It was five seventeen in the morning. November's chill crept through the cracked attic-windowpanes and settled on Jan's skin, like the damp hands of a stranger. Outside, the fine night rain had turned Berggasse's cobblestones into an oily black mirror that occasionally fractured the reflection of naked trees as the wind stirred them. Jan lay on his cold metal bed, staring at cracks in the ceiling, twisted lines that formed the shape of a crying face. From downstairs came his mother's cough: dry and hollow, like two pieces of wood knocking in an empty room.
He slipped off the blanket. The wooden floor groaned under his feet. He let his hand slide over the old radio by his bed, the object his father had left behind before disappearing in 1997, but he did not turn it on. Instead, he moved toward the window and traced away the fog on the glass with his fingertip. Through the mist, the silhouette of Saint Peter's Church loomed in the distance, its spires like two rusted daggers pointing skyward.
The kitchen tap water ran brown. Jan held his glass under the faucet for a minute so sediment would sink. On the kitchen table, his mother's pills were laid out in order of dosage: morphine at seven in the morning, codeine at eleven, methadone at five in the afternoon. With trembling hands, he carried the glass into the bedroom. His mother lay on the bed, eyes closed, but her rapid, sharp breaths betrayed that she was awake.
He placed the glass on the bedside table.
"How are you today?"
Eva opened her eyes. Her pupils dilated, two dark holes that swallowed all light.
"Yesterday... the new nurse came." Her voice rustled like sandpaper. "From the New‑Auden Foundation. She asked if you... can take care of Liza."
Jan pulled a cloth from his pocket and wiped a droplet of saliva from the corner of his mother's lip.
"I can."
"Don't lie." Mother looked at him. "You're eighteen. You can't even pay the electricity bill."
Outside, two neighbors whispered as they prepared their herbs for the market. The scent of chopped cilantro drifted in beneath the door. The Hauptstraße was full of people now. Jan passed the old second‑hand bookshop Fonderin. In its window, leather volumes of Freedom and the Meaninglessness of the World gathered dust beside yellow tabloids featuring a man in a strange mask. Jan didn't even glance back.
The café Goldlauber smelled of burnt coffee and sour milk. Behind the counter, a middle‑aged woman with tightly braided hair washed cups. Jan sat at the far end of the room. A man in a gray coat by the window read the paper: "New‑Auden Foundation Opens a New Center in Heidelberg." The woman behind the counter approached.
"The usual?"
"Yeah. With a little sugar."
The weak, watery coffee came in three sips, and Jan pushed the coins, biting the fabric of his pocket, onto the table.
The social services office in Heidelberg occupied the old town‑hall building. The marble steps were worn down in the middle, centuries of footsteps. At desk number four, a bespectacled woman flipped through files.
„Lizabeth Schultz? Eight years old?"
"Yeah."
The woman glanced at the file.
„The New‑Auden Foundation is your best option. Educational, medical, even…" She tapped the paper with her pen, „artistic programs."
Jan looked out the window. Rain had begun again, streaking long lines down the window like tears.
„When... does she have to go?"
The woman handed him a sheet of paper:
„Tomorrow at nine in the morning. Her personal belongings should go with her."
A few hours later, the house smelled of cabbage soup, always the one thing Jan knew how to make. Liza sat on the floor, lining up her plastic dolls.
"Why are you waking me up so early tomorrow?"
Jan stirred the soup with a spoon.
"We're going somewhere new."
"Is it a school?"
"Something like that."
Liza snapped one of her dolls' legs.
"Isn't Mom coming with us?"
Jan shook his head. Across the room, the dim dawn light fell on a family photo placed on the wardrobe, taken at Christmas in 1996, when their father still lived with them. It was two minutes before midnight; Jan had been wide awake. Liza slept in her bed, clutching her doll. Moonlight fell across a poster for New‑Auden pasted on the opposite wall:
"A place for a brighter future."
Jan turned off the light.
That morning, Heidelberg smelled of damp stone and rotting leaves. Jan tightly clasped Liza's hand, her small fingers reddened where his grasp pressed down. They passed beside the river, its dark waters carrying broken branches and leaves, as if the river itself selected its victims. Liza held her blue umbrella overhead, but the rain came at them from every angle.
"What's it like there?" she asked, her voice lost beneath the sound of rain. Jan stared at a white building down the street. New‑Auden looked like an old school, with tall windows guarded by black bars. Above the entrance a small angel statue, the face cracked, one eye broken, was affixed.
"Like a dormitory." He lied. "With lots of kids your age."
Inside the entry hall, the sharp smell of disinfectant stung his nose, the acrid bite of bleach that scorched the throat. The pale green walls, once cheerful, now dulled beneath layers of dust, approaching gray. Behind the reception desk, a woman with her hair pulled into a tight braid sat without looking at them, pushing forms across the desk.
"Name?"
"Lizabeth Schultz."
Without speaking, the woman checked off something chained to her pen.
"She'll be in room fourteen. Put her belongings there."
A long corridor led down to the rooms. Children's drawings lined the walls, green, trees, yellow suns, families holding hands, but the colors had faded, as though someone had intentionally ruined them. Some had faces crossed out. The small room number fourteen had two single beds and a barred window. The little girl on the other bed sat staring at the wall. When they entered, she didn't even turn her head. Liza clutched her doll tightly.
"Can I come home tomorrow?" she asked softly. The stern woman stood behind them.
"We have posted the rules on the door: meals, sleep, visits." Her voice was monotone, mechanical. "Visits are only once a month."
Jan knelt down and kissed Liza on her forehead. He smelled the child‑shampoo scent in her hair, that familiar scent that lingered each night on the family pillow.
"I'll come back soon."
Another lie added to his unending list.
When the door to New‑Auden closed behind him, the rain had stopped. Heidelberg was still damp. Jan headed home, but his feet carried him to Café Goldlauber again.
Behind the counter, Emilia cleaned glasses. She had pulled her black hair into a ponytail today, and wore a silver bracelet on her left wrist that jingled softly with each movement.
"I've seen your face before." She said it without waiting for his order. A steaming cup of coffee appeared in front of him. "That's how people look when they bury someone they loved."
Jan stared at the cup. Steam brushed against his face like the short breath of a living thing.
"I didn't bury her." He said. "I just... left her somewhere."
Emilia tossed a rag onto the counter.
„Heidelberg is full of places like that. Most of us have left parts of ourselves behind."
A man at the back of the café folded up his paper. Emilia spoke loudly:
„Today it's on the house." She slid the paper aside to keep it out of his view.
A month passed. Jan now moved between three places: home, where his mother lay lost among pills; the refinery, whose black fumes burned his lungs; and New‑Auden, where each time he saw Liza, she seemed a little quieter. Sundays were visiting hours. He sat on the same cold metal bench in the courtyard of New‑Auden, watching Liza draw with a stubby pencil on paper. The girl no longer asked about home. That night fine autumn rain began again. Jan came off his night shift at the refinery, and the reflections of the Duncanstraße streetlamps shimmered on the puddles of the sidewalk. He wanted to go straight home, but a crowd headed toward Karl‑z‑Platz drew his attention like ants toward sugar. At the marble steps of the old city theatre, a man in a black suit handed out flyers:
"Free admission! Don't miss tonight's message!"
Jan resisted, but his feet led him inside. The theatre reeked of velvet curtains past their prime and perfumed people who never sat in cheap seats. Crystal chandeliers cast fractured shadows on carved walls. As the seats filled, women wearing pearl necklaces, men in watches, students with notebooks open, all waited in silence. Then the lights went out. Only a sharp white beam illuminated the stage. He stepped from the darkness. His mask combined angel and demon features, reflecting light and assaulting the eyes. His long gray coat swept the floor, as though he belonged to the darkness itself. As he moved, the fabric rustled like crow wings. He stood nearly six foot four, with the voice of a fifty‑eight year old.
"You... heirs to broken histories,
you whose fathers died in muddy boots on battlefields, yet you live in dorms with clean shoes;
you who think freedom is bought with ballots;
you who fear death, though you have never learned to live...
Yes, I speak to you:
Liberation is ruin."
Then his voice fell silent, not as a sign of closing remarks, but as a quiet signature pressed upon their chests.
"I am not here to save you, for salvation is a myth the weak weave for survival. And you... children of the mute century... how long will you cling to the dream of deliverance? In a world whose gods are dead and whose heroes are buried in advertisements, your savior is the mirror you long to flee."
"You paint the world like a child, bright colors, void of depth or darkness. Virtue is a name you pin on inaction, so your dead conscience won't rest. You judge from between two lines drawn in your decaying mind, oblivious that truth respects no geometry."
"You shout freedom, while still wearing the chains in your sleeves. And whenever freedom comes at the cost of suffering, you trade it for pleasure and smile, because you are not free, only choosing your own cage."
"Your civilization is a ruin built with stones of terror. Knowledge is an ancient temple of doubt, not certainty. Faith is the last refuge of those who shut their eyes to truth, fastening themselves to the counterfeit peace found in the silence of cemeteries."
"Do not regard me as your enemy. I am the light that seeps from the depths of night, not for warmth, but to reflect your ugly face back to you. I am the fire that breathes into your bones so that you may know you are alive, and there is still a chance to burn; not for immortality, but for the instant recognition of existence."
"You treat history as popular novels, pages of false heroism with endings made to let you sleep soundly at night. But I, I have come to awaken you."
"If you weep, it is not for the loss of innocence, but for awareness, which, like a sweet poison, flows through your blood and has no return. I am the bearer of not a promise of heaven, but a promise of awareness. And awareness is humanity's hardest torment."
"So if you cannot bear it, depart me, for I have come not to answer, but to plant within your soul questions that have no answers."
"Have you ever thought..." his voice sharpened like a blade scraping skin, "why you are alive?"
Even breathing stopped audible. He extended gloved hands toward the audience. "You are alive because I allowed it." The stage light flickered softer. His shadow on the wall behind him stretched three times his size.
"Civilization is a lie, and your gods..." he tilted his head. "...they are all dead."
The crowd gasped and panted. A woman in the front row covered her mouth.
"I have come to release the world from this pointless suffering. I do not wish to save you. I do not wish to waste the world's time. When death calls you, only then will you understand the meaning of death and suffering."
Behind the mask, if eyes actually existed there, they fixed on each spectator. "You worthless, vile wretches." Then the lights went completely out. When they returned, the stage was empty.
Jan rose and fled the theatre through the startled murmurs of the audience:
"Spectacular..."
"Profound speech..."
"Revolution in philosophy..."
"I always knew Nimbus was wise. Even if he insults us, we love him."
He slipped past them, ran down the theatre steps, and vomited in the dark street in front of Café Goldlauber. Emilia stood behind the counter. When she saw him, without a word she brought a wet cloth and a glass of water.
"Everyone reacts like that the first time they see him." she said.
Jan looked at the cloth. Spots of blood mixed with vomit showed.
Now December's cold had seeped through New‑Auden's broken windows and rested on Jan's skin like invisible stings. He sat on that same old metal bench in the courtyard, hands buried in his worn coat pockets. His breaths turned into small clouds that faded in the icy air. Liza came, wearing New‑Auden's gray uniform coat, far too large, sleeves gathered around her small fingers. Her hair had lost its neat blue ribbon and now fell tangled across her shoulders. Her shoes were muddy, as though no one cared to clean them.
She sat beside Jan on the bench. A bird landed on the branch of a withered tree in the courtyard. It fluttered its wings, looked, then flew off.
"How is Mom?"
Liza's voice was small, like something echoing from the bottom of a deep well. Jan looked at his hands. The skin on his fingertips had cracked from working at the refinery, black lines of oil lodged in the fissures, like a permanent tattoo of poverty.
"Same as before."
"Does she hurt?"
"Always hurts."
Liza swung her little legs, her shoes tapping the bench: tap, tap.
"It's... cold here at night."
Jan closed his eyes. He saw a row of metal beds in the New‑Auden dormitory, barred windows, cracked glass.
"Do you need more blankets?"
Liza shrugged.
"Sometimes."
From the main building came the lunch bell. A woman in a white coat stepped out and glanced at them. Liza got up. Her oversized coat dragged across the ground.
"I have to go."
"Wait."
Jan searched in his pocket. He pulled out a pack of gum, peppermint, her favorite brand. He handed it to her small hand. Liza looked at the gum package, then at Jan.
"Will... our mother die?"
The air held still for a moment, even the birds fell silent. Jan raised his hand. He aimed to smooth Liza's hair like he used to, but his hand stopped halfway.
"I can't say."
Liza slipped the gum into her pocket. She turned and walked toward the building. Her oversized coat trailed on the ground, and her small footprints pressed into the melting snow. A nurse arrived.
"Sir, please hurry. If they find out you've been here a second time in one month, it could cause trouble for me."
"Okay. Okay. I'm going now. Goodbye, Liza."
"Goodbye, Jan."
The Rhein‑Heidelberg refinery in the pre‑dawn darkness looked like the skeleton of an industrial demon. Gigantic smokestacks rose above the horizon as pillars bearing a black sky. The scent of sulfur and heavy hydrocarbons hung in the air, so that each breath tasted of crude oil. Jan showed his ID card to the shift guard. The sunburnt-faced guard grumbled under his breath:
"Shift D, distillation line three. Check the high‑pressure valves today."
The crude‑oil distillation unit was where chemistry met hell. One‑meter‑diameter steel tubes coiled from sixty‑meter towers. Hot steam hissed at twenty‑bar pressure from fittings, sounding like a giant's cry.
"Schultz! Read the gauges on line C3!" shouted Jürgen, the shift foreman in a yellow hard hat.
Jan approached the central control panel. The Bourdon tubes' needles oscillated near the red zone.
"Forty‑seven bar on the heat exchangers! Above design limit!"
Jürgen hammered the main pipe.
"Coking is starting! Open the bypass valve!"
The catalytic cracker was forming coke deposits, black residue clinging like cancer to the reactor walls. Jan tightened his asbestos gloves and walked to the high‑pressure butterfly valve. The metal was hot, burning even through the gloves.
"Hydrogen sulfide levels have spiked in the hydrogenation unit! Put on your masks!" yelled Ralf, the veteran worker.
Hydrogen sulfide, colorless, deadly. Two deep breaths could stop a lung. Jan fixed his acid‑resistant mask to his face. A smell of burnt rubber filled the mask. At 10:30 AM, a small explosion occurred.
In the isomerization unit, a transfer line carrying heavy naphtha ruptured. Hot liquid at 300 °C sprayed onto the concrete like molten lava.
The SCAPE siren blared. Jan ran toward the explosion‑proof shelter. Behind him, Kourt shouted:
"Turn off the circulation pump! Thank God the flame arrestors held, we'd all be airborne otherwise!"
When his shift finally ended, Jan stood under a stinging cold shower. Water poured down his body and onto the cracked tiles, black and slick, like crude oil. Jürgen smoked nearby:
"Tomorrow will be the same. I just hope the flare stack works today. Yesterday they released acid gases into the atmosphere."
Jan looked at his hands, no matter how many times he scrubbed them with industrial degreaser, the black oil lines beneath his nails remained, like a permanent poverty tattoo.
Under moonlit Duncanstraße, a road of shadows stretched out. Jan stepped off the refinery grounds, his spine bowed from fourteen hours of smoke and fire. The smell of gasoline and sulfur had settled into his worn work clothes, unremovable even by rain. Midway home, the warm glow of his grandfather's store shone like an island in the darkness. The old wooden shop window was filled with rusted cans of paint and second‑hand tools. The door's bell chimed as he entered.
Grandfather Erich stood behind the counter, cleaning an antique double‑sided saw. His pebble‑glasses rested on his nose, neon light accentuating deep wrinkles.
"I thought you wouldn't come today." His voice crackled like autumn leaves.
"My shift ended early." A familiar lie.
Erich set the saw aside and pulled a local beer bottle from underneath the counter:
"I saved this for you. It comes from the new brewery, they say it's made with mountain hops."
The shop smelled of old wood and varnish. Walnut shelves held things the world no longer needed: ivory-handled screwdrivers, broken cuckoo clocks, even a 1930s gramophone. Jan helped stack the bottles while his grandfather flipped through the account book.
"They raised the heritage‑store tax again. You know what that means? Nobody wants things that can be repaired anymore... everything is disposable."
A black cat's shadow flickered behind the display. Erich glanced at the wall clock:
"You should go to your mother. The new nurse came today, young woman... quiet."
At their home the air smelled of barley soup and disinfectant. The nurse, a slender woman with braided hair, sat next to the bed changing his mother's IV. When Jan entered, she only nodded before walking away. Eva looked smaller than ever lying there. Her hands, once capable of playing piano, now looked like dry branches. She opened her eyes.
"Liza… how was she today?"
Jan picked up the bottle of pain medication and glanced toward the light. The thick red liquid spun in the glass, viscous like blood.
"She was quiet. She was drawing."
His mother raised a trembling hand, a familiar movement. She tried to reach his hair like when he was a child but stopped again midway. Jan gently lowered his head until his hair came close enough to her hand.
"Do you hurt?"
Eva inhaled deeply, her breath rustling like tearing paper.
"No... today is okay."
She was lying. Because she always hurt.