The Lives of the Prophets
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The man gets up, eyes sparkling, breathing feverishly, with one aim in mind: to reveal to the world what has just been revealed to him. He rubs his eyes; the revelation is still crystal clear. Until this moment, he would have found it difficult to accept that he could suddenly become a prophet. Now, on the contrary, he discovers he can assume the role with the requisite faith and sang-froid. As he hurries downstairs in his pajamas (his mission is too momentous to worry about trivial details like finding his pants, shirt, and jacket), the trumpet blasts still echoing round his head, he sees his wife in the kitchen getting breakfast ready and their child bawling in his cot. His wife is surprised to see him up so early. She tells him so, but he doesn’t hear her because he’s already opening their front door and stepping out into the street, determined to divulge his revelation. He reaches the square, sees a green Volkswagen Passat parked next to the bakery, and climbs on top. It is the perfect pulpit. The four individuals who have come out to buy bread, savory pastries, or milk for breakfast (wrapped up tight, wearing scarves and hats pulled down over their ears) look at him bleary-eyed. He is sporting sky-blue, gray-striped pajamas; the wind sears his skin and freezes his bones. Wasting no time, he takes a deep breath, stares at the glazed faces of the four individuals staring up at him (one man’s nibbling the crust of a baguette he’s carrying under his arm), and goes blank. What was he supposed to be prophesying? He can’t remember.
The more stressed he gets, because he can’t remember, the blanker his brain becomes. Time rushes by. People look at him, rooted to the spot, and he finds that even more stressful. Was what he had to prophesy good or evil? It was mind blowing, for sure: he can remember how he reacted. But was it a mind-blowing reaction to good or to evil? And hadn’t he felt quite shocked? Had it perhaps fallen to him to prophesy the horrific end of the world? No, it wasn’t anything like that. Was it the opposite, a new dawn of hope? Too grandiose. It was no earth-shaking prophecy. Perhaps it was more modest. But what was it? He can hear the sound of a TV from a nearby window. A dance orchestra is playing a musical interlude on the morning program. He tries to concentrate and remember at last what it was. But it’s not coming. Seconds pass as if they were minutes, the four people who were looking at him drift away (one by one), and he’s left standing there with his finger sticking up and his mouth open, speechless. Until the owner of the Volkswagen appears, surprised to see a man on top of his car, and angrily bawls him off the hood; then he grabs the prophet by the lapels and slams him up against the wall, while the prophet tries (in vain) to remember whether that was what he had to prophesy, being knocked against the wall, being in a state of uncertainty, being unable to remember.
He ruminated for days. He was absolutely clear on one front: he had not deceived himself into thinking he had something to prophesy when, in fact, there was nothing. His gut feeling was right. He had been summoned to prophesy an extraordinary occurrence. But was it extraordinary for the world? Or simply for him? That was why he had run downstairs and into the street, so he could bring it into the open. But could he still remember what it was when he was on his way downstairs, or did he come down awestruck, remembering nothing, yet obsessed by the need to tell everyone?