It all happened too fast. The doctors stated that, in all probability, she had cancer. I held her hand while she slept, she clasped mine tightly, because she was dreaming about something. And I thought, She isn’t dying, because dying people no longer dream! A ridiculous thought, but I held on to her till the morning, because there was no one there who could console me. The warmth of her hand and her whole sleeping body was the only acceptable reality for me.

All my life I have borne the burden of my meaningless name. But I came to terms with that early on, convinced it was after all just a name, that it didn’t matter what a boat was called, just that it could sail, and that we fill the being bearing our name with the glow of our being. It was a consoling thought. It’s only today, in my fifty-sixth year, that I have completely accepted and identified with my name. This is why. The doctor asks her: “What year is this? Which month? Where are we now?” She looks at him and there’s no reply, she has forgotten the year and the month and the place. Then the doctor points at me, sitting beside her bed, “And who is this man?” For a moment she settled her gaze, she appeared to be looking right through me, and I felt a chill run through my whole body. And I thought: She’s forgotten me. But then her face experienced a total transformation, she looked at me as though she had saved me from nonexistence, or as though she had just given birth to me, and with an expression of the purest love she said: “Semezdin, my Semezdin.” And that was the moment when my name filled with meaning. I was her Semezdin. That is my love story, and my whole life.

All of a sudden, bodies in a hospital start to become distorted. The nurse who injects her with morphine looks pear-shaped. Her head is minuscule in comparison with the rest of her body. It’s probably due to some inner optic problem of mine, which recurs whenever I find myself in a hospital. That is, I see human bodies as defective and incomplete. Perhaps because in a hospital a body is transformed from a subject into an object. But as soon as I get outside, my gaze becomes normal and I see people the way they, presumably, are. So a hospital becomes in my eyes like a crooked mirror, which distorts bodies. And then it seems to me that it’s the presence of people that makes this world imperfect, when it’s otherwise beautiful and amazing!