We preferred to concern ourselves with the present. We talked about the other residents, about the nurses, the doctors, the kitchen staff, or the pigeons on the gutters and the gravel paths in the garden. Sometimes we told each other dreams. But what we liked best was to talk about food. Henri­­­­-ette loved hearty meals, whereas I preferred the fine pastry dishes I’d learned from old cookery books. She wanted to hear about these pastry books. I had to describe the photos to her in detail, and recite the recipes in their entirety, if possible, which of course it wasn’t. So I too began to make things up. I said, ‘You need two hundred and eighty grams of butter, one hundred and forty grams of icing sugar, two or three egg yolks, a small handful of ground almonds, a bit of lemon peel, two hundred grams of flour, and jam, of course (preferably blackcurrant). You have to stir the butter vigorously with the icing sugar and the yolks, but vigorously means vigorously, otherwise it won’t work, you see, so you stir vigorously for at least twenty minutes, then you sprinkle in the ground almonds and the grated lemon peel and keep stirring; now you add the flour, stir it in vigorously again for a few minutes, then you put a quarter of the batter into the tin (you don’t need to grease the baking paper, the butter in the pastry is enough), spread the jam on top, then you distribute the rest of the batter with a nozzle in a lattice over the cake, though of course you can always do some other pattern, it’ll still taste the same, then you decorate the side with the rest of the batter and put it all in the oven, bake at one hundred and eighty degrees for forty to forty-­five minutes, finally release the cake gently from the tin and sprinkle it with icing sugar.’

‘Even more sugar?’ she asked, her eyes closed.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But it has to be icing sugar. And use a sieve. You definitely need a kitchen sieve.’

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘A fine kitchen sieve?’

‘The finest sieve you can lay your hands on!’

And so the summer passed. We spent some lovely times together. Yet the main thing I remember is a feeling of sadness. In fact, I remember my whole life as if through a veil of sadness. Sadness is all that’s left. But perhaps it could be worse. For a long time I tried to tell myself that we don’t die, we just leave this world. Death is just a word. But that’s not true.

In early October she grew too weak to make her way to the communal area, and I spent the afternoons in her room. It was even emptier than mine. There wasn’t even a table, and only one chair. In a corner stood a suitcase. Henriette said it contained letters and a few books, the only acceptable luggage for any journey. She lay in bed with her torso half-raised on a support pillow, a small, malicious queen. It looked as if she might at any time get lost in her own bed. But she laughed again and bit into her baguette sandwich, which she dunked in the cup of milk on her bedside table with trembling fingers. We had the newspapers brought to us, and I read to her. She often ranted about what was going on in the world, and when she did she would scold so loudly and with such fury that one of the nurses would burst in to tell us to be quiet.