The narrator helps an unconscious drunk and misses his German Abitur exam when an elderly man collapses into a roadside ditch on the way to the examination. The episode binds an act of immediate care to a lasting academic failure: the narrator remains with the man until medical help takes him away, arrives two hours late, and later tells Frieder that he has seen the man first appear dead, then alive, and finally dead. The exam is not missed through indifference or deliberate refusal, but because the narrator stops to help someone whose condition becomes urgent before he can know what has happened.

Causes and Setting

The narrator is travelling to the German Abitur exam when he encounters the old man on a road between villages. In recent years, the roads have been widened until pedestrians can no longer walk safely along them; people on foot have to use the ditch, while cars travel too fast. The encounter thus begins in a landscape organized around fast-moving traffic and the precarious space left to walkers.

The old man is moving slowly and unsteadily through that roadside ditch. As the two come level, the narrator greets him. The man looks up, tips sideways as if struck, and falls headfirst into the ditch. The sudden collapse transforms an ordinary journey to an exam into an emergency, and the narrator has no time to treat the man’s condition as a distant or abstract concern.

The Attempt to Get Help

A black BMW brakes behind the narrator, its hazard lights on. Someone in the car tells him to stop another vehicle so that it can fetch an emergency doctor. The narrator follows the instruction, and a soldier becomes involved in the response. When asked what he is, the narrator answers that he is a soldier; the exchange places him within the scene as someone expected to assist, even as he is still a student on the way to an examination.

The drunk manages, with difficulty, to sit up. Dirt and grass mark his forehead, and a broad strip of scab runs across his chin. The soldier says that they will stay until the emergency doctor arrives. The promise to remain turns the roadside stop into a vigil: the narrator and the soldier do not simply summon help and leave, but stay with the man as his state changes.

At one point the man suddenly folds backward and does not move. The soldier bends over him, feels for his pulse, and becomes agitated. Two paramedics run out from the emergency department and assess the old man, checking his neck and chest with quick, practiced movements. They place him on a stretcher, cover him up to the forehead, and wheel him into the building. That measured sequence—from collapse, to examination, to the covered stretcher—makes the possibility of death concrete without allowing the narrator to settle immediately on a single account of what he has witnessed.

The soldier later comes back out and drives the narrator back to his bicycle. The return to the journey does not undo the time spent waiting or the sight of the man being taken inside. By then the narrator is two hours late for the examination.

The Exam and Its Failure

The narrator identifies his lateness as one reason he fails the German Abitur. His German teacher, Doktor Turnschuh, says nothing when he arrives two hours late. The silence is not presented as an explicit judgment or punishment; the evidence gives no further explanation from the teacher. What follows, however, shows that reaching the exam has not restored the conditions needed to take it successfully.

The narrator tries three times to read the difficult text, but cannot get to the end. He has no idea what it means, and describes any attempt to write about it as resembling an airplane landing in extremely dense fog. The image registers not just a lack of preparation or knowledge, but the gulf between the examination’s demand for coherent interpretation and the narrator’s inability to get his bearings after the day’s events. The exam failure is therefore tied both to the measurable delay and to his inability to make a way through the text once he is there.

Retelling and Significance

Later, by the bicycle racks, Frieder asks about the essay. The narrator says that he has failed it, then recounts the encounter: he saw a dead man—or thought at first that the man was dead—who was still alive, and then was dead after all. He adds that the others must have seen the man shortly before him, walking along the road while he was still alive. The account keeps the sequence unsettled in the narrator’s own words; it preserves the shock of moving between apparent death, temporary survival, and death rather than smoothing the event into a simple report.

The episode’s consequence is not limited to the failed exam. The narrator has been required to act before he can know whether the old man will recover, and the time consumed by staying for help cannot be recovered for the examination. The contrast is sharp: the exam asks him to read and explain a text, while the roadside encounter places him before a person in immediate physical danger. His later telling to Frieder links the academic failure to the witnessed death, explaining what happened without making either the rescue or the loss seem orderly or complete.