It's after hours at work and the phone rings in a nearby office. Who's phoning after hours? Don't they know what time it is? Don't they know that I'm the only one left in the building and I'm not running to answer somebody else's calls? Okay, they probably don't know that. Nonetheless I'm infuriated by the sound of that phone. I'm not going to answer it. I clear my mind and focus on a calming image, which in my case is a cream-coloured linen shirt, freshly ironed but artfully wrinkled, with a little brown stain on the cuff. The shirt hangs on a rack in a drycleaner's. Puffs of steam burst up from the commercial irons. A hand reaches out, plucks the shirt off the rack, affixes a beige tag with the "Could not remove certain stains" box checked in pink pencil, slips a filmy plastic slip over it, throws it back on the rack. A Jewish family that emigrated in the early years of the Reich started this business in 1937. They had nothing but a few clothes and a suitcase stuffed with old newspapers when they arrived, but they managed to get a bit of property and some second-hand drycleaning equipment. They built it up into three drycleaning locations around the city: Fleischmann's Fine Drycleaning, est. 1937. And now it's all over. That linen shirt is the last item of clothing that Fleischmann's will ever clean. Martha Braun, née Fleischmann, looks at the circular brown stain on the linen cuff and silently files it away as an emblem of their failure to compete with One Hour Martinizing.

Damn, that phone's ringing again. Who are these people? Do they just not want to talk to anyone?

parode - exode