The ragged felt doll, hanged on a decrepit wall of the storeroom, kept some of its colors despite the passing time. The green of its jacket was almost worn out, but the red of its buttons and the blue of its trousers were still shining. I quietly closed the door of the semi obscure room.
I wanted to buy that house. I liked the intricate patterns of the lawn, and the nice neighborhood.
The house intrigued me. I asked the landlord to tell me its story. The house belonged to a waste collector who found a fortune in a trash bin. He bought the house and moved here with his girl and his wife.
After a while, his wife got ill and died. He was a very religious man and thought that he was punished by God for not having returned the money he found. He sold the house only to buy a ticket for him and his child and fled the town.
The landlord forgot the name of the town where the waste collector moved in but in the evening I received a call from him. He remembered the town.
It was a small town to the north, cold and empty like a place between heaven and hell, where one could only live to get his redemption. Old, gray buildings, shadows of children, smell of garbage and icy rain and long narrow streets peculiarly peaceful.
The next Sunday I got to the church. There was a church near the house, made of stone, with a red steeple and moss on roofs.
I was never a church goer until then. I stepped inside the church and I heard the priest delivering his sermon „the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field”.
On my road home I understood that the treasure hidden in the field of the distant town was the waste collector’s faith that he discovered again. He gave away the house and got his real fortune back.
I have never bought the house of the waste collector. Sometimes I pass by the house on Sundays, that’s all.