The only items of value in our apartment are books. And this bookshelf, handmade, the work of an American sculptor. It’s made of light wood and it’s easily moved from one place to another. And today, as I was vacuuming, I shifted the shelf with my shoulder and a lot of books fell onto the floor. Sanja came to help me put them back. And I remembered something: when he came by to see us the first day after we returned from the hospital, Asim used precisely that image to describe her state after the stroke. “It’s as though an earthquake had knocked books off a shelf onto the parquet,” he said. “And now each one has to be put back in its proper place.”

It’s been three months since her stroke, and her bosses haven’t even telephoned to say hello and find out how she is, whether she’s recovering. That’s probably how it is everywhere in the world. So I arranged a meeting at her firm. In my telephone conversations and email exchanges, R. (an official in Human Resources) kept giving me contradictory answers, so I had no confidence in her explanations about Sanja’s rights and obligations. And, in a word, if I hadn’t called her yesterday, I wouldn’t have known that Sanja’s employment comes to an end on the sixth of August. How come, since she hasn’t yet used her holiday days? R. maintains that she hasn’t yet received approval for that from her boss, who’s on leave. That’s why I’ve asked for this meeting, to try to get some concrete answers in writing. R. kept me waiting in the lobby, after a young man in uniform at the entrance to the Conference of Catholic Bishops of America instructed me fairly authoritatively to sit to one side and wait. After a while, R. appeared, led me into a conference room, and showed me where I was to sit, but she herself remained standing, near the door. She put down a sheet of paper with the explanations. I suggested that she sit down, as though I were at home here and she the visitor. And she said, no, no, she’d stand. This is an unusual situation: I’m sitting, reading, while she stands, rigid, at a distance. It’s presumably not that she’s afraid of my violent reactions, and so she’s uncertain, staying on her feet, so that she can run away in the event that I charge angrily in her direction. I insist that she sits down, because she’s making me nervous. She does so reluctantly, her shirt done up to the highest button, but she has pulled the pendant on the chain around her neck onto her collar: a gold German iron cross. “Are you German?” I ask. Out of a need to mollify her, I tell her that I work for German television. She looks at me fairly coldly and, instead of replying, points at the paper in front of me.