Refugees have two worlds, the one they have left and the one where they are now. The antagonism of the two worlds is the essence of exile. That duality is carried over into language: the first language is the mother tongue, the other the language of the new surroundings. After a stroke, a person may forget their language, or one of them, or they may begin speaking a quite different language, with which they had not previously been in contact. Sanja’s languages are all present and correct, and she has no difficulty in moving from one to the other, in that sense nothing has changed. But the atlas of her world is confused. She sometimes wakes convinced she is in Sarajevo. She says: “I must go to work.”
“OK, if you go out of our door now, how will you get to work?”
“I go down in the elevator, come out of the building, cross the road, then over the big parking lot, I go to the underground, take it first to the left, then we make a circle to Čengić Vila . . .”
“This is Washington, there’s no Čengić Vila here . . .”
She’s confused because of her own nightmare, but then she redeems herself, charmingly: “How shameful! What kind of town is this with no Čengić Vila?”
The medication that is meant to reduce her pain and depression is called Lyrica. This is the way the world ends. By a word changing its meaning.
We were told that the windows would be cleaned at the end of last week. A workman came on Tuesday and removed the protective meshes that stop tiny creatures coming in when the windows are open. But the cleaners have postponed their part of the work for a week. Today it’s Saturday, and because everything was open, a sparrow came in through one of our windows, it flew about frantically and then did manage to find a way out through a different window. It all happened quickly. The air that the little bird had swirled about in the room turned the page of the book I was just reading.
I make notes in haste, along the way, in the car, in the elevator, in bed, just woken from sleep, because if I don’t record things straightaway, I will certainly forget them. But if it weren’t for this notetaking, if there were no moments when I turn into myself, I feel I would exist less, or I would forget myself.
Each of these moments exists in a perpetual present. But, nevertheless, every word of this diary will be forgotten. This book will no longer exist, nor will there be anyone who remembers her.
There are nows, says Julian Barbour, there are various nows and all those nows exist simultaneously, as different possibilities. And that’s all. No one and nothing travels from one now into the next now. We pass, but time does not.