Her isolation. When I get home from work I run up the stairs, and she opens the door as I reach it. Smiling. I thought that she watched from the window for the old Ford Taurus to appear in the parking lot, and then went to the door to open it before I rang the bell. But it isn’t like that. She says she doesn’t look out the window, but waits by the door, watching through the spy hole.

When I get home from work, we have coffee and remember the past. Every day. And I always hope she will have woken up that morning and recalled everything. In our conversations, we often go through the list of addresses where we’ve lived. She remembers some of the places, but not others. We lived in Zagreb for a few months, for instance, and she remembers that. She left Sarajevo with Harun in September 1995. The town was still besieged, a driver from the Soros Open Society Foundation drove them over the airport runway, to Konjic, where they got into a truck and that took them to Split. Two days passed before I could speak to them, by then they were already staying with my Zagreb acquaintances Nenad and Marija, whom Sanja had met then for the first time. In our short telephone conversation, she told me that she and Harun were fine, that the journey had been exhausting, and that they were resting. She said that Marija and Nenad were good people. I asked her: “How do you know?” And she replied: “Because in their house a cat and a dog live together.”

She’s finding her isolation increasingly hard. We decided to start learning Spanish in the hope that this would help fill her day with interesting content. As long as I’ve known her, she has praised the music of the Spanish language. “Just don’t hurry me, you have your rhythm, and I have mine, I’ll learn slowly. Poco a poco!” she says. In fact, she doubts that the two of us can study together. Once, thirty years ago, the differences between us were so great that it’s a real miracle we’re still together. Her recollection of the past century is more intensive than her memory of the twenty-first. She says: “We’re a dog and a cat who’ve been living together for thirty years now.” What’s important for her is the accord that’s rarely established between natural enemies. The rule is that cats and dogs don’t like each other, and when it happens that they can, after all, put up with each other, that is a harmony that makes this world a better place. Over time, we’ve reached an accord. Or it would be more accurate to say that the differences between us are increasingly slight. We differ the way a Spanish r differs from a French one.