Gottesweg

I had seen him before, a few weeks ago, on the tram home. Now he was sitting at my tramstop – alone in the open glass cabin – twitching nervously. He was waiting for the same tram as me. I remembered his ever-twitching body that couldn’t rest even for a few seconds, as his head would suddenly fall on his chest or his arm would quickly rise above his shoulder. The abrupt yet constant movement was of involuntary nature and seemed as if a merciless puppet master was randomly pulling at the strings attached to his fingers, elbows, head and torso in intervals of a few seconds and the poor creature had simply given up resistance and hung like a defeated towel in the hands of a greater power.
As I stood next to him, something else came back to my memory, stimulated by its intense and definitely un-ignorable presence in the air: his revolting smell. It was a complete mystery to me: how could anyone smell so horrendously bad? Where did this smell come from? Last time I saw him, he looked significantly dirtier – now his hair seemed washed, his clothes showed no visible stains and his jeans even looked new. One had to imagine an insidious mixture of matured, concentrated urine, fermented eggs and some kind of sulphurous gas, so odious was the stench.

[I just want to emphasise that I am by no means exaggerating for poetical value or anything – I have never smelled such a repulsive aroma in my whole life – not at the many waste water treatment stations I visited recently, neither in the dirty backstreets of Bombay slums, nor in the waste dumps all around Cairo.]

How could the beautiful element air carry such an abhorrent scent at such potency so far from its source? One could hardly stand within about three meters of the man in the open. When we sat inside the tram, you could see how one after another, everyone in the wagon would either lift their nose in disgust (and almost disbelief) or express the latter to their neighbour, as his stench slowly filled the room.

Poor him.
He reminded me of religious stories, where God comes in the shape of a beggar to your door and you just shout at him and slam the door in his face. Might this smelly sod be God in disquise?