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!”

Befuddled by the painkillers, she easily drifts into sleep and even more easily wakes from it. She woke briefly and said anxiously that she kept sleeping and she ought to get up, because she’d be late for an exam at the university. And then I didn’t have the heart to tell her that our student youth is far behind us, in a past that would be best forgotten for our own good, in a state that no longer officially exists, in a world that is no more.