“Marlies? Are you listening? There’s been enough dying. Death hasn’t exactly made himself scarce recently. I strongly recommend you don’t throw yourself at him.”

“Your recommendations are always shit,” Marlies said.

She sat directly under the hook on which her aunt, that bad-tempered, intolerable woman, had hanged herself.

“How did you get ahold of Palm’s gun?”

“Palm was drunk. He slept so soundly, I could have cleaned out his entire house. Now get lost. It’s time to put an end to it all.” Marlies looked at me. Her eyes were wilder than Palm’s used to be.

Of course, I thought. It is time to put an end to it all when you put all you’ve got into making sure no one wants to visit. When you haven’t chosen any of the things that surround you. When you don’t like anything, not any suggestions, no frozen dishes, not a single item in the gift shop, it certainly has to end sometime when everything is all blurry.

I had always thought that time passed Marlies by because her days were all identical and left no trace. But that wasn’t true. Time did pass for her, and the worst was: it passed pointlessly.

I leaned my head against the open window. “Please let me in.”

“Disappear. Just go away.”

I thought of Martin and what he wrote in my poetry album. He had leafed through it to the last page and written in his neat, child’s handwriting: “At the very end I’ve taken root / to keep all others from falling out.” When Elsbeth sent us to Marlies’s house afterward because someone had to check on sad Marlies, Martin showed her his entry and said, “Just like you, right? You took root at the end.”

Marlies didn’t understand. But Martin was convinced that Marlies must have moved to the end of the village and was so intolerable because she’d been invented to keep any criminals from attacking us from behind.