I’ve visited the police station and the national register and a couple of bureaucratic offices that lack any counterpart in Sweden. The bureaucracy here is a country of its own. With its own language and rules. Freedom can be tough when you haven’t had time to learn how to handle it. My questions, though disguised, raise suspicions that can’t be satisfied, not because sixteen-year-old girls who speak English are any more dangerous than anyone else, but because undeveloped freedom is often met with constant vigilance.

I haven’t made much progress in the cafés and restaurants and shops either, but at least I can have more straightforward conversations there, my intentional questions can be disguised as unplanned. Women don’t seem to like me as much as men. I’m not supposed to be out after dark—alone and young. It’s not something anyone said exactly, but it’s impossible to mistake what they’d like to yell at me. So I always end up talking to men. If I want to find out anything, anything at all, about the family I once had and whatever traces they may have left behind here, so I can paint a complete picture of myself and not just these puzzle pieces, then I’m going to have to keep spending my afternoons alone at the corner table sipping Turkish coffee with way too much sugar in it. And my evenings in the middle of the bar, waiting for someone who just took off their wedding ring to offer me a glass of raki or a foamy Birra Korça.

I’ve had the most success with a man who’s not much older than me, twenty, twenty-two at the most. He started talking to me at one of the cafés. He was sitting there reading like me, and he became curious about my book, an American thriller that I picked up at the airport. After a while he moved over to my table. Philosophy. In Albanian. That’s what he was reading. He flipped through its pages, showing me, and I recognized a word here or there without saying so. He has a nice laugh that makes a person feel happy. We met again at the same café the next afternoon. By chance. At least I pretended it was. When he arrived with the same book under his arm, I had already been sitting there a couple of hours, waiting and hoping. We drank several cups each, and I asked him to tell me about Shkodër. He speaks so vividly, as though leading me by the hand down its streets and through its seasons and centuries. With him it feels like I’m starting to understand this city and its surroundings and even the whole country a little better now. I wonder if I dare ask him to help me search for my family and relatives at those bureaucracies I can’t seem to handle.