I’d asked Marlies to write in my poetry album that day as well. She reluctantly opened the album, flipped past the optician’s entry, “Boulders can be crushed and mountains can be scaled, but you cannot be forgotten, you are nonpareil,” my father’s entry, “The brown bear lives in Siberia, in Africa lives the gnu, the black boar lives in Sicily, in my heart there’s only you,” she flipped past Elsbeth’s entry, “Be happy and full of joy, like a puppy with a brand-new toy,” and the shopkeeper’s, “Why must you always roam? The good is near at hand. If you learn to catch happiness, you’ll never need to leave this land,” and my mother’s, “Only love knows how to become rich by giving to others.” She ignored Selma’s entry, “Not every day is Sunday, nor every meal a feast, but you can still be happy and see your life increase,” and when she finally found a blank page, she wrote in pencil “Greetings, M.”

“Martin believed you would save us all,” I said softly.

“That worked out really well,” Marlies called, “especially for Martin. And for Selma.”

“But Selma was over eighty.”

“She left me in peace,” Marlies said, her voice breaking slightly. She cleared her throat. “Selma was the only one out of all of you who always left me in peace.”

“And she still will.”

“Get out of here,” Marlies said quietly. “I can already see Death. He’s coming for me.”

I’d had enough. “Okay, Marlies, you’re right. It’s time to put an end to it all.”

Marlies’s curtain rod fell down. The left side had come undone. The curtains hung diagonally at the window.

There’s always something falling around here, I thought, there are a lot of things that aren’t properly fastened. And suddenly I thought of Selma asking me if I’d noticed anything when the macramé owl in her kitchen fell off the wall after I’d said that my life was in order.

Marlies stared out the window. I thought she was staring because of the crooked curtain rod, but that wasn’t true.

“He is coming, Death is coming right for me,” she said.

I turned around and saw what she was staring at: a man in a long black robe walking through her garden straight toward us. I took a step back and stumbled against the wall.

“That’s not Death,” I said, “it’s Frederik.”

He stopped a few steps from me. “Did I come at a bad time?”

“Frederik,” I said.

“It’s me,” he said, and smiled. “You wear glasses now.”

“Frederik,” I said again, as if a person becomes more real the more you address him.

“I had a very bad feeling, and when the optician called me, I set out right away,” he said, as if he had come from the next village.

“All the way here,” I said.