Selma had stood there, in a very young version of herself, holding her son in her arms, Selma, with no part of her yet in the slightest deformed. She saw Elsbeth climbing up the hill, in a very young version of herself, Elsbeth still slim, climbing unusually slowly, unusually bowed, as if she were walking against a current to which she would have happily abandoned herself in exhaustion. And Selma knew then that Heinrich was dead. She knew it even before Elsbeth stepped into the kitchen and said, “Selma, unfortunately I have to tell you that my brother—” and she could not get any further.

Selma had stood there just a few days earlier. With her son in her arms she had looked at the newspaper photograph that Heinrich had hung on the kitchen wall. “That’s an okapi, my little Peter,” she said. “Your papa discovered it. In the newspaper, that is. It’s the most comical animal in the world.” She kissed his head and said, “Tonight I dreamed of one. I dreamed that I was standing in the Uhlheck with an okapi. In my nightgown. Imagine.” She pressed her nose into her son’s stomach and both of them giggled.

Heinrich had stood in that spot. From it he had watched the shopkeeper go, the last, rather drunk, of Heinrich’s birthday guests to leave. It was his first birthday in his own house. Heinrich lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out the window into the night. He looked over the meadow and the slope that bordered the forest, the trees swaying in the wind that always blew.

Behind him Selma was picking up the bottles and glasses from the kitchen table. Without a thought, she put a piece of chocolate in her mouth and drank the rest of Elsbeth’s cherry brandy, which was still on the table. “This is delicious,” Selma said to Heinrich. She went up to him and wrapped her arms around his chest from behind. “Is there such a thing? Cherry-brandy-flavored chocolate?”

Heinrich tossed his cigarette out the window, turned, and took Selma in his arms. “I don’t know,” he said, “but if not, you definitely should invent it.” He pulled her close. Selma kissed his mouth, his throat, his neck.

“My heart is racing,” she said, smiling.

“As it should be,” Heinrich replied, lifting her up, one arm under her back, the other under her knees. Selma laughed, and Heinrich wanted to carry her into the bedroom, but they only got as far as the living room.

And Heinrich had lain in that spot, on his stomach, looking in great concentration over the floor that had just been laid. His chin almost touching the planks, he looked from one corner of the room to the other. Then he looked up at his best friend, standing next to him completely covered in dust, who had helped him with every step, with measuring, ordering, laying the planks, everything.