The last word and other stories

the long version

The old man was only a little surprised, because he was by now well accustomed to inexplicable events, when he received at the hands of a stranger, a passport in a name which was not his own, a visa and an exit permit for a country which he had never expected or even desired to visit. He was indeed very old, and he was accustomed to the narrow life he had led alone without human contacts: he had even found a kind of happiness in deprivation. He had a single room to live and sleep in, a small kitchen and a bathroom. Once a month there came a small but sufficient pension which arrive from from Somewhere, but he didn't know where. Perhaps it was connected with the accident years before which had robbed him of his memory. All that had remained in his mind of that occasion was a sharp noise, a flash like lightening and then a long darkness full of confusing dreams from which he finally work in the same small room that he lived in now.