When the nurse comes into the ward to give her an injection, Sanja says, “You smell nice,” to please her, to establish human contact with a small compliment before the pain.

Otherwise I think there’s something deeply problematic about the way treatment is managed in a hospital. Every ten minutes people come to check her name and date of birth; to scan the bar code on the plastic armband around her right wrist; to take her pulse, blood pressure, temperature; to take blood samples, knock her knee with a rubber hammer . . . It’s torture by lack of sleep, and it could all be done in a slower rhythm, so that the patients have time to catch their breath, to fall asleep, to have a minimal amount of rest, at least during the night. A hospital ward is a torture chamber. I think hospitals ought to sign the Geneva Convention and stick rigorously to the rules.

I put my T-shirts on her, because they’re bigger and more comfortable than hers. I’ve got one here that’s the color of the September sky in Sarajevo on a sunny, cloudless day. That’s the one she likes best.

It’s three in the morning now. Through the high hospital window I count the planes descending from the night sky to the airport, the lights from their windows merging with the occasional lights from the windows of houses in Arlington. She opened her eyes briefly, glanced at me, then turned onto her other side and went on hovering between sleep and waking. She glanced at me, but I’m not convinced she knew who I was.

It’s three in the morning. I have always liked her early wakings. When I used to write at night, it sometimes happened that I woke her because I would forget to move the kettle off the heat before it whistled. So I might wake her at three in the morning and she was always cheerful, ready to joke. There she is in the doorway, she looks at me, shakes her head, and says: “You’re fifty years old and still writing ditties!” And once, woken like that, still half asleep, she said: “The Chinese believe that dragons like the smell of copper.” Dawn is her time of day. That’s why I remember many of her morning sentences. Showered, her hair wet, ready for work, she would spread out her arms and ask: “Is someone going to tell me I’m beautiful?”

She has forgotten everything. She asks: “How old am I?” Whatever number I tell her, she’ll believe it. So I ask her her date of birth, because she has to answer that question every five minutes for one of the hospital staff.

“September 17, 1960!”

And I say: “Now it’s 2016. Can you work out how much time has passed between 1960 and 2016?”

She closes her eyes and counts. Then she looks up and says, “I can’t be that old!”