Irina had grown up in a Moldovan village that was inhabited only by old people and children. She thought of her own grandparents and, as so often in recent years, regretted having abandoned them. Lark House gave her the opportunity to give to others what she hadn’t been able to give them, and she kept this in mind as she began looking after those in her care. She soon won the residents over, including several on the first level, the independent ones.
From the start, Alma Belasco had caught her attention. She stood out from the other women thanks not only to her aristocratic bearing but to the magnetic force field that seemed to separate her from the rest of humanity. Lupita insisted that the Belasco woman did not fit in at Lark House and would not last long: any day now the same chauffeur who had brought her in a Mercedes-Benz would come and take her away again. And yet the months went by and this didn’t happen. Irina did no more than observe Alma Belasco from a distance, because Hans Voigt had instructed her to focus on people from the second and third levels, and not to get distracted by the independents. Besides, Irina had more than enough to do in looking after her own clients—they were not to be called patients—and learning the ins and outs of her new job. As part of her training, she had to study the videos of recent funerals: a Buddhist Jewish woman and a repentant agnostic. For her part, Alma Belasco would not have paid any attention to Irina if circumstances had not briefly turned the young woman into the most noteworthy member of the community.
FRENCHIE
In Lark House, where there was a depressing majority of women, Jacques Devine was considered the star attraction, the only heartthrob among the twenty-eight male residents. He was known as Frenchie, not because he had been born in France, but because of his exquisite manners—he held the door open for the ladies, pulled their chairs back for them, and never went around with his fly unzipped—and because he could dance, despite his fossilized spine. At the age of ninety he walked with a straight back thanks to the rods and screws that had been surgically attached to it. He still sported some of his curly head of hair and knew how to play cards, at which he cheated shamelessly. He was sound in body, apart from the usual arthritis, high blood pressure, and deafness inevitable in the winter of life, and quite lucid, although not sufficiently to recall whether he had had lunch or not. That was why he was on the second level, where he received all the help he needed. He had arrived in Lark House with his third wife, but she had only survived for a few weeks before being run over in the street by an absentminded cyclist.