I taught the Häubel children how to tie their shoes on our front steps, Friedhelm married the widow from the House of Contemplation, and on his express wish we all sang, Oh, you lovely Westerwald, in front of the registry office—at the wedding the twin from the upper village, the one who was the mailman, asked if I wanted to kiss some more, since he was unattached at the moment—and that winter Palm made a discovery. He was on his way to Selma’s with some Bible passages when he saw her gripping my arm tightly, trying in vain to make her way down the snow-covered slope in front of her house without constantly coming close to falling. Palm watched her, thought for a while, and went home. That evening he came back with two vegetable graters. He tied them to the soles of Selma’s winter boots with florist’s wire.

“Brilliant, Palm,” we said.

“Brilliant,” Frederik wrote two weeks later, and we almost slapped Palm on the back, but that wasn’t allowed.

“Endless expanses,” the optician said when Selma asked him, a book of photographs of Australia open on her lap, what vastness meant.

Selma pushed her wheelchair over the Uhlheck, Marlies complained about a book recommendation, Palm quoted Bible passages, and the optician tentatively asked if they hadn’t already gotten through the entire Bible. “A long time ago,” Palm said, “but each passage can be interpreted a thousand different ways,” and one night the twin from the upper village, the one who wasn’t the mailman, broke into the bookstore.

He hadn’t counted on Mr. Rödder still being there, on his knees under the counter trying to hook up a modem. Unnoticed, Mr. Rödder scrambled on all fours to the travel section and held down the twin from the upper village until the police arrived. From then on, Mr. Rödder was much more even-keeled. Even his eyebrows, once in a constant state of agitation, calmed down. Mr. Rödder grumbled less. He no longer sidled between the shelves but strode proudly, conscious of having performed an important act.

“There’s always something going on in your village,” Frederik wrote, and I wrote back asking if perhaps he didn’t have an email address so we could reach each other more quickly, since everything took so long this way. Frederik responded, with a delay, that naturally he wasn’t on email and: “By the way, I’m happy gravity is still here. And that we are, too.”

My mother, who had started writing poetry, won second place in the local newspaper’s poetry competition, and Palm’s hunting blind collapsed without him in it. Surprisingly, it was the posts the optician hadn’t taken a saw to that had crumbled. The posts he had sawn lasted forever because he and Elsbeth had repaired them so well.