Last weekend, the third Sunday in Advent, I finally unpacked the angel. We spent almost two hours picking it out in Naples last year. That is, actually we hadn't wanted an angel. We wanted a couple of those figurines you find in a presepe, the manger scene set up at this time of year in almost every Italian church, where they then grow into whole cities and landscapes, like the ones we build for model trains. During a previous visit to Naples, I had bought a figurine of that sort, a market peddler with her fruit stand. Holding the woman in the palm of my hand, I thought she looked lovely and lost, like the sole inhabitant of some star. In the girls' room, however, first her melons and oranges turned up missing, then her head. Which is also why we abandoned our original plan. But the angel was actually Ralf's idea. He was not to be deterred from presenting us with a large angel — the good ones cost around 200 euros — as a thank-you for our hospitality, as he put it.

Ralf visited us in Rome twice last year, and both times he vanished again from one moment to the next. In retrospect, the angel seemed like a kind of security deposit. He had hailed a taxi in Naples to take off in pursuit of the car full of women, and his first sign of life since then was the Christmas card I received yesterday, asking if the angel was hovering above us.

By now, I would have been hard-pressed to describe the angel: large, a good 15 inches high, baroqueish. Removed from the soft wrapping paper, it appeared to have shrunk remarkably — until I discovered the two wings packed with it.

Suddenly, I saw before me the wrenched face of the vendor as he strained to remove the angel's wings, while his wife explained that we needn't worry about transporting it. They sent entire manger scenes to Canada, Australia and Japan every year. Urging her husband on, she spread her arms wide to demonstrate how easy it was to pull out the invisible angel wings and then reinsert them. "Si fa accussì!" — that's how it's done, she cried, "si fa accussì."

It's amazing to me now that we ever took the angel once its wings had been ripped off and screwed back in again. But Ralf insisted — just look at those hands, so lifelike, as if they were playing a harp.

Determined to treat the angel better than its vendor had, I first discovered the holes in its red bib apron and long robe of bright, shimmering olive green, then threaded the nail carefully through — and was stymied. Wielding the wing like a hunting knife, I poked around with the nail in search of the hole where it must have once been. I went at it more vigorously, and the fabric tore. I heard it rip, but could see no sign of the tear. I had almost given up when the nail slipped into place. I now held the angel up by the eye screw between its shoulders, and the first wing did a marionette's flap on one side. The second reddish blue wing was just as much trouble. Maybe Ralf's card and my difficulties with the angel have nothing whatever to do with this story. But it's not a story either, more a postponed diary entry from our three-day excursion to Naples. Because time and space are all that connect what happened. I believe, however, that the first experience made me more receptive for the second, so that suddenly everything took on a meaning that, from a more sober perspective, probably isn't there, at least not for other people. It was purely by chance that Ralf came with us to Naples. Ralf is a friend or acquaintance — depending. In September 1988, as a graduate of the Ernst Busch Acting Academy, he joined the theatre in Altenburg, landed a couple of good-size roles, and stayed aloof from politics. But then, in the spring of '90-I was already working at the newspaper — he started drinking. He was fired a year later, went into rehab, returned to Altenburg, and supplemented his unemployment by delivering our free paper. His new passion was computers, our paper's Apples. Ralf made friends with our two typesetters and evidently learned simply by watching. When we decided to add a third typesetter, the two women wanted Ralf to join them. He stayed on until our bankruptcy in 2001, set out on his own designing websites and has muddled through ever since. Although we no longer had much to do with each other — I left the paper shortly after he was hired — he was the only person from those days that I still heard from with any regularity.