‘But soon everything that had felt so tragic and dramatic to begin with – thousands of people ill and dying, the great pause, the intense dreams, the solidarity clapping – came to feel normal.’
‘It was the afternoons that did it, three o’clock like a kind of death knell, the house seeming too still, too many hours of sunlight left in the day. How had Thora even started going to the chat rooms?’
‘Living on money from the government, excused our duties and our liabilities, reducing our wants to eating and sleeping and what in the eighteenth century may have passed for exercise, the alderman’s stroll.’
‘I made many pictures of such trees, and each time, some analogy to art would impress itself on me, the more so because of the universally locked museum doors.’
‘I write an obituary that appears in the newspaper that she always used to read while drinking her afternoon tea. I receive €170.03 for the obituary.’ Translated from the German by Kurt Beals.
