I begin to settle in to my trip as to a fate that had been dealt me; I learn to adjust, to orient myself, to seize my advantage: I have to find food, occasionally wash and shave, the toilets are stuffed with people, the station kiosks are looted bare, there are fistfights over a rationed herring sandwich. But I am alone in my Allied compartment—until Frankfurt. Then the German railroad service shoves an Eastern European in on me: a Ukrainian, a displaced person en route to Munich (that much is intelligible). We get along on the handful of Russian fragments I picked up in Bessarabia. Our communication remains rudimentary, and besides, he is not very sociable. He gazes out the window and sings, sings tender, preternaturally nostalgic songs in smoky vowels and melting labials: mnyesh-myets khroshtshuy svolyeshtschik, what do I know. Songs about his little pony or his mother, in any case about deep homesickness and a long road . . . Meanwhile, the train lumbers off again, pulling out of the human ooze, out of the desperate tumult, away from the shouts, gliding out of the floury lamplight under the shot-up station roof, heading into the abstractly alive blackness of the switch yard: bars, twisted and torn, the skeletons of charred railroad coaches, engine wrecks magically present. The down-slanting shine of the illuminated train windows wanders on, a gliding chain of yellow rectangles: they tremble over black crushed stone. The first window leaps up a sooty wall and drops back, the others follow. Rectangle upon rectangle they repeat the leap and drop back, stretch, undulate, expand, shoot out into the darkness, contract, throw themselves like folded carpets over a ramp, lose one half of themselves in a pit and pull it out again. This becomes a dance, a grotesque geometrical dance of submission, a Constructivist parody of assiduity. Rectangles squeeze into squares, squares distort into trapezoids, constrict diagonally into isosceles triangles, straddle their legs and do splits, rip apart into hyperbolas and pour into the endless night. And the wheels grind in the tracks, rattling harder and harder, more and more noisily, crackling through switch clusters, shaking and jerking through the cars, wrenching them onto the predetermined track . . . a dinosaur leaps out of the darkness and attacks the train; he is smashed back; the mammoth proboscis of a water pump makes a grab for me, black and huge, run down by the pack of train-window lights; in back of it, red and green eyes flare up, move along, and are driven away, torn into, sucked up by the general falling, receding . . .