Old Cierny is much loved, there’s a procession all day long of his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. They fill our room with laughter while they fix their father’s, grandfather’s, or great-grandfather’s pillows under his head; comb the sparse hairs on his skull; and do whatever they can to please him. It’s clear from the old man’s vacant gaze that he doesn’t know who all these people are. They turn to me as well, kindly, as though we’d always known one another and were related. The mere fact that I came from a Slavic part of the world gave them the right to that familiarity. Even though their own Slavic origin was pretty foreign to them. His daughter, when she introduced herself to me, said of Lukas: “He’s from Czechoslovakia.” She was a pure-blooded American, from Pennsylvania.

He, who remembered nothing anymore, answered questions in English and then sometimes in Slovak. When he replied in Slovak, the people he was talking to didn’t understand him. However, that didn’t bother any of them, they weren’t conversing with him to exchange information, but to simulate communication.

Someone had just come into the room and greeted Lukas with “How you doin’?”

To which he replied: “Dobro.”

It was a reflex response in Slovak, a language that at this time was evidently closer to him. The person to whom the old man directed his dobro didn’t understand the word. The old man had been separated from his Slovak language for some seventy years. And now the word came out of him, as it were, unconsciously. But this linguistic muddle had an emotional effect on me. As though now, close to death, the old man was preparing to face death in his own language. When he pronounced his dobro it confirmed for me that I was in a foreign, distant land. That was a most unusual experience of language.

Sanja was sitting by my bed, and when she heard the old man say dobro, as though in our shared language, her eyes automatically filled with tears.

Lukas Cierny looked like the Bosnian poet Ilija Ladin.

It wasn’t just a matter of physical similarity. Ladin, too, suffered from complete amnesia before his death.

But now, when I thought about him, the way he appeared in my memory, I became aware that Ladin had many faces.

I remembered: In a box of his photographs, there were lots taken in those express photo booths, which you rarely see nowadays, in the streets of towns all over the world. In a matter of seconds, the machine would make four shots, four portraits on a square of cheap photographic paper. Ilija went into those booths in Paris, Milan, Sarajevo, and other towns, and had his photograph taken as a souvenir. In the pictures, his portrait was repeated four times, but in each one his expression was different, and with each new expression, he was a different person.