But Herr Munin (though it could just as well have been Herr Hugin) immediately walked off, disappearing among a group of Japanese tourists, who had just alighted from an pleasure boat.
He returned to his table, deleted the unsent text message, swallowed his sandwich, paid and set off along Wühre and up to the old town. It was noon, and the bells began to ring from several churches. He had no trouble reaching the small square where, on the façade of the two-storey toy shop, he could see the familiar sign saying Franz Carl Weber, with the company logo – a rocking horse, and the date of its foundation – 1881. On the ground floor there were lots of departments which did not arouse his interest. Hundreds of computer games, and squeezed in among them here and there, Barbie dolls or their relatives – that was really all. He roamed about in this labyrinth, unsure what to do next. Finally he came upon a sales assistant. His white shirt, black trousers and waistcoat betrayed a hesitant kinship with the elegance of former years.
‘Excuse me, please, ’ he asked. ‘Are there any electric railway sets here?’
‘What’s that?’ The young man hadn’t heard properly, or hadn’t understood his German.
‘Model trains. Locomotives, carriages, signals, stations.’
The assistant was surprised.
‘Do you mean a computer game? A railway one? We haven’t anything like that. There’s only Murder on the Orient Express. Interested?’
‘No, that’s not it. An electric railway set, dear sir. Models. Miniature, perfect replicas. Made by Märklin, for example. They travel on tracks like real ones. Have you got any like that?’
‘Yes,’ replied the young man after some thought. ‘Please go upstairs and ask the manager. I’ve only been working here for a month,’ he said, smiling disarmingly.
A moving staircase silently carried him upwards. But even here, among pyramids of Lego bricks, space stations from the Star Wars era and all possible mutants and cousins of the Matrix, he couldn’t find a single railway set. He also spent a long time looking for anyone who might be able to provide information. Finally, from behind a stack of colourful boxes, a young girl emerged, dressed the same way as the assistant on the ground floor.
‘May I help you?’ she asked.
‘I’m looking for trains, Märklin models. The kind powered by electricity. Have you got anything like that?’
‘Please go to the far end of the floor. There should be something on the left hand side, by the window.’
But it wasn’t quite so obvious at all. For a few minutes he searched for the right department, until finally, behind yet another pyramid of remote-controlled racing cars, he found a dusty display case, in which there was a short track laid out in a figure of eight. On it stood a locomotive with three little carriages. For some time he inspected the exotic train. The model locomotive represented a type of steam engine from the late 1950s, still manufactured in those days in Germany. Each of the carriages belonged to a completely different decade. Here a flatcar from the 1920s kept company with an entirely modern refrigerator car and an old-fashioned passenger coach with a long row of little doors down both sides.
‘Would you like to buy it?’ he heard the sales assistant say behind him.
‘Are there any other models?’ he asked in a hopeful tone.
‘That’s the last one. Trains aren’t fashionable these days.’
‘No. I was thinking of the Geneva to Biarritz express or something like it.’
‘In that case you should look on the internet. There are collectors who have their own special sites. Do you want an address?’
‘No thank you,’ he replied. ‘Maybe next time.’
As he was leaving Franz Carl Weber’s toy store, he didn’t even look behind him to say goodbye to the rather old-fashioned letters on the shop sign, which had, after all, brought a few moments of real happiness into his childhood on the cold sea coast. Suddenly he started thinking about his father: had he made the purchase after winning on the lottery, or had the present been the fruit of profound and numerous sacrifices on his part? As far as he still remembered anything, his father’s character would be more indicative of the second possibility. If he could imagine it, the decision to buy a ticket had probably occurred to him earlier, in the first few days of his stay, as he read an advertisement for the lottery in the window of one of the tobacco shops, but with an extremely modest sum of money at his disposal, with every last penny accounted for, he must have thought he might take a gamble shortly before leaving, and then only if he turned out to have a little change left. It must have been just like that: he had counted every franc so that he would have enough for the Märklin carriages, both locomotives, a good supply of track, and also the points and signals. If he had bought a lottery ticket earlier, this purchase would have been improbable, or in any case much more modest. After all, he couldn’t possibly have assumed he would win anything, and only then buy them this unusual present.
As he waited a dreadfully long time for the sluggish waiter at the hotel restaurant, he tried to imagine his father’s tall, slightly stooping figure entering Franz Carl Weber’s toy store, only about forty metres away from here. First he must have taken in the sight of dozens of trains speeding around several enormous model landscapes that filled the greater part of the ground floor. Then, after lengthy observations and calculations, with the catalogue in hand, he must have eventually chosen suitable models and asked for them to be shown to him properly, until finally there came the packing stage and a visit to the cash register – which in those days was still mechanical, with a crank handle, making that part of the store look like a shop out of Dickens.
His father is very pleased, even though sleet has been falling on Bahnhofstrasse for several minutes and a bitterly cold wind is blowing. He presses his hat more firmly onto his head, turns up the collar of his old raincoat, carefully knots his scarf and sets off in the direction of the station with two enormous packages under his left and right arms. But moments later, literally after only fifteen metres, he turns around and goes back past the liveried doorman and into the toy shop again. ‘What’s the matter?’ asks the senior sales assistant. ‘Is there something wrong?’
‘Not at all, everything’s fine,’ replies his father, putting his parcels down on a counter top. ‘I just wanted to ask for your mail-order catalogue, because you see, it occurred to me that I might order something else, from home, from Poland.’
‘Of course,’ says the senior sales assistant, handing him a fat book in soft, shiny covers, similar in shape to a school exercise book. ‘It costs fifty francs,’ he says, and watches the customer open his coin purse and count out the requested sum in twenty and ten centime coins; he is exactly five centimes short, so the senior sales assistant waits calmly. Meanwhile a train ticket falls out of the purse, the receipt for the toys bought a little earlier, a dry cleaning ticket for a jacket, but not the missing five centimes – because his father simply hasn’t got it. The banknote lying at the bottom of his wallet is absolutely not to be touched: it must last him for the final two days.
‘What kind of a salesman am I?’ says the senior sales assistant, picking up the company receipt from the floor and handing it to his father. ‘Anyone who makes a purchase worth more than fifty francs receives the catalogue for free. Here you are, sir,’ he says, handing him the book, ‘you spent several times that sum,’ and helps him to pick up his parcels from the counter. ‘Happy Christmas!’
‘Happy Christmas,’ replies his father, and heads towards the station at a faster pace than before, because the train to Winterthur is leaving from platform two in just under fifteen minutes – Happy Christmas – he repeats to himself now, under his breath, in Polish, as he buys a lottery ticket at the station tobacco shop, splitting that final banknote in the process, which he should only have split the next day – Happy Christmas.