Having exuded a noticeable smell for hours now, my uncle heads off on his eight-minute journey home with a certain sense of importance. He feels this sense of importance because he has been to work, a completely normal working day, he earns his money just like everyone else and is practically a civil servant, he could almost wear a uniform, and if he were to go to the postal depot in Bad Nauheim he would feel like he’s amongst colleagues, and would long to talk shop with them (which, admittedly, the postal workers in Bad Nauheim would never have understood, not realising that he worked in a postal depot too). And also because, for today, he has earned what is about to come, in other words his evening off, in an orderly and exemplary and proper fashion. And his mother will be content (He wasn’t in the Kaiserstrasse district, after all! Or maybe he was, but just very briefly, in and out in a matter of moments, and no one knows about that anyway, even he has already forgotten about it, as if it never happened. And did it really?). Isn’t that how his father came back from work too? Proud, that’s the way to come home from work, with your head held high. The day’s work is done. Just like the mountain rescue team coming home from the mountain. And now he’s heading home. They’re expecting him. He who works has someone waiting for him at home. He strides towards Uhlandstrasse, all manner of things on his mind, imagining his life to be successful and normal and exemplary and, just like every day as he makes his way home from his shift, enamoured by the fact that he’s making his way home from his shift. All the way from Frankfurt, where thousands stream past him on a daily basis, unoccupied, and yet he has his job and his function. Everything needs to work properly, and it does. Everything in its place, including him. The time back before the family sent him to Frankfurt, that’s long forgotten now. Uncle J, an individual with a function and purpose, just like anyone else. That’s what I imagine him to be thinking as he strides home.