Passage through the Red Sea by Zofia Romanowicz
Translated by Virgilia Peterson
Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. (1962)
Originally published in Polish as Przejscie Przez Morze Czerwone
(3) The night before Lucile visits, Narrator has a dream in
which Paul is alive (and Lucile is asleep beside her)
(7) The narrator’s life: “I had so mismanaged without her”
Originally believed Lucile “Could help me straighten out my life,” not to “rake up the memories we had in common.”
Originally believed Lucile “Could help me straighten out my life,” not to “rake up the memories we had in common.”
(8) Narrator counting on “the renewal of our old intimacy
when we met”
(9) Misreading the dream of being with her in camp—not
realizing it was a “premonition of disaster”
(10-11) Shared bread from Micheline—defensive, excuse at the
ready, ashamed for several reasons. Acting animalistic—can’t refuse despite it.
We find out later the Narrator brings back eczema after visiting Micheline’s barracks,
which Lucile gets and it disfigures her fingers and hand.
(15) Paul—Lucile’s husband.
Narrator loved him, too.
“[T]he living were no less lost to us in those [camp] days,
no more accessible to us, than the dead. Narrator writes to Lucile, asking her
to come visit: “no longer bear this burden alone.” The past still overwhelmed
her…she hasn’t moved on.
(16) Narrator longed for the reunion with Lucile, “the
reunion that I had longed for all these years.”
(17) concerned that Philippe “could ruin our reunion,”
though she wasn’t sure how he could
(18) “Carpe diam, carpe horam” was Philippe’s motto
(20) In camp: “an underlying will to survive”
“feeling distraught and defenseless” at the thought of
meeting Luicile
(21) Her pellet and the feeling of freedom (or power) it
promised/gave her
“No one
knew it was there, as they transported us for a night and a day, and still
another night and still another day, while through the cracks between the
boards of the freight car we peered at the unidentifiable landscapes we were
passing, and it seemed to us, not as though they were transporting us farther
and farther, but as though they were sinking us deeper and deeper, even deeper
than the depths. No one could possibly suspect that I was, in fact, free; that
I was there only for as long as I was willing to remain, since at any moment,
if I so desired, I could with one gesture, with one single little gesture, turn
the handle of that door of mine and remove myself from this collective fate,
from this transport, changing my body into something over which no living soul
would ever again have power.”
She never took the “pellet,” giving up her coat when the
prisoners arrived at the camp. Even though she lived through the ordeal, the
experience marred her and her captors still seemed to have power over her.
Narrator’s normal life is to “go on enduring instead of
living” which is “all the more tragic for being normal and routine.”
For a while, the pellet’s existence is what gave her courage
and hope. This was replaced by Lucile.
(24) “Perhaps…I had been overwhelmed by an instinct stronger
than reason or will”
When she saw Lucile she decided not to commit suicide
(25) They saved each other’s life through “loving
reciprocity”
Narrator loses her identity—“From then on, in my mind, it
was not ‘I,’ but ‘we’>”
(26) Curiosity caused her to be human.
Narrator and Lucile knew of each other before the camp.
(27) The links and attraction made all that would happen
easier to bear
(28) The pellet was “my veto of all that was happening, my
refusal to accept it.”
Was the Narrator expecting the same saving grace from Lucile
a second time when inviting her to visit?
(29) Narrator is dependent on Phillipe
The only object in her room she had feelings for “was a
framed print pictureing the passage through the Red Sea.”
(30) Those fugitives in the painting had two foes, though
they didn’t necessarily realize it: the parted sea waiting to crash over them
and Pharaoh’s army.
Likewise, does Narrator recognize one foe but not the other?
She identified with the lost Jew on the Egyptian shore—of
little faith, hesitant. In her hesitation, “I challenged the patience of the
waters.”
(32) What had been burdening Narrator—guilt, betrayal
(33) Contrast between the life Narrator was living vs. the
life she lived in amp.
“In those
days, there was a sharply drawn line we would not cross, the line beyond which
there was no point in survival, no point in waiting for deliverance, a line
pushed back, it is true, to the extreme limits of human endurance, but all the
more rigid therefore, and it was Lucile who, as judge, kept watch over it for
us both. She herself was ready to die ,if necessary, at any moment, whereas I,
the weaker of the two, the more vulnerable, held on, precisely because of my
cowardice and weakness, more desperately, and sometimes beyond the point at
which we had decided that life was not worth living.”
Lucile orders Narrator to “Let go!” (an order she had given
her earlier to drop a rotten turnip she had foraged and was ready to fight to
defend it.
(34) Letting go could also mean sinking to inhuman depths in
exchange for survival. Seeing others succumb to those depravations “set us on
edge…because it was a warning.”
(35) Human ties allow us to see ourselves in others and help
us act in a way we find acceptable.
There’s a price for deliverance, and for Narrator and Lucile
some prices were too high.
Small things can change the desire to cling to life, to
decide to survive.
(36-7) Phillipe—the same as scraps she wouldn’t acquiesce to
or sink to lower depths?
The thought of Paul being alive, of hearing his step, haunts
Narrator.
(46) Narrator initially missed Lucile at the air terminal
due to “trivial circumstances”
They met at camp by chance, by trivial circumstances, too
Her courage deserted her, as when “something one has been
wanting for too long, something one has counted on too much, comes within
reach…” (ellipsis in original)
(47) Memory of Lucile lost to reality when they met.
“uneasy to see Lucile as she really was”
(48) “memory is one thin and reality is another”
remembrance ¹
existence
(49) memory can “cast its distant shadow”
The history gradually unfolds
(51) Lucile left the hut they had found after leaving the
camp, while Narrator stayed.
Separated on day of liberation.
(53) Lucile “deserted me without a word”
(55) “An instant had changed my life, far more drastically
than war or even deportation.”
When Narrator “meshed” with Lucile, “That was the first, and
indeed the only, time in my life that I was able to become part of someone
else, to become inwardly one with someone else.”
(56) Being together in camp was a “necessity,” but for
different reasons for both of them
That “meshing” was also the Narrator being let into Paul and
Lucile’s world.
“By taking over my
life and joining it to hers, Lucile was saving us both.”
(57) Meeting Lucile at the air terminal, Narrator “found her
again, but again she was beyond my reach. Between us stood the transparent but
impenetrable wall.”
(59) seeing Paul and Lucile kiss—something attainable for
Narrator, but still outside it.
Gave her a feeling of hope, but also deprivation.
(60) Lucile shared with Narrator “her advantage over me”
(61) Though Narrator already “felt” those facts, an thinks
Lucile “did me the greatest wrong”
Lucile
tells Narrator about being a woman. “Lucile, in giving me all she had to give,
all her riches, was at the same time robbing me of even more. She was closing
all other doors to me, just when the door that led to Paul had already been
forever closed.”
“[T]hat
night she determined my fate and her own.”
(64) Rationalizing Lucile telling her about love, etc. “Once
a thing has been put into words, the words themselves have a way of changing
it; it becomes something outside and separate, it takes on a shape, a sound, an
image of its own, and one is somehow freed of it, somehow rid of it.”
Is that what Narrator
is doing with her story? Is she freeing herself of what she has done?
(65) Narrator feels her relationship with Philippe is
treacherous. She is incapable of breaking down a barrier between them, and
Philippe has “no wish to break it down.”
(66) Narrator wanted to be part of Lucile’s life after the
war (and still dreams of being a part of Paul and Lucile’s world), but that was
her own disappointed hope. Lucile didn’t want that. Narrator can’t let go while
Lucile moves on, and Narrator feels betrayed.
(67) Can’t force fate—when pressed hard, “It takes revenge.”
Narrator realizes she got what she wanted while in the camp
instead of “in better times.”
Fate gave her what she wanted “ahead of time.”
Freedom was an embarrassment, useless. “I did not know how
to choose anything, any purpose, any direction; I did not know how to allow
myself the exercise of choice.”
(69) Phillipe—“takes” Narrator in the same way he takes food
or drink; not to help her but to satisfy himself.
Repetitious nature of story-telling. Repeating phrases,
revisiting parts of her story now that the reader knows more of other
circumstances around them, tying current discussions with those that have
passed.
Almost half the book passes/leads up to Narrator and
Lucile’s first post-camp meeting.
Narrator seems to enjoy living her life through Paul and
Lucile (spying on them, following them)
(70) Lot’s wife—has to watch even knowing (or in spite of)
what will happen
(73) Red Sea painting reference: “[W]here the last of the
Jews, the most mistrustful of them, still hesitated on the Egyptian shore.”
(75) On meeting Lucile, Narrator can’t decide who seemed
“the more lost, the more dead” (Paul or Lucile)
On their meeting, Lucile seems to mock Narrator in front of
a man she met on the plane. Lucile is surprised Narrator looks so well despite
the desperate tone of her letters.
(77) There’s a “false note” in their meeting and on the taxi
ride. Narrator feels Lucile’s meeting with the man was “in secret, … and right
then by that lie, Lucile had severed the ties between us.”
Lucile was the axis around whom the Narrator revolved.
(78) Narrator was wanting to “lean on” Lucile, but Lucile
was not cooperating.
(80) Narrator lives under the delusion that being together
with Lucile would somehow bring Paul back, or at least the feeling he was back.
(85) When “that whole awkwardness of our meeting had
disappeared—one word from Lucile, her outstretched hand, had been enough to
enable me to yield to my joy at last.” But that word or gesture did not come.
Narrator’s joy, in the camp and now, had been “unfounded because
it was not shared.”
(88) Narrator describes their shared duties of guarding
meager possessions in the camp, and always fear of separation.
(89) All the strangers in the camp: “In the dormitory, lined
with tiers of bunks up to the ceiling like the shelves in a beehive, were
huddled people, thrown together by chance, hating each other, yet condemned to
sleep in this intimacy. They quarreled over blankets and bunks, they fought
over a piece of bread. Until the last siren sounded, until the shouts of the
night patrol were heard under the window, the tumult and the wrangling went on,
the tumult of a great upheaval in the midst of which our bunk, spread as always
with our blanket, was like an oasis.”
Inmates strive to leave “some trace” of their life since,
“We counted for so little, our life was so uncertain.”
(90) “Together” was the Narrator’s word (or motto, or
mantra). Together is how she liked to think of herself and Paul and Lucile,
whether in the camp or in the park.
(90-911) “[F]ar up ahead where the lines began, a terrifying
voice called out the numbers one by one, and from beyond the walls, above while
we could see the highest branches of the birches swaying, volleys of shots rang
out.
“Those who
were summoned to die moved away without looking back. Tomorrow, or even in the
next moment, our turn might come, but what did it matter, providing we were
together?”
Narrator savors being able to judge Lucile since she felt
she was always judged and need to apologize.
(91) After Lucile stayed out all night: “The moment had
come, not to begin again, not to live a second time, but to judge.”
Quote: “Forget the camp!” Lucile had said to me that evening
before she went off to keep her engagement. “When will you ever make up your
mind to escape it child?”
“with that evil clarity of the nighttime that dramatizes and
poisons everything”
(92) Something about Narrator’s look showed “some touch of
sadness.” Narrator has aged a lot since the camps. Lucile still looks young.
Narrator gives Philippe credit “for having taken an interest
in me all this time.” (because of her poor looks)
(93) Narrator appreciates Lucile’s interest in dressing her
in nice clothes, but “she had no interest in changing me; all she was doing was
to dress me.”
(94-5) Narrator was always passive, acquiescent…letting
Lucile dress her, letting Lucile and Paul plan for her. Once out, Narrator had
no interest in making decisions. “[N]othing…could ever match the future we used
to plan for ourselves.”
Lucile chides Narrator to put the camp behind her.
(95) “clarity of nighttime”
“It was then, for the first time, that I was afraid of my
own impulses.” (wanting to cut up Lucile’s dresses)
(96) Red Sea reference: Narrator is incapable of moving
while everyone else passed through the sea.
Her dream with Paul—Paul offers her the “little pellet of
death.”
Quote: “So this is all it is,” I thought with relief…
(97) Quote:
It was
then, for the first time, that the absurd and saving idea struck me that it was
wholly in my power to put an end to that life flowing secretly along its hidden
course beneath her skin and that I, more than anyone else, had the right to do
so. It was in my power to put an end to Lucile, to fasten her here forever,
beside me, before time moved on again, before the earth revolved, while we were
still, however insufficiently, together, alike, and before we became total
strangers to one another, each for herself alone.
I was more
and more certain, indeed I was convinced, that this was the real purpose and
meaning of our reunion, that from the beginning it had been predestined, and
that it was the only way to make everything clear and be done with it.
(98-9) The first night was bad, but the next day was better.
The visit had ups and downs, “dreams mingled with reality.”
(100) Narrator feels Lucile is recanting all she said in the
camp.
(Reflecting after the following events occur) “Now that
everything is over, now that I am myself again, that I am finally and forever
appeased…”
(100-101) “Everything one touches proves tainted and
condemned from the start. So what is there left to us, other than that which
prompts us to recognize the inherent flaw in ourselves and in everything, and
to accept it? But willing as I was to accept any flaw in myself, I was unable,
I had not the strength, to tolerate a flaw in Lucile.”
(101) “We had survived, and we doubtless do not survive in
order to demand the fulfillment of what we once promised ourselves in order to
be able to survive; we survive in order to live. It does not matter how we
live; what matters is to be alive.”
In the camp, despite their captivity, they felt a type of
freedom. What could the guards do, kill them? They would get to heaven faster
if they did.
(102) But what if paradise was “meaner, less perfect?” Or if
it doesn’t exist at all? Since we can’t be sure, Narrator prefers to “burn and
thirst forever” instead of accepting the mirage of “a higher and more just form
of existence.” (end of sentence is from 101)
(103) “What a mockery it is, when our desires come true.”
Longing, therefore, is futile. Desire, then, turns into
shadows.
(104) Lucile’s mutilated hand and fingers are from eczema
that Narrator brought into their barracks. It not only punished Lucile, but
Narrator, too.
(105) Lucile had avoided contact in bed with Narrator when
Narrator had eczema. Probably afterwards, too (at least it sounds like she did)
Narrator was a child that “needed comforting, counseling.”
But “Lucile was contemptuous of sentimentality” in the camp
and afterwards.
(106) Narrator—little natural dignity in her except from imitating
Lucile. In comparison, the “natural dignity that Lucile seemed to embody, which
was our salvation.”
Narrator tried to please Lucile and win her approval,
receive “demonstrations of affection I so craved.”
(107) Did Lucile’s “present way of life, … her rather
cynical new wisdom” come from the scars?
She felt the need to “make a more definite break with what
was too painful for her, with what bound her too closely, that she had so
promptly rid herself of me, without delay, on that very first night of freedom,
before there was time for us to form any new habits of a new, free life
together.”
(108) “I alone…clung to that imaginary future, to that hope,
and only because of it had I been able to keep afloat.”
Lucile must have abandoned hope in the future or even desire
it.
Narrator feels safer thinking of (living in) the time of the
camps.
Quote:
“And
suddenly, with the wild longing of those who are not truly saved and who feel
the taste of the heavenly rain on their tongues, I went back once again with my
whole being into that other time, into that circle of suffering and damnation,
that closed and therefore unalterable circle, forever safe from disillusion,
cut off by the unknowable succession of days and nights, by the hope of that
illusory [thirst-quenching] rain. I went back to what had been or what had only
seemed to me to be.”
(109) Lucile had broken with the past and with Narrator “in
order to ensure her own salvation.”
(110) Upon gaining their freedom:
“This consciousness of having recovered free will threw us
into confusion, since for years we had been accustomed to walking in step,
unthinkingly, obeying orders, and our joy at having escaped was mixed with
anxiety, even with a certain sadness, a somewhat melancholy feeling of
uncertainty, of having been abandoned, as though we were the first human beings
to walk the earth.”
(111) Evidently Narrator and Lucile had escaped from the
camp relocation.
They saw a husband and wife farming and tried to hike to their
field.
(112) However their attempt to hike to their field took them
off course, putting them in another part of the woods.
They accidentally stumble on a different camp during the
night.
(113) They hear a call for help. Narrator would have left,
avoiding the call for fear of losing their fragile freedom.
(114) Lucile chose “the better, the harder way” and returned
to the camp, which turned out to have been opened.
That’s one reason Narrator longed to see Lucile, to have her
around her again. Quote:
Without her, I could only choose
what was less good, without her there was no life with which I could be
content. In her lay all my hopes and all my potentialities. It seemed to me
that I had only to be with her, to follow and imitate her, for the right choice
to force itself upon me, the choice of the harder way, to be sure, but also of
the better way the way one can remember without remorse.
Yet it was that very night—there
are times when I am sure of it—that something cracked in Lucile. But I did not
realize that the Lucile who left me was another person, someone who too heavy a
load had broken, someone who, after that, would refuse every burden.
(115) They find a man, who had died after his call for help,
in the remains of the camp.
(116) Lucile still takes the dead man’s hand. They bring a
mattress out to him and try to dress his wounds.
(117) It was “as though the salvation of the world, as
though our own salvation, depended on him.” (and bringing him back to life)
Narrator falls asleep, waking alone except for the dead man
nearby.
(118) Narrator catches up with Lucile, who was leaving
through the camp gate. The “slight weight” of the dead man had been enough to
break Lucile, and cause her to desert Narrator that night (although she had
already detached herself emotionally fro her).
Narrator feels upbeat and the world full of promise.
“Someone had died in the night, but that was no doubt the last death in the
world.”
(119) “Then we started off together, seemingly together,
that is, but actually already separate, walking straight ahead, fleeing from
what had been—though we were carrying it within us—fearing what was to come,
dodging here and there, choosing paths, choosing fates, seeking people out and
then running away from them, dozing with our backs against tree trunks, until
we found the refuge of the wooden hut.”
The hut makes Narrator think that it was like having a house
of their own (or at least the first step toward that).
Lucile leaves during the night, but she had already left
earlier in the day because of “the dead man she had been unable to save,
together with everything which, for her, was dead, dead and ended, and which,
if she was to go on living, had to die for her, had to end had to cease to have
any importance whatever.”
(120) Narrator “tests” Philippe and Lucile by dropping back
as they walked, waiting for them to turn around and notice her lagging. They
don’t…the reassurance she wanted did not come.
“But as the people between us, between those two and me,
began to form a living and increasingly thick wall, little by little there
arose in my mind a wicked thought, a wicked hope that drove out the other:
that, on the contrary, Lucile would not turn around, that they two would do the
rejecting, that they would go off together, ridding themselves of me. That was
how I wanted it; there was something within me that desired the worst.”
(121) Narrator thought “that Lucile had only to appear for
Philippe to disappear.”
She had tried to break with Philippe when she knew Lucile
was coming. Philippe had ignored previous attempts (fleeting, desperate) to
break things off.
(122) “But this time, I meant it” in order “to put myself in
order.”
She felt she had been submitting without love, consenting
without desire.
(124) Narrator paints Philippe as a “cynical seducer who had
cast his spell over me and was holding me in humiliating bondage” to Lucile.
Narrator notes “It was not very just,” even though she notes he debased
“everything to the level of a vulgar game” and she “had agreed to play the game.”
She tries to excuse herself by noting her relationship was
her “one link with the world, my one way of having a part in it, my one
security.”
(125) Small thanks for him finding her an apartment and a
job.
Again she mentions that being fair now “can no longer be of
any use to anything or anyone, now when in my case everything has been decided,
crystallized in its unforeseeable finality” as she desires “to understand more
clearly.”
(126) Narrator feels her “whole present life was also a
betrayal of the death that had spared me, washing me up as on a shoal, after
having lifted me so high.”
Narrator believes there was a barrier between her and
Philippe (and anyone else?) on the night Lucile, in the camp, told her the
facts of life. She believed there was a paradise (like between Paul and
Lucile?) and she “would never renounce completely the hope of attaining it.”
(127) Narrator notes how Lucile and Philippe are “in tune,”
“akin.”
They didn’t even have “the decency” to notice she wasn’t
with them.
Philippe showed up unexpectedly at the apartment door.
Narrator slams the door in his face.
(128) Narrator had not told Lucile about Philippe yet when
he showed up at the door. She had postponed it so much that “he had ceased to
exist.”
(129) Philippe’s first words made him “intolerable” to
Narrator, who described him as a “fat beetle.”
Philippe simply opened the door with his key.
How narrator describes her life as full of misery,
hypocrisy, uselessness, and had become unendurable.
(130) Narrator mentions again that “Lucile had only to
appear for Philippe disappear.”
To Narrator, Lucile defined the line of demarcation for
hanging on, surviving.
TO Narrator, she “was the enemy, for already they [Philippe
and Lucile] had become allies.”
(131) “[W]e are slow
to accept the truth we fear.”
Narrator wishes she could have met Lucile halfway
(distance-wise) in order to hide everything about her life.
Imagery of nakedness being pure, while being clothed is
corruption.
(132) Narrator feels she is diseased.
A “film of hope that covered my heart” would “tear apart”
during Lucile’s time with her.
Lucile was needed to “reconcile me to myself,” and Narrator
felt she could only hold contempt on herself—“there was no place for Lucile.”
She forgave weakness in herself, but if Lucile were weak it would be a
catastrophe for both of them. Even worse, Lucile didn’t feel guilty about what
she done.
Narrator has held an idealized view of Lucile because of all
she did for her in the camps. Now when she meets her and sees she has faults,
that view is destroyed and sends her off the deep end.
“[S]he had withdrawn everything on which, long ago, she had
made me build, so there was no reason for her to feel guilty.”
(132-3) Even worse was when Narrator woke up next to Lucile,
and Lucile pulled away.
“There had also been that morning when everything had been
laid bare enough for me to discover another, an intolerable, a grotesque truth,
when Lucile, awakening beside me with an expression I had never seen before,
with the face of a stranger, drew away from me and wrapped herself more closely
in the sheet to avoid touching me. That was what she used to do, so many years
ago. With a look and a smile, she was picking up the thread of those years
again, but the look and the smile were such that, hiding my wounded hand,
folding around it a corner of the sheet, which reddened at once, I too drew
away, with tears of revolt against the present and against the past.”
(133) Narrator thinks she wiped out all of this from her
memory because she was anxious to do so. She’s also concerned about Philippe’s
role”
“Instead of compromising me, Philippe had raised me in
Lucile’s estimation.”
(134) Narrator is ashamed of Philippe.
Narrator’s two days with Lucile finds her attitude toward
her shifting, “from contempt to remorse to adoration.”
Narrator assumed Lucile would hate Philippe as much as she
did, that they would be “adversaries,” “enemies.”
(135) Of course they weren’t. Their “formal ballet,” a
“grotesque dance for two,” were assigned parts. Philippe thrived on their
masquerade…”enchanted, intoxicated” by it.
(136) “I was too slow in realizing what was happening.”
Tries to join in, but feels everything has been “trampled down.”
“I was suddenly certain that this had already happened to me
before.”
(137) Narrator fills in past events, with Philippe in the
role of Paul. “Paul did not exist. He had never existed. Lucile had never
existed, either. People had come between us and hidden us all from each other;
they had replaced us; we were all replaceable. We had all been replaced a long
time ago.”
Gives up on everything. Narrator felt completely
replaceable.
“There was no passage through the Red Sea, there was not
even an opposite shore.”
(138) “What happened, happened through me. Essentially, I
was the cause of it, and if I were to be judged, I would certainly be found
guilty.”
(139) “I wanted it, I longed for it, but still it had to be
within my power to accomplish it and it had to end by being more than mere
intention or that little gash along the hollow of my palm.”
(140) “Afterwards [after the first murder] no one could ever
again take the body for more than it is, for more than a mere receptacle, and
such a fragile receptacle, the content of which—a little breath—disappears when
it suffers the slightest damage. It is possible to kill, and it is so easy that
this most astounding of all things has long since ceased to astound us and
everyone resorts to it.”
(141-2) “If the slain were to rise again, if it were
impossible to kill, and if we had to wait till our bodies fell away from us of
themselves and abandoned us, then the impotence of hatred would be equal to the
impotence of love, and dominance the same as slavery.”
(142) “Thank God, we always had, we always felt beneath our
skin, that invisible little pellet, that blessed flaw in the receptacle
containing us, enclosing us; that key which no lock, no enclosure, could have
resisted. They could kill us, it was true, but they could not compel us to
survive for a single day against our will, they could not drag us across the
line we ourselves had drawn.” That line may be redrawn, but “the line existed
and depended, not on them, but on us, on a gesture, not of theirs, but of
ours.”
Which is funny since Narrator sleepwalks through life, doing
everything either against her will or at least not with her acceptance.
“All violence, therefore, is canceled out by the acceptance
of it, and no change of direction is needed to escape, since escape is always
possible by going out to meet it.”
This seems monstrous. Violence is done to us only if we
accept it. It seems like she’s excusing her on (soon to be described) violence.
She has become little better than her captors in the camps, saying she is
helping Lucile, who doesn’t have the strength to do it herself.
(143) Narrator says she wish she had been shot as they were
leaving the camp, as those lagging behind or trying to escape were shot. “I,
for one, was hoping they would shoot.”
It was at this point that Narrator had helped Lucile, saving
“her once in spite of herself” (142). “For some time, Lucile had no longer been
her usual self.” She was exhausted, seemingly ready to “be crushed, canceling
out with a single stroke the years of our hard-won, secret independence.” (144)
(144) Narrator had planned and caused their escape to
happen, leaping “off the road, into the night, into the forest.”
(145 ) “The wind carried the echo of the shots and also the
great collective lament, the tramping of that thousand-footed monster, enslaved
to its last breath, writhing in agony on the road a few yards from where we
stood, still so close as to be almost brushing against us, still trying to
devour us again, and only slowly dragging past us the last of its coils.”
That feeling of being free, being saved: “Life was no more
than an appendage to salvation.”
The three of them (Lucile, Philippe, Narrator) are in the
car, Narrator in the back (apparently asleep). She can see the looks, gestures
between the other two in the front.
(146) “Indeed, they were not far wrong in assuming that I
was asleep. The truth is that I had never fully awakened since that night
before Lucile’s arrival, when the dream that had been living in me for so many
years had returned to find me and carry me back into its own time; it was this
dream that had set in motion, had put into gear, all that was to happen to me
thereafter. I was asleep, this was nothing but a dream.”
(148) They eat at the same inn where Philippe and she had
first met for a “bang-up meal.” Narrator is upset that Lucile: “It was not
jealousy that made me sit there in silence, appalled at the sight of Lucile
picking up where I had left off instead of helping me to free myself, taking my
place instead of taking my hand to haul me to the opposite shore.”
Narrator wants to convey to Lucile how special that “first
evening I spent with Philippe, the only good one,” something that had saved her
to a certain extent, using it to “justify to a certain extent my subsequent
defeats and compromises, for that evening seemed to me to have been a mitigating
circumstance.”
“But now that whole scene, instead of merely being described
in a conversation, was being re-enacted before my eyes in an inexcusable
parody.”
Narrator seems to have long stretches of her life as well as
certain incidents where everything is dreamlike, like she’s not fully
participating in what is going on around her.
She often visualizes what she should do, a “gesture” she
should make, long before she actually does it. This is what she feels in the
back seat, and has for a while since Lucile arrived—a particular gesture she
should make.
(149) “I started to make the gesture, but once again, only
in my mind. Huddled in a corner of the back seat, I was bathed again in the
sweat that comes of immense effort or of immense fatigue.”
Narrator reaches from the back seat and turns the steering
wheel “with all my strength.” She doesn’t remember if they cried out or not.
(150) Lucile’s hands reach over and are placed on top of
hers, “in a gesture that was not meant, I am certain, to repulse me, that was
not made in self-defense, but was on the contrary intended to show her full
consent.”
Narrator does this not so Lucile to stop being herself,
instead “to stop her, to hold her back, so that she would cease not being
Lucile.”
Narrator is telling this story a month after the events
happened.
(151) Narrator comes to: “I knew that I was alive and
probably I was glad.”
