Street of Thieves

In any case I didn’t have much time off, not much time to interact with my housemates, work was terribly time-consuming and resembled the work of the sewing-machine slaves or the prawn-shellers, but without the smell: I spent twelve to sixteen hours in front of the screen, back bent like a string bean picker, faithfully copying out, with my four or six fingers, books, culinary encyclopedias, handwritten letters, archives, anything that Mr. Bourrelier handed me. The job was well-named: saisie kilométrique, typing by the kilometer; more precisely “double typing,” since this mind-numbing work was done twice, by two different mind-numbed idiots, and then the results were cross-checked, which gave a reliable file that could be sent to the sponsor. Mr. Bourrelier’s customers were extremely diverse: publishing houses that wanted to make digital use of or reprint an old backlist, government officials who had tons and tons of written stuff to go through, cities, town halls with overflowing archives, universities that sent old tapes of lectures and teachings to transcribe — you felt that all of France, all the verbiage of France, was landing here, in Africa; the whole country was vomiting language onto Mr. Bourrelier and his slaves. You had to type quickly, of course, but not too quickly, since you had to pay for corrections out of your pocket: every time a crosscheck of the two samples revealed a mistake, the word or phrase in question was verified and the misprint deducted from my salary. The first book I copied was a travel book about the African coasts at the end of the eighteenth century; pirates, slaves, that sort of thing. There must have been a goldmine in this genre of literature, because after that I was off to Russia, typing out A Frenchman in Siberia, written in 1872; and you might have thought this work was interesting, but more than anything it was exhausting, you had to pay attention to spelling and to proper nouns; you got lost in the flesh of words, in letters, sentences, as close as possible to the text, and sometimes I’d have been quite incapable of summarizing what such or such a page that I had just copied out was talking about. At least, I said to myself plausibly, after a few months of this treatment my French might be impeccable, but above it was all frustrating — I of course didn’t have the time to look up unknown words in the dictionary; I copied them out as is, without understanding them, and the number of typos stemmed from my incomprehension, from my lack of knowledge of one term or another.

Mr. Bourrelier was nice enough to me; he often said to me Ah, sorry, still no thrillers on the horizon, but if there ever are any, I swear they’ll be yours. I was a good worker, I think, I tried to be serious and didn’t have much else to do.

One day, my zeal got me a poisoned gift: when I arrived at work one morning, Mr. Bourrelier called me into his office. He was cheerful, he was laughing like a child, I’ve just gotten some excellent news, he told me. Magnificent news. A very big order from the Ministry of Former Combatants. It involves digitalizing the individual files of all combatants in the First World War. It’s a very fat contract. We replied to their call for bids, and we were chosen. They’re handwritten files, impossible to deal with them automatically, we’ll have to copy them out by hand. We’re beginning with the dead.

“Aren’t they all dead yet?” I asked naively.

“Yes yes, of course they’re all dead, there aren’t any more French fighters from the First World War alive. I mean we’re going to begin with the ‘Dead for France,’ a separate batch of files.”

“And how many are there?”

“One million three hundred thousand files, total. Then there’re the wounded and the ones who got out alive, that’ll be more cheerful.”