It could have been the Semlower Strasse, in Stralsund. The windows have the same ravaged look: the insides of all the rooms seem to’ve been gutted black. Perhaps there is a new bomb that can destroy only the insides of structures… no… it was in Greifswald. Across some wet railroad tracks were derricks, superstructure, tackle, smells of canalside… Hafenstrasse in Greifswald, down over his back fell the cold shadow of some massive church. But isn’t that the Petritor, that stunted brick tower-arch straddling the alleyway ahead… it could be the Slüterstrasse in the old part of Rostock… or the Wandfarberstrasse in Lüneburg, with pulleys high up on the brick gables, openwork weathercocks up at the very peaks… why was he looking upward? Upward from any of a score of those northern streets, one morning, in the fog. The farther north, the plainer things grow. There’s one gutter, down the middle of the alley, where the rain runs off. Cobbles are laid straighter and there aren’t as many cigarettes to be had. Garrison-churches echo with starlings. To come into a northern Zone town is to enter a strange harbor, from the sea, on a foggy day.

But in each of these streets, some vestige of humanity, of Earth, has to remain. No matter what has been done to it, no matter what it’s been used for….

There were men called “army chaplains.” They preached inside some of these buildings. There were actually soldiers, dead now, who sat or stood, and listened. Holding on to what they could. Then they went out, and some died before they got back inside a garrison-church again. Clergymen, working for the army, stood up and talked to the men who were going to die about God, death, nothingness, redemption, salvation. It really happened. It was quite common.

Even in a street used for that, still there will be one time, one dyed afternoon (coaltar-impossible orange-brown, clear all the way through), or one day of rain and clearing before bedtime, and in the yard one hollyhock, circling in the wind, fresh with raindrops fat enough to be chewed… one face by a long sandstone wall and the scuffle of all the doomed horses on the other side, one hair-part thrown into blue shadows at a turn of her head—one busful of faces passing through in the middle of the night, no one awake in the quiet square but the driver, the Ortsschutz sentry in some kind of brown, official-looking uniform, old Mauser at sling arms, dreaming not of the enemy outside in the swamp or shadow but of home and bed, strolling now with his civilian friend who’s off-duty, can’t sleep, under the trees full of road-dust and night, through their shadows on the sidewalks, playing a harmonica… down past the row of faces in the bus, drowned-man green, insomniac, tobacco-starved, scared, not of tomorrow, not yet, but of this pause in their night-passage, of how easy it will be to lose, and how much it will hurt….