Each volunteer is assigned a client for the morning. Erik's mission might be to visit a homebound pensioner and clean her apartment, or go shopping with her, or accompany a resident of the Jordan home for a hearing-aid replacement. On a crisp Thursday morning, Klaus is readying a wheelchair on the third floor of the Jordan home. If it is possible for a woman in a wheelchair to be sprightly, that person is Mrs. Rihova. Since the Jordan is a home, not a hospital, its inhabitants don't stay in pajamas, but get dressed every morning.
More people die there than anywhere else.
The caretakers have already learned that loneliness is the severest, but most treatable, ailment of old age. So Klaus is the best. This is partly because he is the most gentle and careful navigator of the nine caretakers. Klaus says he stopped appreciating the romantic cobblestones of Prague when he started wheeling patients over them. Sometimes holes in the street.