The Investigation

XXIX

YOU’RE IN ROOM 93?” asked a Server wearing white tails and black pants.

“Absolutely!” the Investigator heard himself reply, in a revivified voice. With a gesture, the Server invited him to follow.

The breakfast room was once again packed with people, but the Investigator recognized that they weren’t the same as those who’d filled the room the previous day. This morning there were a lot of families, with children of all ages, including infants, and also many very old persons. They were all poorly dressed, in clothes that were often far from ordinary: Many of the men wore enormous, shabby robes that trailed on the ground, big, threadbare sheepskin jackets, or faded, sleeveless anoraks; the majority of the women had on black, cone-shaped coats, buttoned down the front from throat to feet. Headgear included knotted scarves, handmade ski caps, fur hats, felt toques, seedy-looking berets, decrepit bowlers.

The people were all tightly clutching bundles, or distended, pathetic imitation-leather gym bags, or cardboard boxes tied up with string, or enormous plastic sacks, many of them held together with brown adhesive tape, or ancient pasteboard suitcases that looked to be at the bursting point. Most of the individuals shared physical traits: angular faces, small stature, pronounced noses, olive or frankly gingerbread complexions, dark curly hair, mauve-circled eyes that their evident state of exhaustion made seem even larger.

It was a welter of bodies.

The Investigator couldn’t get over it. There were even more people than there had been the previous day. It seemed that the floor must crack under their weight. And what struck him with even greater force was the heavy silence that reigned in the spacious room. Those women, those men, those children, those old people — it was as if fatigue had sealed their lips and suppressed their desire to communicate.

They looked like peasants or workers or day laborers or farmhands from another century, beasts of burden whose bodies, unceasingly subjected to undernourishment and the law of work, were compelled to make do with their meager bones and the bit of flesh that covered them. Everything about the breakfast throng betrayed poverty, indigence, as well as the dread which that condition — no doubt undergone for decades or even centuries — had succeeded in depositing at the deepest level of their every movement, of every look in their eyes, like a genetic trait it’s no use struggling against. The same mark, the mark of the downtrodden, was imprinted on each of those creatures. But nothing allowed the observer to identify their origins unequivocally or to name the exact country they came from.

Most of them were gathered in dense clusters around tables intended to seat four. For lack of room, skinny children sat on the laps of adults scarcely bigger than they were. They were nibbling on rusks the Investigator recognized, rusks identical to the appalling things he’d been obliged to consume the previous morning, and next to them stood little cups of black coffee, scantily filled with a muddy brew the mere memory of which nauseated him. So all those people, every one of them inhumanly thin whatever their age or sex, nevertheless had to subsist on the same starvation diet.

“Tourists?” the Investigator inquired.

“You must be joking!” the Server replied. “Them, Tourists? Have you taken a good look at them? Have you got a whiff of them?”

“Please, not so loud, they could hear you!” the Investigator murmured.

“They can’t understand us, they’re not from here. I don’t know what language they speak, but it’s not ours, that’s for sure. They’re Displacees.”

“Displacees?”

“Yes, Displacees!” And when the Investigator seemed surprised, the Server took it upon himself to add, “What planet do you live on? For several months now, they’ve been getting turned away in droves, but they keep coming back, and there are always more of them. Have you noticed how many children those women put out? If we could avoid having anything to do with them, we would, but the Hotel is requisitioned by the Repatriation Service, practically every other day. Look at them. Do you think they’re unhappy? They’re just different, that’s all. I hate difference. And I love disinfectants. Take yourself, for example: You smell particularly good, so I’m favorably inclined toward you. Anyway, I was able to save you a table — it’s right over there. Management has asked me to express their deep regrets for exposing you to this unseemly spectacle and this disagreeable odor. I’ll be back in a moment with your breakfast.”

The Investigator walked over to the table the Server had indicated. Its four chairs were all empty. The other tables in the room, several of them only a few steps away, were occupied by large families, by men, women, and children pressed against one another in the greatest discomfort; the Investigator’s table, however, was like a protected reserve, a forbidden island. At the other tables, an average of twenty persons huddled wretchedly in an amount of space equivalent to what he had all to himself. Without looking around too much, the Investigator sat down, lowered his head, and waited.

He tried in vain to remember ever having heard of this phenomenon. “Displacees”? Of course, he knew that certain movements of populations were part of reality, and he was aware of the attraction his continent held for a great many individuals. But Displacees?

“Room 93?”

The Investigator didn’t have leisure for further reflection. The two Servers standing before him had spoken his room number in unison. He nodded, and with a single motion, the Servers placed two large trays on the table, wished that he would enjoy his meal, and disappeared into the Crowd, which opened a passage for them with some difficulty and very quickly closed up again, like two hands trying to keep their warmth in the hollow of their palms.