Today Phoenix looks like a city from the future. Over the last twenty years, there has been new building all around, and meanwhile it’s only our apartment block that has begun to collapse. But Harun doesn’t see it like that. The complex has remained a genuine poor ghetto, he says, the difference is that we came here from a war, at that time this was a great luxury for us. In February 1996, there was an orange tree growing in the yard, and after the hunger, mud, and ice, that was a heavenly contrast: the aroma of orange blossom came in through our window at night. He’s right. My nostalgia (nostalgia?) had grown on an idealized and inaccurate image. Most of the people in the block at that time were Bosnians. The traces of war were still fresh: one young man in a camouflage uniform had a drum set with a lot of cymbals in his apartment and the noise of it was the soundtrack of our American exile; above us lived an old man who used to hold to his ear a plastic transistor radio with a bunch of batteries stuck to it with Scotch tape and at night he would climb onto the roof of our building to catch long-wave Radio Bosnia and Herzegovina; in the apartment opposite ours, while the children were eating watermelon in one room, their father hanged himself in another . . . I could go from door to door like this. Instead of Bosnians, other dead souls now live here.

And it all happened too fast: twenty years later, we entered the atrium of the building where we once lived, spent just a few minutes outside the door of our former apartment, because our arrival had disturbed the inhabitants and managers of the complex, so we left quickly. I don’t know what else to say. And I don’t feel good, it’s as though I’ve been driven out of my own past.

There isn’t an orange tree by the entrance anymore, they’ve planted palms instead.

Our “return home” was supposed to be an important encounter with my own past, but in fact nothing occurred, apart from the coincidental oddity that our old apartment was now occupied by my “double.” And I don’t know how alike Clint and I really are, but I would like to believe in Harun’s explanation, although he probably exaggerated that similarity to give our visit a particular symbolic meaning. But isn’t that quite something in itself? Didn’t I come here to confront myself, convinced that we don’t in fact ever entirely leave the places where we’ve lived, some trace of us remains, our enduring presence, the way hotel mirrors retain the faces of all the people who have passed through the room? But it’s never like that. We remember the place where we once lived, but it doesn’t remember us.