Klaus has lost his key; he cannot find it. He cannot find it, evidently, because he has lost it. These things make sense and no sense; Klaus has lost his key. Nothing makes sense without it, and nothing makes sense to Klaus. He knows where he must go; he knows where he has been; but he doesn’t know where it is; and the present itself, whose key is missing, confuses him no less.

One minute a man takes hands with life, and then … and that is the end of the matter.

You can see Klaus on the riverbank, searching for his key. What a comical figure he cuts, so zealous is he to find it. After all, it is only his future happiness that depends on it, his dreams and the dreams of his children’s children, nothing more. On the contrary, there is nothing comical about it; it is impossible not to feel sorry for Klaus. You half hope that, from behind one of the many stone bridges that cross that river, the rest of the village will suddenly issue to help him. They will be out there, in the meadows along the riverbank, moving their heads rapidly from left to right. There are so many of them; more seem to get born every second; no one could lose a key for long beneath such scrutiny, and presently Klaus will invite them all back for tea. He will go to the woodshed and take out a pickaxe; he will knock a great hole through the wall. And they start to stoop, to get into the room. But Klaus is waving impatiently; that was to get them out, not in. The door was open, anyway: sit down, have some food. And, like a grey wind, now they are settling down and getting up, moving their lips, indistinguishable from loss, from memory, from dust.

At one end of the village is a church; at the other end is a chestnut tree. Many things have been decided, and, doubtless as part of one of those decisions, Klaus’s house is the third one on the left. In it lives a man called Klaus. The name of the village is Yrmtha, which means hardship in some forgotten tongue; the key, after all, has been lost.