The waiting-room, when I finally got there, was crowded with people I seemed to have seen somewhere else. Yes, I already seemed to know all their faces only too ‘well. When I had taken the vacant chair that might have been left purposely for me, I saw that among them, as they sat restlessly fidgeting, there were several boys and girls, school children, and some even younger. Although I'm not particularly fond of children I couldn't help pitying the poor little things, growing up in the vile atmosphere all these rooms have, impregnated with fear and suspense. What could they be but innocent at their early age? And what sort of future could be in store for lives beginning so inauspiciously? But the children themselves paid no attention to their environment. The youngest ones slept on their mother's laps: Some of the others leaned with empty faces against the knees or shoulders of grown-up people. Some were bored and made quiet overtures to each other to pass the time. A boy in a leather jacket had climbed on the window-sill; he had got his paper-white forehead pressed to the pane, and was gazing out at the sky as if saying good-bye to it. In a far corner of the room, two big men whose shoulders carried the words ‘Heavy Rescue’ had spread themselves out in chairs, and were staring dolefully at their huge black boots projecting in front of them. The air was stale, torpid, laden with unquiet breaths.
Meanwhile a constant bustle was going on in other parts of the building: one heard footsteps hurrying about, boards creaking, doors opening and closing, voices, raised sometimes in question or argument. Only we in the waiting-room seemed shut off from participation in the activity, like forgotten castaways wrecked in some stagnant lagoon.
From time to time the door opened a little way and an indistinctlyseen person peeped in and beckoned to one of the waiting clients who immediately jumped up and rushed out as if at the point of the bayonet. A stir of excitement went through the room each time this occurred, and it would be some minutes before those who were left behind settled down again to their restless vigil. I don't know how long this went on. I have the impression that hours passed, perhaps half a day. While I waited I remembered the important man who had been my advisor in former times; his elegant town house, his major-domo, the room with wine-coloured curtains where he used to receive me so promptly. The fact that I now had to seek advice in such a humble and undignified fashion brought home to me painfully how my affairs had changed for the worse. It was as if the authorities, by sending me here, had set their official seal on my degradation.
At last it was my turn to receive the mysterious summons. I had decided that when it came I would walk calmly across the room without impatience or flurry: but, just like everyone else, I found myself jumping up and making a dash for the door as if my life depended on getting through it at lightning speed. It was so dark in the corridor that I could only dimly distinguish a man's figure walking ahead of me with nonchalant steps. He opened a door on the left, signalled me to enter, and followed me in. Apparently it was the advisor himself who had come for me. He was a young, rather plump man, a foreigner obviously, with an impeccably-tied bow tie, and there was about him that finical, even dainty air which stout people sometimes have. It was the tie in particular which gave this effect, as if a neat, blue-spotted butterfly had alighted under his chin.
He stood fingering the ends of the bow delicately for a moment, smiling at me in a way that was both absent-minded and polite, before he invited me to sit down. I took the chair that he indicated and began to explain my case. The room was quite small and square, with green walls. Outside the window, almost touching the glass, was a large tree, still covered, in spite of the lateness of the season, with trembling green leaves. As the leaves stirred, watery shadows wavered over the ceiling and walls, so that one had the impression of being enclosed in a tank.
I felt singularly uncomfortable. My case was difficult to describe. I did not know where to start, or which particulars to relate, which to omit, since it was clearly impossible to mention every detail of the enormously protracted and complex business.
The young foreigner sat listening to me without making a single note. His manner was perfectly correct, but I somehow had the impression that he was not fully attentive. I wondered how much he understood of what I was saying: it was clear to me from the few words he had spoken that his grasp of the language was far from perfect. And why did he not write down at least some of the salient points of my statement? He surely didn't propose to rely purely on memory in such a complicated affair? Now and then he fingered the wings of his tie and smiled absently; but whether at me or at his own thoughts there was no way of knowing.
The situation suddenly appeared heartbreaking, futile, and I felt on the verge of tears. What was I doing here in this tank-like room, relating my private and piercing griefs to a smiling stranger who spoke in a different tongue? I thought I should stand up and go away, but I heard myself talking in agitation, begging him to realize the extreme gravity of my predicament and to give it more serious consideration, seeing that he was my last available source of assistance.
The young advisor smiled at me politely and made some vague fluttering movements with his small hands, at the same time saying a few words to the effect that my case was not really so exceptional as I thought; that it was, in fact, quite a common one. I protested that he must be mistaken, perhaps had not understood me completely. He smiled again, and repeated those indeterminate motions which possibly were intended to be reassuring but which only conveyed to me a distrustful sense of misapprehension. Then he glanced at his watch in a way that was meant to signify the end of the interview, and instructed me to come back again in two or three days.
I don't remember how I got out of the building: I've no recollection of passing between the coils of barbed wire in the alley. The sun was setting and I was in a residential part of the city that was strange to me; I walked up long, hilly, deserted streets between large houses, most of which seemed to be uninhabited. Dry autumnal weeds grew tall in the gardens, and the black window holes gaped with jagged fringes like mirror fragments in which the last rays of the sun stared at themselves bitterly. Then I passed a stranger who glanced coldly at me, and other strangers passed by with cold faces, and still other strangers. Armoured vehicles, eccentrically coloured, stood in an endless chain at the roadside, painted with cabalistic signs. But what these symbols meant I had no idea-. I had no idea if there were a place anywhere to which I could go to escape from the strangeness, or what I could do to bear being a stranger in our strange city, or whether I should ever visit that stranger who was my advisor again.