“Nonsense,” Selma said, and rubbed her forehead, “I’m afraid that’s just nonsense, Luisa.”

She placed a slice of cheese on the bread, put the other piece of bread on top, and slipped it in my lunch box.

“Do you know exactly when you had the dream?”

“Around three,” Selma said. She had woken with a start after the image of the okapi slipped away. She’d sat bolt upright in bed and had gasped at her nightgown, the same one she had been wearing just now standing in the Uhlheck in her dream, then at her alarm clock. Three o’clock.

“We probably shouldn’t take it too seriously,” Selma said, but like a TV detective who is not taking an anonymous letter too seriously.

Selma packed the lunch box into my schoolbag. I considered asking if I could stay home under the circumstances.

“Obviously you’re still going to school today,” said Selma, who always knew what I was thinking as if my thoughts hung in garlands of letters over my head, “You’re not going to let a random dream stop you from doing anything.”

“Can I tell Martin?” I asked.

Selma thought it over. “Fine,” she decided. “But absolutely no one other than Martin.”

Our village was too small to have a train station. It was also too small to have a school. Every morning, Martin and I took the bus to the small station in the next village and then caught the local train to the county seat, where we went to school.

While we waited for the train, Martin practiced lifting me. Martin had been training to be a weight lifter since kindergarten, and I was the only weight that was always at hand and never objected to being lifted. The twins from the upper village only let him lift them if he paid twenty pfennig each, grown-ups and calves were still too heavy for him, and everything else that might have been an adequate challenge—saplings, half-grown pigs—was either firmly rooted to the spot or would run away.

Martin and I were the same height. He would crouch down, grab me by the hips, and lift. He was at the point where he could hold me in the air for almost a minute. I only touched the ground if I stretched my toes down as far as I could. When Martin lifted me a second time, I said, “Last night my grandmother dreamed about an okapi.”

I looked at Martin’s part. His father had combed his blond hair with a wet comb and a few strands were still dark.

Martin’s mouth was at the level of my belly button. “So is somebody going to die?” he asked into my sweater.

Maybe your father will be the one, I thought, but naturally didn’t say it out loud, because fathers aren’t supposed to die, no matter how bad they are. Martin put me down and exhaled.