Berlin – Doing good is a good thing, not only at the end of the year, but especially there. At least this year, because the holidays and the time afterwards have been cold. Real winter, sometimes with freezing cold, with ice flowers on window panes, with frozen puddles. The temperature fell below zero for days. Which some are no longer used to because of the many mild winters.
A woman and her brother-in-law were out for a walk at dusk. They saw a man sitting at a bus stop with his head bowed. The sky was cloudless and the ground was frozen. The man had obviously been there a long time. He was drunk and deeply asleep.
In such cases there are two problems at the same time: the man is a man – and he is drunk. Men usually get physical much faster and some tend to be openly aggressive when they are drunk. Therefore, the willingness to help decreases significantly when a helpless man is very drunk. It is always a game of poker whether he endures the help or whether his fists fly.
But the woman didn’t want to pretend that she hadn’t recognized the man’s plight. It was just too cold not to help. And soon it would be dark.
The woman tapped the drunk man on the shoulder and said loudly: “You mustn’t sleep here, otherwise you will freeze to death.” The man mumbled a little but didn’t want to wake up. The brother-in-law pointed to a poster at the bus stop that actually advertised the cold help. They called there, but no one answered.
So they dialed 911. A woman was on the phone asking them to find a six-digit number at the bottom of the bus stop’s timetable – an identification number that the paramedics would use to know where help was needed.
The two guarded the drunk. He was dressed normally and certainly not a homeless person, so not a professional in dealing with a lot of alcohol in freezing temperatures, but someone for whom the Christmas days had probably not been too contemplative and who had preferred to get drunk afterwards. The woman pulled her narrow blue gloves over his icy fingers.
Then rescue came and the two of them could go. The woman gave the drunk her gloves. She briefly worried about whether the man could have had Corona. Then her pride grew that as a woman she had overcome her usual shyness of drunk men in order to save this drunk man’s life.
“He looked deeply unhappy,” she said. “Who knows what went wrong on the holidays.”
.