‘Amazing,’ Klaus had said excitedly, adding that he always knew a person would be tremendously moved when they stood face to face with a real mountain for the first time. What had he felt? It was strange she didn’t ask. The fact that we are so incredibly uninterested in what is happening inside the person closest to us is probably the source of many problems.

Her eyes started to close, and she could only keep them open with great effort. She had the fleeting sensation that she was getting to be like her mother, and she felt a sort of distant curiosity about her own face. She was surprised that she hadn’t noticed deep wrinkles from her nose to her mouth, bitterly tense jaw muscles, and a loose fold of skin under her chin. Her mother must have been so lonely. Why doesn’t it dawn on a person that their parents had their own lives separate from their children, until it’s too late to ask them how it was? And without knowing that, the whole thing is hidden, the most important thing in the world eternally inaccessible. A tiny hope anxiously made its way through the darkness surrounding her thoughts. What if she told her children the truth? The truth about a father whose love for a woman and tenderness for three children was diminished to a little prick in his conscience when once in a while – because it had to happen – on a street, in a trolley, or on a train, he saw a child who resembled one of them? A little pain that diminished with every embrace, every passionate night, and which in the end disappeared completely in the terrible power radiating from the body of a young, beautiful woman. But is any child in the world able to understand that their father doesn’t care? Did she even understand?