We went back to the house and sat at the kitchen table. Because she was so happy to have him home, Selma held Alaska on her lap. He hadn’t been held on anyone’s lap since he was full-grown; Selma was completely hidden behind him.

Next to me, the optician took his fountain pen from the breast pocket of his shirt and put on his reading glasses. I placed my forearm on the table in front of him and he began copying down the numbers onto a piece of paper. It took a while.

“I’m sure this number has a lovely melody,” he said. Selma had recently had to replace her rotary telephone and now had a phone with buttons and with accompanying beeps.

“Yes, probably the wedding march,” Selma said from behind Alaska.

The optician was done writing and he blew on the ink so it wouldn’t smudge.

“Thanks,” I said. I stood up and pinned the number on the bulletin board over Selma’s refrigerator.

The optician and I stood before the telephone number the way we’d once stood in front of the train station where he had taught Martin and me how to tell time and had explained how time zones work.

“I don’t know,” Selma said, still completely hidden behind Alaska, so that it looked like Alaska was ventriloquizing. “Couldn’t it have been somebody nearby? That nice boy from your vocational school, maybe?”

“Unfortunately not,” I said.

The new telephone rang. I ran to it and picked up the receiver. I knew it was my father before he’d even had a chance to say, “Hello, the connection is terrible.”

“I found him, Papa,” I said, “and the dog, too.”

I JUST WANTED TO ASK HOW ALASKA IS DOING

When you desperately want to call someone but dread it just as much, you suddenly notice how many telephones there are. There was the new touch-tone telephone in Selma’s living room, and in the living room one floor above it was my mother’s elegant, slender phone. There was the telephone in the optician’s back room, the telephone covered in hunter-green velvet on Elsbeth’s side table. There was the telephone in my apartment in the county seat, the one next to the cash register in Mr. Rödder’s bookstore. There was a yellow phone booth on the way from my apartment to the bookstore. “We’re ready,” all these telephones said, “it’s up to you.”

The optician was also ready. The day after Frederik had burst from the underbrush, he had come into the bookstore with a list of books about Buddhism. We didn’t have a single one in stock. When Mr. Rödder called the distributor to place the order, both he and the sales rep despaired over the Japanese names. Mr. Rödder shouted the letters into the receiver as if the distributor were out on the high seas.