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chimneys, billows of white steam issuing from ventilation shafts. Clouds drift over the rooftops, one after another. Every kind of cloud, though – it goes without saying – never at the same time. It would be a simple thing to calculate how many of them have floated by since the hotel was built until the present moment. But this doesn’t mean that the narrator has watched every one. He was summoned to being along with the window outside which all these clouds have passed, along with the snows that fell from them and melted, along with the rains of former seasons. With a whole prior life, so that it doesn’t look as though he were born yesterday. Apart from the dull clouds over colorless and rumpled November mornings when everything seems unimportant, there also existfluffy ones, white as ice cream on hot summer afternoons, that stand wide open toward long, warm, brightly colored evenings; and also little luminous clouds that pass like falling petals across a wasted spring afternoon a moment before dusk. Yet the unease that prevents one from staring too long at a darkened sky must have a cause. To be safe, it would be better to block the door with a heavy armchair. Then the distance from the balcony to the chair is no greater than ten paces; the narrator crosses it unhurriedly and at the armchair turns back. When he’s once again at the halfway point there is a knock at the door. This moment is best endured in immobility. The knock may repeat; it may repeat many times. For a moment it may turn into a thunderous hammering. Is it really necessary to go into such details as the dust rising from the door frame? That which is pushed by the hands of a watch weighs nothing at all; in the end silence falls, as if there were no one on either side of the door. Silence is the natural state to which any noise must return, and from a certain point of view, on each side of the door there is in fact nobody, and the narrator ought to confess that he is aware of this. Nevertheless, a moment later receding steps are heard on the creaking stairs. It’s only now that it is possible to look calmly at the blue of denim overalls passing through the gloom in a blotch with hazy edges in ever lower regions of the field of vision – which is extremely narrow, restricted by the sides of the keyhole – and eventually disappearing without trace below its bottom rim. The narrator is not curious to knowwhat the figures wanted from him: extra attention, special privileges, an opportunity to finally remove the little girl’s photograph from the wallet, an action for which suitable conditions were not created on the previous occasion. As if the photograph were supposed to lend support to predictable complaints and claims, above which there still rises the pathetic question ‘why,’ and even worse, the importunate word ‘let,’ the latter paving the way for a frontal attack by exclamation points with excessive demands. The narrator, barricaded inside, attempts just in case to ignore the ringing telephone, too. But, tormented by its insistence, in the end he reaches for the receiver. What happens next is not as hopeless as might have been expected. A polite female voice passes on a message concerning the actions he needs immediately to undertake; that’s all. Instead of a guiding principle that would give his labors a meaning, he has to be satisfied with the promise of payment to be made in the afternoon. The instructions assume tacitly that any kind of doubt yields before the irresistible power of money.
    Determined to do his job at the lowest possible cost, the narrator sighs and sets to. From the drawer of the nightstand he takes out some scraps of paper covered in handwriting. The writing is smudged and the text illegible. Water has dissolved the glue; nevertheless, out of the fragments with their torn edges it’s possible to assemble the shape of an envelope, like a jigsaw puzzle. Stamp and franks