‘Do you smoke?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but only two or three cigarettes a day.’

She’s no good at lying; in situations like this she will sincerely confess everything. When I heard her answer the doctor’s question, I thought that may well have been the case: at work she probably smoked two or three cigarettes, but she’d kept it from me, because she was anxious not to revive my desire for tobacco (in the past I had been pretty dependent). After my heart attack, five years ago, she too stopped smoking, out of solidarity, or at least she didn’t light a cigarette in my presence. She had smoked ‘two or three cigarettes a day’ all her life, and it had never become a real addiction.

More than twenty-four hours had passed since that conversation with the doctors and now it had become clear why she had said she was a smoker: she had suffered a stroke and one of its consequences was forgetting. The stroke had damaged her so-called short-term memory, so that she’d forgotten the last three years when she no longer went out onto the balcony to smoke.

‘Yesterday,’ I say, ‘I was making coffee, you’d gone to the bathroom, everything was all right, it was raining. As I was pouring water into the machine I heard a cry from the bathroom. I thought you’d fallen, but that wasn’t it, your arm was hurting, you said it was tingling and you couldn’t feel your fingers. You didn’t want us to call an ambulance, but you weren’t getting any better, so I did call. They came, and after a quick examination, decided to take you to hospital. I drove behind the red ambulance and when I reached the hospital, you were already in bed, a nurse was giving you morphine, you were already having a transfusion, then they took you away, with your bed, to a different room where they did a CT scan. It turned out that you were very anaemic so they sent you to the oncology department, as they thought you had cancer. The CT showed that you had a clot in an artery near your left shoulder, and they said it had caused a stroke, or rather a series of small, mini-strokes in the peripheral microvascular branches on the left side of your brain. And now, because you’re anaemic, they don’t know how to treat you. A stroke is treated with blood thinners, but the reason for your anaemia is potentially an internal bleed. So now, if they put you on thinners, it would exacerbate the bleed and that would be a serious problem . . .’

She looks at me anxiously, but she has already forgotten what she asked me, and has already forgotten my reply, and now she asks again: ‘What has happened to me?’

‘Is Daddy angry with me?’

‘Are you asking whether your father is angry?’

‘Yes, he’s angry with me and that’s why he’s not coming home . . .’

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘your father died four or five years ago.’

She thought for a while, it seemed she had remembered, then she put her head on the pillow again and went back to sleep. What had actually happened? She’d woken up in her hospital bed as a little girl of five. That was a time capsule, a trauma of fifty years earlier, and now it was alive in her: her father wasn’t coming home because he was angry with her. Oh, my little frightened girl!

Her father. I never met him, although we lived in the same town for sixteen long years. He never tried to contact his daughter, nor did he ever show any kind of interest in her. That was all important to me, of course, but I didn’t ask, I left it up to her to talk about it or not. And she rarely mentioned him. So I know nothing about him, apart from her incidental, sparse anecdotes. One was from her early childhood. They had a caravan somewhere near the coast. During the night he came with an unknown woman, woke his daughter and took her outside, so that she spent the night in the rain. A little girl at night, in the rain. Nothing connects me to him, apart from the fact that he marked my life indirectly, influenced it and altered my personality over time. Through his relationship with his daughter, he formed her hostility towards the whole male species. We have lived together for thirty years, and all that time she has been wary of me. I never saw him, but I bear that man as my personal burden. I’m tired of him. And I’m used to him. The other image I have of her father is connected with Libya. Her memory of Africa, where she lived on the sensitive cusp between childhood and youth, was bright and consoling. She would often say: ‘I’d like to go back to Africa.’ That was where she spent her last summer with both parents. Remembering Libya, she would always mention her father: ‘He immediately felt at home there, he quickly learned Arabic, and began to make friends with the local people.’ Then she’d talk indifferently, as though describing a stranger. Later, when he left, she didn’t miss him. We’re now on the cusp of old age, but that doesn’t mean that at fifty-one one stops being a child. All these years, she hasn’t missed him, that concrete man, but a father, one who ought by biological imperative to be on her side, when a daughter needs protection and security.

She woke up a little while ago as a five-year-old girl who had blamed herself fifty years earlier because her daddy hadn’t come home for days.

It all happened too fast. The doctors stated that, in all probability, she had cancer. I held her hand while she slept, and she clasped mine tightly, because she was dreaming about something. And I thought, she wasn’t dying, because dying people no longer dream! A ridiculous thought, but I held onto her till the morning, because there was no one there who could console me. The warmth of her hand and her whole sleeping body was the only acceptable reality for me.

Venice. The night before last I was reading an essay about Venice by Sergio Pitol, his first encounter with the town, which he saw through a fog because he had lost his glasses somewhere on the way. I read that two nights ago, and it seems that was all in the distant past, or in some other life. And while I was reading, I could smell cement, because a few hours earlier at work, my friend Santiago Chillari had been showing me photographs of the inside of an old building on one of the Venetian canals, which he and his family are restoring with the intention of turning it into a hotel; the photos were of workmen scraping the walls, stripping off the old paint, with building materials, sacks of cement around them on the floor . . . After reading this piece about Venice, I wrote one about Aleš Debeljak, my friend who died tragically two months ago. I thought about him and jotted down memories of our encounters. We used to meet often, speak on the phone, exchange emails. We got to know each other in the early nineteen-eighties, but it seems to me that our contact became pure friendship only last year: for a few days in October at a literary conference in Richmond, we shared a common balcony in our hotel and we chewed over our two pasts in lengthy conversations. I went through my email to find his last sentence to me. His last message ended with the announcement: ‘This evening I’m taking our dog on our regular walk beside the Venice-Budapest train-line.’ A poet! He managed to encompass a whole cultural space within the boundaries of a ‘regular’ evening stroll.

The door described a complete circle and I stepped back, into the hospital . . .

I think there’s something deeply problematic about the way treatment is managed in a hospital. Every ten minutes people come to check Sanja’s name and date of birth, to scan the barcode on the plastic armband round her right wrist, to take her pulse, blood pressure, temperature, take blood samples, knock her knee with a rubber hammer . . . It’s torture by sleep deprivation, and it could all be done less frequently, so that the patients have time to catch their breath, to fall asleep, to have some amount of rest, at least during the night. A hospital ward is a torture chamber. I think hospitals ought to sign the Geneva Convention and stick rigorously to the rules.