. . better go find a hotel! this city has suffered all right . . . all those holes, those exploded streets! . . . funny, you don t hear any planes . . . aren't they interested in Berlin any more? . . . I didn't get it, but little by little I caught on . . . the city was all stage sets . . . whole streets of facades, the insides had caved in, sunk into holes . . . not all, but pretty near . . . much cleaner, I hear, in Hiroshima, neat, dipped . . . decoration by bombing is a science, it hadn't been perfected yet . . . here the two sides of the street still created an illusion . . . closed shutters . . . another curious thing was that on every sidewalk the rubble—beams, tiles, chimneys-was neatly piled up, no disorder, every house had its wreckage right outside the door, one or two stories high . . . everything numbered! . . . If the war ended tomorrow all of a sudden, they wouldn't need a week to put everything back in place . . . in Hiroshima it couldn't be done, progress has its drawbacks .
