The first time we landed at this airport, on 1 February 1996, our luggage didn’t arrive with us. It got lost somewhere along the way. The airport official said it wasn’t a problem and that, as soon as it arrived, they would forward our suitcase to our address. But at that point we didn’t have an address. The luggage was lost, and that filled me with indescribable anxiety. Later it turned out that the contents of our suitcase were quite inconsequential: some winter clothes that we wouldn’t need in the desert and books that, in all probability, we wouldn’t read again. But because we were refugees from a war, that suitcase was our entire property, it was our all.

Today, when we reached the door of our old apartment (the address at which twenty years before, our suitcase had arrived a week late), we were met by a young man, a caretaker or the director of the complex. He was agitated, possibly a bit afraid of our presence, he asked us not to hang around, and added: “Don’t take any photographs!” Something had happened here. After I explained our reasons, pointing at the door of the apartment where we had lived twenty years earlier and after he was convinced that we had not come with any evil intentions, he said: “You can stay for five minutes, but you can’t take any pictures.”

There was a blue canvas chair by the door, quite faded by the sun, and an empty beer bottle . . . The place looked abandoned, I thought no one lived behind that door. But then a man appeared in the doorway. He startled me because his face looked somehow familiar. I explained at once that we used to live here. Clint, the man was called. He understood the sentimental reasons for our visit, but when I asked whether we could take a photograph of us all together, he drew his head into his shoulders, looking at us suspiciously. He let me take our photo on my cell phone, but later, when we were already in the parking lot, he did after all let himself be photographed with me, hidden behind sunglasses. Something terrible had happened here, but I didn’t ask what, and in fact I wasn’t interested. I had just needed one minute standing in the silence in front of our apartment door, as in front of a mirror.

When we were alone, Harun said: “Did you see? Clint looks like you, you could be twins.”