It all happened so stupidly, in my opinion: one moment, Powel was standing there, dusting the chalk dust off his helmet that turned his head face. and prematurely gray stiff overcoat; suddenly, a cry from a welder a few floors up, a steel beam falling, and Powel lying on the concrete, his head clearly split - segmented like a grapefruit. So stupid; it makes no sense to be shocked or appalled. You take your helmet off for five seconds and someone drops a steel beam on your head. None of us knew Powell well. I was as close a friend to him as any man on the job site and I had no strong feelings for him. He was a difficult man; he had to provoke people. He probably didn't do it deliberately, but he mistreated people. There was this time when he arrived at work with a paper bag full of Dobostorte that his wife had prepared for him. Dobostorte! The Hungarian national cake, shaped like a high-rise building, filled with chocolate cream and topped with a sort of caramel lid, a bit like an éclair and just as rich. That day, it was forty-three degrees in the shade; in the sun it must have been nearly sixty years old. In his perversity, Powel ate these cakes one by one, all day long – we bet he wouldn't be able to finish them. He shoved the cakes into his mouth, crumbs coming out of his nose and caramel and sweat running down his cheeks like plaster eyebrows that had come loose. I guess it was his favorite, he had somehow managed to coerce his wife into making Dobostorte, and he was damned if he wasn't going to eat it all. And sure enough, as the afternoon wore on, we all got tired and hungry, exhausted from the heat. After ridiculing him all day... middle of paper ... steel beam on his head. For at least another half hour, Powel's wife is not widowed, his children are not fatherless - much longer, if I can't reach them. The twins will stay home after school for a week, perhaps in the care of relatives, happy about this unexpected windfall. Then a day at church and the drive to the cemetery, and the next thing you know, Mrs. Powel has started wearing lipstick and these earrings - fake pearls, as big as teardrops crocodile. She loses a little weight, she gets her hair done - and suddenly there is a new man in the house, and the twins smear mayonnaise on her underwear. Life goes on for everyone except Powel, who didn't know what to do with it anyway. I stop dead. I'll have to go back to the construction site - I suddenly realize that on the train I lost the piece of paper with Powel's address.