I sat drinking black tea in the foyer of the hotel. (This was in Munich.) A lady wearing a lustrous purple trouser suit was seated at the keys of the baby grand in the far corner, her rendition of “Hungarian Rhapsody” (with many adornments and curlicues) for now unable to drown out the inarticulate howling and baying from the bar beyond the lifts. It was the time of Oktoberfest, and the city was playing host to six million visitors, thereby quintupling its population—visitors from all over Bavaria, and from all over Germany, and from all over the world. Other visitors, a far smaller contingent, were also expected, visitors who hoped to stay, and to stay indefinitely; they were coming from what was once known as the Fertile Crescent.

“Let’s see if we can make a bit of sense of this,” an itinerant businessman was bleakly saying, bent over his mobile phone two tables away, with clipboard, legal pad, gaping laptop. He spoke in the only language I could understand—English—and his accent derived from northern regions, northern cities (Hull, Leeds, Grimsby). “I should’ve rung two weeks ago. Three. All right, a month ago. But that doesn’t affect the matter at hand, now does it? Believe me, the only thing that’s kept me back’s the prospect of having to . . . Listen. Are you listening to me? We need to resolve the indemnity clause. Clause 4C.” He sighed. “Have you got the paperwork in front of you at least? Quite honestly, it beats me how you get anything done. I’m a busy man and I’m accustomed to dealing with people who have some idea of what they’re up to. Will you listen? Will you listen?”

The photographer arrived, and after a minute he and I went out into the street. In great numbers, the Oktoberfesters were streaming past, the women in cinched dirndls and wenchy blouses, the men in suède or leather breeches laced just below the knee, tight jackets studded with medals or badges, and jaunty little hats with feathers, rosettes, cockades. On the pavement, Bernhardt erected his tripod and his tilted umbrella, and I prepared myself to enter the usual trance of inanition—forgetting that in this part of Eurasia, at least for now, there was no longer any small talk. But first I said, “What do they actually do in that park of theirs?”

“In the funfair?” Bernhardt smiled with a touch of skeptical fondness. “A lot of drinking. A lot of eating. And singing. And dancing—if you can call it that. On tabletops.”

“Sort of clumping about?”

“The word is schunkeln. They link arms and sway while they sing. From side to side. Thousands of them.”

“Schunkeln’s the infinitive, right? How d’you spell that?”

“I’ll write it down for you. Yes, the infinitive.”

Our session began. Broad-shouldered and stubbly but also delicately handsome, Bernhardt was an Iranian-German (his family had come over in the nineteen-fifties); he was also very quick and courteous, and, of course, seamlessly fluent.

“Last week I came by train from Salzburg,” he said as he began wrapping up. “There were eight hundred refugees on board.”

“Eight hundred. And how were they?”

“Very tired. And hungry. And dirty. Some with children, some with old people. They all want to get to this country because they have friends and family here. Germany is trying to be welcoming, trying to be kind, but . . . I took many photographs. If you like I’ll drop some off for you.”

“Please. I’d be grateful.”

And I remembered that other photograph from the front pages a few days ago. Fifteen or twenty refugees disembarking at a German rail station and being met with applause from sympathetic citizens; in the photograph, some of the arrivals were smiling, some laughing, and some were just breathing deeply and walking that much taller, it seemed, as if something had at last been restored to them.

I shook Bernhardt’s hand and said, “Trying to be kind. When I was in Berlin, the police closed a crossroads in the Tiergarten. Then bikes and a motorcade came through. The Austrian head of state. Faymann. For a little summit with Merkel. Hours later, they announced they were sealing the border.”

“The numbers. The scale.”

“And the day before yesterday I was in Salzburg and there were no trains to Munich. All cancelled. We came here by car.”

“Long wait at the border?”

“Only if you go on the highway. That’s what the driver told us. He took the parallel roads.” I hesitated. “On your train to Munich . . . ”

I felt the impulse to ask Bernhardt if at any point he had found it necessary to disengage himself from the eight hundred. I didn’t ask, but I could have and should have.

Bernhardt said, “You know, they won’t stop coming. They pay large sums of money to risk their lives crossing the sea and then they walk across Europe. They walk across Europe. A few policemen and a stretch of barbed wire can’t keep them out. And there are millions more where they came from. This is going to go on for years. And they won’t stop coming.”

It was one-fifty. I had forty minutes. (My book tour was winding down and this was not a busy day.) In the bar, I waited at the steel counter. When Bernhardt asked me how I was bearing up after three weeks on the road in Europe, I said I was well enough, though chronically underslept. Which was true. And actually, Bernhardt, to be even more frank with you, I feel unaccountably anxious, anxious almost to the point of formication (which the dictionary defines as “a sensation like insects crawling over the skin”); it comes and goes. . . . Home was four thousand miles away, and six hours behind; pretty soon, it would be quite reasonable, surely, to return yet again to my room and see if there were any fresh bulletins from that quarter. For now, I looked mistrustfully at my phone; in the in-box there were more than eighteen hundred unopened messages, but from wife, from children, as far as I could tell, there was nothing new.

The heroically methodical bartender duly set his course in my direction. I asked for a beer.

“Nonalcoholic. D’you have that?”

“I have one-per-cent alcoholic.”

We were both needing to shout.

“One per cent.”

“Alcohol is everywhere. Even an apple is one-per-cent alcoholic.”

I shrugged. “Go on, then.”

The beer the Oktobrists were drinking by the quart was thirteen per cent, or double strength; this, at any rate, was the claim of the young Thomas Wolfe, who, after a couple of steins of it, acquired a broken nose, four scalp wounds, and a cerebral hemorrhage in a frenzied brawl, which he started, in some funfair mud pit—but that was in 1928. These male celebrants in fancy dress at the bar had been drinking since 9 a.m. (I saw and heard them at breakfast), before setting off for the Theresienwiese, if indeed they ever went there. I saw them and heard them the night before, too; at that point they were either gesticulating and yelling in inhumanly loud voices or else staring at the floor in rigid penitence, their eyes clogged and woeful. Then, as now, the barman attended to them all with unconcern, going about his tasks with practiced neutrality.