The optician pulled over on the shoulder. He put on the hazard lights and looked at me for a long time in the rearview mirror. I was sitting on two cushions so that the seat belt lay properly over my shoulder. Ever since Martin’s death, the optician buckled me into the back seat.

He turned to face me. “Do you remember how I taught you to tell time and explained how time zones work?”

I nodded.

“I also taught you capitalization, the ß, and arithmetic. And all about deciduous and coniferous trees. And about animals on land and in the water.”

I nodded again and thought again of how the optician could find connections between completely unrelated things, so he’d surely be able to draw one between arithmetic and the doors of a local train.

“And when you’re older, I’ll explain many more things. I can teach you the structure and function of the human eye and how to drive and how to mount a dowel. I can explain geopolitics and identify all the constellations. I can even explain things I don’t understand. If you want to know something that I have no idea about, then I’ll read everything there is on the subject and explain it to you. I am at your disposal for any topic, for this question, too,” the optician said, reaching back and stroking my cheek.

He got out, circled the Passat, and sat next to me on the back seat.

“I’ve never sat here before,” he said, looking around. “You’ve got a nice spot here, Luisa.”

He looked at his hands as if the question were lying there, as if he were holding it so that he could examine it from every angle.

“There’s no answer to your question,” he said, “not anywhere in the entire world or anywhere else, either.”

“Not even in Kuala Lumpur?” I asked. That’s where my father was at the time.

“Not even there. Looking for an answer to that question is like Vasily Alekseyev trying to lift one hundred thousand kilos.”

“No one can do that.”

“Exactly. It’s anatomically impossible. And the answer is also anatomically impossible.”

He placed his hand on mine. My hand disappeared under the optician’s large one.