There’s a bunch of keys swaying from his belt. I’ve seen this in the United States before now, on the whole with young Latino men: they hang their keys from their belts like a decoration.

Interesting. I remember that he used to drag a similar bunch of keys around with him even as a very small child, trying to open locks he happened to come across as he toddled his way about.

I’m interested in his keys, and he shows them to me one by one, until we come to the one that suddenly becomes the most important: “This is the key to the apartment in Sarajevo.”

The three-year-old goes around the large parking lot in front of our building with his bunch of keys and opens car doors. Proud that he has succeeded in unlocking the trunk of a Lada; I quickly pick him up and clasp him to me to protect him from the sudden annoyance of a large man with a mustache, the car’s owner . . .

He still keeps the key to our Sarajevo apartment.

Beatty, Nevada. In our motel room, I try to remember the passwords that open my internet pages, I wanted to read the emails that had reached my inboxes and reconnect with real life . . . On my home computer these pages open automatically and don’t need a password. I’ve forgotten all of them. This is Harun’s laptop, a machine that treats me like an indifferent stranger. The past with its real keys was better. It would be good today to have a bunch of keys like the one swinging from his jeans belt instead of all these passwords. It was all far easier in the twentieth century because our privacy was less wary of the public gaze, and we were more serene in our solitudes. But now in a remote desert motel, in a town called Beatty on the very border of Nevada, I stare at the computer screen. I’ve forgotten my password, and for a moment I feel lost, as though I don’t exist. That’s a brief attack of helplessness. And, since I didn’t know the password, I closed the computer and felt some relief to be liberated from my daily routine. It’s good to travel. I went out of the motel room onto the veranda as though I had walked out of my personal prison into freedom. I was met by a blast of hot air, it was nearly midnight.

Las Vegas. The street is called Dean Martin Drive. A mechanic is changing the tire on the wheel. There’s a beautiful girl with us in the waiting room, sitting in an armchair and drawing on her bare legs with a felt-tip. The two of us were commenting on her drawings. She couldn’t have known that we were talking about her. When he had changed the tire, the mechanic came into the waiting room, waited for us to finish our conversation, then asked: “What language are you speaking?”