They stood before me in a row. It was like a lineup in Tatort when an eyewitness behind a one-way mirror has to identify the suspect among several people standing in a row. To make the identification more difficult, everyone in the lineup looks very similar. “The perpetrator wore a black cowl and a friendly smile,” the witness would have said in this case.

“Good evening,” said the monk in the middle. “We didn’t mean to frighten you.”

I hadn’t been frightened, and only then, when the monk in the middle said that, did I feel alarmed, like an eyewitness who recognizes the main suspect beyond the shadow of a doubt. I felt dizzy and staggered a step to the right, not because anything accosted me from within or from without but because I had a presentiment when the monk in the middle said “Good evening” that he would upend the entire expanse of my life in a single movement.

I had always believed that you could never know something like this in advance, but there, in the Uhlheck, I realized you could.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, because it is an appropriate question to ask someone who is about to change your life.

“Walking meditation,” the monk replied. “We’re here for a retreat in the village back there, in that house with the pensive name.” He pointed behind him, meaning on the other side of the forest.

“The House of Contemplation,” I offered.

Years ago, a widow in the neighboring village had converted her farm into an inn, which she mostly rented out on weekends to therapy groups. When I was a child, primal scream therapy was in vogue. Sometimes, when Martin and I were passing through the neighboring village, piercing screams echoed from the House of Contemplation and the shutters of all the surrounding houses were closed tight. Amused, Martin and I screamed back as loud as we could until the owner of one of the houses came out and said despairingly, “Please, not you, too.”

“And you?” the monk in the middle asked.

He was still just the monk in the middle, still nameless. The monk in the middle’s name could still have been Jörn or Sigurd, which would have been unfortunate in light of the still-unestablished fact that I would eventually say his name around seventy-five thousand times and would think it around a hundred and eighty thousand times.

“I’m looking for Alaska,” I said.

One of the monks giggled. He was at least as old as Farmer Häubel.

“Is that a metaphor?” the monk in the middle asked.

“No,” I replied, then thought of my father and Dr. Maschke. “Well, yes, it’s also a metaphor. But it’s primarily a dog.”

“How long has it been gone?”