Bagar, having eaten his fill, comes out onto the terrace. He stretches with pleasure. Then, turns over on his back to chase wasps with his outstretched paw. The wasps gather here in the fall. They fly about the terrace, but have never bitten anyone. Maybe they’re not even wasps, but worker bees. Why does his father suddenly spring to his mind? Ah, yes, his dad was a beekeeper.

Bitenieks, dravnieks, doru dējējs, bičolis – the Latvian words for beekeeper jostle in his head.

Then he stops struggling with the gusts of language in his head. Nothing can be done about it. They appear like a mist over mountains and, just as suddenly, disappear, as if pierced by the sun.

After breakfast he lets Bagar out. He himself gets into his old Dodge and by the road that circles the mountain, heads out for the store. Does he even need anything? But it’s a habit. He could go to the barber. Does he even have any hair to be cut? He’ll find something. He has a wonderful leg prosthesis; he can drive with it like a king. He’s got so used to it that sometimes he forgets to take it off at night, to give his leg stump a rest.

But in Germany for a long time he only had a pinned up empty pant-leg. What girls he must have missed because of this!

With the first prosthesis – a piece of wood narrowed and covered with rubber at the end – he was more off-putting than with the pinned up empty pant leg. The German woman accepted what the Latvian women had rejected. In return he made sure she had a good life. Once every year he paid for a trip to Germany for her to satisfy her longing for her homeland and its people.

He sits in his Dodge as if on a moving throne. The car is huge, but it turns corners smoothly. When he presses on the gas pedal, it rushes forward as if windblown.

Travelling in one direction from his house over small mountainous roads he reaches a large, neglected house where an Indian family lives. They’re his friends. He’s bringing his wife’s clothes and some bangles for the Indian woman. When he pulls up, the woman’s husband and children beg to be allowed to sit in his car. He gladly obliges them. Sometimes he eats lunch together with them – roast, green string beans and mashed potatoes, washed down with light beer.

“Would you like to smoke a bit of pipe?” the Indian woman asks him after lunch. He usually doesn’t refuse. He sits down on the litter-strewn doorstep, smokes and gazes at the children climbing all over his car. The smoke ploughs away the clumps in his head, leaving level ground that merges with the sky.

His grandma used to smoke a pipe. “Where’s my čibuks?”

meaning her pipe-bowl, she always used to nag the children.