The monarch butterfly migrates from Mexico to Canada and then returns, but that migration takes four generations. The first generation migrates from Mexico to Texas, the third is born in Canada. The grandfather and grandchild butterflies live out their brief lives in different countries. Like those of us who are born in the Balkans.

Two weeks ago Harun arrived at one airport (Dulles), and he is leaving from another (DCA). I’m uneasy about his departure. In our lives this is an event that is constantly repeated: driving each other to an airport. There have already been too many partings. I stop the car, we both get out for him to take his bag from the trunk and for us to say goodbye. A quick embrace (“Take care of yourself!” “You too!”), and he has already vanished through the automatic door that closes behind him so that I see my reflection in it.

And then, frozen there, gazing at the glass airport door, I was greeted by an acquaintance; he was glad to see me. I was still sad, affected by our parting, but this man was genuinely glad that we had met. I recognized him, but I couldn’t remember his name. We used to meet outside the Voice of America building when we both worked there. Many years had passed since then. He was otherwise a passionate reader of poetry, and at those smoking breaks we talked on the whole about poetry. Once he brought me Recollections of Gran Apacheria by Edward Dorn, to show me the sketches in the book and the photograph on the last page, so as to convince me that Dorn and I were so alike we could have been twins. What was his name? I endeavored not to let him see my embarrassment. He reproached me for not getting in touch since I left the Voice of America. In the end, he grew sad and told me he had cancer. I didn’t know what to say. I never know what to say when I hear tragic news. Where was he going? San Diego. I have forgotten his name, but I remember that he used to underline important passages in his books with a graphite pencil.

She forgot to give Harun a ducat; she remembered after he left. “So, you remember that gold coin?”

“Of course I do!”

I’m glad every time she remembers something recent. It means that her forgetting is not amnesia, she has lost focus, but when she is reminded of an event, an image is then awakened in her and so plucked from oblivion. She bought that ducat this year, in January I think, or February, but she had forgotten where she put it, she searched all the places where the little box with the gold coin in it might have been but didn’t find it.