She stepped down gingerly and stood there leaning on the broom handle, looking around the living room to see if there were any more specks of dust visible to her weak eyes. She caught sight of her sister’s stern, stiff expression, which from several ages and different photographic projections observed the room from all angles. And she sighed long and deep at the thought of the treatment the poor woman had likely been exposed to at the mental hospital, without anyone ever knowing, because she was no longer able to liberate a single thought from her depression’s impenetrable morass. ‘Poor little Agnes!’ But then her thoughts shifted to this sister’s numerous offspring, of which the eldest, whom she hadn’t actually seen since he was tiny, was at that moment suffering from a terrible pneumonia; and even though nowadays there were treatments for it, you could never know for sure. God’s ways are beyond our comprehension.

The old woman’s life was replete with misfortunes, the most recent one always seeming to her the heaviest to bear. She sniffed them out and took them in with real talent. Her family was large, taking into account her siblings’ children and the families by marriage. And somewhere along the line there was always a stillborn baby, a grown son who went off the rails, or a daughter who had a child outside of wedlock. And in some magical way she always knew instantly, and every time it pained her deeply and was just as difficult and burdensome. Alas, what we have to go through – it’s a good thing Daddy’s not alive anymore! It was really remarkable what she could endure. Even the neighbor’s sorrows and the other miseries on her periphery, which she uncovered through conversations with salesmen and residents in her building, hit her hard and painfully. But in the end it all merged together, and at heart she didn’t feel noticeably worse when her sister, in her breakdown, completely lost the ability to communicate with other people, than when she heard that the child of a female family member (whom she had never seen) had crashed his bicycle and broken a leg.