And now, when it no longer matters, I can confess: I, too, had my dreams.

My wishes weren’t big, but still none of them came to anything. I longed for a small window from which one could see blue water. I imagined that in my fifties I would live a peaceful life, with time freed up just for writing. I wanted a small shady café where I would meet with friends on a Saturday or Sunday morning to gossip about our past. But I ended up as a prisoner on a vast continent, alone, without people to talk to. A foreigner. And I have grown accustomed to this solitude, I have accepted it as payback for the sins I have committed in my life. And in exchange for my unfulfilled wishes.

To differentiate oneself from one’s father? There’d always been that tension, it’s probably natural in adolescence for a son to compare himself to his father. And I remember your college admissions interview. Your interviewer came to Alexandria, you met at the Starbucks at the end of King Street, beside the river. It was early summer, a lovely day, at the end of the garden the two of you were sitting at a table, I was at another. The distance between us was not great, so I could hear your conversation, not all of it, but I strained to hear as much as I could, and then came the moment when you said to that stranger: “My father is a writer and I want to distance myself from his interests, I want the two of us to be different and I’m not interested in literature!” I think I understood your reasons then, as I understand them now. The difference is that then your announcement (“I’m not interested in literature!”) hurt me, but now I remember it all with a certain pleasure and sympathy for the you who perhaps didn’t yet know what you wanted, but you evidently knew what you didn’t want.

I was working in the Reuters Washington office, and Harun’s student film had been quite a success; invited for an interview, he arrived early and so came in to see me in the video archive. I asked him whether he had anything against my being present at the conversation, and he said no, on the contrary. I listened with interest as he answered questions about his past. And, since his student film was concerned with war, there was inevitably a question about the siege of Sarajevo. And then he said: “All I wanted was to get out of the city, but, when asked about it, my father would always say ‘No, no, I don’t want to go, I refuse to allow them to drive me out of my home!’” That was the first time we had talked about the war so openly, and the conversation took place through an intermediary, Harun was replying to a journalist’s question, but his answer was intended for me.