GR translation: Just for the knife-edge

[Mike Jing]

P256.30-257-5  It turns out to be an ancient four-story hotel with early
drunks lying in the hallways, eyelids like tiny loaves brushed with a last
glaze of setting sun, and summertime dust in stately evolutions through the
taupe light, summertime ease to the streets outside, April summertime as
the great vortex of redeployment from Europe to Asia hoots past leaving
many souls each night to cling a bit longer to the tranquillities here,
this close to the drain-hole of Marseilles, this next-to-last stop on the
paper cyclone that sweeps them back from Germany, down the river-valleys,
beginning to drag some from Antwerp and the northern ports too now as the
vortex grows more sure, as preferential paths are set up. . . . Just for
the knife-edge, here in the Rue Rossini, there comes to Slothrop the best
feeling dusk in a foreign city can bring: just where the sky’s light
balances the electric lamplight in the street, just before the first star,
some promise of events without cause, surprises, a direction at right
angles to every direction his life has been able to find up till now.

What is "Just for the knife-edge" trying to invoke here?
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