If people want to go, then let them. Why should they linger? We made sure she had enough to eat; nobody tried to burgle her home; they let her live in that little pigsty for nothing; I even arranged for her to have company. But obviously we weren’t enough, not Sutu, not Adélka, not me. We listened sympathetically to all her nonsense, even if we couldn’t understand because she spoke French. We knew that, most of the time — even in a foreign language — her cackling amounted to the same old thing. She was lonely.
