Lately, I’ve been dreaming about grandchildren more and more often. Even outside ovulation and outside autumn. It’s getting serious. Now, in September, when everything outside is glowing, naturally, it has only intensified. I imagine the adventures I’d devise for them, how I’d drag them through the countryside, all the things wildly inappropriate for their age I’d read to them, all the art and culture I’d stuff into them, against both their will and the will of their parents — oh, I would enjoy that immensely. It is definitely one of the best films playing in my head, and trust me, the competition is fierce.

Of course, I can’t become a grandmother just like that. I’d have to stop skipping the prerequisite stage, and even that might not be enough, such are the uncertainties of our times. Still, I think I could make an excellent grandstepother, should the occasion arise.

Until someone from my polyandrous retinue responds adequately to this demand, I practise my child-corrupting skills as an aunt, which is great fun too. Although… certain other longings are beginning to emerge there as well — how to put this simply? I’m already fantasising about what it will be like when these children have children of their own. And I can see it in perfect detail, even though the youngest one I occasionally aunt is only five.

I don’t know what it is, but I keep being drawn further and further towards old age, where I am beautiful as a late January morning, somewhere in gently hilly countryside, into a house where I live alone or with someone who is at least a little like me, but not too much, just to keep things balanced.

You can see the house from a distance as you approach it, but it isn’t easy to get there. You have to make something of a pilgrimage into its depths, and the road can be treacherous. Still, humales and hufemales from new generations keep arriving whenever something extraordinary happens to them.

If they’ve read Kafka’s The Castle, for instance, there’s no need to announce themselves in advance. They simply come and are there. They don’t even have to talk about it, because surely it’s obvious what has just happened to them. In fact, now that I think about it, I’d abolish the whole business of announcing oneself beforehand. Walking all the way to that house is quite enough as it is.

I read and write in that house, and I do a great many things with my hands. Until one day I notice that my palms have turned completely black with warts — or rather truffles, to be precise. And the ones who arrive, still going through Kafka or something similarly momentous, can peel them off for me. In fact, they are the only ones who can. No one else can peel them off, not even whoever lives there with me. And as they peel away the black truffles, underneath there is healthy pink skin, but roots as well, and the whole thing quickly grows back so there will be something to peel when the next ones arrive. And then the next, and the next.

Because those hands must and must not remain black. And those truffles must and must not be eaten. Because, as human stands by human, everything that glows within and out of them would sink into that house.