After a few paces, he was readier to confide in me. “You were entirely right before. It is strange that you can’t find anyone who likes doing that work out there. I never used to think about it. But now that I’m getting older, sometimes I have thoughts, odd thoughts, like that one about heaven, and others too. Death. What do we know about it? Seemingly everything and perhaps nothing. Often when I’m working, the children (I don’t know whose they are) hang around me. And just at that time I might have one of those thoughts. Then I dig like an animal in order to draw all the force out of my head and use it up with my arms. The grave gets much deeper than the ordinance requires, and a mountain of earth builds up next to it. But the children see my wild movements and run away. They somehow think I’m angry.” He stopped to ponder. “And it is a kind of anger. You lose your sensitivity to it, you think you’ve got it beat, and suddenly . . . There’s no help for it; death is something incomprehensible. Awful.”

We were walking in a long street under fruit trees that were already entirely without leaves, and the woods started up on our left like a night that might fall upon us at any time. “I’d like to recount a story to you,” I said tentatively. “It will take us just about to where we’re going.” The man nodded and lit up his little old pipe. I began the story.

There were two people, a man and woman, and they loved each other. Loving—that means assuming nothing, bringing nothing along from anywhere else, forgetting everything, and being ready to receive from one person what you had before and everything else besides. And this was the mutual wish of both of these people. But in time, in the daylight, among the many, all the things that come and go, often before you can develop a relationship to them, do not let this kind of loving take place. Events come at you from all sides, and chance opens every door for them.