It was like when he was a child. The sun in his eyes. All the smells inside his nose, where they stayed until well into the evening. You could smell all the scents in your clothes even when you were indoors. A little smoke and a lot of snow. What did snow smell like?
He bent down and scooped up a handful of snow. The sun transformed it into brightly sparkling powder, and he sniffed at it. What was it like? It smelled like a memory he had, but couldn’t pin down. That’s exactly what it was like. A memory of something special.
He threw the memory away and it disappeared into thin air. He moved into the shadow of the buildings and the sun was gone.
The snow was piled up like a wall and he could see it nearly all the way to the crossroads. The shop was on the corner. A minimarket, as they’re called. It had changed its name, but he knew what it used to be called. Had he described it, perhaps? He had mentioned what it used to be called. Not directly, but he couldn’t tell everything, could he? Not now.
He was well known in there. He thought he was, at least. He had done his duty there. His d-u-t-y. He was her friend and he had seen her looking at him in a special way, but he didn’t think it was that way. He was only a friend.
Once he had been on the point of saying it. I’m only a friend.
I’m just somebody who is here. Just somebody who was here. In the right place at the right time. But that wasn’t true. He’d been there at the wrong time. Or, rather, that applied to the other person, to be absolutely correct. To be correct. A-b-s-o-l-u-t-e-1-y c-o-r-r-e-c-t…
Some children were running around in the playground between the building where he used to live and the road. A lot of children. Now there was snow to play in. It wasn’t wet snow, because there was no sign of any snowmen or snow lanterns. He scooped up another handful and tried to pack it into a ball, but he couldn’t. Children knew when it was possible to use it for making things.
They’d sprayed water and made a skating rink as well. He almost wished that he still had his ice skates. But what would that look like? His feet were twice as big now as they were then, weren’t they?
The road had been cleared, but it could have been done more efficiently. The apartment buildings didn’t look up to much. It was like a depopulated area in the middle of the city. Depopulation in the middle of the city! There was less and less on the minimarket shelves every day. They boasted that they still had an assistant serving at the meat counter, but he’d never seen anybody there. Never. He hadn’t been there all that often, but still.
A car drove past and he had to stand on the piled-up snow. It was dirty here. He didn’t want to touch it. He stepped down again. Soon it would be time to go home and get something to eat and then go to work for a long evening shift, and he’d go home again and not be able to go to sleep, and he’d sit in front of the TV, watching videos.
Suddenly the shop was there without him noticing that he’d gone into it. He had the films under his arm. Two posters outside advertised films. One of the actors looked familiar, but he didn’t waste time there because he knew what kind of videos he wanted.
There was somebody else behind the counter, somebody he hadn’t seen before. He didn’t say anything when he paid for the videos. Now he was crossing the street. He looked at the tall buildings that looked like a row of huge building blocks.
Later this evening he would drive past the tall buildings in the center of town.
One morning he’d been waiting outside and watched her get onto the tram. He’d followed behind, although he knew where she was going. Nevertheless, he wanted to see her get off the tram and then disappear among all the thousands of others who were going in and out of the hospital doors.