“But not right this minute,” I said. “Don’t you want breakfast first? You’re always hungry, after all.”

The optician pulled Marlies and me out of the kitchen by our sleeves. “Let him, it will do him good,” he said. He took his coat from Selma’s closet. “Every illumination begins and ends with cleaning the floor. Maybe afterward he can think of connections between things that don’t belong together.” The optician smiled at me in Selma’s mirror. “And you can let them fall apart again as you like.”

He patted me on the shoulder and said, “See you later.”

Marlies came with me, and that alone proved the optician wrong, because it had never before been possible to take a walk with Marlies. She wore one of Selma’s dresses, one of Selma’s blouses, and one of Selma’s coats. When we turned onto the Uhlheck, I hesitated because it was the first time I had ever walked there without Selma. Marlies looked at me out of the corner of her eye.

“I’ll go first,” she said, as if it were a matter of chasing away criminals about to attack us head-on.

She stopped in the middle of the Uhlheck, where you can see the village. “It was an earthquake,” Marlies said, looking at her house. “An earthquake that only shook my house.” She looked at me. “Isn’t that something?”

I nodded. Then we walked on to the House of Contemplation and past it. We walked in single file and didn’t say a single word to each other, exactly as Marlies wanted.

Meanwhile, Frederik stood in the middle of the kitchen and took several deep breaths. It was finally quiet, so quiet he thought he could hear Selma’s traveling alarm clock ticking in the bedroom, the traveling alarm clock that never went on a single trip and perhaps ticked so loud to draw attention to its bungled existence.

Frederik started cleaning the kitchen. He took out all the dishes, all the cutlery, all the pots, pans, and bowls, all the provisions from Selma’s credenza. He got a ladder from the garage and wiped the lampshade inside and out. In it lay three dead moths. Frederik picked them up carefully, carried them into the garden in the hollow of his hand, and buried them there.

He cleaned all the cupboards, top to bottom, inside and out. He leaned far into the refrigerator and the oven. He took a pile of paper from the kitchen bench, the optician’s book on Buddhism, old shopping lists and flyers in which Selma had circled especially good deals. In the pile lay a letter.

Dear Frederik, Selma is dead. She liked you very much. The only thing she didn’t like about you was your time zone. Perhaps we weren’t actually made for each other. That’s not so bad. None of an okapi’s parts belong together and it’s still extraordinarily beautiful …