‘What can I do, damn it – I’m temperamental!’ Henriette would cry, trembling with agitation.

She liked to pick fights with the nurses. If she was in pain, or just in a bad mood, she would shout the most obscene insults at them the moment they entered the room. Secretly, though, she liked these young women who moved among us ghosts like determined angels. On good days she would even compliment them, admire their figures, their smooth skin or the clear whites of their eyes. And the nurses liked her, too, not only because of the tips she handed out on any pretext. All of us had money, more or less (I’d made mine cutting and stencilling metal sheets, Henriette hers, as she put it, with ‘three marriages and a great deal of patience’), but with her it was different. There was something about her . . . I have no memory of my mother, who died when I was just a girl, but I imagine that she was like Henriette.

‘Sssh, be quiet a moment! Don’t you see the clouds out there? From here it looks as if they’re just passing slowly and quietly overhead. Yet in fact they’re racing across the sky, and there’s roaring and thundering and crashing all about them. The trees have noticed them already. They’re bowing down before them.’

Autumn progressed, and Henriette lost her strength. The support pillow was removed, and she was only able to leave the bed in the arms of a male nurse. Mostly she lay on her side with her eyes closed, or gazing out of the window to where the November wind was sweeping the last leaves from the trees. She could barely see, but on quiet nights she fancied she could hear the leaves falling. We still enjoyed talking and laughing. I no longer remember when we did that for the last time.

Her clothes were put away in the storeroom beside the bathroom; she always wore a silk nightdress now that shimmered in the moonlight as if made of polished ice.

They hooked her up to a quietly beeping apparatus, and her dose of medication was increased. She slept almost all the time; sometimes she groaned and her breath rattled in her sleep. Her voice sounded distorted and strange, like the voice of a hoarse child.

I can’t say where I found the strength to keep watch for so long beside her bed. I think it felt as if time stood still while I was sitting with her. There was no clock in the room, and I hadn’t owned one for some time. It only occurs to me now that I didn’t see a single clock during my whole time in the sanatorium. Time seemed to have become irrelevant – and, on the other hand, too precious to measure in mere minutes, hours, days.

Sometimes I held her hand, that withered, wrinkled hand. Sometimes I stroked her hair with my fingers. The nurses had loosened her bun and her hair lay long and dishevelled on the pillow.