Assentierung (Part II)

The lobby I was in was outfitted for the occasion with two tables, marked A-L and Ł-Z for registration. At each table sat a petty officer. Those that had enough command of the alphabet stood in their appropriate lines. For those less inclined to literacy, there was a lieutenant just for this, an expert on the alphabet. When he was given a name, his face betrayed the mental effort required of him to determine for which line and table the name was meant. 

When I gave the sergeant at the table my military booklet, the specially issued ID for every man in the country for just this purpose, he struggled to find my name in his registrar. He found it, at last, as the only name on a separate page at the end. 

Giving me a long, astute look, he said: “brought by escort... city prospective.” He said this appropriately loud enough that you could hear the approbations from the back of both lines. 

The peasant’s complex and the cult of the city had been ingrained in the national consciousness for hundreds of years, evidenced in sayings like ‘let a peasant into the office, he’ll drink from the inkwell,’ or ‘shit’s for a peasant, not a watch,’ which were used commonly, and always evoked silly delight. If the militia had to escort someone, and to that that someone was from the city, then he had to pull some number and it was best to step aside for such a person.

“Get to the main hall!” our lieutenant, the alphabet expert, would yell on occasion, pointing to the big white doors of the main hall. The hall was expansive, square shaped and with alcoves, niches and recesses of all sizes and shapes to every side. Three rows of iron-clad Doric columns, painted sloppily in white, as everything else here, held up large swathes of the relatively low ceiling. The opposite end of the hall had doors identical to the ones we entered, on the other side of which the various examining commissions operated. To the right of the entrance there was a grand stage, elevated about a meter from the floor. There even stood there, also painted sloppily in white, a piano, and at the back of the stage was a red canvas that almost reached the ceiling, decorated in paper sculpture, a giant cut-out of Comrade Lenin’s head in profile set to the background of several industrial smoke-stacks. Stapled to the canvass were a set of white Bristol paper cut-out letters. They were once a phrase in its entirety. Many of the letters had fallen off, but one could make out that the theme of the canvass was ELECTRIFIC TION. Benches and chairs were strewn throughout the makeshift house.

When I came in, about three hundred men were already there. They smoked cigarettes, drank, shaved—they loitered. The mood was drab, like a third class waiting room at a train station, the din of the gathered interrupted occasionally by a spasmastic, hysterical laughter, or by a sudden wrangle in the hall. A characteristic smell unreeled throughout the room, definitely not belonging to a prima sorte. From time to time, the next group of men came in to the hall through the doors. Other than the tables at the lobby, the only other timely and smooth process was the sale of orangeade. 

In a large alcove in the corner at the left of the entrance, there stood piles of wooden boxes, almost to the ceiling, filled with bottles of it. It came in two colors: the color yellow and the color pink. For a counter there was an office table, worked by a busty young woman, by eye about twenty five, decidedly pretty, she reminded me of someone I might’ve known. There was also a fidgety old man back there, with a face identical to Comrade Władislaw Gomułka, who was at the time interned. He wore an old raggedy train conductor’s uniform and was overactive, constantly rearranging the wooden boxes, picking them up, putting them away, bringing them inside.

Just before eight, a disturbing movement began, and through the hall, where by now a good five hundred men had gathered, various officials began to roll in, self-important and dignified looks on their faces, crossing the hall through the doors at the end to where the work of the commission was conducted. Mostly they were officers from various divisions and of various ranks, a few nasty-looking civvies, and I even noticed three women in the group. At this time, at the left wall, on the opposite side from the orangeade stand, the red curtain came up, this one with a well-known visage, the sad face of Comrade Stalin, in three-quarter profile but also in paper sculpture, one of the cheap decorative techniques in heavy use at the time. The phrase stapled to the curtain had so many letters missing that one of the majors in the group of officials summed it up neatly; you couldn’t make out shit what it said. 

It turned out that the raised curtain had been concealing an authentic field kitchen on wheels with rubber tires. Its chimney was placed intelligently, modified to bend twice at right angles and fitted out of a tin pipe at the end of which the smoke came out, an impressive set of extensions. Down to the smallest pipe it was thorough. The smoke bellowed out the upper part of the window except, where the glass ought to be, it was refashioned in the Russian way; there was a piece of plywood placed there, with a brass ring where the tin pipe from the field kitchen went through to prevent the wood from burning. On the other side of the window, outside, the smoke perfunctorily blackened the wall, sullying the Secessional architecture of the building. 

At the end none of it meant anything. Everyone expected that one day the Soviets would come to an agreement with the Germans and hand over this beautiful city to them.