H. Adler - The Wall

We were shown to the first floor. A hall with huge windows and a balcony door served as the waiting room. At the smaller end of the room, near the entrance, a uniformed policeman presiding over a large battered table responded cheerily to our greeting, and asked to see our summons and papers. Then he pointed to where we should take a seat among the chairs lined up in wide arcs on three sides of the hall. Already many sat there waiting in what must once have been a very handsome room. All that was left of it was its height, the whitewashed silk coverings that were pulling loose from the walls, and the precious, though somewhat broken plaster on the ceiling that had also been whitewashed. Otherwise, it looked meager and barren, the floor covered with gray felt that had holes in it. Sadly the chairs stood there, one hardly matching another, many of them rickety, and not one of them without a stain. An unlit iron stove — it was good that we had coats with us — stood somewhat near the policeman’s table, the exhaust pipe winding in a crooked fashion out through the lead-covered upper part of a window. Not on the table but rather on a chair near the door was a telephone surrounded by tangled wires, one of which led off through a door panel in order to make some unknown connection somewhere else. Originally, the hall had been larger. Now it was divided by a paper wall constructed of thin laths. This barrier wasn’t quite square with the corners of the walls that ran lengthwise, such that the window side was longer than the other side. Oddly and irregularly, this offensive barrier infringed upon the cold, bleak room, slicing through the ceiling ornament as well.

Men and women of various ages who had been gathered there were tossed together and could see how they filled to bursting the badly arranged, miserable space. But they never came together as a single body. Each sat with his own thoughts and each had a different goal, each being from a different world, be it the fragile little mother, or the hefty young man with swollen cheeks and sullen eyes, or the nicely dressed young lady with dainty feet, or the pointy-nosed pale intellectual. There they sat all together, whether sour or concerned, apathetic or arrogant, good-natured or crude, nothing shared between them but the power of the immigration police, who had only to send off their brief notes in order to haul in little men and little women, this being how they were treated for a number of hours amid their daily business, brought together submissively from every quarter and every major city here in this waiting room, themselves the lost, who can be in the right only by meekly following orders in the hope that their always precarious good standing might last forever.

There was hardly any noise. Only the policeman up front dared say anything aloud whenever a new visitor entered and looked about at the others, clueless and dense. Our guard being good, he called out in a husky voice until the new arrival figured out what to do and was at ease, though still without hope, shuffling over to a vacant chair. Sometimes a second policeman, to whom our guard whispered something, got involved. Usually it was our man who called out the names — four or five at a time, as a rule — when people’s turn came, butchering the foreign ones so badly that confusion would arise. That was harmless fun, pleasing the policeman enormously, for the time went by so slowly, and except for calling out the names, there was hardly anything else to do but now and then pour tea from a huge thermos into an ugly green cup or light a cigarette whose ashes he tapped into an old-fashioned inkwell.

Those waiting nodded their heads and dozed or chatted quietly. Most of them didn’t know one another, but some ran into others they knew here, including married couples, while others had brought along their bratty children. Some crossed their legs, while others sat there stiff and upright, others bending forward or aslant, others fidgeting, while still others chose not to rest on a chair but instead stood up and, with large, energetic steps, paced back and forth, though only for a little while, for they soon discovered that it did no good, though no one said anything, not even the police. Women had planted their shopping bags next to them on the floor and worked away at their knitting needles, the slowly climbing threads of yarn rising up from the bags below. A student brooded over geometric figures and mathematical formulas, some other men burying themselves in rustling newspapers, while others read books. The few children that were there soon found one another out and began to play, running frequently to the window or straying toward the policeman, who had fun blowing smoke at them, their antics otherwise not bothering him at all, while nearby a young girl fed her doll a piece of chocolate.

Whoever was called got his papers back from the police, disappeared somewhat noisily with a cough, and was never seen again. An exit into the unknown. Anyone who had once waited never had to wait again. You were called, taken in, then spit out; no one knew what happened to you. I had to admit that all my anxieties had been uncalled for, yet I pitied those who were called up, who now had to fight their little battles, while, looking on, the rest of us felt that we had a much better chance of success if we would be allowed to mount a defense. What nonsense. For what good are such insights when no one believes in them or trusts them? In chopped-up segments, time passes by, while just before noon the last stragglers arrive, more and more of those having been called up by the police, the empty chairs soon looking thin and spiritless.

After remaining patient for more than two hours we were finally called up. The policeman said, “Seven,” which was the room number where we had to appear. A sign said to enter without knocking. A small, somewhat wizened man in civilian dress and wearing glasses, no doubt a school warden in better times, greeted us in a friendly manner. We were offered a seat. After we hastily spread our papers in front of him on the desk, everything grew silent. The civil servant sank with pleasure into the contents of the documents. It seemed that for him everything was in order, the statements recorded in the valid passports were true, a world of doubt kept at bay by the neat entries made by civil servants. Born, entered, and approved — everything was in order; the picture is real once it’s been stamped. As anyone who is trained to do so can read, passports reveal that the state attests to the validity of created beings. Whoever has documents that are in order, good for him — he is indeed alive and may go on living. Yet how pitiable the one who does not empty his pockets and offer up papers meekly with outstretched hands, like a desperate prayer to the civil servants, who, immediately touched by such gestures, take on much weightier matters. The ones asking, or who have been summoned to step forward, can relax and stretch out on their chairs, breathing easier through their noses with the patience of pure being, or play with their fingers, look gratefully at the floor, or boldly look wherever they wish, as long as they remain civil. But the best thing to do is watch with shy restraint the promising quiet proceedings of the official, always ready to respond to any glance with the right bits of information or nods of the head in order to assure someone that everything is on the up-and-up. As the official looks over the work of his predecessors and his colleagues, the one summoned is taken in, his fate almost suspended, for everything he is lies there in the written notes, his physical presence just a means in itself, a messenger delivering a message, an appointed courier of papers that grant him a complete sense of himself. So it goes for every person, especially if he is a foreigner, in order that he be certified.