The heat, the heat, the unbearable heat.
Beads of perspiration trickle down his forehead, making a short detour on the
wrinkles around his eyes before moving on along their journeys down his face.
He resists the urge to wipe them away, feels an empty sense of accomplishment
in that. He looks up, sees the neverending stream of
traffic that passes him by. This verkehr in the midst of the
The sun creeps out from behind its hiding place in the
clouds, that coward, and radiates all
the more strongly. That
tyrant. He looks at the waving branches of lush trees that line the
road, then notices that the breeze causing that
movement is barely noticeable to him. He laughs a caustic laugh, and ponders
about his extremely low heat threshold. He then realises that it is no natural
breeze that blows; no, the intermittent breeze is the result of car after car,
van after van, lorry after lorry, bus after bus, speeding past at high
velocities leaving him behind in their wakes. My wake. He longs for the ability
to emulate their speed, even the routineness with
which they stick to their lanes and their own proper roles in society.
Their positions in the verkehr. That
word again, he notes. Is it possible to move out of that traffic? He sees the
fourth cycle of 153 passing him, calculates that this probably means he’s been
here for 45 minutes. Isn’t this being one of the outside-traffic? He notes with
a little wistfulness that this position would be untenable for long. Within
minutes he would be swept up in that verkehr again, and
rejoin the masses as yet another unidentifiable face.
1252hrs gmt +8