It felt as if my brittle heart had finally fallen to pieces. I stopped going to the student meetings and spent the even­ings alone in my room. Weeks passed, each day just like the next, until someone slipped the news under the door in a pale yellow envelope.

Papa is dead.

You read the words and don’t comprehend them. It’s not pain and it’s not sadness. It’s just strange. Time seems to stand still around you, set in a kind of aspic around which your own thoughts buzz like flies grown sluggish in the autumn. And in the room next door the same song keeps playing on the radio, always the same one, over and over again.

Mama and I organized the funeral. It wasn’t a farewell, it was just something to be dealt with. We didn’t weep at the graveside. The bank sent a bit of money, and I moved back into my old room, where I found the tin of insects in a drawer. I didn’t throw it away, but I didn’t open it, either. I left things as they were and settled back into the little kingdom of my childhood.

With Papa’s death, Mama had stopped smiling. The lopsided smile just seemed to have disintegrated. And with her smile her face disintegrated, too, and, later, all of her. My mother vanished almost imperceptibly, and it was only many years after her death that I realized I was alone.

I found work at the Lainsam & Sons insurance company, where I shared an office with three women. Our job was to sort the bills and check the balance sheets. One of the women, Sonja, was convinced she saw something in me, and one evening we went on a date. We drank wine, which was a mistake, because afterwards she wanted to come home with me. I brought her back and we sat on the sofa. I started saying whatever came into my head, and I almost didn’t notice when she touched me for the first time. Later, she placed her cheek against my cheek and I breathed her in, dazed by the wine and the scent of her hair, and perhaps everything would have been different if I hadn’t had a mishap. She said I shouldn’t worry, it could happen to anyone. She stroked my head the way you stroke a little boy.

A few weeks after this episode, Sonja handed in her notice. She wanted to try a new beginning, she said, start a new life, and as I watched her clear her desk, scooping things from her desk to her handbag with an energetic sweep of her arm, I had a vague sense that she was taking my potential as a man along with them.

I was confused and hurt. Nonetheless, I also felt a kind of relief, and perhaps Sonja would soon have been no more than a blurred memory if I hadn’t seen her on a street corner three weeks later, locked in a close embrace with Johannes Storm.