Have I committed a crime? Lamm cannot answer this question. But maybe it doesn't matter. After all, a mistake has been made, and now he can leave town. He thinks not of the chandelier, not of the look on the executioner's face in the tavern, but of the woman who slapped him the night before, the woman who now lies motionless before the wall, as still as a pebble. Is that the punishment? Lamm was pardoned. But the punishment only begins now, now, when the dead city disappears forever into the woods.

Uninvited visitors disturbed an abandoned and lonely man's peace on his fiftieth birthday.