Her suffering was like the screech of chalk on a blackboard. As if a boy were dragging a piece of chalk across a blackboard on purpose to make it screech. Or maybe it wasn’t chalk but the boy’s fingernails, or maybe it wasn’t his fingernails but his teeth. As time went by, this nightmare, the Klaus nightmare, as she called it, became a recurring dream. Sometimes, in the morning, as she helped Werner with breakfast, she would say: “I had a nightmare.”
