A few weeks earlier, Selma had waited for me in her wheelchair in front of the village shop because the ramp had given way under the weight of a detergent delivery. Near her, a bag of rolls sat on the sill of the shop window. Selma didn’t know they belonged to the mayor’s second wife, who had been so caught up in a discussion with the optician about the advantages and disadvantages of contact lenses that she’d forgotten them. Selma was hungry and her errands were dragging on. She opened the bag, took out a currant bun, tore off a piece, and put the bun quickly back in the bag.

Not long afterward, she started forgetting names. “Remind me the name of Melissa and Matthew’s son, the one who got involved in that terrible problem with drugs,” she would ask, for example, and if anyone tried to tell her a name, she would call out, “Wait, don’t tell me!” because she wanted to remember it on her own. Or because she thought it was enough if someone else could remember the name.

She started forgetting birthdays and doctor’s appointments.

“You haven’t eaten found bread lately, have you?” I asked her.

“No,” Selma said, but then she would have forgotten that, too.

She also lost one of the earrings that Elsbeth had given her for her seventieth birthday, made of two somewhat oversized artificial pearls. When she realized the earring was missing, Selma started to cry, and didn’t stop for half the night. At first I thought she wasn’t actually crying over the earring at  all, but over the dwindling of her abilities, over Elsbeth and all the other people she had lost in the course of her life. But Selma had no feel for metaphors. She was simply crying over the lost earring.

She started saying peculiar things. “The forest is creeping into me,” she said when the optician and I pushed her over the Uhlheck. “You know what? I think the forest is sharing my thoughts.”

The optician and I ignored this, as if Selma hadn’t spoken, but the forest rustled even louder than usual.

Selma began frequently saying sentences with the words never or always and said them like someone who had reached the end of her life and could, indeed, form judgments about what had always been and what never had.

“I never really left this house,” she said, patting the flank of her home one day when we returned from our walk in the Uhlheck. “I’ve always liked blackberry jam very much,” she said one morning as she spooned some on her toast.