When the voices were too lazy to come up with a concrete example—usually around midnight—they used words like everything, nothing, never, and always, with which they could easily jostle the optician, especially since he had grown old. Always and never are especially hard to shoo away at an advanced age.

“You’ve never been bold enough to do anything; you’ve never really dared,” the voices said.

They were so clear and resolute that sometimes the optician could hardly believe the people around him, like Selma, couldn’t hear them. The optician recalled Elsbeth’s deceased husband, who had suffered from deafening tinnitus and, utterly worn out, had finally broken down in tears on my father’s examination table and held his ear very close to my father’s. “Can’t you hear it?” Elsbeth’s husband had asked in despair. “How is it possible that you can’t hear it?”

“Shut up,” the optician said tentatively, then turned onto his side and concentrated on his slippers, neatly lined up on the bedside rug.

“You’ve never really dared to do anything,” the voices said.

“Yes, because you always told me not to!” the optician shouted, and the voices repeated that this was irrelevant: the results were what mattered. And so it went on, all night long. And so the following morning resulted in an ever more exhausted optician, eviscerated by his inner voices, slumped over on his examination stool, trying to lift the weight of always and never until he finally stuck his head into the arc perimeter. It was the only place the voices could not enter.

Now, ever since Frederik had appeared, the optician kept a book on Buddhism on his night table, and when the voices started in on Selma and never and always, the optician opened it to one of the passages he’d underlined. “I am the river,” he would say, “and you are leaves floating by on my current.”

“Speaking of rivers,” the voices replied, “the only thing we have to say is: Apfelbach.”

“I am the sky,” the optician said, “and you are just clouds floating by.”

“Wrong, optician,” they answered, “no one is the sky, and you’re the cloud, a rather ragged one at that, and we’re the wind that blows you around.”

In early November, when I still didn’t know that there would be a change in plans and Frederik would be there the next day, I went through the village with a list. I started with Marlies, to get the worst over with first.

“No one’s home,” Marlies shouted through her closed front door.

“Please, Marlies, it will be quick,” I said.

“There’s no one home, deal with it,” she shouted back.

I walked around the house and looked in the kitchen window. Marlies sat at her table, as always in only a Norwegian sweater and her underwear. She was in her mid-thirties now but looked younger. Something preserved Marlies.