She watches the same film every day. Her taste for repetition is nothing new, that’s how she’s been since the late 1980s, when she began reading just one book, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Over the last decade, she has largely watched Pride and Prejudice, in all its film versions. She explained frankly: she is drawn to a world that exists only in costume drama. “I’m only interested in a world where there are no telephone poles.”

“What are you going to do today?”

“I’ll watch my film . . . Don’t laugh. I think that’s a virtue. People easily lose interest in things, they treat each other like novelties and quickly get bored with them. I’m devoted to my film. I’m true to my choices.”

The film she watches obsessively is about a pair of ice skaters, because the cold in the images of snow and ice appeals to her, because as a result of the stroke, the right side of her body, especially her right arm, is prone to waves of heat. And whenever she watches it in her room, the film functions as air-conditioning.

“It’s as though I’m dreaming everything I see . . .” That’s always her first sentence when we come outside. “I’m not sure whether what I’m seeing is really real. Or am I imagining it? I keep thinking this is a dream, that I’ll wake up and everything will be as it was before.” She doesn’t remember. She knows that she’s had a stroke, because she keeps being told, and she knows because of the aftereffects (pressure in the right side of her body). Nevertheless, she has trouble believing that it really happened to her, because she doesn’t remember the event itself. She keeps experiencing that state when we wake in the morning and try in vain to recall a dream of the night before. Or the other way around, as though everything is a dream from which she will wake at any moment. As though she’s imprisoned in someone else’s dream.

Last Saturday, at the swimming pool, I was sitting at a table under a sunshade. Sanja was in the water; I heard her voice and thought she was calling me. I sat up straight, came out of the shade, and saw her arguing with a swimmer who was saying: “This is a swimming pool!”

“Yes, it is, but it’s not just yours!”

And I went over to the edge of the pool: “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” she says. “This man splashes too much when he’s swimming.”