WAS BLEIBT What Remanis is not about who died. It's about who stayed to watch. Snow covers everything but not guilt. The coat is the only warm color in a blue world. Keep it minimal. One lie, repeated for two nights, becomes a life.
The café had fallen quiet when I turned to leave. The night was piercingly cold. Beyond Hamburg’s old Speicherstadt warehouses, wind cut straight to the bone. I drew my black wool coat tight, hands buried deep in pockets, a half-smoked cigarette still caught between my lips. Above, gray clouds churned wild over red-tiled rooftops. Nearly two in the morning.
An uncanny stillness hung over the streets. Only the distant blast of a ferry horn, and ambulance sirens ricocheting through narrow canals. Warehouse walls rose high, hemming in the sky. From Reeperbahn, the weary trundled home. And I — faced a three-hour train ride back to Cuxhaven.
I stood frozen at the canal’s edge when he appeared. Beneath the streetlamp’s glow he stood, wrapped in that sand-brown wool coat — the very one he wore the last night we were together. And there, that smile I knew so well, warm as memory. It could not be him.
“Hello, Alex…”
His voice struck me clear and real. My cigarette slipped, burning my coat; I swatted it away in panic. No phantom this. I heard his voice, saw breath pluming white in the freezing air.
In that instant, I was hurled back three months — to the night I first saw that smile.
That Winter Night at the Station
Snow engulfed Hamburg Central Station. Departure boards flickered erratic. I had missed the last train to Cuxhaven — all because I misread the clock. On the same platform stood a young man, his sand-brown coat slightly too large, a canvas bag of sketches slung over one shoulder. He muttered a quiet curse in German, then turned to me.
“Missed it too?” he asked in English, glancing at my crumpled ticket.
That was Julian. Art student at HafenCity University.
Two hours until the next train. He led me away from the crowded, stuffy waiting hall — to Speicherstadt, to that same small café I had left only hours before. He ordered two hot chocolates, then unwound his scarf and wrapped it round my neck, seeing my thin coat offered no defense against the cold.
“If you still shiver in Hamburg,” he whispered, cold fingers brushing mine on the old wood table, “you have not yet known true chill.” Our first touch — brief, awkward, yet anything but accidental.
That sand-brown coat — the first warmth he ever gave me.
The Promise
Months earlier. Julian’s heating failed. A storm raged. He stayed at my attic apartment. We lay before the fireplace, wrapped in one thin blanket, his shivering form clad only in an oversized white shirt.
“Promise me, Alex…” he breathed, face close to mine. “If ever I vanish — never seek me in canal waters. Look for me at the station. I shall be there, waiting for you to come home.”
I laughed then, pulling the blanket higher. “You are foolish. Am I not always the late one? And you — always exactly on time.”
He smiled — that same smile that would haunt me ever after.
A simple promise. And one I had shattered with my own hands.
The Crime
Three weeks past. We fought — bitterly, in that same attic. He spoke of loneliness, of my absence. Tempers flared. I pushed him, harder than I knew. He reeled backward — his head struck the iron balcony railing with a sickening crack. Blood pooled across floorboards we once shared warmth upon. Panic seized me. I did not check for breath. I dragged him to the dock, bound an anchor to his waist, and slipped him into the canal’s dark embrace. When found, I shall be gone.
The Return
Tonight — drawn back by a gnawing dread I could not master — I stood again at the water’s edge. Never return to the scene of the crime, so the stories say. Yet I had come.
I stripped to my shirt and trousers, flashlight in hand, and waded in. Diving five meters down through murky water — there he lay. His coat lost to the current, but his black shirt and jeans still clung to the anchor I had tied. Hair drifting loose like seaweed.
Relief — dark, guilty — washed over me. My secret held.
I kicked for the surface, gasping, freezing — and saw them. Two police officers waiting on the dock. Beside them stood a man in a sand-brown coat. Same face. Same eyes — yet burning now with quiet, unmasked hatred.
“Lukas,” said the officer, as cold iron clamped around my wrists. “Julian’s twin. From Berlin. He reported his brother missing — told of your quarrel. We have watched this dock two nights. Murderers always return.”
Lukas stepped close. “I hoped — truly hoped — I was wrong.”
Far off, sirens wailed. Drawing nearer.
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