Selma asked the optician, whose face really had become craggy, if it wasn’t about time he started thinking about retirement. But there was nothing wrong with the optician, who was almost as old as Selma, that is, almost seventy-seven, aside from a weakness in the muscles of his lower back that rendered them unable to relieve the burden of his disks, and he dismissed the idea energetically. “I will work until the day of my death. That’s my preference. You’ll see, Selma: I will die with my head in the perimeter.” And that was what happened many years later, only Selma was no longer around to see it.

“What does merciless drought mean?” Selma asked, holding up a photography book of Namibia. The optician translated the words and added, “as you can see.”

The optician was still carrying around the sentence about how something not seen can’t disappear, and still no one could explain it. “I’m sorry,” Frederik wrote. “Please tell the optician that I don’t understand the sentence, either.” The shopkeeper asked how things were with Frederik; the optician declared that it really was time to repair the weak spot in Selma’s floor properly because it was an impossible state of affairs even though it had been possible for decades, and then he forgot about it again; the widow from the House of Contemplation left Friedhelm because she preferred being a widow after all; the wife of the dead mayor moved in with her daughter in the county seat; and then the Häubels’ third child disappeared.

The entire village set out looking for him. We searched in all the houses, the stalls, the barns, and we searched the Uhlheck. The child was called Martin because he was named after Martin. He was ten years old.

“No,” Selma said when we asked about her dreams the previous night. “No, definitely not.”

We weren’t worried about the usual dangers, but about the most outlandish ones. We were afraid that a door somewhere might have opened and the Häubels’ child been ripped from life. But three hours later, the boy came home unharmed. He had been hiding in the dead mayor’s former cowshed, way in the back next to the discarded milking machine. We’d all passed right by him, and when he heard our collective fear, he hadn’t dared come out of his hiding place.