Selma had never been to Alaska and didn’t want to go. “Thank you,” she said, and put the book on the shelf in the living room with the other photography books. Every year, my father gave her a new book of photographs showing the world he felt she urgently needed to let into her life.

Elsbeth gave Selma a pound of coffee and a jar of snail balm, which, according to Elsbeth, could turn gray hair blond. Sad Marlies gave her two cans of bargain mushrooms, and the optician gave her, on her request, ten boxes of Mon Chéri. What Selma liked best about Mon Chéri was the filling. “The filling is so calming,” she would say. She usually bit off the front of the Mon Chéri, sucked out the cherry and the liqueur, and gave the chocolate shell to me.

We sang “Happy Birthday” and Martin took the opportunity to try to lift Selma but without success. We ate cake and my father told us about his psychoanalysis, something he loved to talk about. “Speaking of psychoanalysis,” my father would say, even when no one in the room had said anything on the topic.

My father’s psychoanalyst was Dr. Maschke, whose practice was in the county seat. Soon after my father announced that he was going into analysis—he announced it the way others announce they’re getting married—there was a Tatort episode on television, in which the main suspect was also named Maschke. I wasn’t allowed to see it, not being nearly old enough for a crime show, but I watched in secret through the crack of the living room door.

The Tatort police detective sensed that Maschke was a criminal from the very beginning. He’d received an anonymous letter that said, “Maschke is planning something.” Since then, whenever my father said, “I’m off to Dr. Maschke’s, see you later,” I pictured the anonymous letter claiming Maschke was planning something, something serious enough to warrant an anonymous letter.

Knowing that my father talked about her to Dr. Maschke made Selma uncomfortable. Of course, he had to talk about her, since mothers are the main suspects in psychoanalysis. I didn’t like the idea that my father was telling him absolutely everything about Selma either, because I worried that Maschke was planning something against her. I hadn’t been able to see the whole Tatort episode because Selma caught me watching and sent me back to bed. So I only found out many years later that Maschke, the apparent prime suspect, was in fact completely innocent of all the terrible things that had occurred; Maschke had not tried to take anyone’s life. Maschke hadn’t been planning anything at all. In the end, it turned out that Maschke was one of the good guys.