Before his death, as I said, he suffered from complete amnesia. He was put into an old people’s home. His friends brought him books he had written, which he looked at as though he’d never seen them before. He couldn’t recognize himself in the photograph of the author printed on the cover.

In our room, now, Lukas Cierny was breathing with difficulty, as though having an asthma attack. That lasted for a while, and then he calmed down, and I no longer heard his breathing. And each time that happened, I thought he had died.

Not to remember, is that a punishment? Or a blessing?

In the course of the evening, the nurses who looked after the two of us changed.

That evening there was an African Muslim girl here, wearing a violet silk scarf, with full makeup, including bright red lipstick, as though she were going out for the evening, to a restaurant and not a hospital ward. She was quite cheerful and sweet, young. She may have been twenty, perhaps twenty-five, but she addressed me and the old man with whom I shared a room as though we were children.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

She laughed, and asked back: “Where do you think?”

“Ethiopia?”

“Close.”

“Sudan.”

“Close,” she said, and waited for the guessing game to go on. But I didn’t feel like going on guessing, so, disappointed at my faint-heartedness, she admitted: “Somalia.”

She stood in front of the board—on which she was going to write her name and mine—and asked, with a felt-tip in her hand: “What’s your name?”

After a brief hesitation, I replied: “Me’med.”

From the perspective in which we found ourselves, the differences that are so fundamental to us became unimportant: whether she was from Sudan or Somalia. That mattered only to her, it left the entire continent where she now lived—indifferent. And the entire cosmos was indifferent to the differences in our identities. Seen from the perspective of death, it was a matter of total indifference which of the two of us was Slovak and which Bosnian, Lukas and Me’med, two patients stuck in the same room.

Just before midnight (she had come into our room to take blood samples), the young Somali girl asked the old Slovak: “What’s your name?”

He said nothing.

She asked: “And what year is this?”

And he said: “1939!”

That’s what he said: 1939.

What did 1939 mean to him? He must have been ten, perhaps fifteen, then. That was the year before the big war. Maybe that was when he had to leave his home for good, and now, in his old age, it turned out that he had never left that year. Truly, what had happened to him in 1939? I would have liked to hear his story, but he was no longer in a state to tell it.

There’s a year in my past I’ve never left as well.

1992.