Until this evening I didn’t know that she really is keeping up with the daily news. We had just watched a film (The Magic of Ordinary Days, Hallmark’s love story from the Second World War) in which there are images of a concentration camp, the prisoners are Japanese, in fact people born here, so Americans, most of them had never seen Japan, and their only “sin” was their ethnic origin. And, as we watched those scenes, she said: “If Trump wins the election, they’ll set up camps for Muslims here!”

We are accompanied by what is perhaps an unfounded fear. In the autumn and winter of 2001, Muslims here were suspected, followed, and arrested. Once, we were coming back from shopping and saw several police cars in front of the entrance to our building, their doors open, and we heard the crackling noises of their police walkie-talkies, and she said: “They’ve come for us!” We stood on the opposite side of the road, with plastic bags in our hands as dusk fell, watching the red revolving lights floating above the police cars, and she said: “They’ve come for us!”

She says she slept badly last night, because a “talkative family of cicadas” had moved in under our window. (“Are cicadas, too, illegal immigrants in this country?”)

The hospital invoices are arriving. At the end of the day, I went down to our mailbox on the ground floor. On my way back, I returned along the lengthy corridor and heard footsteps behind me. I turned around, but there was no one there. I went on walking and listening to the sounds of my own footsteps, convinced that a moment before I had perhaps heard myself, my own trudging, and mistakenly believed that someone was following me. But then the footsteps started again, along with muffled panting, as though I were being followed by someone accompanied by a dog; I turn around, there’s no one, just the empty corridor as far as the eye can see. In our building there are more dogs than people. As far as noise goes, this building is a real zoo. I had just unlocked the door and entered our apartment. The footsteps stopped. I’d like to believe I’m imagining the sounds because of my physical and mental exhaustion. (“Who is the third who always walks beside you?” T. S. Eliot.)

“I can’t take it anymore, I’m tired, I just want to go and be with my grandmas and grandpas, with Mensur and Muzafa, with Ibrahim and Fikreta!” (Those are the names of our dead . . .) This isn’t the ordinary loneliness of one who has been left with no collocutor or without the closeness of another person, another body, it isn’t the isolation of Robinson Crusoe. It is, I fear, the isolation in which the dead are more real than the living.

I am gradually discovering that her forgetting is deeper and that her memory is fairly selective. It seems to me that she has forgotten everything apart from her fears.