translated from the German by William Pierce

Every day at half past three Herr Friedrich walks past the Seagull Pharmacy. It’s the ideal hour. Which took him quite a while to figure out. The morning routine isn’t appealing—customers in line to pick up medicines, taking it as a chance to share the history of their sufferings far too thoroughly. Always the same people with the same stories. Intolerances, eczema, an upcoming operation. Mornings, and again in the evening. Too many customers, too much eczema. Three thirty is the best time of day.

From one part of the sidewalk, he has a clear line of sight to the shelves of soap and shampoo, and from the other he can see the pharmacy counters. In winter, a pop-up stand in the display window advertises a bath oil made from pine needles. In summer, posters take up that same real estate, touting ways to guard against the sun. Herr Friedrich stops outside and watches through the plate glass as she calmly sorts products on the shelves, absorbed in her thoughts. That’s how she’s dearest to him. In motion. Everything about her is gossamer. Even her shapeless orthotic slippers look delicate on those feet. How happily he’d tell her so. But he’s not crazy. Anything of the kind would be out of bounds, obviously. He wouldn’t have believed such a feeling could reach him again. Naturally Herr Friedrich doesn’t make the mistake of watching for too long. It has to appear that he goes past every day at the same time simply because it’s on his way.

Home again, he makes a cup of tea with a spoonful of manuka honey. On his tablet he opens the pharmacy magazine he’s been reading. Back when he first ordered a digital subscription, it was hard to understand the articles—or work up an interest. But since then he’s started to enjoy learning what he can about drug approvals, because he happened to notice the subject excites her. He wants to be prepared in case the conversation turns to immune suppression in cancer patients. He’s up to the minute there. After finishing his tea, he reaches for the dictionary and works on vocab. Just a month to go. Then he’s off to her ancestral land. He knows Germany is her home. He’d never make the unforgivable mistake of telling her otherwise. How he’d like to lie beside her in a meadow someday, in a soft summer breeze, watching the clouds push nonchalantly eastward. He wipes the thought aside. It’s too early for that. Much too early.

It took Herr Friedrich a long time to realize he doesn’t mind being alone. While his wife, Margit, was alive, he thought he was meant to be part of a couple. He was still working then. He left the house every morning, and every evening he returned. Margit always had a meal waiting. Occasionally he encouraged her to give a job a try. Some activity that suited her. Everyone has that particular thing they’re adept at. Margit had many, all hidden away. She’d mastered three languages: German, English, and Dutch. She knew stenography and could transform a napkin into a flower. She styled the hair of all the old women in their housing block. She was curious about everything to do with the Bauhaus period. Her spirit was cheerful, even-keeled. He often asked if it wasn’t bleak for her to be home all day. The apartment didn’t even have a balcony. But it wasn’t bleak to her, which made him wonder.

Margit’s skin was so soft. He still remembers that well. One time, at Christmas, he bought his wife an expensive hand cream in a perfume shop, but she told him gingerly how satisfied she was with her chamomile hand cream. So he returned the expensive French box. In the pharmacy magazine, he learned skin has a natural protective layer and doesn’t need cream. Lotions can disturb that barrier. Through the window her hands look beautiful, cinnamon brown. Against her black hair and white uniform, that tone comes off well, though the shop’s lighting makes every kind of skin look pale.

After the evening news, Herr Friedrich gets ready for bed. He washes his face, brushes his teeth, and takes a quick, cold rinse-off in the tub. Lastly, he applies urea foot foam. In the pharmacy magazine, it said urea at 20-percent concentration acts keratolytically. He likes the feeling of soft soles. Even though he changes the bedding regularly, he feels like he can still smell Margit’s snowdrop perfume, as if the mattress and frame were saturated with that scent. Before sleep, she used to put a drop behind her ear and one on the pillow. It was meant as an invitation. He was supposed to turn to her then, and push inside. Afterward, she would pick up the hand towel that she’d put down over the sheet and tuck it away. He would move back to his side of the bed, and they’d both fall asleep. This was their practice, for more than four decades. Since losing her, he has switched to Margit’s side of the bed. It ties him to a life so much in the past that he can hardly believe it was ever his. He refuses to just blot out his memories of that life. But wallowing in them is no good either.

On many nights he can’t resist the urge and rolls back to his original side of the bed. He does it again tonight. Pulls off his pajama pants and takes hold of his penis. He read in a TV magazine that over 60 percent of younger women get on top of the man for intercourse, in order to have more control over how long it goes on. Fairly often, he encouraged Margit to move a little more during their nightly act of love. He promised he wouldn’t judge her. But she didn’t want to try anything. It was all supposed to go exactly the same way every time.

With his penis in hand, he thinks about her cinnamon-brown skin, the slightly antiseptic smell that rises from it. That much she can’t help, it goes with the profession. He thinks about her black hair, which looks thick and strong. Margit’s was soft like cotton candy, but hers is something different, it’s obvious. More like a badger’s.

Over time, he’s gotten the hang of being able to ejaculate right away. It’s all in the mind. If he lets his thoughts wander in the distance, he doesn’t get there. For that, he has to think in a particular direction—specifically away from Margit. He doesn’t consider any of what he’s doing gross or wrong. In the pharmacy magazine he read that frequent ejaculation lowers the risk of prostate cancer. As soon as he gets his release and has cleaned himself off with tissues, he briefly feels around both testicles, checking for lumps. A study in the pharmacy magazine gave ultrasounds no significant advantage over manual examination.

In the morning Herr Friedrich gets up early and steeps a black tea. He takes oil-cured olives from the pantry, butter from the refrigerator. He toasts his beloved whole-grain dinkelbrot and lets some butter melt across it. The tea he drinks from his old coffee cup; he doesn’t know where to buy the typical tulip glasses with red dots on the saucer. He also tried having the toast with sheep’s-milk cheese but couldn’t get accustomed to that sour taste and smell so early in the morning. For his whole life, he’s started the day with strawberry jam. On weekends a white roll, during the week a slice of brown bread. Nutritional science wasn’t always as advanced as it is now. In his next life, he will definitely not touch short-chain carbohydrates. But, as always, it’s no good taking these things too far. He’s about to turn eighty on this same breakfast. It was Margit who didn’t survive it. If he could turn back the clock, the first thing he’d do after her diagnosis is strike sugar from the menu. And build up their microbiome. That’s not in the medical guidelines, he knows, but he’d convince Margit and they would source the products on their own and not tell the oncologist. During her lifetime, they had no internet connection or tablet and no digital subscription to the pharmacy magazine.

He sits with his travel guide after breakfast and reads more about the Black Sea coast. The first tea seeds came from Japan and were cultivated in the Pontic Mountains in northern Anatolia. That’s the very best growing region for tea, tobacco, hazelnuts, and olives. At the start of the twentieth century, a Turkish botanist by the name of Rize was responsible for the entire tea crop. In the photos, the thickly wooded slopes remind him of Japanese landscapes. Those mountains, the Pontic Alps, form a line between the Bavarian Alps and the Himalayas. So much culture, so much beauty. It will be a real pleasure to discover her roots. He himself comes originally from Salzgitter, but he grew up in the area around Muenster. Coffee country. And the land of sheet cakes. He wants to try another Black Sea specialty, hazelnut butter, but where he shops it doesn’t exist. The hours before lunch pass quickly. Then he eats the sheep’s-milk cheese on a salad, the kind of choice the pharmacy magazine recommends. In the evenings he would prefer spicy food, but his meal plan calls for a light soup. About this, too, he has learned a few things. The traditional Black Sea soup, made with butter and a spoonful of corn flour, tastes very good to him, as long as he salts it. Buying corn flour wasn’t hard at all. He found it in the health-foods section at a convenience store. Is that what makes her so captivatingly beautiful? A traditional diet that, in so many respects, aligns with the advice of the pharmacy magazine?

Margit was diagnosed on a Tuesday. He’d driven back that evening from the Karstadt in Bielefeld, where he supplied the technology used in their window displays. He was active in Detmold, Herford, Lemgo, Paderborn, Wiedenbrueck. Over the years he’d built up a clientele of clothing stores that kept him busy. There was the Ranck family and the Eichendorff family and a few others, whose sons he still knew from his school days. And those friends gradually took over their fathers’ shops. As far back as the 1960s, Herr Friedrich was installing lamps in display windows and fitting them with timers. Not many small dealers could offer that. Usually the lights had to be turned off by hand—an employee would drive back to the store to flip the switch. But on vacation along Holland’s Baltic coast, Herr Friedrich met a window dresser. And that man put him in touch with a Belgian dealer in timer switches. And Herr Friedrich imported the technology into Westphalia. As time went on, he taught himself more. He was the first to use neon to light up leisurewear blue jeans in the seventies, for men who wanted to stay with the times. In 1972 he bought LED semiconductor components in England and built a glowing yellow sign for the Rancks’ store.

Over the years, the boutique shops were displaced by Horten and Karstadt. But Herr Friedrich always had a flair for change. Rather than sitting back, he worked to get in early. At Karstadt Bielefeld that evening, he’d installed a circuit that dimmed the counter lights and window displays at midnight, and then at two in the morning shut them off completely. Margit stood in the doorway and said, “Dear, we don’t have much time left.”

An operation removed the tumor completely, and she had years of peace. Then came a relapse. Margit’s armpits were radiated and almost burned. Then there was calm again, until the cancer metastasized and was found in her liver. He doesn’t remember Margit ever discussing her illness. He’d just retired, and she was dreaming of a vacation place on Texel, where she had spent her childhood. She came to Germany for him. He would rather have stayed in the Netherlands, but she was against that. He had already built something. She didn’t want to have to start from scratch, she wanted them, together, to carry on with his life in progress. That Tuesday he came home with two blouses in a bag. The saleswomen often gave him clothing for himself and his wife. It was another reason she was always so wonderfully dressed. Margit was a skilled tailor. She enjoyed fashion. She died on a rainy May evening, and until the next day he couldn’t believe it was real.

He went to the pharmacy a lot, and they often talked. She was young, her training clearly different from that of her older colleagues. She frequently let out words like “study” and “data quality.” But he had the simple fact of the scripts, and on them were all the medicines the doctor had ordered. “Keep your head up, Herr Friedrich,” she said to him once. “Cancer is a marathon. You need to preserve your strength.” Her confiding tone surprised both of them. But he had nothing against it. Chemotherapy started on Mondays, and on Wednesdays she was allowed to go home. He took a taxi to the clinic. The ride there he had to pay for out of pocket, but the return trip qualified as patient transport and was reimbursed. At the hospital, they told him Margit had died. “What happened?” he asked the doctor, who came to give his condolences. “It’s been clear for a while this was coming,” the oncologist said. But Herr Friedrich was hearing it for the first time. “Where is she now?” “In the operating room. They’re preparing her.” “Preparing?” “Attempts at resuscitation are messy.” It would take a minute before she’d be presentable again. Not until the next morning did they remember Herr Friedrich and his wish to see his wife one last time. With the shift change and the everyday busyness of the place, they’d simply forgotten him. The entire night he stood in front of the clinic doors and waited to be called back to the desk. That’s how they’d left it. So, to Herr Friedrich, it added up to a misunderstanding. Margit must be alive still. In the end he gave up the chance to see her again, because the nurse wouldn’t leave his side and this felt like too much of an intimacy to share. He just looked at the hill formed by the sheet and tried to imagine the person underneath it. With her medications in a plastic sack that had been hanging from his wrist since the previous afternoon, he went home. There, he sat in the reading chair by the window and had no idea what to do.

Shortly before closing time, he went inside the pharmacy. She understood immediately and said, “Oh, no!” “And now?” he asked. This wasn’t like him. He always had a plan and stuck to it. Life gave plenty of homework. “With us, family comes and helps,” she said. “Do you have anyone?” The Friedrichs had no children. Their only ties of friendship, weak to begin with, were through Margit. But what would her girlfriends have been able to do anyway? Her nametag said “C. Karadeniz.” He noticed it then for the first time. Other details too, things he usually overlooked, echo loudly from that day. He noticed the lights over the pharmacy counter flickering, and the hand sanitizer at the entrance squeaked whenever someone used it. Also, she said he could come anytime, “to talk.” Karadeniz, he later learned from the dictionary, meant Black Sea.

In Margit’s obituary he included two lines from Cees Nooteboom: They scatter their names across the path / that we have to take. He found the verse in her nightstand at the hospital. Margit had written it on a piece of notepaper. The whole thing goes: They scatter their names across the path / that we have to take, they drip their / verses into our last sleep before morning // and are gone again. Nooteboom was the one writer she consistently read in Dutch. So he wondered about her copying those two lines in German. A nod to him? For her birthday she’d asked for a bilingual edition of Nooteboom’s poems, which opened with the line “Why don’t the dead leave us in peace?” Then things went badly again for a while, and she asked for permission to go. He let the request enter in one ear and leave by the other. He was not well informed on the subject. If he’d been subscribing to the pharmacy magazine, he would have been aware of the connection between cancer, chemotherapy, and depression. It wasn’t his fault.

Herr Friedrich spends the afternoons, too, learning vocabulary. He doesn’t want to be one of those Germans who tour a country without being able to thank people in their own language. He wants to greet hotel clerks and ask how they are. He has the confidence for it. If he could only convince her to travel with him. The first months after Margit’s death, he would go into the pharmacy and wait until she addressed him. “And, Herr Friedrich, how are you?” He’d started to learn how to cook, he said, and was also occupying himself with the botany of the Black Sea coast, amazed to find how much old pharmacological knowledge had come down from there. That’s when she gave him a tip: He should get an internet connection at home and read the pharmacy magazine. Did he have a general interest in pharmacy? “I do now,” he said. He confessed to her once that he kept wondering if he was responsible for Margit’s death. Whether, if he had known the interrelationships between nutrition and illness, he might have been able to stop the spread of her cancer. “Would you, in my place,” he asked at a weak moment, “have killed her?” “Herr Friedrich,” she said, startled, “that’s a big question.” “It’s a simple question,” he said. Then asked if he could just touch her hair for a moment.

The travel documents came by mail. He’d be touring four cities by bus in five days, with the choice of an afternoon of Laz dancing—the Laz are an ethnic group with their own language and culture—or a walk among the steep tea fields. Herr Friedrich wasn’t practiced enough to do such hiking without embarrassing pauses, so he chose the afternoon of dance. Though to him that kind of folk demonstration no longer fit the times. He and Margit had sat for an afternoon of Sorbian dancing years ago in Cottbus, and the performance struck him as silly. Back then, they used to take organized bus tours of Germany, and Margit was disappointed when they saw nothing of Prince Pückler’s garden designs—certainly those would’ve been more sophisticated than the stamping of knee-socked kids. Through Margit’s eyes, he’d learned to judge the world differently. On his own he would have settled for a lot of things. Margit was more unforgiving. He wondered what she’d think of him now. He cooks, he travels, he’s interested in foreign cultures. He takes nutritional supplements. Omega-3 capsules with selenium, calcium, and magnesium, and he knows the relationship between vitamins D and K2. My god, how much the two of them did wrong. Black tea he’d guarded as his last act of rebellion against medical research. Her ancestors cultivated it for generations under the most trying conditions. For him it’s a question of respect.

He has to go to her one last time. He wants to say he’ll be traveling to her homeland. Maybe there’s something she’d like him to bring back. Maybe she can forgive him. He wants that so much. At three thirty the next day he girds his heart and goes in. When she notices, she walks over right away. “I know I’m not supposed to come in anymore,” Herr Friedrich says, “but I have one last question.” “What would that be?” He can’t tell if she’s angry or indifferent. “What does the C stand for?” She looks at him questioningly. He points at her nametag. “Oh, the C is for Ceylan.” He repeats her name: “Ceylan.” “It means—” but he interrupts: “It’s okay. I know what it means.” Then, at the exit, he turns back and says, “Iyi günler.” ■

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