“Why shouldn’t it be possible, Ewald? A lot could happen to you that is impossible for people who can use their legs, because they pass by so many things and run away from so much. God has destined you, Ewald, to be a still point in the midst of all the rushing around. Don’t you feel how everything revolves around you? Other people run after their days, and when they have at last for once caught up with one, they are so breathless that they can’t talk with it at all. But you, my friend, simply sit at your window and wait; and something always comes to him who waits. You have a very special fate. Just think, even the Iberian Madonna in Moscow has to leave her little chapel and ride in her black carriage with four horses to whoever is having a ceremony, whether it is for a baptism or a death. But in your case, everything must come to you.”

“Yes,” said Ewald with a strange smile, “I can’t even go to meet Death. Many people run into him when they’re out going places. He is afraid to enter their houses and draws them out into alien territory, away to a war, to a precipitous tower, to a wobbly bridge, out into the wilderness, or into insanity. Most people pick him up, at least, outside somewhere and then carry him home on their shoulders without realizing it. For Death is sluggish and lazy; if people weren’t continually prodding at him, who knows, he might fall asleep.” The ailing man thought awhile about this and then continued with a certain pride, “But in my case, he will have to come to me. Here to my little sunny room, where flowers last so long, over this old carpet, past this cabinet, between the table and the end of the bed (it isn’t that easy to get by), all the way here, to my dear, old, roomy chair, which will probably die along with me, since it has, in a manner of speaking, lived with me. And he will have to do all that in the normal, accepted manner, without making a fuss, without knocking anything over, without doing anything out of the ordinary, just like anyone paying a visit. This makes me feel oddly close to my room. Everything will play out here, on this narrow stage, and for that reason even this final incident will not be very different from all the others that have taken place here and will in the future. It has always seemed strange to me, even when I was a child, that people talk about death in a different way than they do about anything else; and the only reason for that is, nobody who dies tells us anything about what happened to him afterward.

“But what makes a dead person different from someone who becomes serious, turns away from the passing scene, and goes into seclusion to quietly consider the answer to something that has tormented him for a long time? In the midst of people, you can’t even remember the Lord’s Prayer, much less a certain ominous subject that perhaps is made up not of words but of events. A person has to go off somewhere into an inaccessible, silent place—and maybe the dead are people who have withdrawn from everything in order to reflect upon life.”