“I don’t know.”

“When we were children we used to eat the blossom.”

I took a short video on my phone of the living leaves above us, lasting about twenty seconds, and then slowly moved the phone toward her, I took her face briefly, three or four seconds, and stopped. Then I showed her the video. As far as we could see it on the telephone in the reflected daylight, the little film seemed nice. When we got home and I looked at it carefully, I had stopped recording at the moment when she turned her face to look at me. Oh, that look haunts me now. Such an expression of bliss, reconciliation, and absence of vanity, such a lack of interest in posing and withdrawal from everything . . . Melancholy, but beautiful! We stayed at the pool for two hours and she was glad we were there, even though the water was cold; she had gone to the edge of the pool with great enthusiasm, but after dipping her toe into the water, she gave up on the idea of swimming. Earlier, too, when we were crossing the parking lot in front of our building on the way to the pool, she was quite happy: “I feel more natural in the water. Water is my closest element. Maybe some forebear of mine was a mermaid!” I thought she was happy. But then the cold lens of the telephone camera revealed the look in her eyes . . . How could one console a person with such a look?

Sometimes, when she’s cheerful like today, she says that her forgetfulness is not a problem, or that it is a lesser problem than the pressure she feels in her right arm.

“I don’t think there have been such important events in my life that I should remember them. Besides, we don’t even remember our birth, and that ought to be one of the most crucial events. If only my arm would stop hurting. Forgetting doesn’t hurt . . .”

Questions we repeat every morning. “What day is it today?” “Which year?” “What month is this?” Outside the wind says Juuuuuuuune.

She opens up pages on the internet randomly researching what she’s forgotten and what she still remembers. She tires quickly because of problems with her sight; sometimes what she reads disturbs her, and sometimes she’s pleased with what she finds. In an online dictionary she found the word labrnja, laughing at the sound of the word itself and its meaning. Labrnja: the space for the teeth. “In Bosnia men used to tell women to ‘shut their labrnja!’ Imagine that: shut the space for your teeth!”