The Short Line

The fluorescent light at Przemyśl Główny does not so much illuminate as expose. It is 3:14 a.m. and cold in the way only a station platform can be cold, a cold that lives in concrete.

A train from Lviv has just emptied itself. The air smells of diesel and wet wool and instant coffee from a kiosk that never closes.

They have set up two lines with retractable belts, the kind you see at any airport. One sign says EU / EEA / CH. The other says ALL PASSPORTS.

I join the first one. There are four of us.

In the other line, there are maybe eighty people. Women holding sleeping children who have learned to sleep standing up. Older men with plastic bags that contain everything. Two teenage boys sharing one large backpack. The line does not move so much as it inches forward, pausing every few steps while documents are unfolded and refolded.

Border work is slow work. It is meant to be.

The EU line moves. A woman in front of me has a navy-blue German passport, its cover softened by use. She is waved through with a nod. The guard barely looks. I show my own, burgundy, with its familiar harp or eagle or whatever symbol you happen to carry. He scans, stamps, hands it back. The whole transaction takes eleven seconds.

Eleven seconds is a luxury here.

I have spent enough time in airports to know the choreography of queues. How we pretend not to look at each other. How we study the instructional pictograms as if we have never seen a pictogram of a passport before. At Przemyśl, the pretense falls away. The two lines can see each other perfectly.

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What does it mean to be sorted so quickly. The word queue comes from the Latin cauda, meaning tail. We are an animal with two tails tonight, one short and one very long.

In the long tail, a mother is trying to keep her papers in order while holding a child. The papers have been held so many times the edges have gone white. In the short tail, we stand with our hands in our pockets, because there is nothing else we need to hold.

There is no cruelty in the guard. There is only procedure. The EU/EEA line exists for a reason. Schengen must be maintained, even here, especially here, sixty kilometers from a war. The system is working exactly as designed.

That is what is so difficult to watch.

On the platform, a volunteer in a yellow vest offers tea. She offers it first to the long line. Some accept. Most do not, because to accept tea you have to put something down, and no one wants to put anything down.

Behind me, the station clock ticks. The next train to Kraków will leave in an hour. It will leave whether the long line has finished or not.

I think about all the other lines I have stood in without thinking. Priority boarding. Fast track security. The quiet car. We pay to be sorted, and we tell ourselves the sorting is natural.

At the edge of war, the sorting is not natural at all. It is explicit. One line is about where you are from. The other is about what you are running from.

When I am through, I do not know where to stand. The platform beyond the belts is too open. So I wait near the wall, pretending to check my phone.

The woman from the long line with the papers and the child finally reaches the booth. The guard speaks to her, not unkindly. He asks her to step to the side. She does.

I put my passport back in my jacket pocket. It felt very light.