Selma pushed her wheelchair, its seat covered with glass jars full of herbs and powders, the uses of which were a complete mystery to us. Selma thought for a moment and then tipped it all onto the small fire at the optician’s feet, all the cures for a broken heart, for constipation, for people who refused to die after their deaths, for toothache, sweaty feet, bankruptcy, and gallstones, all the aids for easy births, for restful sleep, and to make someone fall in love with a person he could not love.

“Without Elsbeth, none of this is any help,” she said.

Selma kept Elsbeth’s photo album. She kept the piece of carpet Elsbeth always stuck between her stomach and the steering wheel when driving, and her slippers. She put Elsbeth’s slippers under the living room sofa, on which I lay awake all night after Elsbeth’s funeral.

I turned on the light and picked up one of the slippers. It was impossible to guess what the original color had been. I looked at the landscape that had formed on Elsbeth’s slipper over the years. The uneven, furrowed rubber sole, the inner hollows caused by her bunions, the glistening black hollow made by her heel.

I didn’t cut and run. I put Elsbeth’s slipper back under the sofa, next to the other one. I took a piece of paper and wrote: “I hereby affirm that we are not made for each other.” I wrote it as solemnly as other people sign a marriage certificate.

Part Three

PART THREE

ENDLESS EXPANSES

Ever since my father started traveling, he would give Selma a book of photographs of whatever country he happened to be in for her birthday. Selma no longer shelved these books without looking at them, as she had before; now she studied them carefully. She wanted to form a picture in her mind of what her son was seeing.

After the birthday guests were gone, Selma sat in the armchair with her new book of photographs and the optician settled down on the red couch opposite her. The captions in the books were usually in English, and for that the optician was considered the resident expert—ever since he had translated song lyrics for Martin and me. He watched Selma as she read or he looked at the old fir trees outside the window, their branches swaying in the wind that always blew here. And he waited. He waited until Selma looked at him over the top of her reading glasses and asked about English words she didn’t know. He knew them.

On her seventy-second birthday, Selma sat with a book of photographs of New Zealand on her lap, and it seemed to her that she had just unpacked her last birthday book a few days before.