God bless the Fundbüro

for Yuri 

God bless the Fundbüro, said Yuri who was named after Juri Gagarin, the cosmonaut who was the first man in space. Yuri with a Y had often – without knowing it contributed a line or inspired a thought. My mobile phone, an object I was so deeply attached to that I felt enslaved by it, had reappeared. Someone had taken it straight to the lost property office without selling it or keeping it for themselves.

There are still honest people said my godmother, and I thought of the tired woman behind the counter who handed me the phone wrapped in clear plastic and asked for my ID, even though she already had it in her hand. Honestly delighted and undoubtedly relieved, I threw a coin into the pink porcelain piggy bank that stood to the right of the counter for this purpose. Reference was made to the online auction
of unclaimed lost property. Surely it was tiring to catalogue and organise everything.

Colourful caps hung on small clothes pegs vertically around a stand. Behind the counter, rows of shelves full of abandoned treasures opened up. I imagined God 
holding a blessing hand over all this: the tired woman, the unadorned metal shelves 
and the manifold legacies of absent-minded passengers. A soft light illuminated everything minimally and emphasized the shabbiness of the abandoned objects. 

Visual aids, walking aids, memory aids. Laptops, mobile phones, umbrellas, walking sticks, items of clothing... Above all, the collection of prosthetic limbs was reminiscent of a pilgrimage church where, among the votive tablets, crutches that were no longer needed found their place.

A few days earlier, I had sung in such a pilgrimage church—under images of the Virgin Mary in various depictions of martyrs and saints. The kneeling Saint Anthony may have had something to do with my phone finding its way back to me so quickly.

I thought about the lost property report. How wonderful that one could report a loss. I decided to assign serial numbers, types and makes to my losses and describe them as accurately as possible. Perhaps then I would find out whether I really wanted the lost back. Some of my dreams, which had become fallible realities, I would gladly put up for auction. Perhaps they could be useful to someone else. I wanted to keep a few others and love them even more hopelessly precisely because of their fallibility 
and inadequate realisation.

I thought again about God and whether he was really so interested in all this that he would give his blessing to it. How did Yuri imagine this God or my godmother? As cosmonauts? As honest people? The old man with the bushy beard was surely preparing for the jobs in the run-up to Christmas. God bless our dreams. God bless our hopes and God bless our losses and delusions I prayed and left the hospitable place