“That is, not tonight, but a while back.”

Marlies said nothing.

“Do you remember my visitor from Japan?” I asked. “From a few weeks ago. I haven’t heard a thing.”

Marlies said nothing.

“I’ll have to come to terms with it,” I said. “Oh, and by the way, I passed my trial period. Even though you complained so much.”

“Your recommendations are shit,” Marlies said.

“That’s probably why I haven’t heard a thing from Japan,” I said.

I put the slice of roast on the windowsill. The tinfoil glistened like moonlight reflected in a bowl.

In January, the optician, Selma, and I drove to the doctor’s office in the county seat. Selma’s joints were becoming increasingly deformed and, in order to verify what everyone could already see, her hands, her feet, and her knees were put in an X-ray machine, one after the other. She had to hold still, which she did with her eyes closed, not opening them even when someone came in now and again to rearrange her limbs for the next image. Selma sat there and looked at the black-and-white afterimage on the inside of her eyelids. She saw Heinrich with a frozen smile, turning to wave one very last time. Meanwhile, the X-ray machine took grayish-white pictures of Selma’s frozen body, and Selma, looking at Heinrich, tried not to twitch when the machine took the images.

The optician and I sat outside the X-ray room. “A letter from the other end of the world takes time. He’ll be in touch,” the optician was saying when Selma appeared, holding something that looked like a cross between a shoehorn and a fork.

“Look what they gave me,” she said happily.

Lately, it had become difficult for Selma to raise her arm to touch her head, and what she had in her hand was a long-handled comb.

“Besides, you could write, too,” Selma said later in the optician’s car. And because she was right, I told Mr. Rödder the next day that I was going to tidy up the back room. Mr. Rödder nodded, and I leaned against the door, climbed over all the broken objects, sat down at the folding table, opened a bottle of hazelnut liqueur a customer had given us, drank half a coffee cup’s worth for courage, and wrote Frederik a letter.

I wrote that the letter I was sure he’d written had unfortunately not arrived yet. Then I explained in many, many sentences why it was, in fact, impossible for a letter from Japan to ever make it all the way to the Westerwald, given all the pitfalls and all the conceivable human errors that would plague such a letter on its voyage. Surely, I wrote, Frederik’s letter from the summer was the only one ever to have made it all the way here from Japan.