“It’s strange. When I remembered you again for the first time, one night three weeks ago while I was traveling, it struck me at the time: you were a religious child. And now that I’ve seen you, in spite of the fact that you are so different than I expected—in spite of that, or I might almost say, all the more certainly because of that, I feel what led you in the midst of all your perils was your . . . your piety.”

“What do you mean by piety?”

“Well, your relationship with God, your love for Him, your faith.”

Klara closed her eyes. “Love for God? Let me think.” The doctor watched her in suspense. She seemed to be slowly speaking out her thoughts as they came to her: “When I was a child, did I love God? I don’t think so. I didn’t even . . . it would have seemed to me insanely presumptuous—that is not the right word: like the greatest of sins—to think: He exists. As though by saying that I could have forced Him to exist in me, in this weak child with the ridiculously long arms, to exist in our poor home where everything was fakery and deception, from the bronze plates on the wall that were made from papier-mâché to the wine in bottles that had expensive labels stuck on them. And later”—Klara made a gesture with her hands as though to ward something off and closed her eyes tighter as if she were afraid she might see something hideous through the lids—“I even would have had to drive Him out of myself if He had been dwelling in me at that time. But I knew nothing of Him. I had totally forgotten Him. It was only in Florence, when for the first time in my life I saw, heard, felt, and understood and at the same time learned to be thankful for all that—only then did I think again of Him. There were signs of Him everywhere. In all the paintings I found traces of His smile, His voice resonated in the bells, and on the statues I saw His handprints.”

“And then you found Him?”

Klara looked at the doctor with large, happy eyes. “I felt that He existed, once at some time He existed. Why should I have felt more? That was already more than enough.”

The doctor got up and crossed to the window. A bit of a field was visible and the little old Schwabinger church, and above that the sky, no longer without hints of evening. Suddenly Dr. Lassmann asked, without turning around, “And now?”

“Now . . .” Klara hesitated as he came to stand directly in front of her and raised her eyes all the up way to his. “Now I sometimes think: He will be.”

The doctor took her hand and held it for a moment. He gazed off into space.

“What are you thinking about, Georg?”