Time stopped for a moment after he said this, and then it began racing. It raced alongside us as Selma, the optician, and I drove to the county hospital. Then it braked and passed infinitely slowly as we sat in the hospital corridor and waited with beige-colored coffee cups not one of us could hold straight.

Doctors came and went constantly. Their footsteps on the linoleum sounded like a child’s hiccups. Again and again the three of us jumped up, and each time we were told there was no new information.

“Incidentally, I didn’t dream of anything at all last night,” Selma said, answering the question the optician and I had been avoiding for hours. I thought, It can’t be all that serious, and tried to believe it. This wasn’t easy, because Elsbeth had been hit by a bus, the county seat’s public bus. How could it not be all that serious?

The frantic bus driver had said that Elsbeth appeared out of nowhere, right in front of the bus, which was going at full speed. Bystanders said she’d just walked into the street without looking to her left or right, completely focused on a piece of paper she was holding. One of the bystanders had picked up the piece of paper, which had fluttered onto the asphalt far from Elsbeth. It was a list, written in Elsbeth’s shaky handwriting.

Wine

Ask Häubels re rooster tongue

Boil Piepsi’s bones

Verbena

Bat heart

Brooms

When night fell and there was still no new information, the optician stood up.

“I’m going to call Palm,” he said abruptly and decisively, as if he had just realized that Palm was a celebrated doctor.

Selma gave him a questioning look.

“So he can pray for Elsbeth?”

“No,” the optician said, “because he knows about animals.”

After the call, Palm got right into his car. He drove a long way, to the large, weather-beaten fortress he had visited a few times with Martin, on the few days he hadn’t been drunk.

And while Selma and I clutched our mugs and the optician smoked one cigarette after another in front of the hospital door, Palm parked his car, took his flashlight from the trunk, and shoved it in under his belt. Palm’s lights were always good, he knew about illumination.

He looked for an unlocked door but couldn’t find one. The low door on the back of the tower looked very weather-beaten, but its padlock was sturdy. Palm started to shake the door.

After Martin’s death, Palm was drained of his rage and, with it, his strength, because the two always went together in Palm. He looked around and cleared his throat.