I remember the rest of the day quite clearly as well.

When I was left alone in the ward, this is what I thought about:

Of course I had been thinking and all these years developing my attitude toward my own death, but I didn’t expect it could come as a consequence of my heart stopping. All my other organs could stop functioning, but the heart was out of the question, it was there, I thought, to beat for me, just as long as I needed it.

I called Harun. He was now in St. Louis. At the airport.

“How long is it till your flight?”

“Six hours.”

At midnight on 31 January 1996, on our way from Zagreb to Phoenix, Arizona, on our immigrant journey to America, we had been at the St. Louis airport.

We were changing planes.

I remember rows of gray leather seats in the waiting room, and midnight travelers with Stetsons. In those days there were ashtrays on high stands beside the seats, and the stale air reeked of Jack Daniel’s. There wouldn’t be any ashtrays there anymore. And now, as I chatted to Harun, I remembered a photograph from that journey. It was of him asleep, his head resting on his arms on a table in the airport café. He was thirteen then. I was thirty-five. He’s twenty-eight now. Almost as old as I was that midnight, when we were wearily waiting for the plane to Phoenix. How long ago was that? Almost fifteen years.

“I’m sorry, son.”

“What for?”

“That you’ve got such a long wait.”

“You’re comforting me, as though I was the one who’d had his heart stitched up!”

That textile image “stitched up” surprised me. As I thought about it, language became the only reality, I felt that every physical touch was freed of pain, and that was a nice illusion.

I’m really well, I feel cheerful and it’s easy to forget I’ve had my heart “stitched up.”

Other than a dull ache in the vein they opened in my groin, in that soft area between my genitals and my thigh . . .

When I was lying on the operating table, at a certain moment I had become aware of that, that they were shaving my groin; a cold and quite disagreeable touch. At the time I didn’t know why they were doing it. If my problem is my heart, I thought, why are they shaving my private parts?

A cold razor blade scraping over my skin.

And the image of a man condemned to death, being prepared in the morning for the electric chair, came suddenly to my mind.

And then this: Today Sanja said that was it. No more cigarettes.

“If you want to go on living,” she said, “you have to stop.”

And it was high time.