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I once saw a city in flames (Emperor Nero would have kissed his perfumed fingertips):

There were so many flames that they looked almost dainty, even loving. Quick as a cat’s tongue, they licked out of the blackened window caverns of the houses and up the walls. They flared up wildly in dark smoke and crackling flurries of sparks only when a building collapsed. Then they whooshed and flickered over the glimmering pile of rubble. But overhead, the sky was a dark glow: the incubator of the Apocalypse—

And I stared till my eyes were red, that the image might be seared into me. After all, you don’t see that kind of thing every day.

I told myself, “Hey! People are burning in these houses. The basements they’ve crept into are buried. The heat is boiling the juice out of their bones, they’re shrinking into little black monkeys. But if they manage to break out of their cellar holes, then the burning wind will raise them aloft like dry leaves and whirl them into the flames.”

But I was only telling myself those things. The wall of fire was impenetrable and was reflected in me just as impenetrably. No shriek pierced it on either side. Then, the young man came toward me.

The young man was gazing straight ahead, imperturbable, striding through the heaps of broken glass, the smoldering ruins of furniture, and the tattered snarls of fire hose. He was walking along the more or less intact right side of Kurfürstendamm (for this took place in the Berlin of 1944, on the morning after a turbulent night: one of the solid bombing nights in which the Wilhelmine splendor of Berlin’s Old West Side lost its plaster of paris amid all sorts of illumination effects that flouted the blackout regulations: the loss being so complete that only the sooty walls remained, and even they were mostly joined and entangled like the fingers of a praying pastor—very few of them were still left upright, as a warning) . . .

He was obviously a young man of good breeding, and he wore civilian clothes. This too was not something one saw every day. For it was precisely the young men of the best families who deemed it an honor to do their accursed duty and carry out their obligation to Führer, Volk, und Vaterland, on land, in the air, and at sea, in Minsk and Omsk and Andalsnes and high over the wind-rowed dunes of drifting sand in the Libyan desert and deep down with the fish by Ullapool. His raincoat with a sloppily dangling belt was unbuttoned, and his hands were in his pockets. He was heedless of his good shoes, which trod over upholstery springs and into the twisted spokes of baby-carriage wheels. And when he had to cross one of the side streets, he stepped rather inattentively down from the sidewalk to the road and tripped . . . However, he caught himself with the inexplicable, clownish skill of a drunk or other deviant and, after briefly reeling, as if drawn on an invisible string, he strode on: without removing his hands from his pockets or his gaze from the nothingness he was staring straight into. What was happening around him wasn’t his concern. Nor was it really his concern anymore what had happened to him.