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way off where traffic lights flash from time to time next to an iron railing with a blue poster. There is a row of words in white: FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY AND THAT OF OTHERS , PLEASE OBSERVE TRAFFIC RULES . At the spot where the accident had occurred, the truck slows down and, turning on its high-speed sprinkler jets, flushes clean any remaining traces of blood.
    The road cleaners don’t necessarily know that a few hours ago an accident had occurred and that the unfortunate victim had died right here. But who is the deceased? In this city of several million, only the man’s family and some close friends would know him. And if the dead man wasn’t carrying identification papers, right now they might not even know about the accident. The man probably was the child’s father, and when the child calms down, it will probably be able to say the father’s name. In that case, the man must have a wife. He was doing what the child’s mother should have been doing, so he was a good father and a good husband. As he loved his child, presumably he also loved his wife, but did his wife love him? If she loved him, why wasn’t she able to carry out her duties as his wife? Maybe he had a miserable life, otherwise why was heso distracted? Could it have been a personal failing and he was always indecisive? Maybe something was troubling him, something he couldn’t resolve, and he was destined not to escape this even greater misfortune. However, he wouldn’t have encountered this disaster if he had set out a little later or a little earlier. Or, if after picking up the child he had pedaled faster or slower, or if the woman at the kindergarten had spoken longer to him about his child, or if on the way a friend had stopped him to talk. It was unavoidable. He didn’t have some terminal illness but was just waiting to die. Death is inescapable for everyone, but premature death can be avoided. So if he hadn’t died in the accident, how would he have died? Traffic accidents in this city are inevitable, there are no cities free of traffic accidents. In every city there is inevitably this probability, even if the daily average is one in a million; and in a big city of this size there will always be someone encountering this sort of misfortune. He was one such unfortunate person. Didn’t he have a premonition before it happened? When he finally encountered this misfortune what did he think? Probably he didn’t have time to think, didn’t have time to comprehend the great misfortune that was about to befall him. For him, there could be no greater misfortune than this. Even if he was that one in a million, like a grain of sand, before dying he had clearly thought of the child. Supposing it was his child, wasn’t it noble of him to sacrifice himself? Maybe it was not purely noble but to acertain extent instinctual, the instinct of being a father. People only talk about a mother’s instinct, but there are some mothers who abandon their babies. To have sacrificed himself for the child was indeed noble, but this sacrifice was entirely avoidable: if he had set out a little later or earlier, if at the time he had not been preoccupied, and if he were more resolute by nature, or even if he were more agile in his movements. The sum total of all these factors had hastened his death, so this misfortune was inevitable. I have been discussing philosophy again, but life is not philosophy, even if philosophy can derive from knowledge of life. And there is no need to turn life’s traffic accidents into statistics, because that’s a job for the traffic department or the public security department. Of course a traffic accident can serve as an item for a newspaper. And it can serve as the raw material for literature when it is supplemented by the imagination and written up as a moving narrative: this would then be creation. However, what is related here is simply the process of this traffic accident itself, a traffic accident that occurred at five o’clock, in