It was then that Veronika found a way of passing the time, now that ten minutes had gone by and she had still not noticed any physical changes. The final act of her life would be to write a letter to the magazine, explaining that Slovenia was one of the five republics into which the former Yugoslavia had been divided.

The letter would be her suicide note. She would give no explanation of the real reasons for her death.

When they find her body, they will conclude that she had killed herself because a magazine did not know where her country was. She laughed to think of the controversy in the newspapers, with some for and some against her suicide, committed in honor of her country’s cause. And she was shocked by how quickly she could change her mind, since only moments before she had thought exactly the opposite—that the world and other geographical problems were no longer her concern.

She wrote the letter. That moment of good humor almost made her have second thoughts about the need to die, but she had already taken the pills; it was too late to turn back.

Anyway, she had had such moments before, and besides, she was not killing herself because she was a sad, embittered woman, constantly depressed. She had spent many afternoons walking joyfully along the streets of Ljubljana or gazing—from the window in her convent room— at the snow falling on the small square with its statue of the poet. Once, for almost a month, she had felt as if she were walking on air, all because a complete stranger, in the middle of that very square, had given her a flower.

She believed herself to be completely normal. Two very simple reasons lay behind her decision to die, and she was sure that, were she to leave a note explaining, many people would agree with her.

The first reason: Everything in her life was the same and, once her youth was gone, it would be downhill all the way, with old age beginning to leave irreversible marks, the onset of illness, the departure of friends. She would gain nothing by continuing to live; indeed, the likelihood of suffering would only increase.

The second reason was more philosophical: Veronika read the newspapers, watched TV and she was aware of what was going on in the world. Everything was wrong, and she had no way of putting things right—that gave her a sense of complete powerlessness.

In a short while, though, she would have the final experience of her life, which promised to be very different: death. She wrote the letter to the magazine, then abandoned the topic and concentrated on more pressing matters, more appropriate to what she was living, or rather, dying, through at that moment.

She tried to imagine what it would be like to die but failed to reach any conclusion.

Besides, there was no point worrying about that, for in a few moments she would find out. How many minutes?

She had no idea. But she relished the thought that she was about to find out the answer to the question that everyone asked themselves: Does God exist?

Unlike many people, this had not been the great inner debate of her life. Under the old Communist regime, the official line in schools had been that life ended with death, and she had gotten used to the idea. On the other hand, her parents’ generation and her grandparents’ generation still went to church, said prayers, and went on pilgrimages, and were utterly convinced that God listened to what they said.

At twenty-four, having experienced everything she could experience—and that was no small achievement—Veronika was almost certain that everything ended with death. That is why she had chosen suicide: freedom at last. Eternal oblivion.

In her heart of hearts, though, there was still a doubt: What if God did exist? Thousands of years of civilization had made of suicide a taboo, an affront to all religious codes: Man struggles to survive, not to succumb. The human race must procreate. Society needs workers. A couple has to have a reason to stay together, even when love has ceased to exist, and a country needs soldiers, politicians and artists.

If God exists, and I truly don’t believe he does, he will know that there are limits to human understanding. He was the one who created this confusion in which there is poverty, injustice, greed, and loneliness. He doubtless had the best of intentions, but the results have proved disastrous; if God exists, he will be generous with those creatures who chose to leave this Earth early, and he might even apologize for having made us spend time here.

To hell with taboos and superstitions. Her devout mother would say: “God knows the past, the present, and the future.” In that case, he had placed her in this world in the full knowledge that she would end up killing herself, and he would not be shocked by her actions.

Veronika began to feel a slight nausea, which became rapidly more intense.

In a few moments, she would no longer be able to concentrate on the square outside her window. She knew it was winter; it must have been about four o’clock in the afternoon, and the sun was setting fast. She knew that other people would go on living. At that moment a young man passed her window and saw her, utterly unaware that she was about to die. A group of Bolivian musicians (where is Bolivia? why don’t magazine articles ask that?) was playing in front of the statue of France Prešeren, the great Slovenian poet, who had made such a profound impact on the soul of his people.

Would she live to hear the end of that music drifting up from the square? It would be a beautiful memory of this life: the late afternoon, a melody recounting the dreams of a country on the other side of the world, the warm cozy room, the handsome young man passing by, full of life, who had decided to stop and was now standing looking up at her. She realized that the pills were beginning to take effect and that he was the last person who would see her.

He smiled. She returned his smile—she had nothing to lose. He waved; she decided to pretend she was looking at something else; the young man was going too far. Disconcerted, he continued on his way, forgetting that face at the window forever.

But Veronika was glad to have felt desired by somebody one last time. She wasn’t killing herself because of a lack of love. It wasn’t because she felt unloved by her family or had money problems or an incurable disease.

Veronika had decided to die on that lovely Ljubljana afternoon, with Bolivian musicians playing in the square, with a young man passing by her window, and she was happy with what her eyes could see and her ears could hear. She was even happier that she would not have to go on seeing those same things for another thirty, forty, or fifty years, because they would lose all their originality and be transformed into the tragedy of a life in which everything repeats itself and where one day is exactly like another.

Her stomach was beginning to churn now, and she was feeling very ill indeed. It’s odd, she thought I thought an overdose of tranquilizers should have sent me straight to sleep. What she was experiencing, though, was a strange buzzing in her ears and a desire to vomit.

If I throw up, I won’t die.

She decided not to think about the stabbing pains in her stomach and tried to concentrate on the rapidly falling night, on the Bolivians, on the people who were starting to shut up their shops and go home. The noise in her ears was becoming more and more strident, and, for the first time since she had taken the pills, Veronika felt fear, a terrible fear of the unknown.

It did not last long. Soon afterward, she lost consciousness.

When she opened her eyes, Veronika did not think, This must be heaven. Heaven would never use a fluorescent tube to light a room, and the pain—which started a fraction of a second later—was typical of the Earth. Ah, that Earth pain—unique, unmistakable.