There was nothing that I missed. To be honest, I was glad I’d left my old things in the Paulstadt apartment, where they presumably sat in dusty silence for quite some time. Objects had long since lost their meaning. Henriette called them ‘the clutter of our lives’.

I’d already seen her many times before our first conversation in the waiting room. She was unusually small and thin, always elegantly dressed, and wore her long white hair in a bun at the back of her head that she called a snowball. Everything about her was somehow crooked and contorted: her back, her legs, her nose, her hands. Her face was crosshatched with fine wrinkles, and on her décolletage, right over her delicate breastbone, she had a scar at least fifteen centimetres long in the shape of a horseshoe.

She always sat in the same corner of the common room. She drank dark red tea and always had a book open in her lap, although everyone knew that her eyes had clouded over long ago and she could hardly even tell faces apart. I remember the slight maliciousness that overcame me during one of our first encounters. I had, of course, heard about Henriette’s poor eyesight (there are no secrets in the sanatorium concerning residents’ state of health and vulnerabilities), and yet – or perhaps for that reason – I asked her what the book in her lap was about. To my amazement, she told me the story from beginning to end. It was about an explorer who was consumed with ambition, and about his adventures in the hot desert sands. She spoke emphatically, elaborated every detail, and recounted the entire story all the way to its dramatic end, by which time the tea was cold. I could have slapped her.

‘Tumour as well?’ she asked me once.

‘Liver,’ I replied. ‘And now the kidneys, too.’

‘Mine’s in my head,’ she said. ‘Everything that’s bad for you starts in the head. Where are you from?’

‘Paulstadt,’ I said.

‘Sorry?’

‘Paulstadt,’ I repeated.

‘Good grief,’ she said, raising one of her finely plucked eyebrows. ‘Really?’

Her arrogance annoyed me, because I liked Paulstadt. It was my childhood home, the home of my youth, and I said so. She closed her book with a soft brush of her hand and looked at me with her little, half-­blind eyes. ‘I know I can be a fool sometimes,’ she said. ‘Stupid and supercilious. But I’ll be damned if I’ll apologize. You understand that, don’t you, my dear?’

Little, thin Henriette, almost transparent by the end. Her shins like narrow wooden slats beneath her dress. The gnarled hands on the back of her book. The dark, mottled face, almost smaller than the snowball behind it. The fluttering, permanently reddened eyelids. Her gaze, which seemed to retreat further into her eyes with every day that passed.

‘Paulstadt, Paulstadt,’ she said, another time, seemingly lost in thought. ‘Isn’t that the place where that dreadful thing happened?’

‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘Terrible.’