“Not enough syllables,” Selma said. “Imagine calling out ‘Pain, come here, Pain!’” I desperately wanted to keep the dog, so I thought quickly and feverishly how you could best call “Pain.” When I finally came up with something, I said it out loud, and the dog jumped up and ran off. Selma said that you couldn’t blame him, she would have run away at that suggestion, too. We set off into the dusky forest and soon found the dog in the underbrush, where he had hidden from my suggestion like the deer from Palm’s shotgun: I’d suggested, “Ouchy, we can call him Ouchy.”

The dog (whom we finally named Alaska—it was Martin’s idea; my father agreed because Alaska is big and cold and that’s true of pain as well, at least of an encapsulated one) grew quickly. He surprised us every morning, because like everyone else he grew mostly at night. Some nights, I interrupted my own sleep and growth to watch Alaska as he slept and grew. In our house at night, the only thing you could hear was the creaking and rustling of the trees in the wind outside. In my ears, however, it didn’t sound like the creaking and rustling of trees in the wind but like the creaking and rustling of bones, the sound of Alaska’s bones growing in all directions as he slept.

MON CHÉRI

If Selma hadn’t dreamed of the okapi the previous night, Martin and I would have gone to the Uhlheck after school like we always did. We would have rebuilt our hut in the forest, which Palm often knocked down when he drank. It didn’t take much. Our hut was already shaky, and the fact that it collapsed so easily provoked Palm to such a degree that he always trampled the remains after it fell.

We would have played weight lifting in the field like we always did. Martin was the weight lifter and I was the audience. Martin would find a branch that didn’t actually weigh very much and would lift it above his head as if it weighed a ton. “And now you must be wondering how the super-heavyweight Vasily Alekseyev was able to lift a hundred and eighty kilos in the snatch. You have to picture it more or less this way,” he would say, holding the branch over his head, letting his narrow shoulders and thin arms tremble and holding his breath until his face turned as bright red as weight lifters’ faces turn in competitions. “He was also called ‘the Crane of Shakhty,’” Martin would say proudly as he took a bow. I would clap. “I’m sure you want to know how Blagoy Blagoev was able to lift a full hundred and eighty-five kilos,” Martin would say with another demonstration of trembling and shaking, and I would clap.