I sat up on the edge of the bed. At first I thought the rain had leaked in during the night, but the puddle in the middle of the room was just Frederik’s robe.

My comforter was on the floor. It had slipped off the bed a long time ago. I pulled it up like a very old fisherman hauling in a net. It took a while. My arms were ninety percent water. I was enfeebled by love.

While I was hauling in the comforter, the heavy optician slept facedown on his bed, not moving once over the course of the night. At the same time, Elsbeth and Palm slept sitting upright on Elsbeth’s sofa. Elsbeth had fallen asleep first and then started awake. “I’m sorry, Palm, but you make me so tired with all those Bible passages and explications.”

Palm had smiled at her and said, “But that’s no problem at all, my dear Elsbeth.” Elsbeth had fallen asleep again and Palm continued his explication until he, too, nodded off. At the same time, Marlies was not sleeping. She stood at the window, eating peas from the can. She stood right in front of the window, something she could only do at night because no one came by to bother her then. She shoveled the peas in reluctantly because her body had shyly reminded her that once again she’d eaten nothing all day. The juice from the peas ran down her chin and she wiped her mouth. At the same time, my father was standing in front of a telephone booth in Moscow. He checked the wristwatch that was set to Central European time and hung up the receiver. At the same time, my mother, lying next to Alberto in the apartment over the ice-cream parlor, had the hiccups. A few hours earlier, Alberto had asked my mother if she wanted to move in with him and she had laughed longer and louder than she had for an eternity, as if moving in together were the funniest joke in the world. Alberto, rightly, was offended.

“Fine,” he said, “now pull yourself together.”

But my mother couldn’t stop laughing. “I’m sorry,” she said, “it has nothing to do with you.” Tears streamed down her cheeks. “But it’s hilarious, I don’t know why, either.”

She tried to fall asleep, but the hiccups continued, and whenever she thought of the words “move in together,” she burst out laughing again, until Alberto said, “I’ve had it. I’m sleeping on the sofa.”

At the same time, Selma lay in bed under her flowered quilt and luckily only nearly dreamed of an okapi. At the very last moment, she realized it was just a misshapen cow standing next to her in the twilight in the Uhlheck.

ANIMALS CAN SENSE THESE THINGS