...of a transaction

Close by the two walkers, a woman hugged a man, who merely responded with a smile. But when, after a short conversation, the man tried to fondle the woman, she turned away. Speaking softly, he tried again, drawing her whole body to him; she stiffened and he turned away with a gesture of discouragement. His cheeks went violently red; and Sorger, who noticed for the first time how young the two of them were, thought of the skiing instructor, whose face in the “chapel” had worn an expression of bitter disappointment. And he drew the young fellow entirely into himself - that is, into the shimmering worldwide snowy night, into the healing wintry space, to make him well again.
Then, behind the window of the grocery store, the sad people reappeared - a grotesque, mocking world - in the form of two elderly men (the one sitting behind the checkout counter, white; the other, standing in front of it, black). They avoided each others' eyes as though - aside from the actual circumstance (which undoubtedly played a part) of their being “clerk” and “customer,” “black” and “white” - something more, something worse than personal enmity had erupted between them: the wretched incomprehension that blurs the features and muddles the mind - something that neither wanted and that made them both miserable.
Unlike the young couple on the street outside (where the man, with face averted, was timidly tickling the woman), the faces of the two old men in the grocery store were deeply pale. They did not speak; they hardly moved (except that the black man kept crumpling a brown paper bag). Both kept their eyes lowered; their lids quivered; not once did either appeal for support or help to the other customers, who stood congealed with their purchases, not even impatient, just as pale, silent, and forlorn as the protagonists. Only when the black man, soundlessly moving his lips, finally opened the door, did the clerk raise his face to the next customer, but he did not grin (as the witness outside had expected); he merely showed (to no one in particular) his dark, desperately wide-open, and for a moment earnestly imploring eyes.

[The Long Way Around, from Slow Home-Coming, Handke, P.]