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.

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.