For weeks he rides the freights, hanging in shifts to the outside of his assigned car while inside someone else sleeps on the straw space he vacated. Later they change places. It helps to stay awake. Every day Thanatz sees half a dozen DPs go on the nod and fall off the train, and sometimes it’s funny to watch, but too often it’s not, though DP humor is a very dependent thing. He is rubber-stamped on hands, forehead, and ass, deloused, poked, palpated, named, numbered, consigned, invoiced, misrouted, detained, ignored. He passes in and out the paper grasp of Russian, British, American and French body-jobbers, round and round the occupation circuit, getting to recognize faces, coughs, pairs of boots on new owners. Without a ration card or Soldbuch, you are doomed to be moved, in lots of 2,000, center to center, about the Zone, possibly forever. So, out among the ponds and fenceposts of Mecklenburg somewhere, Thanatz discovers that he is exempt from nothing. His second night on the rails his shoes are stolen. He comes down with a deep bronchial cough and a high fever. For a week no one comes to look at him. For two aspirins he has to suck off the orderly in charge, who has grown to enjoy rough-bearded cheeks flaming at 103° against his thighs, the furnace breath under his balls. In Mecklenburg Thanatz steals a cigarette butt from a sleeping one-armed veteran, and is beaten and kicked for half an hour by people whose language he has never heard before, whose faces he never gets a look at. Bugs crawl over him only slightly irritated that he’s in their way. His daily bread is taken away by another DP smaller than he is, but with the look of some right to it, a look Thanatz at best can only impersonate—and so he’s afraid to go after the little rag-coated liver-colored back, the munching haystack head… and others are watching: the woman who tells everyone that Thanatz molests her little girl at night (Thanatz can never meet her eyes because yes he wants to, pull down the slender pretty pubescent’s oversize GI trousers stuff penis between pale little buttocks reminding him so of Bianca take bites of soft-as-bread insides of thighs pull long hair throatback Bianca make her moan move her head how she loves it) and a beetlebrowed Slav too, who has forced Thanatz to go hunting cigarette butts for him after lights out, to give up his sleep not so much to the chance of finding a real butt as to the Slav’s right to demand it—the Slav is watching too—in fact, a circle of enemies have all observed the taking of the bread and Thanatz’s failure to go after it. Their judgment is clear, a clarity in their eyes Thanatz never saw back on the Anubis, an honesty he can’t avoid, can’t shrug off… finally, finally he has to face, literally with his own real face, the transparency, the real light of…