She stayed. Wet, my hair dripping, wrapped in the bathrobe, I stretched out on the bed. And I felt increasingly bad. She brought me cold tea, which didn’t help, and then, having no choice, she called 911. After that, she stared out at the street impatiently, looking for the ambulance. I didn’t have the energy to turn onto my other side so as to watch her by the window. I looked at the sofa where she had been sitting. I felt suddenly uneasy because she wasn’t where she had just been. Then I looked at the photograph on the wall above the sofa:

Lhasa. Early morning. A young Buddhist priest had come out through a high wooden door in the wall of a stone building, and was now walking down a narrow cobbled lane, with a wisp of morning mist in front of him. A small white cloud. Like a ghost that the priest in his red robe was following. I let my gaze follow the white cloud above the cobblestones in Tibet.

Behind me, Sanja said: “Here they are.” Then she came back into my field of vision. She opened the door and looked down the corridor, anxiously, occasionally glancing toward me. And then our room was filled with strangers from the emergency services, settling themselves briskly around me on the sofa. I had never experienced such an aggressive assault on my privacy. Quite uninhibited and sure of themselves, they glanced around the room they had come to, glanced at me, admired the floral pattern of the bedspread I was lying on, strangers in my room.

A girl in a blue uniform had just opened my bathrobe, so that I lay before them naked, and asked: “How old are you, sir?”

“Fifty.”

After the initial shock, there was calm.

I looked at everything around me without emotion, and so—without fear. And now that it’s over, I remember the event as though I had seen it from a distance, as though my mind had become separate from my body and had observed what was going on almost with indifference.

The shock didn’t come when the girl in the blue uniform said: “Sir, you’re having a heart attack!”

That’s when I felt calm. Because my mind had overcome my emotions. In films, when people describe a critical moment such as this, the picture is often left without sound, and sometimes it’s even in slow motion. That’s a technical evocation of the mind at work.

The mind behaves like a cold camera lens.