Since her stroke, her perception has sharpened, she sees the anomalies or correctness around her more clearly, the logic and illogicality of phenomena. I brought her cherries.

“Americans don’t make a substantive distinction between sweet and sour cherries, they’re all ‘cherries’ to them. Whereas we have višnja, Morello cherry, and trešnja, sweet cherry. Did you have any little girls in your school called Višnja? We had several in my school. But not a single Trešnja. We have an expression: ‘If the višnja was like the trešnja,’ implying that the latter was better and nicer than the former, and yet little girls were named after the sour cherry, not the sweet. That must be because of the energy of the words, because, as far as I’m concerned, a watermelon, lubenica, is tastier than either kind of cherry, but it seems unnatural to call a girl Lubenica. I don’t like my own name, Sanja, I never accepted it, it’s not me. I’d prefer to be called Višnja. Or Dunja (quince). Of all the fruits, the nicest girl’s name is Dunja. You come across Malina (raspberry), but you’d never find a girl called Kupina (blackberry). And, now, think about it, in our language not a single fruit or plant is masculine. Apart from jasen (aspen), if the name Jasenko comes from jasen. No, I tell a lie! There’s also Jasmin, after the flower. And maybe there is some other name that comes from a plant, which I’ve forgotten, since the stroke . . . There’s the girl’s name Jelka (fir tree), but there isn’t a single man called Bor (pine), although that would be a good name.”

We buy cherries every other day. Even in our childhood they weren’t this tasty. This is the year of the cherry.

“As a matter of interest, where did you get your name?”

“From my cousin, Semezdin. In April 1992, my uncle Rizo, Semezdin’s father, phoned me in Sarajevo from Tuzla and said: ‘You write for the papers . . . You should know that everything you write will one day be used against you,’ In short, he was asking me to be careful what I said, because in a war people can die because of the wrong word. ‘Be careful!’ he repeated several times. That was an unusual conversation at the beginning of the war. And at the end I asked him about the origin of my name. It’s after a Circassian, he said. A Circassian who lived in Bijeljina, in northeast Bosnia. He was a musician and a convivial man, his forebears had been exiled by the Russians from the eastern shore of the Black Sea, from a place called Semez. So, the name came from the Circassian’s nostalgia for the place of his birth. I like this little theory about the name, and I’d like to believe it, but I haven’t been able to find any reference in books to a place of that name on the shore of the Black Sea, so I have to take my uncle’s explanation with a pinch of salt.”