A not-quite-insignificant person in a nice coat.

Admittedly, the hat is balanced on a pair of ears too prominent and too high, and he’s secretly grateful for the shoulder padding in the coat. Not that he’s narrow-shouldered, exactly, but a year is a long time to be apart. Time makes everything rosier. Well, in any case he’s freshly shaved and spritzed.

In his hands he carries a bunch of autumn flowers in yellow tissue paper. Big, vivid dahlias bought at exorbitant cost. He holds the bouquet in front of him. 84

Inside the florist’s small shop the dampness was a chilly mouth, earthy and succulent. He let himself be kissed, while a mousy man in oversleeves, a miscast civil servant, added flower after meticulously chosen flower to the colourful bunch.

Soon he’ll feel the life in her lungs through the fabric of her dress. The remaining mountain air she’s kept for him in the slender branches of the tissue. Her hair will smell of moss and weather-sleekened stone, and he longs for that, the air, fresh and clear as a cold shower.

It’s how he thinks of her. In her slim-limbed body she contains everything that is home. Her eyes, sharp and refreshing, could be poured into a glass of schnapps. Aquavit, the water of life. He chuckles to himself.

One morning she was walking down the road towards the factory. He thinks of it now. Her scarf whispering around her glossy curls. Her shins were clean and white and shone in the sun. She gleamed, she walked and fizzed. She’ll come sailing in just like that now, he can tell, with the lush greenery of the mountain between her lips, and now he sees the boat.

The gust of wind running ahead of the big vessel tastes of iron. For a moment he can picture the way the village back home appears when the wind knocks a hole in the fog and sends a sudden rush of yellow August sun across the red and green and black roofs. The way the light scuds and shivers on the metal handles of the oars and the 85black-tarred wooden boats. The shadows of the clouds trickling up the mountainside.

Fritz has become a single hat among many on the wide quay. Perhaps he does look odd, after all, in his shiny shoes, with his hat perched so high on his ears.

He touches the yellow tissue paper gingerly. A short while ago it rustled luxuriously; now it feels sweaty, brittle.

The grille in the sky is squeezing shut.

A clatter of battle-ready umbrellas.

The bouquet: suddenly it looks like too much. He stuffs it under his coat as well as he can. Now he’s standing there like some kind of Napoleon, short, compact and groggy with homesickness.