The Decay of the Angel - Yukio Mishima

Western staircase. Only from it do you get a good
view of the street. My chin on the sill, I knelt looking out
at the snow. It was a quiet street even on ordinary
days, and today the automobile tracks were blotted
out.
There was a dim light from the snow. Though the
sky was dark, the light of the snow signaled a strange
time of its own, different from the time of day. Behind
the house across the street it settled into hollows
between the blocks of a concrete fence.
An old man, umbrella-less, in a brown coat and
black beret, came up from the right. There was a
pronounced swelling toward the bottom of his coat.
He was embracing it. It would seem that he had a
parcel of some sort which he wanted to keep dry. I
could see a gaunt, hollow face under the beret, quite
out of keeping with the stout figure.
He stopped at our gate. There was a low gate
beside the main one. I thought he would be some
unusually impoverished caller with a request to make
of my father. He looked around him, however, not
bothering to brush the snow from his now white coat
and making no motion toward coming in.
The swelling disappeared. A parcel fell to the
ground, as if he had laid a great egg. I gazed at it. At
first I could not make out what it might be. A spherical