“Since last night, I think,” I said, because you lose track of time and no longer know the difference between last night and the coming night when you sense your life is in the process of being upended.

The monk in the middle looked at the ancient monk, who nodded. “We’ll help you,” he said.

“Look for the dog?” I asked, because you become slow on the uptake when you’ve lost track of time.

“That’s right, to find the dog,” the monk said.

“To look for.”

“To find,” he insisted.

“It’s roughly the same thing,” the ancient monk said.

“You’re Buddhist monks,” I said, and all three nodded as if I’d answered the grand-prize-winning question.

“What does the dog look like?” the ancient monk asked.

“Big, gray, and old,” I said.

“All right, let’s spread out,” the ancient monk said.

He turned and walked straight back into the forest. The second monk turned to the right. The monk who had been the monk in the middle rested his hand on my shoulder and smiled at me. His eyes were very blue, almost turquoise. “As blue as the Masurian Lakeland,” Selma would later say. “As blue as the Mediterranean Sea in the Mediterranean midday,” Elsbeth would later say. “It’s some shade of cyan blue, to be precise,” the optician would later say, and “As blue as blue, that’s all,” Marlies would later say.

“Shall we look together?” he asked me. “My name is Frederik, by the way.”

We walked next to each other, keeping a lookout, and Frederik kept looking at me out of the corner of his eye, the way Selma had looked at the okapi in her dream. Frederik was tall. He had pushed up the sleeves of his cowl. His arms were tanned as if they had just returned from summer vacation, and covered with fine hairs, blond ones; you could tell that the hair on his head would have been blond, too, if it hadn’t been shaved.

For a long time, neither of us said anything. I frantically tried to come up with a question, but because too many questions arise when a Buddhist monk is suddenly walking beside you in the Uhlheck, especially when it’s one who is about to upend your life, the questions all get wedged together and none can get free from the others.

Frederik didn’t look as if he had a question. I figured Buddhist monks likely never have any questions, but that wasn’t the case. At my side, Frederik was also trying to figure out how to separate questions that had gotten wedged together. “What do you think?” he wrote me much later. “That kind of thing doesn’t happen to me every day either.”

Frederik stuck his hand into his cowl pocket and pulled out a chocolate bar. It was a Mars bar. He unwrapped it and held it out to me.

“Want some?”

“No, thanks.”