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.
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.