“There’s a Bosnian, a doctor in Kentucky. I heard this story today. He had a heart attack, just like you, and while he was still in the hospital, he asked his wife to park the car behind the hospital building. Then he’d go out, hide in the car, and smoke a cigarette. Imagine! A doctor. His unfortunate wife refused to bring cigarettes, and she told his doctor colleagues about it.”

In America everything is geared to stopping you smoking. Of all the nations on the planet, they are the most resistant to the tobacco habit.

Nevertheless, one of the finest sentences about the cigarette and dependence on it was written by an American, Laird Hunt: “When you smoke, other people come up to you and ask for a light.”

The next day.

I thought about how the news of her son’s heart attack could upset my mother in Bosnia. To preempt any possible pain, I called her and explained that a rumor I had had a heart attack was likely to spread through the Bosnian part of the world. I was calling, I said, so that my voice and cheerfulness would reassure her that this was not the case.

She listened to me attentively, then there was a short pause before she asked: “So how are you, otherwise?”

I clearly recognized her anxiety in that otherwise.

“Of all possible diseases, they hit on a heart attack,” she said. “The Mehmedinovićes don’t have them. No one in the family either on your father’s side or on mine has ever had a problem with their heart.”

So, that meant I was the first. Genetic degeneration had to start with someone; or else I—like all my relations—had started out with the same inherited heart, only I had carelessly filled mine with stuff that exceeded its capacity.

And when the call was over, I remembered a line of verse I had last thought about perhaps in the late 1970s. It wasn’t remotely worthy, metaphysical poetry, but a rudimentary line by the forgotten Bosnian poet Vladimir Nastić, that went: “I swooned, Mother, like you, giving birth to me.”

Sanja came this morning before eight o’clock. On her way to my ward, she had bought me a decaf in the hospital canteen. The decaf was sweetened with artificial sweetener.

It wasn’t coffee, it wasn’t sugar, nor was I myself.

And she said: “You’re looking well!”

I nodded affirmatively, clearly I looked well, tied to the bed with all these cables so that I couldn’t move, sit up, or get out of bed and walk around the room. But that didn’t bother me. And I drank the coffee with great pleasure, just as though it were real coffee, with natural white sugar.