Eleven years later, he traveled to Moscow and went to see a cardiologist. That was how it emerged that his heart was, in fact, in excellent shape. To begin with, he was overjoyed at his health. But it quickly turned out that he was unable to return to a normal way of life, as he was completely adapted to his rhythm of going to bed early, walking slowly, and breathing with difficulty.

What’s more, the world became quite tedious for him, now that he could no longer talk about his illness.

A young African man had come to photograph my heart.

(On his index finger, rather than on his ring finger like most people, he had a silver ring with a square stone, that is, a combination of two stones: a large turquoise in the form of a tear was integrated into a square of black onyx; for the next half hour, as I watched him work, I looked at that ring.)

To photograph my heart, he used a handheld scanner and moved the cold, egg-shaped object, on the left side of my naked chest, over my breastbone. On the monitor in front of him, was he focusing on the image of my heart? Or some other visual content? I don’t know, I couldn’t see what he was seeing. I always felt a bit dizzy whenever I heard my own heart. For some reason, I don’t like to hear that sound, which means that I don’t like hearing the ticking of ancient clocks, either. My hand sometimes falls unconsciously onto my chest, on the left side, just as I am falling asleep, then I become aware of my heart, and that wakes me up. And now, as that young man was recording me, I was seething with discomfort. At one moment he pressed the round scanner hard down between my ribs. This was a moment of utter bodily discomfort.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to make a bit of space between your ribs, so that I get a clearer image.”

I can easily handle pain.

But this wasn’t pain; this was separating the ribs right by the heart, this was far more than I was prepared to put up with. And that pressure between my ribs unleashed an uncontrollable fury in me. He had been scanning for half an hour already—had he taken any images? He said he had, but that it wasn’t enough. And I told him that for me what he had already recorded was absolutely enough. I pulled my pajamas over my chest, and crossed my arms over it for good measure, to prevent any further approach to my ribs.