Heinrich opened his arms and Selma fell into them. She embraced Heinrich’s still-young body, Heinrich embraced Selma’s body that had lived for more than eighty years as tightly as he had when she was young, and Selma could only feel those parts of her body that were touching Heinrich’s. For example, she couldn’t feel her right shoulder anymore, just as she had lost sensation in it for a time after Martin’s death, when she carried me around day in, day out. This time it was different. This time her shoulder wasn’t numb. This time her shoulder seemed to have vanished.

“I can’t feel my shoulder anymore,” Selma said into Heinrich’s neck, which smelled exactly as it had in his life, of mint and faintly of filterless Camels.

“That’s how it should be,” Heinrich said, his mouth against her neck, “that’s exactly how it should be, Selma,” and his hands stroked her back, her hair, her arms. Selma trembled. It was a trembling she couldn’t locate. She didn’t know what exactly was trembling, she simply trembled.

And then Heinrich said to her what Selma had said to me when I was five years old and had climbed too high in a tree in the Uhlheck. Selma could see the tree very well from where she stood. I didn’t know how to climb down. Selma had raised herself on her tiptoes, stretched her arms up, and held me tight while I still clutched the branch.

“Let go,” she’d said, “I’m here.”

OKAPIA JOHNSTONI

“Dear Frederik, Selma is dead,” I’d wanted to write, right away, on the morning after Selma’s death, but I stopped after “Dear Frederik” because no one should write it, no one should set it down, as long as my father still didn’t know.

I wasn’t the right person to tell my father; my mother should be the one.

“Of course,” she said, but when my father called on the afternoon following Selma’s death, she wasn’t there. She was out organizing Selma’s funeral, so I had no choice but to be the right one.

When I heard the phone ring, I pictured my father somewhere far, far away at a public telephone with a terrible connection through which he couldn’t understand anything other than “Selma” and “dead.”

“It’s me,” my father said. “Good news, Luisy: I was able to get a flight for today.”

“Papa,” I said.

“Can you understand me?” he asked. “There’s something I absolutely have to tell you.”

“There’s something I have to tell you, too.”

“Luisa, I have seen an actual okapi. A real one. Here in the rain forest. It’s an extraordinarily beautiful animal.”