The Man Who Snapped His Fingers

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I didn’t sleep a wink all night. A sleepless night in a pale, wakeful sleepwalker of a city. The country has been covered in snow for three months. The sun hasn’t gone down in four months. It floods the expanse of crystallized ice. Diamonds for cutting throats. I loathe this mass of ice with its blinding clarity, its unhealthy reverberations.

It is six o’clock in the morning. I leave the center and take the train at six-thirty. A heavy mist smothers the desolate horizon of this rotten suburb. A lunar landscape, fraying as far as the capital. The fog calms me, penetrates me, engulfs my being. I become blurred, I merge with my surroundings. This suits me perfectly. I can no longer stand clarity. Precision frightens me. Definite outlines oppress me. I vacillate, stagger. Even when I’m sitting down. It’s intoxicating.

The central station is deserted. At eight-thirty I arrive outside the closed doors of the Office for Refugees and Stateless Persons. The building is a fifteen-storey skyscraper, a beehive. With hundreds of little offices. The office for asylum seekers and stateless persons is on the sixth floor. The one where I have an appointment is located on the left in a long corridor. I know my way by heart. I could get there with my eyes closed, walking backwards. You go in through a creaking sliding door. There is a Formica table on the right as you come in with three chairs, including the one for the presiding official. The only one with an adjustable back. If I were clever with a pencil, I could draw the dog-eared map that is taped to the wall on one side, the worn-out coat rack, the plastic cups, the half-filled bottle of water, the files — including my own — piled on the table. This office is actually an interrogation room that does not say its name.

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