An official persuaded to embody herself all the multisecular values of France looked at him as if he had just lost his soul. She scornfully took his fingerprints to verify that the metic was the right one. Then, after filling in the appropriate documents, she abandoned him to the super-armed escort, with a complicit eye-fold.
Direction: the administrative detention center. The Administrative Detention Center or CRA was at the jail what diplomacy was at war. Except that the only thing negotiated by the fellow diplomats was the schedule of the next charter for the point of fall of the detainee.
A day of total isolation was well worth a week of conventional prison. But one day in CRA was well worth a month of total isolation. The CRA was in a way the euphemism of the concentration camp. The outcome was not inevitably so fatal. But both of them oozed anguish and despair; perspiration of indifference and sadism.
Karim saw sherpas of anathemas swallowing razor blades, excommunicates sewing their eyelids and mouths, cursed of humanity jostling each other begging their pittance, disinherited from mercy putting a rope around their necks, scapegoats immolating themselves by fire.