At midnight, my left arm became numb, it must be a new heart attack. So now what? I get out of bed carefully so as not to wake Sanja. It’s really not good. It’s not the right time for an infarct. The arm’s quite numb. I search in my bag for the nitroglycerine tablet I carry with me in case my heart seizes up like this, it should help for a while. I put the little bottle with the tablet in front of me on the desk. Then I open up the unfinished texts on my desktop computer, intending to email them to Harun, to protect them from the chaos of multiple versions, so that in the future no one would mistakenly print texts I wasn’t yet happy with. Those small tasks soothed me, although my arm was increasingly stiff. I opened the piece I’d been working on for months now, corrected one or two typos, altered the occasional sentence, and then I added a whole new fragment. When I’d finished it, I read through what I had written and was satisfied, and that stimulated my desire to write. I stayed awake until morning, making notes. And at daybreak I filled the kettle with water for our first coffee. Outside it was drizzling.
They say that troubles never come singly, other, smaller or greater problems graft themselves onto them. And that is indeed the case. Of all the additional troubles that occurred over recent days, the one that most disturbs me is the alarm on our car, because it has suddenly begun to go on and off of its own accord, bothering people around us. It happens unexpectedly, sometimes after midnight, or early in the morning. There’s no logic to the activation of the alarm. Our car is a Ford Taurus, made in 2002, and on the internet I found that the unusual behavior of the alarm was a factory fault. That happens with American cars, in a culture founded on a quick profit, cars are built with cheap components, so as to make savings in their production and produce the maximum profit. In any case, the alarm went off uncontrollably and this caused me a significant problem. I accustomed my ear to its sound, I wake easily and dash down to turn it off, and then come slowly back up the stairs. Sometimes it happens that on my way back I hear it again, so I go back down. Horrible! I am becoming afraid of our Taurus. Today I fell asleep from tiredness, and now her voice summons me from sleep: “Wake up, Sem, the car’s whistling again!”
Our alarm that turns itself on and off rhythmically.
Sanja’s stroke occurred in the English language. In these notes I translate the whole event into an isolated, fairly remote language (spoken by a relatively small number of people, so that I can imagine its future disappearance). Some details are not translatable. Our isolation is seen most clearly in the empty space between the two languages. But that empty space is the same as forgetting.