I looked over at the gift shop. The optician was already waiting for me. Smoke wafted up from behind the postcard display rack.

Dr. Maschke started listing all the questions he wanted to ask Frederik. He talked about “non-action” and “non-attachment” and “not one” and “not two.” This place is swarming with negatives, I thought, hardly listening to Dr. Maschke. I felt like I really was behind a fogged-up pane of glass and was amazed there hadn’t been a clinking sound when I bumped into him.

I repeated several times that I had to get going, but Dr. Maschke kept talking. He talked and talked, until Marlies suddenly appeared at the corner.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. “Did you have another complaint?”

Although it wasn’t very cold, Marlies wore a cap pulled down low over her forehead, and a scarf covered the lower half of her still-youthful face.

I wondered what it was that preserved Marlies so well. Maybe she didn’t age because all her days were exactly the same, so time thought it should leave her face untouched.

She was carrying an elongated package, which she pointed at Dr. Maschke like a rifle. “I bought a bar lock for my door.”

“You already have one,” I said.

Marlies had four locks on her door already. I asked myself how one door could have so many locks. I thought of Frederik’s letter, and a door collapsing under the weight of its locks struck me as such a sad image—I almost started to cry.

“You can never have enough locks,” Marlies said. “And now I’m going home.”

Dr. Maschke was fascinated by Marlies, as if she were a masked beauty.

“Do that,” he said to her. “Blaise Pascal once said: All of humanity’s misfortune stems from one thing: not knowing how to sit quietly in a room.”

Marlies squeezed the package under her arm and smiled. Not once in my entire life had I seen her smile. I didn’t even know that it was anatomically possible.

“That’s right,” Marlies said. Not once in her life had she said that something was right.

“I’ve got to go, too,” I said.

Dr. Maschke held me by the sleeve. His leather jacket creaked.

“Speaking of staying at home, do you know why your father is always traveling?”

I looked over at the postcard display rack, behind which the optician had lit another cigarette.

“Are you allowed to speak about your patients with people you don’t know? Isn’t that forbidden?”

“I consider your father more of a friend than a patient,” Dr. Maschke replied. “But far be it from me to impose my insights on you.” It wasn’t so far after all, though, because he pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up on his nose and continued undeterred. “He’s always traveling because he’s searching for his own father.”

“Hunh?” Marlies said. “But he’s dead.”