Mr. Rödder sprayed Blue Ocean Breeze on Alaska, Marlies complained to the shopkeeper about the frozen vegetables, and my father came to visit. He looked more and more like Heinrich. Little by little my father’s facial features had started to shift like a landmass slowly sliding toward his father’s face.

“How strange,” he said, grabbing his nose, “and yet I’m much older than he ever was.”

On my twenty-fifth birthday, when the candles stood close together on my cake, the optician said, “Happy birthday. Be glad that they all still fit on one cake. For me, we’d need half the bakery.”

“Close your eyes,” Selma said. She put a chain of blue gemstones around my neck.

“The stones are cyan blue, by the way,” the optician said.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Happy birthday, dear Luisa,” Frederik wrote. “I have the feeling that someone who hopefully means well has seated us at opposite ends of the same table. However, it’s a table that is 9,000 kilometers long (with those dimensions I think we could call it a banquet table) and although we can’t see each other, I know you’re at the other end.”

The optician looked at me steadily. “The stones are cyan blue,” he repeated.

“Yes, thanks, I got it,” I said.

“What does the impressive Greenland ice deposits mean?” Selma asked on her next birthday, and the optician translated it for her.

Palm quoted Bible passages, the optician thought up connections between things that had nothing to do with each other (gravel and hairdos, orange juice and Alaska), and Marlies covered the already opaque window in her front door with packing paper. I moved the still-unpacked bookshelf Frederik had given me four years earlier from one corner of the room to the other. The mayor’s daughter and Farmer Häubel’s great-grandson had their sixth child, and I got my first pair of glasses. Then came a total solar eclipse.

The optician had never had so many customers in his life. People came from the county seat and the surrounding villages, where the solar eclipse glasses had sold out immediately. I helped the optician at his store; he had bright red cheeks and a hoarse voice from so many customers. The twin from the upper village, the one who was not the mailman, tried to resell his pair for eighty marks, but no one was interested.

We watched the eclipse from the Uhlheck. The entire village was there; the mayor took a group photograph. When the sun was completely blacked out, Palm took off his glasses and looked directly at the circular blackness unprotected. “What are you doing?” Selma cried in alarm, and put her hand over Palm’s eyes.

“The glasses don’t let any light through,” Palm objected.

“That’s the whole point,” Selma explained, but because her fingers were so crooked, Palm could see through them. Then time shifted to a new millennium.