All aboard

[Monte Davis]

We've been here before, Evacuating, yo-yoing, remodeling Rocky Mountain
trestles. But here's a _Sicherheitsdienst_ officer just starting to feel at
home in 1942:

"My first night in Stalingrad, I still remember, I had another metro dream.
It was a station with many levels, but they communicated with each other, a
huge labyrinth of steel beams, footbridges, steep metal ladders, spiral
staircases. The trains arrived at the platforms and left them in a deafening
racket. I didn't have a ticket and was terrified of being checked by the
station police. I went down a few levels and slipped into a train that was
leaving the station and then dive-bombed almost vertically on its tracks;
below, it slowed down, reversed its direction and, passing by the platform
again without stopping, plunged in the other direction, into a vast abyss of
light and harsh noise."

_The Kindly Ones_, Jonathan Littell, tr. Charlotte Mandell