“To think I lived long enough to witness this,” Selma said. “But if time keeps racing this fast, I may well see the next millennium.”

“I worry that gravity will disappear with the change to the new millennium,” I wrote to Frederik.

We celebrated the new year in the community center. The optician and the shopkeeper spent the entire evening setting off fireworks; from above, our village looked like a ship in distress. Behind the building, near the toilets, I drunkenly kissed the drunken twin from the upper village, the one who was the mailman. I kissed him despite his bad karma and because everything was spinning from the sparkling wine, but I stopped as soon as he said, “Luisa, you’re as hot as a Roman candle.”

Gravity did not disappear. Nothing changed except for the actor who had played Melissa in Selma’s television series for decades was suddenly replaced by another. Selma acknowledged this with an irritated snort. Then she looked at me and said, “Something has to happen.”

“What?”

“Go out with that nice young man sometime, the one from your trade school. What’s his name again?”

“Andreas,” I said.

Selma asked the optician what enormous population density meant, and he translated it for her. It was in a book about New York. The optician bought heat patches for his lower back. The deliveryman pushed his gray-covered cart to the shop door and my father came to visit. He brought me a scimitar, which I gave to Mr. Rödder as a gift. The twin from the upper village, the one who was not the mailman, set crazy Hassel’s farmhouse on fire and didn’t get caught, and Selma and I stood looking at a tree on the bank of the Apfelbach and wondered if Elsbeth was right about ivy on a tree trunk actually being a person climbing toward redemption and, if so, who it was. The optician said it was a shame we didn’t know anyone who was a stamp collector, since we had so many marvelous stamps we’d received with the photography books sent from all over the world and the letters from Japan.