I said I had brought it from home. Then she explained that I could by all means keep it here as well; maybe she believed I had a childish emotional attachment to that rug.

Then I called Sanja, who had gotten lost somewhere in the depressing architecture of the hospital corridors.

If a line is drawn under Tuesday, 2 November 2010, this is what happened to me:

As I was getting ready to go to work, I had a heart attack.

I was in the shower when I felt a dull, metallic pressure in my chest and throat, and when, soon afterward, the ambulance arrived, the girl who examined me said, bluntly and without beating about the bush: “You’re having a heart attack.” Under an oxygen mask, I watched Sanja on the sofa opposite the bed where I was lying surrounded by strangers. Her face was contorted with fear. They hurried to take me away, wrapped in the cover on which I was lying, they took me to hospital, and then I had an operation. And after they had installed stents in my blocked arteries, I was settled into a hospital ward. It all took a little more than three hours, but during that time my world, and me in it, were fundamentally altered.

After the operation, the doctor looked for Sanja, but she wasn’t in the waiting room. When they’d put me into the ward, I called her on her cell phone. She answered, she was on her way. She came into the room, pale, her face swollen with crying. That face expressed the uncontrolled joy and absolute sorrow that had entirely overwhelmed her. Something in her was broken. She had an irresistible urge to hug me but didn’t dare for fear that she might hurt me. I asked her to sit on the bed, beside me.

“Where were you?”

“Outside the hospital.”

“It’s cold outside, and you’re dressed like that . . .” I’d only just noticed that—in her haste—she had simply put a little sweater on over her T-shirt.

“I didn’t dare wait.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was afraid the doctor was going to come and tell me . . .”

“Tell you what?”

“That you’d died.”

“It hadn’t quite come to that.”

“When I was giving them permission to operate, they asked if I wanted them to fetch a priest.”

“What did you say?”

“I said there was no need for that, and that you weren’t going to die.”

“You didn’t tell them that a priest couldn’t reconcile me to God . . .”

“No.”

“You should have!” I said, joking.

She pretended to be cross (people were dying here and he was having a laugh!), then she slapped my chest gently with her open hand, then at the same instant remembered my heart and shuddered, she could have hurt me oh oh oh she waved her hands in the air over me ohohohooo. Then we laughed.