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a children’s home, as I said – or a madhouse, you can take your pick.”
    *
    He could be very sharp-tongued. Particularly when he was over in the Löwen and had already had two glasses of coffee with kirsch. He reproached Budmiger for his drinking, his card-playing and his sloth. “You let others work for you, don’t you,” he teased. “Quite right. That way you don’t get so tired.” Sitting at his table in the pub he called Dr Lätt an idiot, a bletherer, a rascal. Lätt wasn’t a doctor, he said, he was a vet, and a rotten one at that, just about good enough to give out pills. He bought them by the hundredweight, white ones, red ones and green ones. If you took the red ones your piss turned green, if you took the green ones your piss turned red, and if you took the white ones you couldn’t pee at all. Formerly they used to give out a lot of laxatives at the home, but since Dr Lätt had started coming regularly, they didn’t need to anymore, he was laxative enough.
    *
    A three-day stubble, copper mixed with grey. Tobacco crumbs in the right-hand corner of his mouth. The small, inflamed eyes. He picked his nose with forefinger and thumb, and briefly examined what he’d dug out before flicking it down on the gravel. A hen pecked, pecked again, clucked, stood there, her head twisted up sideways. A late summer afternoon. It was hot. We were sitting in the shade. His hands in repose on the metal table. A smoking cigarette butt in the ashtray. Who would visit me one day, here or elsewhere, in some godforsaken place?

8 – September: Body contact
    â€œBasically, two men are not too much at all,” she said.
    â€œBasically?”
    â€œAdmittedly, it can be rather strenuous sometimes.”
    â€œStrenuous because of me?”
    â€œStrenuous taken all in all.”
    â€œYou can always give it up.”
    â€œAnd who, dear man, should I give up first?”
    â€œMe, of course.”
    â€œYou’re such an idiot!”
    It wasn’t worth being jealous. I just had to keep hoping that Fritschi wouldn’t cut any capers, and that his wife wouldn’t lose her nerve. A tough woman from the Valais, as I’d found out in the meantime.
    *
    â€œHere, down on the right between my gum and my lip. The lip as well, a little bit. There’s nothing there, no swelling. It just feels numb. As though it wasn’t flesh, as though it was rubber.”
    Father looked thoughtful as he explained.
    Sophie stopped short:
    â€œShow me where, exactly?”
    She stood in front of him as, leaning on the stick in his right hand, he pulled down his lip with the fingertips of his left. Sophie craned forward.
    â€œI can’t see anything,” she said.
    â€œNo,” he said, “there’s nothing to see.”
    She touched his lip.
    â€œCan you feel this? – And this? – And here, can’t you feel it?”
    â€œLike rubber,” he said.
    Reassuringly she linked arms with him. “Perhaps it’s from your dentures,” she said. “A pressure sore.”
    â€œThat’s probably what it is,” he said.
    A Saturday afternoon, pleasant, not too hot and not too cold; she had gone on ahead in the bus and had tried to find Father in the home and then in the Löwen. There the landlady had told her that she’d seen Haller go over to the woods after lunch. Half an hour later – I had followed on my moped – Mrs Budmiger gave me the same information. I saw the two of them coming toward me on the path from the woods.
    A mown meadow; a field of maize.
    We went straight through the orchard on our way back to the pub.
    â€œLet me invite you two men to a dessert.”
    â€œI’m the one who does the inviting here,” said Father.
    *
    Occasionally when I met a woman I thought: What would it be like with her? Why not? Sophie did it. – It’s easy to think of something like that when a pretty woman