living in the dark corners of cosmos

The tranquil days at Heartburn Hotel are gone.

The holidaymakers with their kids, dogs and suntans are flooding in. The workers and businessmen who have spent weeks and months in the quiet of the hotel over the winter, smoking and reading the papers and ordering their steak and beer in the evenings, grumbling pack up and leave.

Some of them stay. A few of them I never see but the computer tells me they are there somewhere, in some obscure room in a faraway derelict building. The young ex-convict, a few hardworking builders who diligently leave early in the mornings and return for an early night, a few others.

Late at night I walk through the overgrown jungle that used to be a garden on my way to lock up the sauna building for the night. A roaring fire is lit in an old fireplace at the other side, behind the trees, and an old man with snow-white hair and beard is sitting there quietly staring into the flames. It is a peaceful sight. He is there almost every night. His days he spends cleaning the hundreds of windows of the hotel, a task to which he seems to dedicate his heart.

Except for his threadbare clothes, he looks like Santa Claus. Maybe he is.