I pay attention when he asks: “Russians?”

And then he says: “Go back to Russia!”

He has The Washington Post on his lap,

who knows what he’s been reading there today

that makes our Slavic accent so irritating

that he lost control and said: “Go back to Russia!”

I was wounded and angry. When our eyes met, he drew his head

into his shoulders and sank more deeply into the leather armchair.

Only then do I see the woman sitting beside him.

She says: “Let’s go home.”

He says: “We can’t, it’s raining.”

She says: “So what? We’ll run to the car.”

The two of them live together. I paid attention to her,

because it was easy to recognize her Russian accent when she spoke.

They soon left, but when they were already at the door,

he turned back to tell me once again: “Go back to Russia!”

She turned to us with an apologetic look.

Then they started to run. And when they reached the other side of the road,

They could no longer be seen for the rain.

Snowflake

SNOWFLAKE

Love is a form of forgetting.

—RICHARD HELL

When they carried her out of our apartment into the rainy day, she was in pain and barefoot, so she turned and told me to bring her “some shoes.” I picked up the first ones I found. I drove behind the ambulance in which she was traveling toward the hospital, glancing from time to time at those white tennis shoes on the passenger seat. Rain and the monotonous sound of the wipers. Canvas tennis shoes are not for a rainy day. Sanja was in the red vehicle in front of me, her shoes were following her.

In the hospital, two doctors asked her synchronized questions and she answered. Questions about her allergy, about her medical history, she answered with wide-open eyes in the face of the authority of the two men in their white coats, as though she were taking an exam. And then one asked: “Do you smoke?”

“Yes,” she said, “but only two or three cigarettes a day.”

She’s no good at lying, in situations like this she will sincerely confess everything. When I heard her answer the doctor’s question, I thought that may well have been the case: at work she probably smoked two or three cigarettes, but she’d kept it from me, because she was very anxious not to revive my desire for tobacco (and in the past I had been pretty dependent). After my heart attack, five years ago, she, too, stopped smoking, out of solidarity, or at least she didn’t light a cigarette in my presence. She had smoked “two or three cigarettes a day” all her life, and it had never become a real addiction.