Stella. She’s the reason I’m here. Here, justice is being done before World History. Make sure you get a seat next to the black-haired girl with the pale cheeks and dark eyes. She survived the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. You just wouldn’t believe how much knowledge goes into a pair of eyes, big and dark as they may be—she probably screws like an angel . . .

and while we stuff our faces here and work on the choreography of mating, somewhere off at an angle, upstairs, in one of the thousand honeycomb cells of the Fürth courthouse, the main defendants are being tried. When you’ve swallowed your canteen vittles, drunk your coffee and the rest of your canned beer, burped, put out your cigarette, wiped your kisser with the paper napkin, you can go upstairs and watch them being driven through a caged corridor like lions in a circus. The great figures of the crumbled Third Reich: Göring, Hess, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Frank—twenty-two men in all, accused of crimes against humanity, all kinds of war crimes, crimes against peace, conspiracy . . . Inside, they fill two rows of benches—twenty-two men of the white race, as pale as intestinal worms (they’ve been living under artificial light for nine months) but washed, clean-shaven, with clean hands and brushed suits. Göring in a kind of bridal silvery gray: double-breasted flannel jacket, marshal’s piping on the breeches, Krakoviak boots on his short, fat legs. He’s alert and lively, very interested in everything going on about him, slides around on the bench and peers everywhere. Next to him, Hess’s saurian skull looks as if it had just clambered out of a diluvial ocean, sending a first bewildered glance into the prehistoric world from beneath its overhanging bushy eyebrows—when you encounter that gaze, you are peering down two gun barrels. Ribbentrop’s bank-teller mug: empty, tight-lipped, arranged in dourly dignified wrinkles. Keitel’s maître-d’ skull. Kaltenbrunner’s dripping Aztec profile. Frank’s man-in-the-street mien puffed up with a convert’s remorse. The homosexual scrotum in Funk’s cheeks. Schacht’s Punch-and-Judy head . . .

Outside, in the impoverished vending stalls of the bombed-out city, you can purchase them (with Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels in the bargain) for a handful of marks: carved as ornamental corks for liquor bottles—bottles for liquor that can’t be had anyway, that can be found only by Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, in the Arabian Nights bazaar of the PXs (the Russian, in any case, has no home) . . .

and here, on the witness stand, a man whose secrets are being wormed out of him—grave worms: “So you admit that you actively participated in the mass shootings of thirty thousand Polish citizens, most of them of the Mosaic faith? Fine—now who gave the orders for this action? . . .”