Naturally, I didn’t know that there would be no tomorrow for buying new shoes in the county seat. I didn’t know that a few days later, I’d be wearing my too-large Sunday shoes and holding Selma’s hand in the cemetery and everyone close to me, including the optician, the “Employee of the Month,” shaking with sobs, would form a circle around me so I wouldn’t see the course the world had taken, so I wouldn’t see too clearly how the coffin was lowered, a coffin, the priest said, of a size showing that here lay someone who had not been granted even half a life; but I saw it very clearly, not even all of them together were enough to hide it. And naturally I didn’t know that as soon as the coffin was set down almost without a sound, I would turn and run, and that Selma, of course it was Selma, would find me exactly in the spot under her kitchen table where my feet in their too-small shoes now stood, that I would be huddled there, my face smeared with a sticky red paste and countless Mon Chéri wrappers at my feet; I didn’t know that Selma would crouch down and I would see her tear-streaked face, that Selma would creep under the table with me and say, “Come here, you little praline,” and everything would go dark because I would press my face against Selma’s black shirt, black as the bow on a funeral wreath; naturally, I didn’t know any of this because if we did know such things in advance, if we knew in advance that the entire expanse of life could be upended in less than an hour, we would lose our minds.

At seven-fifteen, Martin and I were standing in the train. Martin had not lifted me on the platform. I had dictated my homework to him as fast as possible.

“Go,” Martin said when the train started, leaning his back with his backpack against the train door and closing his eyes. I stood against the facing door and looked outside.

“Wire factory,” Martin said exactly at the moment we passed the wire factory.

“Right,” I said.

“Field, meadow, crazy Hassel’s farmhouse,” he said.

“Right,” I said.

“Pasture,” Martin said. “Forest. Forest. Hunting blind two.”

“Hunting blind one,” I said.

“Sorry,” Martin said, and smiled. “Hunting blind one. Now field again.”

“Perfect,” I said.

I looked outside over Martin’s head. The strand on Martin’s head was still stuck down but it would be standing up again before we got to school.

“Forest, pasture,” Martin recited quickly, because we were approaching the section where the train sped up, the section in which naming everything at exactly the right moment was especially challenging. “Meadow, meadow,” he said.

Then suddenly the door sprang open.

Part Two

PART TWO

SOMEONE OUTSIDE

“Please close the door,” Mr. Rödder said.