Then too I still recall the man with the seal’s face: portly, stocky, with a black moustache and gold-rimmed eyeglasses, who was continually seeking “to have a word” with the policeman. Nor did it escape my attention that he always strove to have a go at this separately, a little bit away from the rest, preferably in a corner or by the door. “Constable,” I would hear his strangled, rasping voice at these times, “may I have a word with you?” Or: “Please, constable… just a word, if I may…” In the end, on one occasion the policeman actually asked what he wanted. He then appeared to hesitate, first mistrustfully flashing his spectacles around rapidly. Even though this time they were in the corner of the room quite close to me, I could pick out nothing at all from the ensuing muffled muttering: he was apparently proposing something. A bit later a treacly smile of a more confidential nature also materialized on his features. At the same time, he began to lean just a little closer, until bit by bit, he was right over toward the policeman. In the meantime, as all this was going on, I also observed him make a strange movement. I did not get an entirely clear impression of the thing; at first I thought he was preparing to slip his hand into his inside pocket for something. It even occurred to me, from the evident significance of the movement, that he might be wishing to show an important paper, some remarkable or special document. Only I waited in vain for what might emerge, because in the end he did not complete the movement. All the same, he did not exactly abandon it either, but rather became stalled in it, forgot about it, suddenly somehow aborted it, I might say, just at the climactic moment. As it was, in the end his hand merely fumbled, brushed, and scrabbled for a moment in the general area of his chest, like some big, sparsely haired spider or, even more, some kind of smaller sea monster that was, as it were, seeking the crevice that would allow it to scuttle under the jacket. While that was going on, he himself kept talking, with that particular smile frozen to his face. All this lasted maybe several seconds. After that all I saw was the policeman putting an end to the conversation there and then, very brusquely and with conspicuous decisiveness, even to some extent indignantly, as far as I could see; although I really didn’t get much of what it was all about, his behavior struck me too as somehow fishy, in some not readily definable way.
As for the other faces and incidents, I no longer recall much. In any case, as time went by any observations of this kind that I made became increasingly vague. All I can really say is that the policeman continued to be very considerate toward us boys; with the adults, on the other hand, or so I observed, it seemed as if he was just a touch less cordial. By the afternoon, though, he too looked exhausted. By then he would often cool off among us or in his room, paying no attention to any buses that went by in the meantime. I also heard him repeatedly trying the telephone, and every now and then he would even announce the outcome: “Still nothing,” but with an almost plainly visible expression of dissatisfaction on his face. There was another incident that I also recall. It happened earlier on, sometime after noon, with one of his pals, another policeman who came by on a bicycle. First of all, he propped the latter against the wall where we were; they then carefully closeted themselves in our policeman’s room. It was a long time before they emerged. On parting, there was a lengthy shaking of hands in the doorway. They said nothing, but the way they kept nodding their heads and exchanging glances was something I’d sometimes seen with tradesmen in the old days, back in my father’s office, after they’d chewed over the hard times and the sluggishness of business. I realized, of course, that this was not very likely to be the case with policemen, but still, that is the memory their faces conjured up in my mind, that same familiar, somewhat harassed dejection, that same forced sense of resignation so to say, over the immutable order of things. But I was starting to grow tired; all I remember of the remaining time thereafter is that I felt hot, was bored, and even grew a bit drowsy.
All in all, I can report, the day came and went. The order eventually came through, at round about four o’clock, exactly as the policeman had promised. It said that we were to make our way to the “higher authority” for purposes of showing our documents, so the policeman informed us. He, for his part, must have been notified by telephone because prior to that we had heard bustling noises, indicative of a change of some sort, coming from his room: repeated, peremptory ringing of the apparatus, then he in turn sought to be put through to somewhere to dispatch a few terse pieces of business. The policeman also volunteered that although they had communicated nothing absolutely specific to him either, in his view it could be no more than some kind of cursory formality, at least in cases that were as clear-cut and incontestable in the eyes of the law as, for instance, ours were.
Columns, drawn up in ranks of three abreast, set off back toward the city from all the border posts in the area simultaneously, as I was able to establish while we were en route, for at the bridge and at one turnoff or crossroad or another we would meet up with other groups that were similarly made up of a smaller or larger bunch of yellow-star men and one or two — indeed in one case three — policemen. I spotted the policeman with the bicycle too, accompanying one of those groups. I also noticed that on each occasion the policemen invariably greeted one another with the same certain, so to say businesslike briskness, as though they had reckoned on these encounters in advance, and only then did I grasp more clearly the significance of our own policeman’s previous phone transactions: it seems that was how they had been able to synchronize the time-points with one another. Finally, it hit me that I was marching in the middle of what was by now a quite sizable column, with our procession flanked on both sides, at sporadic intervals, by policemen.
We proceeded in this manner, spread over the entire road, for quite a long while. It was a fine, clear, summery afternoon, the streets thronged with a motley multitude, as they always are at this hour, but I only saw all this in a haze. I also lost my sense of bearings rather quickly, since we mostly traversed streets and avenues with which I was not all that familiar. Then too my attention was rather taken up and quickly sapped by the ever-growing sea of people, the traffic and, above all, the kind of laboredness that goes together with the progress of a closed column in such circumstances. All I remember of the entire long trek, in fact, was the kind of hasty, hesitant, almost furtive curiosity of the public on the sidewalks at the sight of our procession (this was initially amusing, but after a time I no longer paid much notice to it) — oh, and a subsequent, somewhat disturbing moment. We happened to be going along some broad, tremendously busy avenue in the suburbs, with the honking, unbearably noisy din of traffic all around us, when at one point, I don’t know how, a streetcar managed to become wedged in our column, not far in front of me as it happened. We were obliged to come to a halt while it passed through, and it was then that I became alive to the sudden flash of a piece of yellow clothing up ahead, in the cloud of dust, noise, and vehicle exhaust fumes: it was “Traveler.” A single long leap, and he was off to the side, lost somewhere in the seething eddy of machines and humanity. I was totally dumbfounded; somehow it did not tally with his conduct at the customs post, as I saw it. But there was also something else that I felt, a sense of happy surprise I might call it, at the simplicity of an action; indeed, I saw one or two enterprising spirits then immediately make a break for it in his wake, right up ahead. I myself took a look around, though more for the fun of it, if I may put it that way, since I saw no other reason to bolt, though I believe there would have been time to do so; nevertheless, my sense of honor proved the stronger. The policemen took immediate action after that, and the ranks again closed around me.