At 7:00 a.m., before I set off to work, I make her coffee; she prepares my lunch, goes back to bed, and sleeps for another hour. She drinks her coffee when it’s cold. For the rest of the day, until I come home, she invents jobs for herself as a refuge from loneliness. For her forgetfulness, it’s very important that everything is always left in the same place, so that she can find things more easily. But, to fill the time she spends alone, she moves objects around the apartment and rearranges the furniture. Today she sent me an email. Subject: Call me. And underneath, an explanation: I don’t know where I’ve left my phone. I called her, she set off toward the source of the sound and so found her phone. Last year something similar happened, only the roles were reversed. She was in Sarajevo, I couldn’t find my phone, so I sent her an email asking her to call me. And she did, and the sound came from the washing machine, where I’d put my jeans I had earlier spilled coffee on. She called in time, so the phone wasn’t drowned in water and detergent. That’s so simple: she phoned me from a different continent to save me from my forgetfulness. It’s a shame there isn’t a machine that discovers forgotten events and returns them to the memory.

On my way to work, a text message from her arrived on my phone: “Do you remember when we were children, little girls wore crocheted collars on their school smocks . . .” It was early in the morning, and she was in the depths of her childhood.

Two hours later she called to say: “I’ve ironed all your T-shirts, and I kissed every one.”

And here I am, I can’t stop thinking about those kisses, as though a hundred cats were tickling my soul with their soft paws.

We had put on our best clothes. I was driving south along the wide Route 66, when the car began to slow down. I pressed the accelerator, but the vehicle had trouble gaining speed. Then we slowed to a standstill, stopping on the hard shoulder. We got out of the Taurus and looked at gray smoke curling up from it. I had the feeling that at any minute the smoke would turn into fire and the car into an inferno. And the more I touched the Taurus, the dirtier I became. Irritated, I made an effort not to convey my irritation to Sanja. She had tamed the wind in her hair by pushing her sunglasses onto the top of her head; her gold necklace gleamed in the sun. She was young again! I touched her face with my filthy hand, and she wiped the soot from my brow, straightening my eyebrows. The smell of spit and memories of childhood. We were already late for where we had headed, but my irritation had completely disappeared, we laughed, hugging, without really knowing where our happiness had come from. And then a pigeon landed right beside our car. This isn’t exactly a place where you expect such a bird to appear. You won’t find any seeds to peck here, my dear! It waddled about fearlessly, wound itself around our shoes . . . An unusual pigeon, its legs were covered in feathers right down to its claws. A feather-shanked pigeon. Golub gaćan, I say, that’s what it was called in our childhood.