During her visit, Mia spent the first half by the poolside, smoking with the flannel-dressed girls in Nikes and occasionally spraying one or the other from her green bottle of perfume. Her mother, offended, sat on a bench some distance away and every now and then reproachfully exclaimed: “Now, Mia …”

Having discussed back and forth the meaning of poetry, the bitter fate of the baroness to be living in such a primitive era, and having without success called and called for the little boy Janis, Mia finally got up and went to her mother.

They sat down on an out of the way bench. Under a poplar tree soft catkins fell in their laps. Mia watched how apathetically and carelessly her mother smoked. She took a cigarette, lit it with a large flame, drew in four puffs – somewhat feverishly – in, out, in, out – and then extinguished the cigarette against the stone foot of the bench. And so on, one after the other, one after the other.

Mia took out the cigarette packs from her bag and stacked them up in a neat pile beside her mother. Her mother grasped the pile – as if holding on to a secure, permanent support.

“Coffee,” she worriedly said. “Next time don’t forget the coffee, and the cigarettes, the cigarettes too. Next time.”

“Father won’t come,” Mia said. “He needs to recover; he’s taking it hard; he must clean out under your bridge …”

“Now, Mia …,” her mother protested. “He’ll soon forget.” She said this with a sense of belief. “But I really don’t remember anything.”

And then she continued: “I tell everybody here that it was a suicide.” Her mother looked at Mia conspiratorially and somewhat pleadingly. Mia noticed that at this moment some genuine interest had tensed up her mother’s apathetic face.

“You don’t even know how to commit suicide,” Mia said. “Now, Mia.”

Her mother furrowed her brow so pitifully, it made Mia laugh. Mia had always admired her mother’s face, which, be it seen in whatever toilet or hovel, stood out like Mona Lisa’s translucent cheek.

“Do you have something for pain?” her mother said, trying to change the topic. “I’ve got a pain sometimes.”

“Where does it hurt?” “Here and there.”

Mia stared at her mother as one does at a child when it has managed to give an obviously invented reason to get yet another candy. She dug in her purse and found a plastic bottle with seeming painkillers in it.

Mother’s eyes immediately riveted on Mia’s hands.

After thinking a moment, Mia also poured some vitamin tablets and peppermint lozenges into the bottle. Only then did she hand it to her mother.

“All of it?”

Her mother in disbelief reached for the yearned for, forbidden fruit. At times like this Mia long ago had ceased to feel qualms of conscience.