4. Early that fall, midSeptember already, with the rains just starting, we left Wiesbaden. Mud was waiting for us, when we got to Kassel, along with the white-washed wooden barracks, that autumn. Trudging cold water, while the wind and rain blew right through us, we patched cracks in the barrack walls, gathered up rain-soaked alder sticks, and talked cold weather, mud, on-coming winter. And it was not much later the snow arrived, fuming in over the Wilhelmshohe ridges and treelines. Yet winter, even that one, passed; soon it was summer, then one more fall coming on, as we watched the woods go under, out on the slopes, while we stood by the trolleys, or with our skimpy pouches waited in long lines for bread, milk and vegetables, or tugged at carts the coal and alder-logs loaded down. Past thrashing and screeching from a pond inside our compound, where children splashed unsettled black water on each other, we'd stroll the schoolhouse path hand in hand, in pairs or clusters, and passing the commissary along the way we'd hear strokes from constant, on-going ping-pong inside, the voices of Sipas and Tony, old records, an accordion wheezing. Sundays, we'd go roam the fields, or just stand around, down by the gameyard, to watch the men tossing a basketball get worked up over each point, or sit back inside our low-slung shed of a moviehall to watch some cheap slapstick, and then pour out shouting, the whole slew of us flooding one hillside, while down below in the Yugoslav hall harmonicas played and the dancing went on, with frog-croaks drifting above the fields and on through gardens where people wandered the hedgerows and bushes as solitary dreamers to look off toward a blazing shimmer of lights in faraway Kassel and hear the trains go pounding by, until one day, toward spring, the departures started. Saying our good-byes, kissing each other as old friends down the years, having shared the long haul, one room, one fate, we carried out our pitiful belongings, our bits and relics, and climbed up into the trucks to look back from under the canvas top at friends who were to stay behind, eyeing their small cluster, the few faces there, people standing lined up by the edge of the lot, already starting to fade back: and listened for the last time to the noises of the compound, and looked at the barracks, that cloud of dust off the road a last cover hanging back there, obscuring the years, the friends and the past, our shared memories: looked out from under the canvas, eyes steady, fixed on the road.

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