The vertigo passed and I moved back to the car. I looked again at the depression in the front panel. It seemed larger now, and higher on the body. A dog could not have made such a dint, I thought, or only a dog as large as a man or a roo. What I did then I can’t account for. For some reason I looked up, as if I felt I was being watched, though I knew there was no one there. I’ve come to think that everything that followed can be traced back to that sensation, though if someone were to ask me what it was, I would be at a loss to explain. I often feel in any case that language is really no more than a banging of our head against a wall.

I’m plagued by a recurring dream that comes to me only in parts. Or so I’ve thought. Because recently I’ve come to realise that what I’d taken to be separate parts are in fact connected, like limbs of the same body. The realisation felt like I’d put together the pieces of a puzzle. That the dream had started as a story that someone had cut into pieces and shuffled wildly, then presented to me as I slept in a random sequence that has lasted for almost sixteen years. But though it makes sense to me to think of it this way, I now believe the opposite is the case: that the dream started as one random fragment following another with no original whole, only finding that whole somehow as it went, moving towards (I can put it no other way) something that did not yet exist.

The dream is about my father: my father and me in East Berlin. Which is strange because I have never been to East Berlin, and yet in the dream I am the same age as my father and seem to know the city better than he does. But what is even stranger is that my father, too, had never been to East Berlin: as a recently married man, he once told me, he had lived for a brief period in the west of the city, but he had lived in Istanbul for many years more by the time he was the age in the dream (his parents had fled Baghdad when he was still a boy), and it was to Istanbul he was forced to return with my mother after my birth and before their escape to Australia.