It’s true that time goes faster the older you are, Selma thought, and felt that this wasn’t a very good arrangement. Selma wished that her sense of time would grow old with her, that it would develop a limp, but the opposite was true. Selma’s sense of time behaved like a racehorse.

“What does New Zealand’s amazing faunal biodiversity mean?” Selma asked.

“Astonishing variety of animal species,” the optician explained.

In the village below, the shopkeeper was moving the cartons of milk from the back shelf on the right to the back shelf on the left. My father came to visit us. He brought shawls of Genoan velvet. I wrote Frederik. Frederik wrote me. One of the mayor’s pigs escaped and the optician caught it.

Meanwhile, the trees in the Uhlheck lost the green from their leaves and let them fall. Not much later, the shopkeeper’s warehouse roof collapsed under the weight of a heavy snowfall that, heavy as it was, nonetheless melted in an instant, according to Selma’s sense of time. Then, in the twinkling of an eye, the trees in the Uhlheck grew new leaves and in the same twinkling of an eye, Selma was celebrating her seventy-third birthday with a book of photographs of Argentina on her lap.

“What does untamed nature mean?” she asked.

And the optician replied, “Uncontrolled wilderness.”

I wrote Frederik. Frederik wrote me. We wrote each other despite or perhaps even because of my affirmation, and even though our letters had to travel halfway around the world, even though they were prey to all sorts of technical and human error, they dependably arrived at their respective destinations, albeit with a certain delay.

“The twin from the upper village, the one who’s the mailman, put newborn cats in a bag and drowned them in the Apfelbach,” I wrote Frederik.

Two weeks later his answer arrived. “Drowning cats brings very bad karma.”

“Couldn’t we talk on the phone sometime?” I asked in a letter, and, as expected, he answered that phone calls were very complicated.

Even though it wasn’t anatomically possible, I tried to transform love, at least into something modest and manageable. That, too, was complicated, but because I didn’t see Frederik and never spoke with him, it wasn’t hard to pretend, with time, that it was manageable.

The optician often asked how things were with Frederik. “We write,” I said, and the optician found that wasn’t an adequate answer to his question.

“But you love him,” he said as I sat on his examination stool for a vision test because my eyes always hurt whenever I read fine print.

“No,” I replied, “not anymore.”

The vision chart behind the optician fell to the floor. He went into the back room to get another.

“I made this one just for you,” he said.

It read:

I leaned forward. “I need glasses,” I said.