It was a late autumn evening, tired and a little angry from pain, I was walking home from work. I was only ever so weakly able to sense the beauty of the autumn evening, old thoughts or rather verbal emotions were swirling in my head, alternating with pleasant, enticing stories that seemed to disconnect me for a moment from the awareness of the gloomy reality. As I walked, I felt like I was stepping on something soft and high, I looked down and saw a dark, square object, picking it up, I realized that it was a lady's purse. I decided to take it home with me and take it to a police station tomorrow. I thought to myself that it would not hurt me to do such a symbolically good and civic deed. But I hesitated, something prevented me from taking the purse to the police the next day. Maybe it was because I had become completely absent-minded and inattentive, I had been preparing for a long time to do even the most insignificant tasks. And I didn't take it away the next day either. Weeks passed and it was still with me. At first I felt a little guilty, but later I decided that the woman would have ordered a new card long ago if she had needed it. I didn't steal the wallet, but I wasn't sure if couldn't be punished for not reporting found property.
When I checked the inside of the wallet, I found that there was only one bank card, the kopeck section was empty, and in the place intended for banknotes there were crumpled pieces of paper with entries that I did not bother to delve into. After a month, I finally got around to taking the wallet to the police, I was afraid that the responsible persons would see me as the culprit, a thief, but I was hopeful that good intentions guarantee a favourable outcome or at least an understanding attitude.
As soon as I informed that I had brought a lost wallet, one of the employees of the institution asked me to sit down and write a report. When the same employee took my application, he asked me to wait a little while and went into one of the offices in the hallway. To my surprise, the employee, upon arriving, announced that I would have to speak to an investigator. The word investigator seemed familiar and foreign to me at the same time. These are people whose job is to extract the truth from subjects who may be particularly immoral, degraded, or even crazy, but who may also be completely normal, civil, and spiritually pure. I immediately began to feel anxious, the sinner in me came to life, I did not feel at all able to defend myself, I felt guilty and angry that I felt guilty. Or rather, weak. The employee led me into a rather small, modestly lit room and showed me a place to sit. After I had waited a few minutes, attentively capturing every moment, aware or even exaggerating the importance of the event, a woman opened the door ajar, turned to me with one side and spoke enthusiastically, even loudly, to someone standing behind the door. The volume and liveliness of her voice seemed passionate to me, I felt passion in her being. I felt that passion did not belong in this room, but I did not have the strength to question it, the healthy formality of life receded, the heavy and boring realism that usually held my consciousness in check loosened its grip, and for a very short moment I felt free. Finally the woman closed the door behind her and greeted me, timidly abandoning the greeting, I let myself be captivated by her posture and face, her whole being, acutely perceiving and feeling who she was, what she was. She was at the same time extremely beautiful and ugly, that is, she was not a woman with whom I could impress society, walk proudly down the street, or tell everyone that I owned her. Quite the opposite. Although I tried to cultivate in myself the feeling that I was not as unconscious and instinctively driven as others, when I got to know women, I always felt that I was scheming, that I could not free myself from that rational, reptilian part of my feelings, namely, that I saw a woman as an opportunity to rise higher or fall lower in some ill-conceived hierarchy that frames all human relationships. But this woman was outside the hierarchy, or rather, the impact of her being on mine momentarily shook this hierarchy (it).
She sat down opposite me and gave me a kind, genuine smile, I saw that her eyes were watering, a shiver ran down my spine, I felt relieved that this investigator would not be one of those who would greedily try to get the shit out of me, and then ask why I smelled. She began the investigation with friendly questions about me, where I came from, where I lived, I almost didn't feel like I was being investigated. After a while, she turned to the question of the wallet - when I found it, why didn't I take it to the police station right away, etc. I said that it wasn't my priority, I was busy with something else, I allowed myself such honesty for her sake. The investigation lasted only fifteen minutes, after which the woman announced that I would have to come again. I felt a little overwhelmed, but happy that I would see her again.
This time after my first meeting with her seemed truly blessed to me, I couldn't stop thinking about her, she had somehow opened my eyes to life outside the cell I had lived in for so long. She had given me the possibility that there was a life outside the cell, where there were no regulations, no laws, and no falsehood. Strangely enough, she was exactly that. From the moment I met her, the awareness of her accompanied me almost everywhere and always, she was a bridge between the inside and the outside world, for a moment she made my life a little more logical. But at the same time, her omnipresent presence was fantastic, I had stolen her reflection, in which I enjoyed reflecting myself. Perhaps someone will say that with such an obsession I was only serving my ego, raising myself to the highest levels of the hierarchy with the help of fantasy. Perhaps I picked up the wallet because I had hoped to find money there, but when I didn't find it, I lost all interest in the matter.
At the next meeting, the woman informed me that the person who had reported the missing wallet had quite a lot of money in his bank account, nothing grandiose, but a cause for considerable concern. She smiled as she had the previous time, but a sneer crossed her face. It was a very brief moment, but I felt myself freeze, did she really think I had stolen the wallet? After a moment, her face became again kind and welcoming, one you wanted to trust.