Passage through the Red Sea by Zofia Romanowicz

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.”

(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.”