless invested him, their memory was his. He told himself peacefully that he had come back, one among others, one among many, and he was happy to understand them, to know them, all those who, they, looked at him from elsewhere, as one looks, beyond the boarding barriers, in airports, at the relatives who are going away. The smells kept reaching him with a surprising power of evocation. Would prayer have a scent? But no, it’s the garments of the faithful, their little cases where the tallitot and the tefillin sleep, and the books so often read and reread. He knew this smell so well, since it had accompanied his ten years, his fifteen years. With others, of course, but that one, he associated it with his first steps, with his first joys, with his first angers too, and his first disgusts.

— That’s life, what! said Jonathan to Monsieur Narboni, who was still leaning over him, but who no longer answered him, it’s this particular life that I didn’t explain very well to Anna. That’s why she…

He kept inhabiting his dream, despite the noise of the streets of Paris, despite the purr of the engine, despite the special atmosphere of the hospital, later. He kept inhabiting his dream. He did not really know that he had arrived at Saint-Antoine, he did not know that they were examining him, that they were again injecting into his vein something to give life back to his life. He knew nothing of all that. Because life, gently, had left his body, despite the intelligent products invented by men, despite the marvelous Israeli sandwich offered by Monsieur Narboni, despite Monsieur Narboni himself, and despite Anna who had absented herself. Life had left a tranquil body, a soul that had come back.

— The Red Sea, said the voice of Monsieur Narboni that no one could hear, the Red Sea, he crossed it all the same!

R.D