You were always afraid of doctors. You were three, a rose thorn was stuck in the palm of your hand, I took you to a clinic, where nuns happened to be working that day. You refused to go into the clinic, while they encouraged and cajoled you. You resisted, screaming and arguing: “No, no!” Wanting to insult them, you shouted: “Penguins! Penguins!” And the nuns laughed.

The scent of a three-year-old boy’s hair has stayed in my memory.

Page, Arizona. After two sleepless nights, here we are in a hotel. I take a shower. I wait for the trickle of water to shift a blue thread from my shirt that had settled in my navel.

Stretched out on the hotel bed, Harun is absorbed in the photographs he has taken today, so that his laptop is constantly in danger of falling off the edge of the bed onto the floor. That’s how it always is with him, something is always threatening to nose-dive off the edge of something . . .

I remember, he could have been three or four, I am holding him in my arms, but he’s restless, he struggles in my embrace, and then succeeds in getting away and falls so that he cuts his tender child’s chin on the edge of the chair. As he grew, the scar got bigger. He never reproached me for it, maybe because men like their scars. But his mother, whenever she felt a need to put things straight, would scold me as a joke: “Come on, don’t flatter yourself, you weren’t capable of holding him even when he was a baby!”

I was woken by the sound of the door opening. I sat up in bed and looked out the window at the mauve neon sign on the roof of the motel opposite us. For a moment I regretted being jolted out of my comfortable sleep. And I tried in vain to remember what I’d been dreaming about. I was woken by the sound of a door opening, and after I became aware of that sound, I looked automatically out the window, listening to all the sounds from outside. And so my dream vanished. If everyday reality is intensive, and if I think of it the moment I wake, I forget my dream. I was woken by the sound of a door opening. Awake, I looked out the window. I dragged myself out of bed and discovered that the door of our room was unlocked. I went out and surveyed the parking lot from the motel veranda. In the middle of the parking lot was a swimming pool surrounded by a high wall. The swimming season had not begun, there was no water in the pool, but around the empty egg-shaped hollow, there were several sun loungers. On one, a woman wrapped in a gray coat was sitting, rocking from left to right, as though soothing an inner pain. I watched the glow of her cigarette. A black jeep had just come into the parking lot, a man got out, set off toward the motel reception, but then stopped, changed direction, and went up to the pool wall. He stood right beside it, listening. He couldn’t see the woman, and she couldn’t see him. Only the wall separated them. In all probability, she was not aware of his presence. In the silence, the man laid his hand on the wall. Delicately, the way one lays one’s hand on the belly of a pregnant woman, and as though attempting to discover through his open palm what was not accessible to his eyes. And that was all. Nothing else occurred. Exhausted from our journey, we had fallen asleep in a motel room with an unlocked door.