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THAT’S HOW WE LEFT BASEL. The Gerbergässli … rue Helder … Steinenvorstadt … Nadelberg … rue de Bourg. A lot of people came to our building, mostly police. Some wearing uniforms, others in plain clothes. Among the latter were some who looked like businessmen from the city center, while the wide-brimmed black satin hats on some of the others made them look like dancers from the variété. Two in uniform accompanied us with our most essential luggage across the Luisenplatz to the train station as people stopped and stared. We crossed a footbridge over a tributary where scarcely two hours before I had been playing with the yellow riverbed gravel at the foot of an artificial cliff. So we were going after all … So long, Basel!

WE WERE underway by one in the afternoon … I walked in and out of the compartment … the windows on both sides of the train car offered interesting views of the buildings and people … In the corridor I had a whole window to myself. Every now and then mother would call out to me not to lean on it so much or I’d get filthy, and to come back and join Vati and her in the compartment where they were sitting with Gisela … I ignored her, I felt ashamed to sit next to her … I pressed my ear up against the pane to drown out her voice. This was my first proper train trip … All I could remember of my first actual trip, when I was five years old and went with Vati to a sanatorium in Urach and back home to Basel, were the blue upholstered benches in the Pullman car … Now I could see what Basel was like when it got dizzy. At first like a fat, gray-green snake flying backwards, half on the ground, half in the sky … into a sort of huge sucking tube in the distance behind us … a proper dismemberment, a torrent, a hurricane.

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