Joachim’s friendship with the Bell ringer begins in fear and turns on the return of a missing ink eraser. The episode transforms a figure whose approach once sent the child fleeing into a trusted companion: Joachim accepts rides on his shoulders and returns to him nearly every day. Its decisive movement is not an explanation of the Bell ringer but a change in how Joachim can encounter him, from a distance defined by alarm to a closeness made possible by repeated, shared experience.

Fear on the road home

On his way home from school one midday, Joachim heard bells ringing suddenly behind him. He had learned to avoid the Bell ringer whenever he was alone; when accompanied by his father, he would take his hand and let the man pass. This time the Bell ringer appeared unexpectedly. Joachim stepped off the path, took off his schoolbag, and pressed himself against a rough-barked avenue tree, hoping not to be seen. His second-oldest brother had warned him that patients should not be shown fear, because visible fear might enrage them. The advice did not settle the child: it made staying hidden feel like a test he had to pass.

The Bell ringer stopped just after passing him. In the sudden silence, Joachim saw him frozen with one bell raised and the other held beside his head, a motionless figure in Bundeswehr clothes. Joachim believed the man had turned and would come for him. As he reached for his schoolbag, its strap slipped through his fingers and pens fell into the grass. Then he heard teeth grinding nearby and ran without looking back, toward three doctors in fluttering white coats. Even while running, fear was joined by embarrassment at the possibility that the doctors would think he had overreacted.

Behind one of the hospital’s space-saving bungalows, Joachim sat down and tried to breathe, but could not make himself draw air in. His attention veered to an absurd memory of his second-oldest brother’s experiment with a chocolate-coated marshmallow: under an airtight plastic bowl, a vacuum pump made the sweet swell until its chocolate shell split. The association interrupts the immediate panic rather than resolving it. The remembered scene preserves the disorder of the child’s fear, in which a private, comic image arrives while breathing itself seems to have become impossible.

The missing pen returns

The encounter changes during a later visit to the hospital’s minigolf course. Joachim had to clear branches and leaves from the lanes before playing, and the wind had left still more debris among the trees. He narrated his own game like a sports report, entered scores in a notebook, and invented excuses when a poor result made him want another attempt. After he struck a ball hard against a barrier and had to search for it in the grass, he heard a distant grinding sound. The Bell ringer stood near the loop, reached into his Bundeswehr parka, and held out Joachim’s missing ink eraser—the object lost during the earlier flight.

Joachim wanted to run, yet found himself walking toward the man, minigolf club clenched in his fist. The Bell ringer kept hold of the eraser for a moment as Joachim tugged at it. That brief contest made the man’s strength unmistakable; Joachim understood that he could not pull the object from the Bell ringer’s closed hand by force. The man’s jaw worked as if he might be trying to form words, but the child could not tell whether the grinding contained syllables or speech. Then the hand opened. Joachim backed away, but the return of the lost object had already altered the encounter: the Bell ringer had come not to pursue him, but to give something back.

Bells become a shared spectacle

The Bell ringer bent forward, and Joachim initially feared he was preparing to spring at him. Only then did he notice the two bells on the grass. The man began with the larger bell, swinging it along his body and over his head; the smaller, higher-sounding bell joined the movement. The ringing gathered force, and the swings spread through his shoulders, back, and head until his whole body seemed to join the bells’ arcs. Joachim watched as the man set himself in motion like a huge engine, then galloped noisily across the grass.

The following day, Joachim heard the bells again near the hospital gate. His old impulse was to escape, but he stayed where he was and discovered that he no longer felt afraid. The sound now seemed full and exhilarating, vibrating in his ears. The Bell ringer stopped before him, set the bells on the asphalt, and came close enough for Joachim to notice the smell of his parka, hair, and beard. The child could not decide whether the unusual mixture was repellent or intensely fragrant. The man’s teeth still ground, but now the sound seemed friendly and inviting. What had once been a warning heard from a distance had become a presence Joachim could remain beside.

A daily ride through the grounds

Without ceremony, the Bell ringer took Joachim by the wrist and lifted him onto his shoulders. The child had outgrown his father’s shoulders as a means of transport years earlier, but his weight was no obstacle to the Bell ringer. The man ran while ringing ecstatically. Joachim clung with both hands to his black hair and pressed his thighs against him, making himself small so he would not be knocked down or swept off by the golden bells swinging around them.

On the long straight road, they waited for the food cart carrying metal troughs to the hospital stations. They let it gain a short lead, then raced after it and overtook it. The cart’s stainless-steel sides reflected Joachim sitting high on the Bell ringer’s shoulders: a blond, curly-haired rider on a shaggy dark giant. The drivers waved. The Bell ringer grunted happily, and the pair left the road, pushed through the undergrowth, and made another circuit through the psychiatric park. The ride joins speed, sound, and an ordinary hospital routine; even the food cart becomes part of their shared play.

Repetition, trust, and intimacy

From then on, Joachim was allowed to ride the Bell ringer nearly every day. The intimacy of those outings lingered after they ended: Joachim’s fingers smelled of the man even after he had washed his hands at night, and the skin of his hands felt unusually soft and smooth. The account registers the friendship through its physical residue as well as its repeated action. Closeness is not presented as a sudden abstract understanding, but as something built through touch, proximity, and returning to the same companion.

The Bell ringer’s habits further complicate the child’s first impression. He loved sweets and was especially devoted to chocolate. When Joachim brought him a bar, the man became restless, slit the wrapper with his pointed, bitten nails, and carefully broke the chocolate into pieces. Wherever they were—a low wall, a bench, or a stair—he arranged the pieces in a line before eating them one by one, with complete attention. Joachim could ask whether they should set off, but the Bell ringer remained absorbed in the ritual until he had finished.

Joachim’s father described the Bell ringer as one of the kindest patients in the hospital and said he was the opposite of what his appearance suggested. At lunch, Joachim’s brothers made cryptic remarks involving a plate estimated at twenty-five centimeters and an eel of the same length; his mother stopped the exchange, while Joachim did not understand what his brothers seemed to know. The child’s account thus distinguishes his direct companionship with the Bell ringer from the adults’ and older children’s private knowledge. What Joachim can know for himself is more immediate: a returned possession, a familiar sound, an offered shoulder, and a companion whose daily rituals he learns to recognize.