“Are you a goddamn baby or what?” Palm roared, and Martin kept his eyes closed. He seemed strangely relaxed, as if he were standing in front of the local train door reciting what I was looking at: field, forest, pasture, meadow, meadow.

“He only wanted to help me,” I said.

Palm bent down toward me and stared. His complexion was mottled, as if he had once had feathers and someone had yanked them out. Whenever Palm looked at me, I wondered how someone so filled with darkness could ever have known anything about luminous bodies.

“You think you can make a fool of me,” he hissed, and his hiss was even worse than his yelling.

I thought of the little bird, of its eye that turned red with the first blow, and I didn’t want the world to take its course, the world in the form of Palm.

I stood in front of Martin. “Leave him alone,” I shouted.

Palm pushed me away. Light as I was, I fell down even faster than the hut in the forest. Palm grabbed Martin, whose eyes were still closed, and dragged him into the house. Alaska growled for the first and only time in his life. The door slammed so hard it seemed it would never open again.

I felt nauseated. Death between four walls instead of outdoors suddenly no longer seemed so unlikely. The dogs in the yard barked. I stood there, staring at the door behind which Martin had disappeared, and then at everything around it. Pasture, field. Forest.

WITH DEEPEST SYMPATHIES

After Palm had pulled Martin inside, I ran to my mother’s flower shop, the closest refuge. Her store was called Fresh as a Daisy. My mother was proud of the name, but my father thought it was fatuous. It smelled of lilies and pine trees because my mother kept a lot of wreaths in stock. She supplied flowers and funeral wreaths not just to our village, but to the surrounding villages as well. She was always very busy. Whenever I rushed to see her, I had to brake and wait until she finished something or other: a phone call about the phrasing for the bow on a wreath or about the color of the flower arrangements for a wedding banquet, or a conversation with the mayor’s wife, who needed a bouquet for the wife of the mayor in the neighboring village.

Eventually my mother would finish what she was doing and turn to me. But there was always something else that needed to be done. She was always occupied with something, even when she turned to me, and this something was a question—one that had lived inside her for more than five years.