Street of Thieves

One million three hundred fucking thousand dead, you don’t really realize what that represents, but I can assure you that makes quite a bit of work for typing by the kilometer. Gigabytes and gigabytes of scanned files, a special program to enter the data, last name, first name, date and place of birth, serial number, date, place, and type of death, sic, type of death, they didn’t weigh themselves down with fancy phrases, at the time, do you think, they had hundreds of thousands of files to fill out. All of it handwritten, in a beautiful fountain-pen calligraphy: Achille Brun, soldier, 138^th Infantry Division, Died for France on December 3, 1914, in the hospital at Châlons-sur-Marne, Type of death: war wound (crossed out) typhoid fever (added), born January 25, 1891, in Montbron in Charente; Ben Moulloub, Belkacem ben Bohammad ben Oumar, second class, 2^nd Regiment of Algerian Infantrymen, Died for France on November 6, 1914, in Soupir, in Aisne, Type of death: killed by the enemy, born in 1884 in (illegible), département of Constantine, and so on a million three hundred thousand times, even with the special program you needed one or two minutes per file, especially to decipher the names of unknown holes in the wall, Algerian douars, Senegalese villages, French hamlets I knew nothing about; some of the soldiers stayed in my memory, like that Achille Brun or that Belkacem ben Moulloub, and it was strange to think that these ghosts of poilus were making a posthumous trip to Morocco, to Tangier, in my computer.

We divided up the work, my colleagues (French literature students or young typists, mostly) and I: one hundred fifty or two hundred files in the morning, and sixty pages of books, minimum, in the afternoon. The problem was that you couldn’t give up one project for another; everything had to be done at the same time: copying out the memoirs of Casanova for a Quebec publishing house was at least as urgent as the “Killed by the Enemy.” The volumes of History of My Life were immense, endless. I confess having taken great pleasure, despite the sleepless nights, in typing them out by the kilometer. This Casanova was funny and likeable, courtly, crafty; he spent his time running around with his sex on fire, hence on running around taking care of his venereal diseases, which didn’t seem to cause him any shame; for him, the body, women, youth had nothing shameful about them. There was an ironic intelligence in him that reminded me of Isa ibn Hisham and Abu al-Fath al-Iskandari, the heroes of Hamadani — but in a longer version, of course. The Casanova was one of the rare books I actually read as I was copying it out: over three months’ work, without any slacking.

I always wondered how much Jean-François Bourrelier billed for our services, and what his cut was; I never dared ask him. One thing was for certain, the Killed by the Enemy and Mr. Casanova didn’t touch a penny of it, and as for myself, after the accounts were audited (money withheld for corrections, etc.), I rarely managed to get more than five hundred euros a month, for a minimum of sixty hours’ work a week, which was an extraordinary salary for a young yokel like me, but far from the tens of thousands of dirhams promised. When payday arrived, Mr. Frédéric always looked slightly apologetic, he’d say Ah, there were a lot of corrections, or else Good, this month isn’t too bad, but you’ll do better next month, you have to get used to these dead-soldier files and accelerate your pace.

I told all my stories to Judit in interminable letters, that was my recreation, every night, when I should have hated the computer and above all its keyboard I would write at great length to Judit to explain what we had done that day, Casanova, the poilus and I; I told her about Achille Brun the typhoid-stricken and about Belkacem ben Moulloub dead in Soupir, about Casanova and Tireta watching an execution on the Place de Grève from a window, in the company of two ladies, without going so far as to dare tell her the obscene but hilarious details of Tireta’s mistaken shot.