There is something macabre yet idyllic about this dotted line along the dark stretch of the waiting train: a foreshortened row of crouchers facing in different directions with dropped pants or hitched-up skirts revealing naked, lamentably bony behinds. Completely emaciated asses, so sharp they could shit into bottlenecks . . . And one of the men embraces his thin thighs under the knees and peeps back over his shoulder—like a faithful dog that has to shit but doesn’t want to lose sight of its master. And he hops away from his pile, hops like a frog, glancing around with bulging eyes—does he have worms? In his nutritional state, he can’t possibly be constipated—or is he embarrassed? . . . At any rate, he destroys the alignment, breaks out, disrupts the parallel—he is already close to the buffers between two cars, where he probably wants to hide—aha!—where he tries to creep through and vanish in the underwood of the pines on the other side . . . He has turned his skull ahead and peeps under the buffers and is about to take his final leap . . .

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.