She starts cooking. She’s making butter biscuits. She’s got flour even on her socks.

I took food she had prepared for me to work, mostly salads, but she’d never cut the vegetables completely, so that they didn’t lose their freshness, I had to do that later, and so along with the container of food she added a knife to the bag, metal, but colored orange, so that at first glance it appears to be plastic. It’s very sharp. Last year I traveled to Boston, and at the airport I passed through the body scanner, I turned around to wait for my luggage and then on the screen in front of the security officer I saw the inside of my hand baggage and in it my knife! Several officers in blue shirts came running up to me, and I said: “That’s for salad!” They explained agreeably that I couldn’t get onto the plane with that object, so I had two options: to throw the knife into the rubbish bin, or to post it to my home address. They gave me a FedEx cardboard envelope, I filled in everything I had to, put the knife in the envelope, stuck it down, and handed it to the agreeable official. From the plane I phoned Sanja to tell her what had happened, and she said: “It’s a good thing you didn’t end up in jail!” And she said we shouldn’t open the envelope when it arrived. We should keep it closed as an art object or a time capsule.

The day before I brought her back from the hospital, I visited the apartment to prepare the rooms for her arrival: I washed, dusted, and vacuumed. Behind the sofa I saw a miniature spider, a spiderling, so small that it wouldn’t have been able to survive my touch. I left it to weave its slender threads. Two weeks have passed since then, Sanja has just woken up on the sofa and there’s the red trace of a spider bite on her forehead! She’s still allergic to them. And that’s the rule in our relationship. Everything that occurs is, after all, my fault.

No one visits us anymore. I hadn’t thought about that before, but it’s clear to me now: people are afraid of a sick person.

One of her most frequent questions: “How did Harun take all of this?” I tell her that her son was here for ten days in April. I’m used to her question, I have a prepared answer that always surprises her because she has forgotten everything, and then she repeats the same question: “And did he hug me when he came?” She asks this with such seriousness and waits for my answer with such concentration, as though a hug were a precise test of a son’s love.