H. Gallasch, my friend from work, brought us food from an Italian restaurant and briefly took me outside the hospital to breathe in some fresh air. Through the big circular door we went slowly out into the rain. Everything in the hospital had slowed down, adapted to the movements of the patient. Time slowed down as well. From our ward, you had to pass through a labyrinth of corridors to come out into the rain. “It’s just as well you aren’t a smoker,” said H. “Otherwise you’d be popping in and out for a smoke.” I didn’t stay long outside, it was a cold April day, we said goodbye and I went back inside through the round door that revolved so slowly. I glanced at the paper sack of food in my hand and saw an image of Venice showing a palace and bridge with a gondola passing under it, and suddenly the revolving door became a time capsule.

Venice. The night before last, I was reading an essay about Venice by Sergio Pitol, his first encounter with the town, which he saw through a fog because he had lost his glasses somewhere on the way. I read that two nights ago, which now seems like the distant past, or some other life. And while I was reading, I could smell cement, because a few hours earlier, at work, my friend Santiago Chillari had been showing me photographs of the inside of an old building beside one of the Venetian canals, which he and his family are restoring with the intention of turning it into a hotel; the photos were of workmen scraping the walls, stripping off the old paint, with building materials, sacks of cement around them on the floor . . . After reading this piece about Venice, I wrote one about Aleš Debeljak, my friend who died tragically two months ago, I thought about him and jotted down memories of our encounters. We used to meet often, speak on the phone, and exchange emails. We got to know each other in the early 1980s, but it seems to me that our contact became pure friendship only last year: in October, at a literary conference in Richmond, for a few days we shared a common balcony in our hotel and chewed over our two pasts in lengthy conversations. I went through my email inbox to find his last sentence to me. His last message ended with the announcement: “This evening I’m taking our dog on our regular walk beside the Venice-Budapest train-line.” A poet! So a whole cultural space was transformed into the boundaries of a “regular” evening stroll.

The door described a complete circle, and I stepped back, into the hospital . . .

In the morning, as I was washing my face, I spotted in the mirror some white strands of hair on my forehead. Only two days have passed since we got here, and I’m already going gray.