‘They wanted to put in a tram line, but people opposed it, didn’t they?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Those idiots just opposed it!’

‘Yes. Possibly. I don’t remember now.’

We fell silent for a while. Suddenly she gave a jolt and straightened up in her chair.

‘Just imagine,’ she said. ‘A tram! With tracks and dinging bells and all the trimmings!’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Really terrible!’

People put their heads together in the common room and corridors. The rumour was going around that Henriette was a Jew. One of the nurses had heard her talking in her sleep. It had been more like babbling, though, she said, completely incomprehensible, and mixed with the grinding of Henriette’s remaining teeth, but she was sure she’d heard a few words of Hebrew. I didn’t join in the gossip. I could have asked Henriette, of course, but I never had the nerve. And what difference would it have made?

I know now that she made up the story of the ambitious desert explorer as she was telling it. She had that gift. You never knew with her what was true and what was not. But she told such good stories that you just wanted to listen, either way. There was a kind of rivalry among the female residents as to who got to sit next to her in the afternoon. I was usually quickest. The trick was already to be seated in the common room before she came in. Then we would sit together, she would tell her stories and I would listen. Sometimes we would both fall asleep. Her snores found their way into my dreams, as the puttering of boat engines in foreign harbours, as the rise and fall of a forest floor cracking open, as my father’s snoring, quiet and throaty, somewhere in the darkness of an apartment abandoned long ago.

‘I will never address the unfathomable out there with the word God. If I ever do, it’s the medicine talking, do you understand?’

We didn’t talk much about our past. The essentials were soon ticked off: where we’d lived, employment, husbands (dead), children (none), patterns of life and convictions (varying). Stuff like that. I think we felt our past had been exhausted in the telling. It consisted of nothing now beyond faded pictures, names and dates that could no longer be brought to life.