My interest in memory loss has already existed a long time, and last year, after a routine visit to the doctor, my cardiologist explained that forgetfulness is one of the side effects of the medication I’ve been taking for years now. Soon after that, I went to Arizona to see, twenty years on, our first American address in Phoenix. And I wrote a diary during that journey in which I tried to discover the extent of my forgetting. Fear of forgetting had started to become an obsession with me some time ago, so this loss of Sanja’s is more than pure coincidence. The question I kept asking myself in the solitude of the hospital room was: Does our obsessive preoccupation with specific topics mean that we influence events ourselves, or do we unconsciously recall our near future, so that the memory expresses a deeper interest in problems we have yet to encounter? Did I influence what happened to Sanja, or have I been remembering it for some time already as an event that had yet to come?

Here’s another brief memory in connection with our first address as a contribution to the theme of forgetting. Some time ago Harun wrote the screenplay for a film that opened with a violent war scene in which a girl was injured and her man killed. The consequence of her injury was amnesia. She did not remember anything. The Red Cross discovered that her husband was in fact still alive, because they found his name and a new address on their lists. She went there, although she had already forgotten everything connected with him, she couldn’t even remember what he looked like. The man she was going to meet was in fact the man who had killed her husband and then used his personal documents to leave the country under his false identity. And the place of their meeting was a community in Phoenix, that first American address of ours.

When Harun and I turned up last year in front of “our” apartment in Phoenix, nothing happened, not a single sign that the place recognized us. Not only people, but places too can experience amnesia.

I had decided to take Sanja to Blues Alley on Friday, to a concert by Arturo Sandoval, I thought it was time for us to begin participating in events, so that she’d have things to remember. But it was too ambitious a plan. This morning (it’s Friday) she woke with a bad pain in her right arm, tired and out of sorts, and she doesn’t want to leave the house. After work, I go out the back door into Blues Alley, it’s raining, on and off, and in front of the bar Arturo Sandoval is standing, alone and lost in thought, in a blue linen jacket, he’s holding a cohiba between his fingers, occasionally glancing at the sky and puffing out thick smoke. I want to talk to him, but I can’t think what to say, so I walk past him, continue along Avenue Wisconsin, and go down into the underground garage. I have two tickets for the concert in my pocket, I check that I haven’t lost them along the way, I’m still hoping that the pain in her arm will have eased.