Elke Pastor looks at her luggage: three plastic boxes into which she has sorted her things. She finds this more practical than a suitcase. Laundry is piled up in it, along with cookbooks, crime novels and cosmetics. Also bread dumpling flour, hollandaise sauce and oatmeal. And instant coffee, which she much prefers to drinking than from someone else’s machines. She later takes the opened milk from the fridge to her neighbor Rainer; he already knows that: “Oh yes, Elke again,” he says. “Always on the move.”

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