Sometimes

by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

At a quarter past nine in the evening Leïla Ghorbel was still standing. There was no chair beside the glass box, and nobody had ever thought there should be one. She had been on her feet since four. They had swollen inside her shoes, and she could feel the leather across the instep, a narrow pressure that never let go of her, like a debt.

The courtroom was new. Everything in the building at the Porte de Clichy was new: pale wood, high glass, carpets that swallowed footsteps, and an air that came from nowhere and smelled of nothing, the air of an aeroplane in which a crime had never been committed. Only the people were old. They came up from the cells one after another into the box, two policemen behind each of them, and each of them brought with him the smell of the cells: cold sweat, the rubber of the mattress, and the bad coffee from the machine downstairs, which they had been given at noon in a plastic cup, and which they had all drunk.

She had done four that afternoon. A Moroccan who had hit his brother-in-law with a chair. A boy from Annaba who had sold eleven grams of resin at the foot of the Barbès viaduct and who looked twelve and claimed to be nineteen. Two Algerians from the same car, who had to be interpreted separately. She did not like that, because they contradicted each other and she had to give each contradiction its full weight, as if she had chosen it. The court thanked her each time. "Thank you, madame l'interprète." It was said in the same tone as the clerk's "Next." Then she wrote the hours in her notebook.

The fifth was called Aymen Jaziri.

He came into the box with his hands in front of him, though they had taken the handcuffs off at the door. He did not know what to do with them yet. He was thin, with a tracksuit top zipped up to the chin, the kind they all wore, grey, and a beard of three or four days that had grown in patches. He was perhaps twenty-two. He had a Sfax face, or so she decided in the second it took her to look at him, and at once she was annoyed with herself, because her mother would have said exactly that, a Sfax face, with the same little nod of recognition, as if a face were a postmark.

"You speak French, monsieur?"

The présidente had asked without raising her eyes. Madame Roussel was a woman of sixty with grey hair cut very short, reading glasses on a cord, and a way of turning pages that made each one sound like a verdict. Jaziri looked at her, then at the prosecutor, then, through the glass, at Leïla, because she was the only person there who looked like his aunts.

"Shwayya," he said. A little.

"He says: a little," said Leïla.

"We will proceed with the interpreter. Madame, you are on the list of the court of appeal?"

"Yes, madame la présidente."

"Thank you."

She took her place at the slot in the glass. It was a horizontal opening at the height of a mouth, a little lower than her mouth, so that she had to bend forward, and she always bent a little too far, as if out of zeal. She knew she did it. She had seen herself once, in the black glass of the window at the end of the room, on a winter evening when the lights were on inside and night was outside: a woman in a navy jacket bent towards a box, her neck stretched out, her mouth open near a hole. A bird feeding another bird. She had straightened up at once. The next day she had bent again.

---

The facts were simple. On Tuesday, at about half past six in the evening, a telephone had been taken from a café table on the Boulevard de Clichy. The owner, a German tourist, had shouted. A man had run. Two plain-clothes officers had caught him in the Rue Germain-Pilon with the telephone in his left pocket. He had not resisted. He had said, in the van, that he had found it.

The présidente read all this aloud in a quick, flat voice, and Leïla followed half a second behind her in Arabic, in the Tunisian of her mother's kitchen, which was not quite Jaziri's Tunisian but close enough. He nodded at each sentence. When the présidente said in the left pocket he looked down at his left side, as if the pocket might still contain something.

"Do you recognise the facts?"

She translated. He spoke for a long time. He said that he had seen the telephone on the table. He said the table was empty, there was nobody, the man had gone inside to pay or to the toilet, how could he know? He said that in Tunis if you leave a telephone on a table it is because you don't want it. He said that he had run because the German had shouted and when someone shouts you run, everybody knows that. He said he was sorry. He said it twice. He said, wallah, he was sorry.

She gave all of it. She left out wallah, because in French there is nothing to do with it, and the court does not swear by God. She left out the second sorry, because it was the same as the first. She kept everybody knows that, and she heard the prosecutor breathe out through his nose.

The prosecutor was a young man called Gaillac, with fair hair parted carefully on one side and a gown that was too new, so that it still kept the folds of its packaging across the shoulders. He wrote while Jaziri spoke. He wrote while Leïla spoke. He did not look at either of them. He was writing, she thought, the same thing both times, and she did not know which of the two of them he believed he was taking down.

"Let us come to your situation," said the présidente. "You are of Tunisian nationality?"

"Yes."

"You have been in France since when?"

"Fourteen months."

"Papers?"

He made a small movement of the shoulders. She translated the movement too, in a sense. She said: "He says no." He had not said anything.

"Do you work?"

"Sometimes. On building sites. Painting. When there is work."

"Declared?"

He laughed, very briefly, then stopped, because he had understood the word before she had translated it, and had understood at the same moment that he should not have laughed. She said: "No, madame la présidente." The présidente turned a page.

"Where do you live, monsieur?"

It was the question. It always was. There were the facts, which everyone knew were small, and then there was this question, on which everything turned, because a man with an address is a man who will come back, and a man without one is a man who must be kept. The defence lawyer knew it; she saw his head come up. He was a duty lawyer, Maître Pinson, round-faced, with a cold, who had been given the file at half past two and had spoken to his client for eleven minutes in the room behind the cells. He had a paper on the bench in front of him, a sheet torn from a notebook, with a name and a street in Aubervilliers on it.

Leïla put the question into Arabic. She asked it gently. She had a way of asking that question gently which she had not chosen; it had come to her, she supposed, from the work, the way a carpenter's hands come to him.

Jaziri answered at once, as if he had been waiting for it.

"Nargod 'and wild 'ammi. Fi Aubervilliers. Sa'at."

I sleep at my cousin's. In Aubervilliers. Sometimes.

---

There was nothing extraordinary in the sentence. She had heard it a hundred times, in a hundred forms. Sa'at: sometimes. It had come last, after the town, the way one adds a coin one has found in another pocket. He had not stressed it. He had not even, she thought, heard himself say it. It had come out of him as the truth comes out of people who are tired: without their help.

And she had it now. It was in her mouth.

She felt it there. It was a strange sensation and she had never had it before, or she had had it a thousand times and never noticed it, which comes to the same thing. The word was in her mouth like a stone, a small smooth stone of the kind children put on their tongues to see whether they can be swallowed. It had a weight. It had a temperature. She could have rolled it against her teeth. All the other words of the sentence had already gone; they were waiting in the room, in the air that smelled of nothing, for her to release them in French, and they were light, they would float out by themselves, he sleeps at his cousin's, in Aubervilliers. That was a sentence. It had a full stop. One could stop there. People stop there all the time.

And then the stone.

Nobody was looking at her. That was what struck her. The présidente was looking at the file. Gaillac was writing. The clerk was looking at her screen. The two policemen in the box were looking at nothing, in the way that policemen look at nothing, with great attention. Maître Pinson was looking at his paper with the street in Aubervilliers. Even Jaziri was not looking at her; he was looking at the présidente, because he had understood that she was the one, and that Leïla was only the hole in the glass.

So she was alone with it. It was the first time in eleven years she had been alone in a courtroom.

She thought, quite clearly, in French: I translate. I am not here. It was what she said to herself in the mornings on line 13 with her notebook on her knees, and it was what she said to her sister at Sunday lunch when her sister asked how she could, the ones who are sent down, how can you, Leïla. I'm not the one who sends them down. I am not even here. I am a passage. Things pass through me. She had said it so often that it had become true, the way a path becomes a path. She had sworn it, too, eleven years ago, in front of the court of appeal, with her hand raised: her honour and her conscience. She had understood the oath to mean that her honour and her conscience would henceforth be kept somewhere else, like a coat in a cloakroom, and given back to her at the door in the evening.

But the stone was in her mouth and not in a cloakroom.

She noticed that her tongue was dry. She noticed that her feet hurt. She noticed that the slot in the glass had a smear on its lower edge, where hundreds of mouths had come close and breathed, and that she had never seen it before, and that it was disgusting, a little grey crescent of breath and grease. She noticed that she was bending too far forward. She noticed that she had been silent for perhaps a second and a half, and that in a moment someone would look up.

He sleeps at his cousin's in Aubervilliers. Full stop. Who would know? Gaillac had no Arabic. Roussel had none. The clerk, the policemen, the lawyer, nobody. Jaziri himself would not know, or, if he knew, would not say: excuse me, madame la présidente, she has forgotten to tell you that I am homeless. It would be the easiest thing in the world. A coin put back in the pocket it came from. It was so easy that it did not even feel like an act. It felt like a simplification, a matter of style. Interpreters drop things all the time. She had dropped wallah ten minutes ago and a second sorry, and nobody had died of it.

That was precisely what frightened her. Not that it would be a lie. That it would not feel like one.

And on the other side, sometimes. The exact word. The faithful word. She would say it in her professional voice, the voice of the list of the court of appeal, and it would go out through the slot and across the pale wood, and Gaillac's pen would stop for a fraction of a second and then go on faster, and she would have done her job, and her honour and her conscience would be waiting for her in the cloakroom, clean, folded, untouched, because she had not done anything. She had only been exact. Nobody can blame you for being exact. Exactness is not a choice; it is the absence of a choice; it is what a mirror does.

She knew that this was not true. She knew it in her mouth, where the stone was.

A mirror does not hesitate for a second and a half.

---

"Madame?"

The présidente had looked up.

"He says that he sleeps at his cousin's," said Leïla. "In Aubervilliers." She heard her own voice, which was perfectly calm, which was the voice of the list. "Sometimes."

Gaillac's pen stopped. Then it went on, faster.

---

After that, everything happened as it was going to happen, and she translated all of it. She translated the présidente asking where he slept when he did not sleep at his cousin's, and Jaziri saying, here and there, with friends, at the Gare du Nord once or twice when it was hot, and she translated when it was hot though it was of no use to anyone. She translated Gaillac, who stood up and spoke for four minutes in a voice that was much older than his face. A man without papers, without declared work, without fixed abode, who has told the court himself that he sleeps only sometimes at the address his counsel will no doubt present to you. She translated sometimes, which Gaillac had put in inverted commas with his voice, and she heard that he was quoting her, and that in his mouth it was now a word of French, a word of the prosecution, as if it had always been his. Six months. Committal to prison at the hearing. She translated committal. She translated at the hearing.

She translated Maître Pinson, who blew his nose first and then did his best, which was not much. A young man. A first offence, in France at least. A telephone, recovered intact, returned to its owner. A family address, here it is, the cousin can be called, the cousin is willing. He held up the sheet from the notebook as if it were a passport. She translated the cousin is willing. Jaziri looked round at the public benches, where there was nobody but a law student with a laptop and a woman asleep with her mouth open, and Leïla understood that the cousin was not there, and had perhaps never been told.

She translated the présidente asking the defendant if he had anything to add.

He said: "Nothing. I'm sorry. I want to work."

She translated it.

The court withdrew. She stayed standing by the box, because there was nowhere else to stand. Jaziri sat on the bench inside the glass with his hands between his knees. One of the policemen yawned without opening his mouth, so that only his nostrils widened. Gaillac went out to make a telephone call. The clerk ate a madeleine from a packet, very quietly, breaking off small pieces under the desk.

Leïla did not look at the box. She looked at her notebook, in which she had written 16 h 00 at the top of the page, and under it the names, and beside each name the hour of the end of the case. There was a space beside Jaziri. She looked at the space.

She was aware, without looking, that he was not looking at her either. The glass between them was very clean except for the slot. She was aware of the two of them, her outside and him inside, not looking at each other with great precision, the way two people in a lift do not look at each other, each of them occupying, in the other's not-looking, a place of exactly the right size.

The court came back after twelve minutes. Four months. Committal at the hearing. The présidente explained, in the same flat voice, that he had ten days to appeal. Leïla translated: four months, today, ten days. She translated the ten days twice, because it was the only thing in the sentence that belonged to him.

The policemen stood. Jaziri stood. The handcuffs came out from somewhere behind a belt and went back on, quickly, with the small double click that she did not hear any more and heard now. At the little door at the back of the box he turned. She thought he was going to say something to the présidente, and she leaned, by reflex, a little too far, towards the slot.

But he was speaking to her.

"Ya'tik essaha," he said.

It is what one says in Tunis to a man who has finished a job: to the baker who hands you the bread, the plumber packing up his tools, a woman who has carried something heavy up the stairs. May God give you health. It is thanks, and it is also the acknowledgement that work has been done, that something has been carried. Her mother said it to the bus drivers.

He said it in an ordinary voice. There was no irony in it, or there was, she could not tell, and she understood that she would never be able to tell, that the sentence would stay exactly as it was, with its two possible faces, for as long as she lived, and that it was not for her to decide which face it had, because he had said it, and he had gone.

The door closed behind him.

"Thank you, madame l'interprète," said the présidente.

"Next," said the clerk.

---

There was no sixth. The sixth had been released by the prosecutor's office at seven o'clock, and nobody had thought to tell her. She went down in the glass lift, which went slowly, so that the whole lit building rose past her floor by floor. At each floor she saw herself, a woman in a navy jacket, reflected and then not reflected, and then reflected again.

Outside, the boulevard was wet. She stood under the overhang of the building and smoked a cigarette, which she did not do any more, from a packet she kept at the bottom of her bag for exactly this, though she had not known until now that this was what it was for. The tobacco was dry and old and tasted of the bag. She smoked it to the end. The filter was hot between her fingers.

She was thinking, against her will, about the cousin in Aubervilliers, who would perhaps telephone tomorrow to the police station, who would perhaps not telephone, who existed or did not exist. She was thinking that Jaziri had not lied to the court, that he had not even tried, that the one sentence in which he could have helped himself he had spoiled with a word he had added of his own accord, out of exactitude, like a schoolboy correcting his own sum in front of the teacher. She was thinking that he had been honest, and that she had been honest, and that between the two honesties a man would sleep tonight, and not sometimes, at Fleury-Mérogis.

She was thinking: I only translated.

She heard the sentence. She heard it as if it had been said by someone else, through a slot, a little too eagerly. She looked at it. It was made of exactly the same stuff as he sleeps at his cousin's in Aubervilliers, full stop. It was smooth. It had a full stop. One could stop there.

She dropped the cigarette end in the gutter, where it hissed and went out at once, and took the notebook out of her bag. Under the light from the lobby she found the space beside Jaziri, uncapped her pen, and wrote 21 h 34. Then, under the list, in the box for the total of hours to be claimed from the court, she wrote 5 h 34, and signed it with her full name, slowly, so that every letter could be read.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ā Iōanne-Paulō Sartre per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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