And she said: “Come to think of it, the ducat is something that otherwise doesn’t exist. A ducat as a nonexistent unit of measurement. In our language a clever person would be praised with the saying ‘All his ducats have value.’ The closest we got to a ducat was when a factory started producing chocolate in the shape of a coin. Did you go digging in your garden, looking for nonexistent treasure? We all dug and searched for gold coins in our childhood. The ducat was a measure of value from the past, the nineteenth century presumably. And we all referred to gold ducats, without ever having actually seen one. That’s why I bought that gold coin with the face of Mark Twain on it as a gift for Harun, so that a ducat would be a nonexistent measure of value for him, a metaphor, as it had been for us. I put it somewhere in the house, but where? I don’t know, I’ve been searching all morning, but I can’t find it. He often quotes Mark Twain on his Facebook page, the two of them were born on the same day . . .”

Varnishing her nails. I paint her nails. I’m slow and I don’t move calmly from the root of the nail to the tip, I’m not exactly a skillful painter. But she doesn’t object. She has small, child’s hands; when her nails are painted black, they look like watermelon seeds. Today’s color is: yellow.

Existing in the consciousness of a child. “Once Zara, a little girl of five, saw a woman with yellow nail polish and a yellow scarf. Zara is now a grown woman and she often remembers that unusual woman with yellow nails waiting for a bus at the Huntington Terrace stop. The little girl grew up with that image . . .”

“And who’s the woman with yellow nails?”

“You.”

Drawing a clock. This morning I managed to persuade her to draw a clock face: to write in the numbers and draw the hands so that she can see what time it is now. Yesterday she put the 12 and 6 in the right places, only she swapped the numbers from the left with the ones from the right. But this morning they are all in the right place, except that she has written 9 where she should have put 3 and 3 where 9 should have been. She is still mixing up the left and right side.

Ina, my boss from the German television station, sent flowers, a lovely bunch of tulips.

(This year in Arlington, deer have been going into gardens and eating the flowers. Not any flowers, they are selective, and they are particularly fond of tulips. It hasn’t ever happened before that deer came into people’s gardens for their flowers. Or at least the owners of Arlington gardens don’t remember them doing so.)