“Will you affirm the end coming, my dear child?” she asked.

This must be what it feels like when a scimitar is rammed into your stomach, I thought.

Selma stroked my cheeks. I thought of Frederik for a moment.

“You’re all crazy,” I said, my voice much too loud in Selma’s silent, nocturnal kitchen. “You all keep asking me to affirm some nonsense or other.”

“Be happy that you’re even asked,” she replied. “Usually these things are considered valid without any affirmation.”

I looked into her eyes and only then recognized that something sinister had played out behind her eyelids.

“You dreamt of an okapi,” I whispered.

Selma smiled and put her hand on my forehead as if she were feeling for a fever. “No,” she said.

“You’re lying to me! Why are you doing that? You don’t need to be afraid to say it,” I exclaimed, even though I was the one who was afraid.

“I thought for a long time about what I should put in order in my life, and I couldn’t come up with anything,” she said, patting my knee, “aside from that spot over there, perhaps.” She pointed to the red circle outlined on the floor. “But I would have liked to help put your life in order, Luisa.”

“My life is in order,” I said, and the macramé owl the shopkeeper’s wife had given Selma fell at my feet from the wall.

Selma looked at the owl, then back at me. “Do you notice anything?”

“No,” I said, and I wasn’t lying.

She handed me the Mon Chéri. “Unwrap it,” she said.

Just when she’d gone back to bed, about four-thirty in the morning, the doorbell rang. It was the optician. He had a comforter draped over his shoulder and a rolled-up air mattress under his arm. “I have a bad feeling,” he said.

The optician lay down next to the sofa. We all slept late, and while we slept, Frederik wrote, “Luisa, please get in touch. I have a bad feeling.” But I only read it two weeks later.

The next morning, Selma had a slight fever. Her eyes glittered. I pulled the optician to the door of her room.

“We should call the doctor,” I said.

“Out of the question,” Selma called from the bedroom. “If you call a doctor, I won’t say another word to you.”

The optician and I looked at each other.

“Not one word for the rest of my life,” Selma shouted, and burst out laughing.

The telephone rang. I hoped it would be my father calling, and it was. “You have to come home,” I said. “Selma’s not well.” It didn’t sound right, but I couldn’t say: “Selma’s doing great, she’s just dying.”

“I’ll catch the next flight,” my father said. “I’m in Kinshasa right now.”