Holding hands, we step into the circular glass door through which I have often passed over the last months. Our moving shadows break up in the glass. The melancholy of late summer. We go up in the elevator to the fourth floor. We’re in the hospital for a routine medical examination. We sit and wait. In the silence, we look at a painting in front of us by an anonymous artist. And then Sanja asks: “Isn’t it a pitiful destiny for an artist for their works to end up on the wall of a doctor’s waiting room . . . ?”

Toward midnight, in the apartment above us, someone is moving furniture and the feet of tables scrape over the floor. I don’t know why this is repeated every night. Once, when the noise was insupportable, I went upstairs and banged on the door, which no one opened. I don’t know who lives in the apartment above ours. I don’t know why they drag their furniture over the floor on top of our heads just before midnight. But I’d like to know. That restlessness of the tenant above us doesn’t last long, not more than two or three minutes, and after that I always become aware of the silence that surrounds us.

Today, in a book, I found the following description: It’s 1913, and the setting is the Grand Hôtel de Cabourg. Marcel Proust has rented five rooms, one for him to stay in and the other four so that there is silence.

She says: “It’s the twenty-first century now, but I had a friend who was born in the nineteenth.”

We often refer to years, and we’ve become quite childish already. I feel pretty tranquil. It’s enough for her to straighten the collar of my shirt, and that touch calms everything in the universe. Misfortune has reduced us to our essence. And nothing is left of us, apart from love.

Today we went to Tony’s Auto, at our old Alexandria address, where we’ve had all our cars fixed over the last twenty years. Repairs to the Taurus would cost nearly three thousand dollars, and that’s more than the vehicle is worth. We gave up the old Ford, and the one-eyed mechanic said they could quote for it to be taken to the car cemetery. I took my personal belongings from the glovebox in front of the passenger seat, mostly documents, pens, and loose change, and we bade the Taurus farewell. I didn’t feel particularly sad.

When we turned from there into Fayette Street, we stopped to let a car with a camera on the roof and the inscription GOOGLE on its door go past, they were filming the street for that Street View on their map. Just here, in the building behind us, was where we had lived until five years ago, and then we moved, fleeing from painful memories. After today’s chance filming, I thought about our being imprisoned for a long time at our old address. On the film we would have blurred faces, so that no one would be able to recognize us and so our privacy would be protected. For a moment I was pleased about all that, but then, once I had become aware of it, my pleasure was transformed into apprehension.