I arrived sooner than I had been expected. My parents still lived on the first floor of the same house. I walked up one flight of stairs and then another to the attic, where grandmother had always liked spending her time the most. I wanted to see her first and only then father, mother, and the sisters. Then, I saw the few things she had owned; but she was not there. There was her chest, with blue and yellow flowers painted on it. It was locked, the key was not in the lock. And there was her bed; it was empty. I rushed downstairs into the living-room. There sat my parents. The sisters were absent. They were considerate. They had thought, the parents had the right to go first. I did not even greet them, but asked where grandmother was. "Dead - - - deceased!" was the answer. "When?" "Last year." Hearing this, I fell onto a chair and lay my head and arms on the table. She was no longer alive! It had been kept from me, to spare me, to avoid making the imprisonment even harder on me. These might have been rather good intentions; but now it hit me just the more powerfully. She had not been really sick; she had just simply pined away, because of the grief and suffering for - - - me! It took a long time, before I rose my head again, in order to greet the parents now. They were startled. Later, they told me that my face had looked worse than that of a corpse. The sisters joined us. They were happy about the reunion, but they looked at me so strangely, so timidly. This was nothing else but a reflection of my own face. Though I tried my best, I could still not fully conceal the blow which had just hit me. I wanted to know only things about grandmother for now, nothing else, and they told me. She had talked a lot about me, but never a single word which would necessarily have offended me, if I had been present. And she had never complained or even wept. She had said that now she knew that I was one of those souls which had been hurled over to the wrong side at their births, to be destroyed there. Now, she was convinced that I had to go through the spirits' furnace, to suffer all the torment of earth. But she knew that I would not scream, I would bear what I had to bear, and force my way up to Jinnistan. The closer she came to death, the more exclusively she only lived in her world of fairy-tales, and the more exclusively she talked about nothing else but me. On one of her final days, she said that the cantor, who had died a long time before, had been with her that night. He had been our neighbour. Those two houses were connected. Then, she said, the wall had suddenly opened in the darkness and a bright light had filled the room, but it was no ordinary light, but rather a light she had never seen before. Lit by this light, the cantor had appeared. He had looked just as he used to when he was still alive. Slowly, he had come up to her bed, had greeted her with a friendly smile, as he