The Snowflake Collector – 3: 'I Need to Know How to Collect Snowflakes'

While he knew well how to craft wooden cases, and for these wooden cases build sturdy boxes and for the sturdy boxes – many as there would be – construct a formidable shed, and had the tools in his hut and the fir trees on his land by the stream to make all this, and while he also possessed an old diamond glass cutter and knew where to find good flat solid glass which to cut into precisely dimensioned plates of three inches by one, over time in very large numbers, The Snowflake Collector did not know how to collect snowflakes.

He had never before given any thought to the possibility that he might one day determine to collect snowflakes and thus become The Snowflake Collector, but now that he had done so – as certain and as irrevocable as if it had been set in stone, and yet, of course, from a wider, much longer perspective, as transient too – he felt compelled to research the matter, in detail.

It would have appealed to his great sense of distance and isolated remoteness, which he so had sought out and which he so cherished, to undertake a long journey into the valley and from there take the yellow bus to the very small town and from there take a little red train to the nearest small city and from there a bigger and faster and greener or whiter train to the bigger (though still fairly small) city and there go to the large stately library kept by the university and ask the bespectacled and certainly not hostile but perhaps slightly weary librarian for a book on Snowflake Collecting, but he also felt and knew that that was an unnecessary and therefore wasteful exertion and an excursion that entailed the expense of time and resources, and while he did not believe that time was something that could really be expended any more than it could be kept in a jar, he nevertheless found the whim that propelled him from his valley and into the big (though not very big) city to be overpowered, readily, easily, by the comfort and safety of his mountains.

So, instead, he walked down to the inn, an hour or so from his hut, in the outpost hamlet some few miles from the village and there he was greeted with a smile by Yolanda, the waitress from the Ukraine. Yolanda had come from the Ukraine to find work here as a waitress and she liked the landlord, because the landlord was not interested in her, he mostly spent time with his mostly young friends. Like everyone else, Yolanda knew The Snowflake Collector, although she, like everyone else, did not know yet that that’s who he was. She greeted him and started pulling a dark ale for him because in all the years she'd known (or thought that she’d known) him (for nobody really knew him at all), he had never wanted anything other than a dark ale from the tap.

‘Is Yanosh around?’ he asked her, having thanked her, as she brought the heavy beaker over to him, at the table in the corner with a small view out of the square window onto the very brown cows in the distance on some meadow.

‘He is, I can call him for you if you like?’

‘When he's not busy.’

He knew that Yanosh would not be busy now, because Yanosh was Yolanda’s son of about fifteen and he didn’t like his peers down in the village too much, so he mainly kept himself to himself in his room, playing games on the computer or writing songs which he never played to anyone, or fantasising about travelling back in time or forward, or being naked with an actress he recently started to fancy.

Yanosh came down directly when his mother asked him if he would, because he liked The Snowflake Collector, and although he didn’t know yet that that’s who he was either, he, unlike almost anyone else in the world, sensed that he did know him a bit. They both knew each other, a bit. And they liked each other for knowing each other a bit, but not more, and for mainly leaving each other alone but when necessary being able to spend time in each other’s company without ever having to say a word or do anything.

Sometimes, when he felt particularly bored or lonely or uncertain why he was even here, or just wanted to be out of his room, but not anywhere where there were people, but also not anywhere where there were none, Yanosh would stomp up that same path that The Snowflake Collector had just come down now, and simply sit outside his hut, in the sun, or if there was no sun, then in the rain. It didn’t matter to Yanosh whether there was sunshine or rain, or no rain but clouds: he liked sitting outside The Snowflake Collector’s hut, because here he could sit in absolute peace and with no demands being made on him, and simply watch the world go by, which it didn't, up here, because up here, the world stood pretty much still; but Yanosh, much as The Snowflake Collector, knew of course that nothing stood still, that everything was in motion, always, and while Yanosh did not find this either disconcerting or comforting – he had little need, in his life, yet, for disconcertion or comfort – he nevertheless found it soothing, and sometimes The Snowflake Collector would already be sitting there too and they would nod at each other and perhaps even mutter ‘hello’, though with hardly any tone to their voice at all, and then sit there, and sometimes The Snowflake Collector would not be around but would find him there and join him and they would similarly nod at each other or, not expending any unnecessary breath on words, perhaps mutter ‘hello’, perhaps not even that, but sit there in great silence, which they both so greatly appreciated, Yanosh quite as much as The Snowflake Collector.

Over the years that Yanosh had come to sit with The Snowflake Collector, there would have been the occasional conversation, sometimes perhaps inside the hut, over a glass of Chrüterschnapps or with a slice of Bündnerfleisch, and so The Snowflake Collector knew that if he ever was in need of any information at all, the person to ask was Yanosh, because Yanosh spent most of his waking hours – when he wasn't sitting with him here in front of his hut or in his very small kitchen – on his smartphone or his computer and he therefore had access, any time night or day, to all the knowledge in the world, if perhaps not all its wisdom.

Yanosh sat down and they nodded at each other their familiar nod that did not demand any words and The Snowflake Collector said, to the querying glance of the youth, who in spite of his pain never once betrayed any sorrow:

‘I need to know how to collect snowflakes.’

Listen to The Snowflake Collector