Edith was now resting on the messy desktop. Her head was cradled in one elbow, and she heard a faint ringing in her ears. It reminded her of the telephone, which had been cut off because the last bill hadn’t been paid. Children love their father at six, eight, and twelve years, and it’s still better for them to blame their mother for everything about to happen than to know the truth. What is the truth anyway? Is it so important? The most important thing, thought Edith, is what happens to a person when they see mountains. The most important thing is probably always precisely the thing you can’t have. That’s where all the happiness is. Was Klaus happy? She started humming a tune: My girl is bright as amber … It was what he had sung when shaving that morning, in a high, happy voice. He seemed so incredibly happy that he couldn’t hide it. The children were laughing and fooling around with him in the bathroom. And once, once Edith’s father had lifted her high up over his head, and she had looked down into his radiant, dark eyes, and without having words for it yet, she understood that in that moment, her big, mild-mannered, melancholy father was happier than she had ever seen him before. Happier for her of course, for his little girl, the apple of his eye, who else? This was the last memory she had of him. She had never seen him again. How old had she been? Six or seven. You get by, helped by hate flaring up in your mind like a tall, clear flame, which keeps despair at a distance. Her mother hated the woman, and the child hated the mother, and that was childhood. Her mother died of cancer three years ago, and now Edith was thirty-five, and maybe it is always too late by the time the heart is ready for reconciliation. And it all had something to do with those mountains.