After the ASSENTIERUNG, I dreamt about bathing myself and changing.

  Going home was not an option.

  Karl’s performance had taken away any appetite I might have had.

  I needed contact with normal people.

  I needed to swim.

  The Germans left in this place several splendid baths and swimming complexes.

  They stayed in use, but fell into disrepair under the post-war regime, like most of the town.

  In the end, none of it meant anything.

  Everyone expected that one day the Soviets would come to an agreement with the Germans and hand over this beautiful city to them.

  Swimming was always the number one matter for me. If I found myself anywhere for more than a week, the most important concern was whether there was somewhere to get a wim in.

  I could swim any distance, any river or any lake, very effectively.

  Unfortunately, swimming from the age of four, through the years I permanently impressed and magnified my slight but various bad swimming habits.

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  After a summer spent on the coast, the fall was spent in the covered pools.

  As usual, the pool crowd was all there.

  I recounted to them my day’s adventures.

  And they revealed to me a wildly disturbing fact.

  For the last couple of years in the army there existed an effort to direct into a special battalion a certain element, like sons of former capitalists and freeholders, sons of rich peasants, sons of pre-war politicians, reactionaries, and young people who demonstrated their pro-American and pro-Western sympathies. Collectively known as class enemies, or the anti-socialist or anti-Soviet element.

  Ostensibly within the parameters of the broad duties of army service, they were forced into hard labor, often fourteen or sixteen hours a day in the coal mines and the unhealthy and dangerous sections of heavy and chemical industries.

  The aim: biological destruction of the undesirable element in the course of building the socialist nation.

  Candidates for this service were designated by the Communist Party’s youth organizations and the Ministry of Public Security.

  Finally it became clear to me what the presence of the miserable-faced self-important civilian officials at the ASSENTIERUNG meant.

  I swam for more than an hour.

  Physical labor, as it were, never interested me, and I never felt the slightest urge or predisposition in this direction.

  I knew perfectly well that I could not count 100% on my competitive athletic standing as a fencer to get me on the sport team for the army.

  My predicament was made more dire by my fatal, pro-American political opinion.

  All in all, a glum fate in the mines awaited me.

  I needed to escape.

  As I got changed in the locker room, again I got to feeling like Humphrey Bogart.

  As I saw it, I had three to five weeks.

  Above all, the most important thing was connections.

  I went to B?awat first.