What does he think of me? He never showed any open liking for my choices. I never heard him endorse them or praise me for anything. Apart from once. While he was studying in Los Angeles, I traveled there for a reading, in a place called Villa Aurora, famous for having been an exile refuge for German writers and philosophers—Brecht, Mann, Adorno, and others—during the Second World War, and the house contains mementos of those few important years. In the days that I spent there, there were a couple of German artists living there, and a journalist, a Kurd who—people said—would have been arrested if he returned to Turkey. In the evening, I did my reading, the audience was unusual, mostly older people, escaping from the tedium of their afternoons, and my words didn’t reach them. But I enjoyed the reading, above all because I had impressed Harun. He was with his new girlfriend. And afterward, in conversation with our hosts, over a glass of wine, I heard him compliment me for the first time ever, he said authoritatively: “Sem is very perceptive!” (And, yes, from his first spoken words, he had always called me by my name; all these years I had been Sem for him, except when, transferring to English, to be understood by the people he was talking to, he began to follow a more formal usage, and at times, when he was speaking with his American acquaintances, he referred to me as my dad.)

On the other hand, he never displayed hostility toward my choices. He couldn’t identify with literature, especially poetry, which he read only reluctantly. Only later did he begin to read Rumi, indicating a tendency toward mysticism, although he made a clear barrier between himself and religion very early on. I had once tried to get him to “open up,” to discover what he really thought about poetry. He resisted, but he confessed that the people he met, ever since secondary school, particularly those at college, were “frightened of poetry!” I think he said that as a compliment to poetry, its seriousness. In his value system, everything that was not accepted by the masses was good.

There was a black pickup parked in a rest stop beside the road, and in the shadow of the steering wheel a man stripped to the waist was shaving blind, with no mirror.

As long as we’ve been on the road, I’ve been letting my beard grow.

Throughout the war, for the almost four years the siege of Sarajevo lasted, I shaved with just one razor blade.

Our clothes are dusty, there’s red sand on our shoes, the car is dusty, and the windshield is greasy and dirty so that one can hardly see out of it. (“It’s the tiny insects that get stuck to the glass as you drive. I keep cleaning them off and they keep coming back.”) Thousands of barely visible insects perishing before the driver’s eyes; their microscopic deaths create a consistent splotch on the glass, ceaselessly drawn by an invisible Jackson Pollock over the American road.