Page 53 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
hardened myself further so as to penetrate, without danger to myself, their customary mystery.
It became quickly apparent that it was difficult to steal in Central Europe because the police system was perfect. The paucity of the means of communication and the difficulty of crossing the borders, which were excellently guarded, prevented me from fleeing quickly, and my being a Frenchman made me all the more conspicuous. Furthermore, I noticed that very few Frenchmen in foreign countries are thieves or beggars. I decided to go back to France and there pursue—perhaps even limiting my activity to Paris alone—a thief's destiny. The idea of continuing my way around the world committing more or less important larcenies also tempted me. I chose France out of a concern for depth. I knew the country well enough to be sure of giving stealing all my attention and care, of handling it as if it were a unique substance whose devoted craftsman I would become. I was twenty−four or twenty−five years old at the time. In pursuit of a moral adventure, I sacrificed dispersion and ornament. The reasons for my choice, whose meaning is revealed to me today only perhaps because I have to write about it, were not clearly apparent. I think that I had to hollow out, to drill through, a mass of language in which my thought might be at ease. Perhaps I wanted to accuse myself in my own language. Neither Albania, Hungary or Poland, nor India or Brazil would have offered me so rich a matter as France. Indeed, theft—and what is involved in it: prison sentences, along with the shame of the profession of thief—had become a disinterested undertaking, a kind of active and thoughtful work of art which could be achieved only with the help of language, my language, and which would be confronted with the laws springing from this same language. In a foreign country I would have been merely a more or less clever thief, but, as I would have thought of myself in French, I would have known I was a Frenchman—a qualification that allows none other to survive—among foreigners. To be a thief in my own country and to justify my being one who used the language of the robbed—who are myself, because of the importance of language—was to give to being a thief the chance to be unique. I became a foreigner.
Perhaps the uneasiness created there by political confusion imposes upon the Central European states that oppressively perfect police system. I am speaking, of course, of its swiftness. It seems that, owing to a network of informers, an offence is known before it is committed, but their police do not have the finesse of ours. Accompanied by Anton, an Austrian, I entered Yugoslavia from Albania, showing to the customs−officers a passport which was simply a French military service certificate to which I had added four pages from an Austrian passport (delivered to Anton) containing visas from the Serbian consulate. Several times, in the train, in the street, in hotels, I handed this strange document to Yugoslav policemen; it seemed to them normal. The stamps and the visas satisfied them. When I was arrested—for having fired at Anton with a revolver—the police returned it to me.
Did I love France? I was nimbused at the time with its brilliance. The French military attache in Belgrade having demanded several times that I be extradited—which is contrary to international law— the Yugoslav police resorted to a compromise: I was escorted to the border of the country nearest France, Italy. I went through Yugoslavia from prison to prison. There I met handsome criminals, violent and sombre, swearing in a savage language in which the oaths are the loveliest in the world.
“I fuck the Mother of God in the ass!” “I bugger the wall!”
A few minutes later they would burst out laughing, and I could see their splendid teeth. The King of Yugoslavia was then a graceful twelve or fifteen−year old lad whose hair was parted on the side: Peter the Second, whose portrait, which also adorned the postage stamps, hung in the offices of all the prisons and all the police stations. The anger of the roughnecks and thieves rose up toward this child. They railed against him. The raucous insults of the spiteful men was like a street−quarrel with a cruel lover. They treated him like
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