Because Selma wanted to get back to doing what she always did as soon as possible, she went for a walk in the Uhlheck at six-thirty. “Come, Alaska,” she said, but Alaska didn’t want to; in fact, in those days Alaska also wanted to do nothing but sleep.

The optician followed Selma to the Uhlheck in case I slipped or her disks did. The optician looked at the ground. His eyes stung from crying, from too many field-of-vision tests. Besides, he felt there was nothing left worth seeing. The symphonic beauty he had always tried to get Martin and me to appreciate had been retired to storage like an old theater backdrop.

On the third evening, it started to rain over the Uhlheck. As a precaution, the optician had brought along Selma’s raincoat and rain hat, a transparent bonnet with white polka dots. He draped the raincoat over me on Selma’s back, gently placed the rain hat on her head so nothing would happen to her hairdo, and tied the bands carefully under her chin. Then they started walking again, but after a short distance Selma stopped in her tracks and the optician, who hadn’t expected this, ran into her from behind. Selma swayed and the optician held her tightly. He tried to stabilize her and me with his own body as he had the sawn post of the hunting blind.

“To be honest, she’s becoming rather heavy,” Selma said.

She turned around and started for home. For the first time since the invention of the world, she didn’t want to walk for the full thirty minutes in the Uhlheck. The optician was surprised when Selma didn’t climb the hill toward her house but continued downhill until she reached the general store. She stopped in front of the cigarette vending machine.

“Do you have any change?” she asked, and shifted me over her shoulder and farther down her back. My head hung just above her rear end.

Selma had smoked when Heinrich was still alive. In many of the gray photographs of her and Heinrich, they both had a cigarette in the corner of their mouths and if they didn’t, Selma claimed, it was only because they laughed so hard the cigarettes had fallen out. Selma had stopped smoking when she was pregnant with my father and had become one of those people who wave their hands reproachfully and cough indignantly when anyone is smoking any distance away.

“Selma, now, this is no reason to start smoking again,” the optician said, and as soon as the sentence was out of his mouth, he knew it was the most idiotic sentence said in a long while, and this at a time hardly lacking in idiotic sentences. It was more idiotic than the one about time healing all wounds, more idiotic than the one about God working in mysterious ways.