The Bright Side of the Doom, Part 87: What A lifeguard Experiences

One morning at the start of my shift, I thought I saw a swimmer far out with my binoculars. It was either a man tired of life or a daredevil, well-trained long-distance swimmer.

We immediately launched the lifeboat. Due to the high waves, we kept losing sight of the swimmer. When we finally reached him, we found that the person had been dead for hours.

In rigor mortis, the drowned man was floating face down in the water. The man’s pale skin was marked with scratches and scrapes, obviously caused by stones somewhere in the shallows. Away from the bathing beach, we laid the body down.

No one knew who the dead man was. Neither in the mayor’s office nor with us a missing person report was present. It was not until noon that it became clear that the drowned man had gone swimming the previous evening against the will of his fiancée.

The current and the wind drove the body overnight near our beach. There was no end to the interrogations and accident reports I had to write. All kinds of institutions were interested in the accident, from the CID to the Coast Guard and the Stasi.

Long before this sad incident, I had by chance become a member of a small vacation band whose guitarist and singer was prevented by an operation. Until the end of…