Selma had dreamed of an okapi three times in her life, and each time someone had then died. That’s why we were convinced her dreams of an okapi were directly connected to death. That’s how the mind works. It can draw connections between completely unrelated things in an instant. Coffee-pots and shoelaces, for example, or deposit bottles and fir trees.

The optician had a mind especially adept in this. You could name two things that had absolutely nothing to do with each other, and right off the bat he would explain how they were closely related. And yet it was the optician of all people assuring us this latest okapi dream most certainly would not cause anyone’s death, that death and Selma’s dream were completely and absolutely not connected. But we knew that the optician, like us, believed they were. The optician more than anyone.

My father claimed it was complete and utter nonsense and that our delusion came from the fact that we allowed too little of the world into our lives. He was always saying: “You’ve got to let more of the world in.”

Previously he would say this decisively and primarily to Selma. Afterward he said it only rarely.

The okapi is an incongruous animal, much more incongruous than death. It looks utterly disjointed, with its zebra shanks, its tapir haunches, its giraffe-like rust-red torso, its doe eyes and mouse ears. An okapi is completely implausible, every bit as implausible, in fact, as the sinister dreams of a woman from the Westerwald.

The okapi was officially discovered in Africa only eighty-two years ago. It’s the last large mammal to be discovered by man, at least that is the consensus. In any case, no mammal could top it. No doubt someone unofficially discovered the okapi much earlier, but at the sight of it may have thought he was dreaming or had lost his mind, because an okapi, especially a sudden and unexpected one, looks completely invented.

An okapi does not look remotely sinister. It couldn’t possibly, even if it tried very hard to, which, as far as anyone knows, it rarely does. Even if crows and screech owls had been fluttering around its head in Selma’s dream—to a fully sinister effect—the okapi still would have made a very mild impression.

In Selma’s dream the okapi stood in a meadow near the edge of the forest, in a group of fields and meadows that together are called the Uhlheck—the owl forest. People from the Westerwald often call things by a different or shorter name because they like to get any talking over with quickly. The okapi in the dream looked exactly as okapis do in real life, and Selma, too, looked exactly as she did in real life, namely like Rudi Carrell.