Page 47 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
The prisoner: “Because of poverty, your Honor.” The judge: “That's no excuse.”
“I've been all through Europe,” Stilitano said to me. “I've even been in Greece.”
“Did you like it?”
“It's not bad. But it's partly destroyed.”
Michaelis, a handsome male, confessed to me that he was more proud of the looks of admiration he received from men than from women.
“I strut more.”
“But you don't care for men.”
“That doesn't matter. I like to see them drool when they look at my pretty puss. That's why I'm nice to them.”
When I was being followed on the Rue des Couronnes, the terror that the plain−clothesmen caused me was communicated by the swish of their rubberized raincoats. Every time I hear that sound again, my heart contracts.
At the time of that arrest, for the theft of documents concerning the Fourth International, I made the acquaintance of B. He was about twenty−two or twenty−three years old. He was afraid of being deported. While we were waiting to be taken to the anthropometry department, he edged up to me.
“I may get deportation too,” I said.
“Really? Stay next to me. Maybe they'll put us in the same clink. (The prisoner gives his cell a friendly nickname.) We'll manage to be happy if we're deported.”
When we got back from the records office, he managed to say to me confidentially, “I knew a fellow who was twenty years old who once asked me to find him a guy. He felt like being fucked up the ass.”
Finally he confessed to me the same evening:
“I was talking like a dope. I was the guy who felt like it.” “You'll find that here,” I told him.
“That's why I'm not so worried.”
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