“And you’re supposed to ask the monk how it is that you can’t see something if you’re not trying to see it. Or something like that,” Selma said.

“So she hasn’t called him yet?” the optician asked.

“No,” Selma whispered.

“In Buddhism, there’s often great emphasis on non-action,” the optician said.

“I’ll come over this evening,” I said. When I arrived at Selma’s, the optician was still reading at the kitchen table and Selma was busy with a potato masher, mashing potatoes as if she wanted to prove that things very well could disappear.

“Do I seem unstuck right now?” I asked.

“Yes,” said the optician, who was too engrossed in his reading to listen.

“Yes,” said Selma, who was too engrossed in mashing potatoes to listen.

“Then I’ll do it, I’ll call him now,” I said.

“Good,” Selma and the optician said, the one not looking up from the potatoes mashed beyond recognition, the other not looking up from his thoroughly highlighted reading.

I went into the living room, picked up the receiver, and started dialing. When I was about halfway through the number, the optician stormed into the room and cut off the call.

“Don’t do it,” he said.

I stared at him.

“Different time zone,” he said. “It’s four in the morning there.”

I spent the night in Selma’s living room on the fold-out couch, a red corduroy monstrosity. I often spent the night either with Selma in the ground-floor apartment or with my mother on the floor above. Nights at Selma’s in the village, unlike those in the county seat, were as uncompromisingly silent and dark as nights should be.

I woke at two in the morning. I turned on the small lamp on the side table, stood up, and went to the window, skirting the dangerously weak sections on the floor that the optician had marked with red. It was dark outside. I couldn’t see anything except my own blurred image in the windowpane. I was wearing one of Selma’s nightgowns, blurry, ankle-length, and flowered.

I calculated eight hours ahead. If I don’t call now, I thought, I never will, and time would shift forever and I’ll never see him again. I took the rolled-up phone cord from the hook and carried the phone to the window. I dialed Frederik’s number.

It rang for a very long time, as if the ring had to struggle laboriously all the way to Japan: from here to the county seat—which was difficult enough—then over the Carpathian Mountains, the Ukrainian plain, the Caspian Sea, across Russia, Kazakhstan, and China. Just when I was becoming convinced that it was impossible for a ring to make it from the Westerwald all the way to Japan, someone picked up on the other end of the line.

“Moshi moshi,” said a cheerful voice. It sounded like the name of a children’s game.