Sometimes I’m woken by the clattering of Kalashnikovs over Sarajevo. I get up, make coffee, and stay awake till morning, through the window I look at the lights of Washington, or snow falling over the Pentagon.

During the night, Lukas Cierny got out of bed, and the young Somali put him back: “Where were you going?”

He replied: “To get dressed, I must go for a walk.”

He didn’t actually know he was in a hospital.

Then in the morning, when she was encouraging us to get out of bed, he refused, and she ordered him loudly: “Get up! Stand up!”

“No!” said the old man.

And then—over the old Slovak who was refusing to get out of bed—she began to sing: “Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights!” Youth is beautiful in its arrogance.

The young Somali girl, with her violet scarf, with her new makeup, gleamed in the morning light, bending over the Slovak at the end of his life. She was happy because she was at the end of her shift and singing.

I was waiting very impatiently to be let out of the hospital.

In fact, I was afraid this wouldn’t happen today. It was Friday, and that would mean I’d have to stay here over the weekend.

But the doctor did appear, he asked me to walk down the corridors hooked up to all those sensors and sonars. I walked down the corridors, while the doctor followed the behavior of my heart on the monitor in front of him. I enjoyed that walk: in an hour I’d be outside, beyond the hospital walls.

When I came back into the room, the doctor checked the working of my heart once again, this time with a stethoscope, and as he didn’t find any sinister sounds in my chest, in the end he gave me precise instructions on how to behave—when I got out of the hospital.

And then I could go home.

I looked at him. He was Indian, he was called Rayard. And I thought: This man saved my life and we’re parting like complete strangers.

I said: “You saved my life.”

He said: “Yes.”

And left.

After that, a smiling middle-aged man with a mauve bow tie (“I’m your limo driver”) arrived and took me in a wheelchair through the corridors to the main entrance. This was a hospital ritual: regardless of the fact that I could walk, a man I had never seen before was pushing me in a wheelchair out of the hospital. There was something childish in that ritual move out of the world of the sick into the world of the healthy.