But the home guardsman has noticed something. There’s something wrong. The alignment of shitters is untidily interrupted . . . The home guardsman slowly removes his left arm from the rifle barrel; his right arm reaches for the strap; he pulls the rifle from under his armpit, takes careful aim—he’s probably taking fine sight, the target’s not more than perhaps forty paces off—and the shot sings and lashes onto the train and then across and beyond to the jagged black wall of pines, which catches it and hurls it back, making it echo, across the potato field . . . and the shitting frog simply keels over on his nose; not even his arms let go, embracing his thighs as if they were his most precious possession on earth . . . he merely keels forward, and his naked white backside is turned toward the heavens like a moon howitzer; it suddenly seems tremendous, seems to swell, a gigantic, shiny egg, as in a Bosch painting; it lacks only a huge funnel stuck in it or a crane flying up from it . . .

1946, in a train compartment between Frankfurt and Würzburg.

I have a travel order from the British military government, and thus I have the right to take Allied trains. In scheduled German trains—that is, the ones hung with human clusters like bacchanal festoons—I may use the cars and compartments reserved for members of the occupation forces. In the British Zone, such compartments are nearly always empty. In the American Zone, they are moving brothels for GIs riding alone or in tiny groups. Between the main stations on a given stretch, a relay service of Fräuleins has been set up. They climb in with a john at one station, screw all the way to the next station, and then pick up another client for the return trip. Commuter sex, paid for with PX commodities: cigarettes, chocolate, nylons, canned meat, coffee.

I have come from Bad Hersfeld (from John) and am going to Nuremberg (to appear there as a witness). I have had to transfer several times: from a local to an express, from an Allied to a German train. The trip drags on and on. It is my first one after the war; I am seeing a wealth of medieval images: ruins, lunar landscapes, scattered beaten people. The Germans wear rags on their feet and coffee cozies on their heads. When they come to a railroad depot, they start out from far away, from their caves in the rubble fields. They swarm along like lines of ants, over trodden footpaths that wind through remnants of houses, right through the traces of former kitchens and parlors with nettles luxuriating in the corners.