How do we decide which one to use? the book read? One of the most striking experiences that the signer of these lines shares with his ilk was a youthful wandering between the shelves of libraries, randomly flipping through the books written by pools whose name he sees for the first time, so a page read on the spot, a paragraph, maybe just a sentence, would be decisive. We all knew who Dostoevsky, Krleža and Andrić are (whether we read them or not), but who is Siegfried Lenz (for example) and what does his German lesson - we didn't. We had all read Camus A stranger (a short novel), but we When the pumpkins were blooming At that time, we had to discover Dragoslav Mihailović ourselves. And then we started reading newspapers and magazines, we found reviews there, and went to libraries with an already prepared list - which does not mean that we gave up wandering between the shelves, it was still a magical experience, on the same level as going out with a girl (only without the panic and stress). In the meantime, the criteria changed, so that, now at an advanced reading stage, translators would start to draw our attention. I had no idea who Ježi Andrzejevski was, but I saw that he was translated by Petar Vujičić, the translator of Gombrović Diary, which meant it was worth a try. And it paid off. Reading Friends it turned into a memorable experience. To that extent, the translator's criterion has been retained to this day. It doesn't matter that I haven't heard of the writer, if they were translated from Norwegian or Danish by Radoš Kosović - I take the book without hesitation. If Olja Petronić translated from French or English a writer I don't know - I will supply it immediately with joy. (Let's add to this pair, for example, Igor Cvijanović, Milo Gavrilović, or Aleksandar Milajić - these people do not translate anything, on the contrary, they vouch for the texts they translate with their names and translation skills). French writer Vincent Delecroy (never heard), translated by Olja Petronić. And, of course, an exceptional novel, an ingenious translation.
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CRIME AND FACTS
The novel was based on a real event. The lady in charge of monitoring traffic through the English Channel, a tricky stretch of the Atlantic Ocean between France and England, turned a deaf ear to the refugees' calls for help one night. Twenty-seven people sank that night along with a dead engine and a blown dinghy. Two people survived. Vincent Delecroix's novel reconstructs that night through a conversation between a civil servant who decided not to help people in mortal danger and a gendarmerie captain who interrogates her about the event. The strangest thing of all is that there is no puzzle on the factual level, because everything that happened that night in an old lighthouse turned into a control tower somewhere in the English Channel was recorded: the calls for help from the people who were in the sinking boat (they called who knows how many times), as well as the reactions of the lady whose job it is to respond to the calls for help and organize the rescue. Apart from reassuring them and saying that help was coming (an obvious lie since she didn't call anyone for help), that is, she repeated several times that they were not in French territorial waters, but in English waters, and that they should contact the English, she actually did nothing: she did not inform the English, who would reach the people in about twenty minutes, she did not inform the French, nor did she contact the ship that was nearby sinking. She does not deny the factual level, nor can she deny it. What interests the gendarmerie captain - who, as the lady herself says, looks incredibly like her, as if she were her double - is why she acted the way she did, that is, why she didn't act the way she had to, or at least she didn't fulfill her duty? It is at this point that an almost silly plot begins, in which the civil servant states the reasons for her actions, that is, the reasons for the absence of actions. And there is nothing illogical in her defense, her reasons are pure and clear, except that they are insane. "The sinking didn't start in the English Channel: it started as soon as they left home," says the French civil servant to the policewoman. "Perhaps they even began to sink when they got it into their heads that it would be better elsewhere, when they began to want supermarkets and baby supplements, when they heard about social security or when a relative living in London told them that a man could become a billionaire by washing dishes in a Tamil first-hand shop. So it could be said that all their unhappiness, I repeated, comes from not knowing to remain in peace in your own room" (p. 37). Therefore, it's all right that they sank. It's their own fault. It's not her fault, the maid, it's the fault of those who sank. What the hell were they doing at sea in the middle of the night? She didn't make them cross the channel. They decided it themselves. The risk of drowning was theirs. And what does she have to do with it?
The captain of the gendarmerie, every now and then, was speechless with astonishment.
METAPHYSICAL WALLS
The first line of defense of a woman who has not helped people in mortal danger, even though it is, among other things, part of her job, is metaphysical ramparts. Fate and bad judgment of those people decided, not her. Even if we do not notice the sediment of racism that rises in every sentence - here they want supermarkets (and not fleeing from the horrors in their countries, for example) and are gullible, after all, stupid because they believe that by washing dishes in some hole you can become a millionaire (that money they get from blacking in London is a small fortune for them, but the civil servant does not stoop so low in her thoughts) - the clerk hides behind a thick metaphysical curtain, behind the metaphysical reasons of which even one Camus, at one time, felt sick while trying to argue with Sartre. To clarify: metaphysical reasons, often quite true, are broad, abstract and take little account of individual destinies. When, for example, he says to Camus that the people of the Soviet Union are in a cage, Sartre replies (disgustingly adding) that we are all in a cage (my dear Camus), the only thing is that our cage is golden. Well, after that wisdom, he still remains in his golden French cage, and leaves the Soviet cage to the unfortunate Soviets. So did the clerk.
It is particularly irritating and terrible that the facts are so obvious that the captain of the gendarmerie is left with nothing but moral outrage: what kind of person are you, he asks her, roughly, why does the lady pretend not to understand the question, or say that she is not in a moral court, that her job is not to sympathize with people but to take care of the bigger picture (again the metaphysics of an officer who will sacrifice a bunch of soldiers in one position in order to make a breakthrough in another, or something already so). So why didn't you help them, asks the disgusted policewoman, if that's your duty? There is no answer here, but new metaphysical reasons are emerging, inevitably imbued with racism. For example, she, a civil servant, says that she will not surrender voluntarily "in order to admit some imagined guilt based on I don't know what kind of moral judgment that no article of law could support, and I don't mind, on the contrary, listening to the recordings from that night there and hearing my own voice, because it's not the voice of a monster or some criminal - it's a voice all of us" (pp. 117-118). She, therefore, who does not consider herself a monster even though she did not lift a finger to help people in mortal danger - and not only that, but deceived them that help was coming, even though it was not true - speaks on behalf of all of us. So, roughly as Adolf Eichmann spoke at the trial in Jerusalem: he was only the executor of the operation that they supported svi. But, apart from being untrue, this defense shows an impressive capacity for self-deception and invoking some kind of excuse general will which, of course, does not exist, but it sounds good. That is why the gendarmerie captain calls such speech somnambulistic (p. 75).
MEASUREMENT OF THE SOUL
In order to say that, in their impeccable logic, the reasons are crazy, it is necessary that the interlocutors - the captain and the lady - agree on the assumptions for the conversation, on what is not crazy, let's say that both recognize the existence of moral norms and the necessity of respecting those norms beyond positive laws, or at least agree that compassion, for example, is a human trait without which, from the perspective of a policewoman, there is no humanity. The problem is that the civil servant remains indifferent to that level and clings firmly to a logic that does not take into account what would be called human reaction. The worst of all is that her defense is not meaningless, nor are the assumptions on which she relies, but when we leave out morality and compassion from the equation of humanity, what emerges from the ruins of humanity cannot be called anything other than a psychopath: a psychopath is not an insult, but a diagnosis, it is a person devoid of an emotional dimension. This is why the civil servant resents the way the policewoman treats her, the captain looks at her, namely, "like a judge from hell, implacable, obsessed with measuring my soul in order to leave it as best as possible to eternal torment" (pp. 77-78). The clerk is, in fact, completely convinced that she is right, and she reproaches the policewoman for not asking her the right questions so that both of them could come to the "right conclusion" (p. 70). The real conclusion is, of course, that the refugees hid their own death, but instead of the right questions and the right conclusion, the environment captain avoids reality and bullies her with nonsense. Namely, her task - the task of a civil servant - is not to take care of moral feelings and to sympathize, but to act. Then why didn't you act? asks the policewoman. There is no answer at that point.
In the central part of the novel, on some twenty pages, Delcroix described the agony of drowning people, so that we would not relax and, caught in the vortex of monstrous arguments, forget what happened at sea. And here Delcroix shows a high skill of brevity and keeps to the most necessary. The novel is small, there is neither time nor space to lose, and it is precisely the directness and brevity that trigger anger and horror and powerlessness in front of a woman who does not show that she belongs to civilization. After all, it is easier for the reader to imagine himself in the role of the captain of the gendarmerie than in the role of the lady who did not lift a finger to save people. The question is constantly in front of our eyes: how would we react in the position of a policewoman? How would we resist the strong urge to strangle her on the spot and what questions, in general, should we ask her? Because, of course, the employee will be convicted according to positive laws, but that is no consolation. This novel is about something more terrible than crime. It's about indifference.
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