Life is the flight of a sparrow that flutters in through one window and flies out another.

Fifteen years ago, it was raining. A taxi driver was taking us to the fish market, because you wanted to see the restaurant that features in one scene of the film Sleepless in Seattle. But when we reached the restaurant, you were disappointed. In the film it was a more attractive and better-lit place, while we entered a small, dusty bistro. The difference between the fictional and nonfictional is not the same as the difference between the real and the illusory. In the case of this concrete restaurant, it’s a real place, used in the past for the needs of a fictitious film story. “Everything looks better in a film!” you said, with a note of regret in your voice. When we’re young, we want our love story to be unique. It would have been better if you hadn’t met me, for our relationship contained no material for romantic comedy. It’s always better in a film, there’s no smell of fish slowly thawing on the stalls of the great Market. Life stinks.

“Sem Mehmedinovik! The man who has a rubbish bin in his car!” That’s how my friend Santiago, the cheery Spaniard, introduced me today.

But that’s because of Sanja’s need to put everything around her in order. There mustn’t be any rubbish on the floor. That’s why we have a rubbish bin in our old Ford Taurus.

She listens to music so as to remember her youth, on the whole songs from the late 1960s and ’70s (mostly Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young). And she says: “Woodstock, how magical that sounded in the Balkans! But Woodstock is a store for wood! How provincial we were! Why, even those who knew what the word Woodstock meant would not be moved. It does sound mighty in English! It could not be an ordinary wood store. And if it was to do with trees, they would have been some special American trees, and not our beech or our common oak . . .”

Today we went for a doctor’s examination. The doctor (a neurologist), said several times that it was a serious question whether our medical insurance could cover the costs of the memory test (this was, allegedly, an expensive examination to determine the extent of forgetfulness). She repeated that it was “a serious question” three times, and then Sanja lost patience and said that it couldn’t possibly be a serious question. “Why does Something exist, and not Nothing? That’s a serious question!” she said.

And, it seemed to me, time had stood still. It has been two months since Renata cut her hair, but her hair doesn’t seem to be growing.