The Investigation

XXX

FOUR THICK SLICES OF BACON, three white sausages, two andouillettes with herbs, a ham omelet, four boiled eggs, six herring fillets marinated in vinegar and onions, some small gherkins in sweet-and-sour sauce, smoked salmon sprinkled with dill, reindeer meatballs, a jar of rillettes, an assortment of cheeses, a basket of Viennese-style baked goods, half a pound of butter, grilled toast, aniseed bread, poppy-seed bread, sesame-seed bread, honey, quince marmalade, rose jam, a slice of cheesecake, a pitcher of apple juice, a bowl of fresh fruit salad, some bananas, some peaches, some strawberries, a pineapple, five kiwis, a large pot of smoked black tea, and another of bergamot tea. Not a rusk in sight! Not a drop of vile black coffee! The Investigator couldn’t believe his eyes. So many delights, and all of them on the table in front of him, the empty-bellied starveling. His head spun at the sight of all that food, and his dizziness felt like intoxication. He didn’t know where to start, but he knew he had to, especially since he was afraid the Servers would change their minds or realize they’d made a mistake and come back for the trays.

He flung himself on the croissants, the omelet, the herbed sausages, the poppy-seed bread, cramming the food into his mouth with his fingers, barely chewing, swallowing things whole, gasping for air; he poured himself cups of steaming tea and drank them down in one gulp, thrust his fingers into the honey, tore apart a herring fillet spread with quince jelly, dunked a chocolate puff pastry into the rillettes jar, mopped up the herring marinade with bacon, wiped his lips with a slice of toast, which he then shoved into his mouth, chewed up and swallowed two bananas at once, nibbled on a reindeer meatball. He felt his belly filling up like a granary after the harvest. He smiled as he devoured, stuffing himself without stint, his head lowered to the bowls, the plates, the cups, abandoning all dignity, not caring in the slightest about the various sauces running down his chin or the stains on his sweater or the state of his fingers, which had been reduced to greasy tongs. And to think how hungry he’d been, so hungry he could have wept. A distant memory. He smiled as he gorged.

“Is everything all right?”

The first Server had just reappeared. At the sound of his voice, the Investigator raised his eyes. “Everything’s fine,” he said, gesturing at the carnage he’d already perpetrated on the contents of the two trays.

“If there’s anything you want, don’t hesitate to let us know,” the Server said. “That’s why we’re here.”

He bowed, turned, elbowed, and disappeared behind the screen of bodies massed around the Investigator’s table. Now only a few inches away from him, they formed a human wall, a compact masonry of eyes, hands, mouths, faces pressed against one another, a living mural of Displacees, observing him, imploring him. He was surrounded by old people and young people, women and men, children and adolescents, crowded next to one another, on top of one another, in thickly serried ranks, in three or four superimposed layers, like a mass grave for the living, and they looked at him, and their wide-open, staring eyes expressed their atrocious hunger, their longing to eat — perhaps even their willingness to kill for — a piece of bread, a slice of sausage, a disk of hard-boiled egg.

The person closest to him was a child. It might have been four or five, or maybe even ten, but it was so thin that it seemed beyond age. The Child — a little human being, scarcely alive, in fact almost dead, its grotesquely distended stomach touching the edge of the table where the food was piled — looked at the Investigator. It didn’t ask for anything. It merely looked at the Investigator with its empty eyes. It looked at him from the depths of its exile. It was no longer simply a Displacee. It was also a Witness.

The Investigator dropped the piece of sausage he was still holding between his fingers. No more room. Only with difficulty could he swallow what was in his mouth. His stomach hurt. He was suffocating. Those people were all so close to him. Too close to him. He couldn’t get any air. And the Child was staring at him. So were all the others, but the Child most of all, and there was something in its pupils that scored the Investigator’s soul like an engraver’s tool on a copper plate, and what that tool etched there were questions. Interrogations.

All sounds had ceased. The Investigator undid the big napkin he’d knotted around his neck and dropped it on the table, which was still laden with food. Then, slowly, he got up.

And to think, everything had started off so well.

Little by little, the massed Displacees gave way before the Investigator, as people do before gods or lepers. Just as he was stepping through the door, he met one of the Servers, who asked, “Are you leaving us already?” The Investigator made no reply; he held his belly with both hands and clenched his teeth. He felt like vomiting, but he sensed that he’d never be able to disgorge everything, to eject everything. Because you can never eject everything, he thought. Never. Just as he doubted that one could live happily somewhere without stealing the happiness of someone who lived somewhere else. He shivered. He felt as heavy as a manhole cover, the rubber boot was chafing his boiled foot, and, to top it all, there he was, turning into a philosopher. A pedestrian, banal philosopher, without breadth or depth, wearing a pair of women’s panties under apple-green sweatpants, and trotting out pedestrian thoughts, as worn out as old pots tired of always cooking the same soups.