The next morning, they all boarded buses and rode through Thailand to the Cambodian border. In the evening, they pulled into a small village where they had rented several houses on stilts. The regularly flooding river forced the villagers to live above ground level, while their pigs huddled down below. Franz slept in a room with four other professors. From afar came the oinking of the swine, from up close the snores of a famous mathematician.

The interpreter was recalled and a long quarrel ensued. At last everyone assented to the following: the parade would be headed by one American, one Frenchman, and the Cambodian interpreter; next would come the doctors, and only then the rest of the crowd. The American actress brought up the rear.

In the morning, they climbed back into the buses. At a point about a mile from the border, all vehicular traffic was prohibited. The border crossing could be reached only by means of a narrow, heavily guarded road. The buses stopped. The French contingent poured out of them only to find that again the Americans had beaten them and formed the vanguard of the parade. The crucial moment had come.

The road was narrow and lined with minefields. Every so often it was narrowed even more by a barrier -- two cement blocks wound round with barbed wire -- passable only in single file.

All up and down the long parade, photographers and cameramen were snapping and whirring their equipment, dashing up to the front, pausing, inching back, dropping to their knees, then straightening up and running even farther ahead.

Now and then they would call out the name of some celebrity, who would then unwittingly turn in their direction just long enough to let them trigger their shutters.

About fifteen feet ahead of Franz was a famous German poet and pop singer who had already written nine hundred thirty songs for peace and against war. He was carrying a long pole topped by a white flag that set off his full black beard and set him apart from the others.