More than twenty-four hours had passed since that conversation with the doctors, and now it had become clear why she had said she was a smoker: she had suffered a stroke and one of the consequences was forgetting. The stroke had damaged her so-called short-term memory so that she’d forgotten the last three years when she no longer went out onto the balcony to smoke.

She looks at her arm, which she can only move with difficulty, and asks: “What’s happened to me, Sem?”

“Yesterday,” I say, “I was making coffee, you’d gone to the bathroom, everything was all right, it was raining. As I was pouring water into the machine, I heard a cry from the bathroom, I thought you’d fallen, but that wasn’t it, your arm was hurting, you said it was tingling and you couldn’t feel your fingers. You didn’t want us to call an ambulance, but you weren’t getting any better, so I did call. They came, and after a quick examination, decided to take you to hospital. I drove behind the red ambulance and when I reached the hospital, you were already in bed, a nurse was giving you morphine, you were already having a transfusion, then they took you away, with your bed, to a different room where they did a CT scan. It had turned out that you were very anemic, so they sent you to the oncology department, as they thought you had cancer. The CT showed that you had a clot in an artery near your left shoulder, and they said it had caused a stroke, or rather a series of mini strokes in the peripheral microvascular tips on the left side of your brain. And now, because you’re anemic, they don’t know how to treat you. A stroke is treated with blood thinners, but the reason for your anemia is potentially an internal bleed. So now, if they put you on thinners, it would exacerbate the bleed and that would be a serious problem . . .”

She looks at me anxiously, but she has already forgotten what she asked me, and has already forgotten my reply, and now she asks again: “What has happened to me?”

The first night in the hospital. She sleeps and wakes in short bursts, her sleep is shallow. She wakes up, looks at me with an expression of disappointment on her face and asks:

“Is Daddy angry with me?”

“Are you asking whether your father is angry?”

“Yes, he’s angry with me and that’s why he’s not coming home . . .”

“Listen,” I say, “your father died four or five years ago.”