The young woman listening to the old man could well be one of those women of whom people say, as they approach forty: She's made it. A woman who finds herself one Sunday in winter confronting emptiness and despair so great that death suddenly seems like an invitation secretly longed for… That morning she had begun to leaf through her address book. Her fingers slid over the pages, as if on ice, without being able to get a grip. A whole crowd and at the same time no one. Then finally a name that reminded her of a promise made at least ten years before: "You'll see, it's not like a cemetery at all; it's a real garden, run a little wild; where you get the feeling right away that they have quite a different concept of death from us…" In all of ten years she has not had a single moment free to go there.
The other visitor, the man in a dark blue overcoat with the collar turned up, showing the gleam of his shirt and the knot in his tie, this man, too, has heard of "the garden where you discover a different view of death." He has the look of someone who, half an hour before the family lunch, a gathering of a dozen relatives, gets up, dresses in haste as if he were on the run, and slips out without telling a soul, something he has never done before.