Frederik was sure there was no need to worry about my father. “Your husband is mourning and doesn’t want to be disturbed in his grief,” Frederik wanted to say, but since my mother didn’t know that he knew my father very well from my letters, he was afraid she would find such a sentence presumptuous. Frederik only noticed how much he knew about all of us from my letters now that he was trying to hide it.

“I’ll be here in case anything happens,” he said. “I’ll be here cleaning.”

“That’s good. Both are,” my mother said, and she left.

The vacuum cleaner was missing the attachment to reach the farthest corners. Frederik ran a hand brush over the stove, the refrigerator, the sink, the credenza, around the legs of the kitchen table. Then he crawled under the bench and swept the baseboards.

At one spot under the kitchen bench, the wood had pulled away from the wall, and a pearl was stuck in the gap between the wall and the baseboard. It was Selma’s lost earring, but despite all the letters, Frederik couldn’t know that. The pearl was a bit too large and a bit too artificial. You could see the seam where the two halves had been joined together, as on a globe. At one point there were barely recognizable traces of glue where the earring post had been attached. Frederik rolled the pearl between thumb and forefinger. A small, blind globe in pearl white.

He put the false pearl down next to him and wanted to clean the rest of the baseboard, but the pearl started to move. It rolled purposefully away, across the kitchen, and under the credenza.

Frederik watched it roll. He crawled out from under the kitchen bench, knelt before the credenza, and felt around beneath it with his hand, but he had to stretch out and stick his arm in up to his shoulder until he could reach it. He stood up, looked at the pearl, and then at the linoleum.

“The floor is slanted,” he said, because some things are so obvious you have to say them out loud, even if no one is listening. He took a step to the right, as if the floor were so tilted you immediately lost your balance.

And because the floor’s slant concerned Frederik so much, he didn’t notice that he was standing with one leg right in the middle of the spot outlined in red, which everyone automatically avoided and which the optician always pointed out emphatically, as if the risk were not one of breaking through to the basement, but all the way to Japan, to the void, or to the beginning of the world.

No one had stood there for a very long time. So long that the spot on the floor didn’t have any idea what was happening to it.