In this case the shock had come at the moment when the ambulance arrived, especially when a bunch of strangers filled my room. This was something that happened to other people, not to me, and it was something I recoiled from, of which I had a natural fear. And here my fear of illness was expressed as fear of doctors and hospitals. I never went to hospitals even as a visitor.

And now the girl in the blue uniform leaned over me on my sofa, and said: “You’re having a heart attack!”

My first thought: She’s wrong, this isn’t my heart. Then I thought: I know this girl from somewhere. I tried to remember where from, but now there were a lot of human hands above me, attaching me to wires, turning me to the left, then to the right, disturbing my train of thought: I couldn’t remember where I had seen the girl before. Through her blue blouse, I saw the outline of her breasts, but didn’t register that as in any way sexual. She was looking at me anxiously, as though accusing me of something.

And one other optical impression: The bodies of all those people around me were unnaturally large, while my body had shrunk. What was it I was feeling? Weariness. Weariness from the pressure in my chest, which was making me breathless, which had become the same as weariness with life. And I thought: So, is that it? So, is this death? At that moment, in fact, I began to see everything not just as a participant but also as an outside observer. And I thought: It’s good, just let it all pass, I’m tired, I want to close my eyes and not remember. I want it all to stop.

All I had lived through up to now was already too much.

On the way to the hospital, lying in the ambulance, my knee crushed by the weight of an oxygen canister, I watched the passing clouds, the green traffic signals that I had noticed up until then only as a driver. Through the back door of the ambulance, after we slowed down for something, I saw a sign on the façade of a brick building with the inscription LIBERATION BOOKS. I had only seen that inscription before on a photograph of Harun’s. And later, when I went with him to look at the books there, we weren’t able to find the shop. He remembered it as being somewhere near the junction of King and Henry Streets. There was no information about the bookshop on the internet. I had searched in vain for it the previous week as well, and now I was looking at the girl in the blue uniform leaning over me to fix my headrest and thinking how ridiculous it would be to ask: “What’s the name of this street?”