Philippe Claudel - The Investigation

“But who is the Guilty Party?”

“I’m looking into that. I’ll find him. And if I don’t find him, I’ll invent him. I’m formidable in my field. I forbid you to concern yourself for a single second with anything more than this: You have a very important mission to carry out. You’re the Investigator.”

The two of them had arrived in front of the Guardhouse. The Policeman, who had insisted on accompanying the Investigator there, pressed the buzzer himself and spoke to the Guard. Was he the same one as the previous morning? If there were two of them, they were physically identical. The Policeman advised the Guard to treat the Investigator well. “He’s a friend,” the Policeman said meaningfully.

Friendship is a rare thing, and the Investigator had never tried it. Many human beings go through life without ever experiencing friendship, and some miss out on love, too, whereas it’s a banal, frequent, and daily occurrence for them to feel indifference, anger, or hatred, and to be motivated by envy, jealousy, or the spirit of revenge. The Investigator wondered whether the Policeman really felt the emotions he was expressing. Were his words merely formulaic? When the polka-dot smock disappeared in the Crowd, the Investigator was still standing in front of the Guardhouse; the fingers of his right hand stroked the medicine bottle that contained the new tablets his friend had given him in parting.

The Guard was waiting, smiling at him from behind the glass partition. The Investigator turned to him, moved his head in the direction the Policeman had taken, and heard himself say, “He’s a friend.” As he pronounced these words, the Investigator felt a pleasant stirring begin in his belly and rise gradually, in little waves, to his heart and lungs, and thence to his soul. “I’m sorry, but my identification documents still haven’t been returned to me,” he went on.

“No problem,” the Guard replied. “You’re the Policeman’s friend. I’ll call the Guide. Would you please be so kind as to direct your steps toward the entrance?”

The Investigator told himself that everything was decidedly looking up on this new morning. The sun was doing the sun’s job. The weather was fine. The behavior of all the persons he’d talked to had been strictly normal. I can even hear birds singing, he thought. The world is in its proper place and going round as it should.

Less than an hour earlier, the Investigator had been devouring pounds of food under the eyes of famished, frightened, exiled human beings about to be sent back to the wretchedness they’d run from. Then, seized by a sense of guilt and shame he could neither master nor ignore, he’d violently vomited everything he’d eaten. So weak and disoriented had he been that he’d called into doubt the very existence of the universe he was moving in and the materiality of the people he was encountering. But a problem-free street crossing, a friendly word spoken by a man, the Policeman, whom to all intents and purposes he barely knew, a smile from a minor functionary separated from him by a glass partition, a ray of sunlight, and an air of spring had sufficed to make him forget the sufferings of others, his own confusion, his fever, his aching forehead, his solitude, his Investigation, and even his hunger. The Investigator was trying his hand at forgetting, which keeps many people from dying too soon.

The Security Officer came out to meet him and, there could be no doubt, he was surely the same one as the day before. The realization dealt a blow to the Investigator’s good humor. The memory of this muscle-bound fellow’s arrogant indifference tarnished the young day’s early light.

“Had a good night? Slept well?”

The Security Officer was still two heads taller than the Investigator. As before, he was wearing a perfectly crisp paramilitary uniform, and the same tools for communications, attack, and defense were hanging from his belt, but he was looking at the Investigator with great benevolence, his mouth open in a smile whose whiteness was practically supernatural.

“I must have seemed a bit harsh to you yesterday,” the Security Officer said. “But what can you expect? That’s my job. Yours is to investigate, and mine is to be on the lookout. And no one’s going to take me seriously as a vigilant sentry unless I put on a surly face and a whole array of knickknacks”—his broad hands indicated all the things dangling from his belt—“which, by the way, are totally useless. I spend my on-duty time silencing my feelings, disguising them, nipping them in the bud, even though yesterday, for example, all I wanted to do was to give you a hug.”

“Give me … a hug?” the Investigator stammered.

“You didn’t notice a thing, right? I don’t mean to boast, but I’m a good actor. I thought about it all night long. I was cross with myself for not having done it. Regrets are terrible. My life is loaded with regrets, and it’s getting harder and harder for me to live with them. I look into other people’s eyes, and I see what I am to them: a uniform, a brutish type doing a brutish job. They stare at me as if I were an animal, a mound of muscles, a beast without a brain. But I have a brain, and above all, I have a heart. A beating heart, a heart that needs love. Do you know, at night, when I take off this uniform and these doodads, when I’m naked and alone again, I weep? Like a child who’s been punished or abandoned. When I saw you yesterday, I felt you could understand me. I felt you were like me, and that we were two of a kind. I wasn’t mistaken, was I?”

The Investigator was dumbstruck.

“Tell me, was I mistaken?” the Security Officer repeated imploringly.

The Investigator made a vague gesture that might have passed for encouraging.

“I was sure I was right. I vowed last night that if the situation arose again, I wouldn’t cause myself any additional regrets. And so, if you have no objections, I’d love to give you a hug, right here, right now. It’s not every day that one has the good fortune to meet an investigator, to say nothing of the Investigator, a man who plays a leading role, whereas I, I’m a mere underling, a shadowy figure summoned at the last minute and very quickly forgotten, a secondary character. It’s my lot in life. A fate I’ve grown used to. I accept it.”

Basically, the Investigator said to himself, this could be just another form of torture. The extravagant benevolence and the exaggerated friendliness, both of them unmotivated and ridiculously hyperbolic, were of a piece with the rest: the brutality, the mistreatment, the indifference, the nitpicking, the absurdity. This is another test, he thought. I’m being messed with. I’m being studied. I’m nothing but a toy, undergoing performance evaluations before being put on the market. Surely someone, somewhere, is watching me. But who? My boss, the Head of Section? His boss? His boss’s boss? The Manager? The Guide who is also the Watchman? The Policeman who claims to be my friend? The Giantess who rules the Hotel? God? Someone more important than God? All my reactions are being noted. I’m probably in the midst of some sort of validation protocol, some convoluted quality-control process, under observation by an entire team of men in white, Scientists, Censors, Judges, Arbiters, and who knows what else. I’m supposed to be the Investigator, but am I not myself the center of another Investigation, one that goes well beyond me, one whose stakes are much more vital than those of the one I’m conducting?

“Well?” said the Security Officer ecstatically.

“Well, what?”

“May I give you a hug?”

This was a strange scene indeed, though nobody saw it: the huge Security Officer, with his Minotaur’s forehead, clutching the puny Investigator to his bosom, wrapping his immense arms around him, holding him tight for a long moment, almost smothering him, as though desperately trying to experience the living character of another individual homologous to himself, yearning to feel a sense of belonging to the same species, seeking the certitude of being chained to the same bench in the same galley.