The optician gave the Häubels’ third child a stamp collection album, and the mayor died; his heart stopped just as he was trying to attach the wreath to the maypole and he fell from the ladder stone-dead. “Please don’t tell me you dreamed of an okapi,” the mayor’s wife said to Selma, and Selma said nothing.

“What are enchanting oasis towns?” Selma asked with a book of photographs of Egypt on her lap, and the optician translated it for her.

Friedhelm sang when he walked through the village and tipped his hat to everyone he met. The optician stuck his head into his perimeter and signaled to the dots that he had seen them. My father came to visit and brought me a glossy poster of a Venetian gondola that was so ugly I wondered if maybe he’d bought it at the gift shop and not in Venice. Mr. Rödder gave an interview to the local newspaper. Over a  bowl of Flaming Temptation in the ice-cream parlor he spoke about heroism. And I went out with Andreas from the vocational school so that Selma would finally leave me in peace. Afterward Andreas came up to my apartment and, because I hadn’t counted on that and hadn’t cleaned up, all the chairs and the sofa were covered with clothes and newspapers. Andreas was about to sit on the still unpacked bookshelf in the corner. “Stop,” I said. “Not there, please.”

“Where should I sit, then?” Andreas asked, and I had no idea where he should sit.

Alaska needed a hip operation and the veterinarian warned us that he probably wouldn’t survive the procedure for the simple reason that, in theory, he shouldn’t even be alive. On the evening before the operation I wrote Frederik, “The operation went well. Alaska made it through the procedure extraordinarily well and is very lively.” On the day of the operation, my father called every half hour, from Alaska, of all places, to ask if there was any news, and only stopped when we told him we needed to keep the line free for the veterinarian.

Alaska didn’t die. Alaska began yet another of his countless lives without dying in between, and after I’d put down a piece of the Christmas roast outside Marlies’s door and had turned to leave, I heard rattling as she undid the five locks on her door and opened it a crack.

“What’s the name of the guy who said people should sit quietly in their rooms?” she asked.

“Blaise Pascal.”

“No, the other one.”

“Oh right, Dr. Maschke.”

The shopkeeper bought a coffee dispenser and wrote coffee to go on a paper plate and hung it on the front door of the shop, but he soon took it down again because no one wanted a coffee to go. “Where I am supposed to go with a coffee?” the dead mayor’s wife asked.