For some time, I felt something, like the soft graze of a hand, over my head as it hung between my arms—a touch at once tender and protective. But my spirit was elsewhere, wandering in the distance through all the places I had seen since childhood; the impression of them still throbbed inside me, but not enough to subdue the longing to revisit, if only for a minute, life as I imagined it might have unfolded in them.

      There was celebration everywhere: in every church, in every home, around the hearth, in heaven above, by the manger below; faces known and unknown dined together, rejoicing; there was chanting, the sounds of bagpipes, the cries of exultant children, quarrels over games of cards … And the roads of cities great and small, of townships, of villages in the hills or by the sea, were empty in the inhospitable night. And it seemed I was hurrying down those streets, from one house to the next, taking pleasure in the revelries of others; at each, I stopped briefly, wished them “Merry Christmas,” then vanished …

      I had already slipped into sleep unawares, and was dreaming. And in my dream, on those empty streets, I seemed to come upon Jesus wandering through the night, while the rest of the world, as usual, was celebrating Christmas. He walked almost furtively, pallid, withdrawn, with a hand holding his chin and his clear, sunken eyes staring intently into the void: he seemed suffused with the deepest sorrow, prey to an infinite sadness.

      I turned onto the same road; but little by little, his image pulled me toward him, absorbing me, and it was as if he and I had become a single person. But my lightness disturbed me as I maundered, almost hovered, through the streets, and instinctively I stopped. Just then Jesus pulled away from me, and continued alone, still lighter than before, a feather adrift on a sigh; and I, earthbound like a swatch of black, became his shadow and trailed after him.

      Then the city’s roads and byways disappeared: Jesus, like a white ghost vivid with inner light, glided over a hedge of brambles stretching on endlessly, a straight line through a black expanse. Gently, he dragged me along behind him, over the brambles, and I was as long as he was tall, and the thorns pierced me all over, but didn’t wound me.

      From the barbs of the brambles I leapt at last onto the soft sand of a thin strip of shore; the sea was before me, and over the quivering waters, a luminous path thinned to a tiny dot against the immense arc of the horizon. Jesus took the path traced out by the moonlight, and I was behind him, like a shadowy skiff amid the flickers on the frozen waters. The light within Jesus died out: again, we were crossing the empty roads of a large city. Now and again, he stopped to call at the humblest doorways, where Christmas, from poverty and not austere devotion, offered no occasion for merriment.

      “They aren’t sleeping,” Jesus murmured, and taken aback by hoarse words of hatred and envy uttered inside, recoiled as if in agony; and he moaned,