Elza gazes into the mirror. Her thin, splotchy skin is like wrinkled linen without artificial sizing. Empty breast coffers, a knotted network of veins, the fine wrinkling at her joints. Elza sees on her flesh hundreds of imprints of time like the hundreds of imprints of life on a fossil turned to stone. Time, which has been playful, merciful, ferocious, tender, crude, contained, irrational, sensitive, proud, cynical, polite, deceitful, honourable, unfair, merciless, thoughtful, surprising, patient, unpredictable, real …

Elza gazes at the imprints left by time turning to naught. Elza allows her flesh to go the way of naught. She will not drag herself upon the rack of eternal youth. She will not anxiously follow the most recent scientific discoveries about the aging gene. It seems to Elza that her journey is timeless. Elza waits for that moment of silence. Her arthritis-crippled fingers will touch it the same way as they touch the yellow flower.

At night Elza can no longer fall asleep. She weaves her thought shuttle back and forth on the loom of time.

Back and forth, back and forth. Elza’s thoughts do not have the memory of a weaver, who knows what patterns to weave. Elza’s thoughts are like holiday party crackers. When someone pulls them, they fly noisily crackling into the air, afterward once more settling down in an endless, silent, painless universe.

When Elza’s thought shuttle stumbles upon the small yellow flowers on Horatio Street, for a moment it seems to her that she knows the reason why, when she smells them, her time-worn memory hears an echo.

Always holding a bunch of yellow flowers, father is leading a tiny girl to her mother’s grave. Father wishes that his little girl would forever love the woman who created her and whom she has never met. The girl gazes at the white marble dove, her head bent, landed on one side of the monument. She pats the motionless bird. It seems so alive, that it will at any instant now flap its folded wings and fly away. But the stone dove remains where she is. She gazes down at the gravesite always with a bunch of yellow flowers laid at its head.

“Dvesele,” Nabuco with a release of breath raps out. “Dvēsele,” Elza draws out the Sanskrit sound. Soul.

The colour of the leaves in the garden is a sign that it will soon be All Saints Day or Halloween. On that one night there will be laughter in the city about death. While no one knows yet how to exchange souls, there will be an exchange of material things. Sweets will rain down on the crowd. Children will go from house to house, collecting goodies. Elza will sit at her windows and look at how the happy, excited people in monster masks run to the death games field. All night long drums will beat, horns and trumpets will sound and laughter will resound in the streets.