Elsbeth was about to set down Palm’s arm when her eye fell on his wristwatch. “Look,” she yelled to the optician, even though he was kneeling right next to her, and she waved Palm’s arm in front of his face. “It’s three o’clock, it’s three o’clock! It’s over. It’s three o’clock and we’re not dead.”

“Congratulations,” the optician said softly. “You, too, Werner Palm.”

Without raising his head, Palm shook off Elsbeth’s hand and slipped his arm under his head. He seemed to be in a stable recovery position.

“I’m going to kill you, you jackasses,” he murmured, “I’m going to blow you away.”

Elsbeth patted his head as if he were the shopkeeper’s wife’s terrier. “Of course you will, Palm,” she said, then laughed and slapped the optician on the thigh, because now that the twenty-four hours were up, she felt that everything was immortal again for the time being.

Far behind in the village, old Farmer Häubel looked at the clock and felt himself immortal for the time being, but, unlike Elsbeth, he wasn’t in the least bit happy about it. He stood up laboriously and, nearly transparent as he was, he shuffled over to the roof hatch and shut it, since no souls would be flying through it anytime soon.

THE TWENTY-NINTH HOUR

When the new day began, twenty-six hours after Selma’s dream, the villagers found themselves in their pajamas, their hearts still intact, their minds still intact, with their hastily burned and hastily written letters.

They were overjoyed and resolved to delight in and be grateful for everything in the future because they were still alive. They resolved, for example, to finally fully appreciate the morning sun playing in the branches of the apple trees. The villagers made such resolutions often, when a falling roof tile narrowly missed them, for example, or a feared diagnosis was ruled out. But inevitably, after a short time, a burst pipe or an unexpected surcharge quickly diluted their brief spell of joy and gratitude, and the sunlight in the apple trees could call it quits.

When the mailman came to empty the mailbox at the crack of dawn, a few people were already waiting to reclaim their hastily mailed letters because the letters now made them uncomfortable, the words having become unsuitably grandiose for a continuing life—always appeared far too often, as did never. The mailman patiently waited as they rummaged through his mailbag and recovered their escaped truths.

The truths people had said to each other at the supposedly very last minute could not be recovered. The cobbler left his wife at daybreak and moved to the neighboring village because she had told him that his son wasn’t, strictly speaking, his son, and this long-confined truth spread an awful stink and a great commotion.