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.

I see many folk tableaux: the bare breasts of nursing mothers, grandfathers carried piggyback, silent gaping faces, trembling hands spooning out bread soups, sleepers piled up like logs, waiting rooms in which people cook and launder . . . The Germans are as human as in their fairy tales: a round-eyed, wonder-eyed, thunderstruck humanity, as if they had looked into the face of God.

The trip has been going on for days. I witness hordes of people swarming onto incoming trains, human surf breaking against the sides of railway cars, foaming up over the roofs and sticking there. Every train is crusted over with people like an old ship’s hull with barnacles. When the train chugs out of each station, it drags along human seaweed, human sludge . . .

Over all this, there are yellow sunups and red sundowns, pale days, lulled by the rising and falling of telegraph wires. Fluffy, feathery skies. Landscapes screwing into and twisting out of the square of the train window. Furrows in the fields, breaking open with a hum, fanning open. Gliding mountain chains, approaching hills. Embankments that hurl the scent of hay in my face and then are torn away. Black nights, the sickle moon cutting its way through the darting clouds. Corpses of cities in the silver milk of starlight.