“Hi there, Dorrit! You’ve arrived.”

I got out of the car and saw that I was in a parking lot, an underground one from the look of things. The man and the woman were both dressed in green shirts the color of linden flowers, with the logo of the unit in white on the breast pocket-I recognized it from the information packet that had been sent to me at home a few months earlier. The man and woman introduced themselves as Dick and Henrietta. Henrietta added:

“We’re your section orderlies.”

She went around the car, opened the trunk, lifted out my suitcase and set off toward a row of elevators at one end of the parking lot where some fifty cars were parked, most of them ordinary family cars, SUVs or minibuses, but I also saw a couple of ambulances. Dick picked up my shoulder bag from the concrete floor where I’d put it while I shook hands. I would have preferred to carry it myself, as it contained my most private possessions, but he insisted and I didn’t want to make a scene, so I shrugged my shoulders and let him take it. He gestured toward the elevators. I followed Henrietta empty-handed with him directly behind me.

The elevator went up only one floor. When we got out, Dick said:

“We’re on level K1 now. That’s the upper basement floor.”

We walked along a wide corridor with a red ceiling, floor, and walls until we reached another row of elevators. We got into one of them, went up several floors and came out into something that resembled an ordinary stairwell with two doors that looked like ordinary apartment doors, one at each end. Dick, who had less to carry of the two functionaries, went ahead and pushed open one of the doors labeled SECTION H3 and held it open for me. I walked into an open common room of the kind usually found in hospital wards or student corridors, a lounge really. On a sofa in the corner sat a woman with red frizzy hair, just starting to turn gray, reading a magazine. In front of her on the table was a steaming cup of tea. Judging by the aroma, it was peppermint. The woman looked up, smiling.