You can live for years with a gnawing question, you can let it hollow you out, and then have it disappear in a flash, in a single moment of waking with a start. My mother left my father; the fact that he had left her already some time before didn’t change a thing. My mother was in a different time zone and so, from her point of view, she had left him first.

Naturally my father noticed. He noticed it far away in Siberia, and he called her from a pay phone the very second she woke with a start, but he didn’t reach her because she was sitting in Alberto’s bed, leaving him. My father was left in the Siberian phone booth listening to an endless ringing tone, and in the apartment below, Selma covered her head with her pillow because the phone on the floor above kept ringing and ringing and ringing.

After she had woken with a start, my mother could not get back to sleep. She got dressed and passed Alberto without a word on her way out of the ice-cream parlor and into the silent village. She looked at the closed faces of the houses she had known by heart for decades, and only then, for the first time, did they truly seem familiar to her. As she walked through the streets, the space she had gained with the question’s disappearance began to expand around her.

My mother’s fingertips, which had been cold for as long as she could remember, suddenly felt warm. My mother wasn’t good at getting separated, but she was very good at being separated.

She walked through the village streets for a long time, longer than our village actually is, but she was so delighted with all the space she suddenly had, that at six in the morning she couldn’t wait any longer. She went to the phone booth next to the village shop. The neon sign over the door was just flickering on; the supplier was parking his truck in front of the shop.

Frederik and I woke with a start when the telephone rang. I was alarmed because I knew that at such an hour the phone only rings for cases of unpostponable death or unpostponable love, and everything unpostponable about love was lying on my sofa right then. I thought: Someone has died.

“I’m sorry to wake you two, Luisa,” my mother said, “but I absolutely have to tell you something. I’ve left your father. I’m alone now.” She said it with the excitement others say, “I’ve just met someone.”

“Congratulations,” I said.

“And I wanted to tell you . . .” My mother gave a heavy sigh. “I wanted to tell you that I’m very sorry I was never really there for you.”