and, not to be outdone, I’ve recently been trying it out myself, but I’ve noticed that he panders to the habit quite differently, with a hunger that verges on the truly feverish. Even his eyes have a strange, febrile expression. He’s more one of those taciturn, somehow none too sociable types, and is not generally liked by the others. All the same, I once asked him what he found so great about smoking so much, to which he gave the curt reply, “It’s cheaper than food.” I was slightly taken aback, since such a reason would never have occurred to me. What surprised me even more, though, was the sort of sarcastic, somehow almost censorious look he had when he noticed my discomfiture; it was disagreeable, so I laid off any further probing. Still, I now better appreciated the guardedness the others showed toward him. By then, another arrival was being greeted with a more unconstrained whooping: he’s the one known to all his closer pals simply as “Fancyman.” That name seemed to me to fit him to a T, given his sleek, dark hair, his big, gray eyes, and the congenial polish of his entire being in general; only later did I hear that the expression actually has quite another meaning, which was why it had been bestowed on him, since back at home he was reputedly very slick in his dealings with girls. One of the buses brought “Rosie” as well—Rosenfeld actually, but everyone uses the shorter nickname. For some reason, he enjoys a degree of respect among the boys, and on matters of common interest we generally tend to go along with his view; he’s also always the one who deals with the foreman as our representative. I’ve heard that he is going through commercial college. With his intelligent, though somewhat excessively elongated face, his wavy blonde hair, and his slightly hard-set, watery-blue eyes, he reminds me of old-master paintings in museums that have titles like “The Infante with Greyhound” and such. Another who turned up was Moskovics, a diminutive kid, with a much more lopsided and what I would call rather ugly mug, the goggles perched on his broad snub nose having pebble lenses as thick as my grandma’s . . . and likewise all the others. The general opinion, which was more or less the way I saw it, was that the whole affair was a bit unusual but undoubtedly some kind of mistake. “Rosie,” having been egged on by some of the others, even asked the policeman if we would get into trouble for turning up late for work, and when in fact he intended to let us go on about our business. The policeman was not in the least put out by the question, but then again he replied that it was not up to him to decide. As became clear, he really knew very little more than we did: he referred to “further orders” that would replace the older ones, which were to the effect that until then, for the time being, both he and we would have to wait—that was roughly how he explained it. Even if this was not entirely clear, in essence it all sounded, as the boys and I thought, quite reasonable. In any case, we were obligated to defer to the policeman, after all. Then again, we found this all the easier in that quite understandably, safe in the knowledge of our ID cards and the stamp of the war industry authorities, we saw no reason for taking the policeman very seriously. He, for his part, could see—so it emerged from his own words—that he was dealing with “intelligent boys” on whose “sense of discipline,” he added, he could hopefully continue to count; as far as I could see, he had decided he liked us. He himself seemed sympathetic: he was a fairly short policeman, neither young nor old, with clear, very pale eyes set in a sun-tanned face. From a number of the words he used, I deduced he must have come from a rural background.
It was seven o’clock; by now the day shift would be starting in the oil works. The buses were no longer bringing any new boys, and the policeman now asked if any of us were missing. “Rosie” counted us and reported that we were all present. The policeman reckoned it would be better if we didn’t hang around there, by the side of the road. He seemed troubled, and I somehow