“Are you related?” asks a nurse.

“She’s my wife.”

But when I say, “She’s my wife,” that is a simplification, she’s more than that. For instance, in 1993, during the siege of Sarajevo, a murderer pointed the barrel of a Kalashnikov at my chest. And she stepped between the gun and me.

“What happened to me?”

“Early in the morning on the second of April, it was raining. I decided to make coffee. You got up from the sofa and went to the bathroom. I spooned finely ground coffee into the filter, then I poured water into the machine, and then I heard a cry from the bathroom, your voice. But ten seconds earlier you had been laughing! I went to the bathroom and found you doubled up, you said your arm was numb and you couldn’t feel your hand or your fingers. Shall we call an ambulance? No! You came back to the sofa, but when you tried to lie down the pain got worse, so you sat up again. I called an ambulance. They came quickly, but when I opened the door they complained about the long corridor they had to walk along. Our building has an incomprehensibly long corridor. ‘By the time you’ve walked down that corridor, the patient might have died,’ said a young man in a blue uniform. They took you to the hospital, a scan showed that you’d suffered a stroke. And here we are now on the oncology ward, they thought you had cancer, but that’s wrong . . .”

The fingers of my right hand are swollen. I can bear pain, I’ve learned. The cold in Sarajevo during the siege years brought on my arthritis, which has gotten quite a bit worse over the last two years. It attacks me in the shoulder and the hip with horrible pain lasting from eight to ten hours. Or, as now, the inflammation makes my fingers stiff. In October last year I was at a literary gathering in Richmond. Wonderful weather, an Indian summer, and then on the first night I was woken by arthritis, my left shoulder was inflamed, unbearable pain; I stood by the window, rigid, in one position, looking out at the illuminated street. Young people were returning from nightclubs, laughing and tipsy, they passed my window the whole night, loud and drunk, and how I envied them their youth and health. In the morning, when Sanja was already awake and getting ready for work, I phoned her to say I was in pain and could hardly wait for the pharmacy to open, I’d go and buy some of those “hot patches” that you stick on the sore place to relieve the pain, and she told me to open my bag, because she’d already packed them in case I needed them. That’s how I lived all these years. I’d call her so she could tell me what I had in my bag.