For some reason this dislocation affects me more than anything else, perhaps because it reminds me of a similar dislocation he told me about on another occasion. He remembered being left alone with the Kurdish peasant girls who lived in his home. The girls were quite young, only ten or twelve years old, though at least twice the age of my father, and had been brought by their families from the border villages to Baghdad, where they worked as servants in more affluent homes. They became my father’s earliest friends. When it grew dark, he said, they all huddled together on a low divan and began telling stories about werewolves and vampires. Of all the folktales he heard, my father said, only the ones about werewolves and vampires stayed in his memory. ‘Every detail of them is present in my mind,’ he said, ‘but not in the language I heard them in. I heard them in Kurdish, but I know them in Turkish; this mysterious translation is perhaps the oddest thing I have to tell you about my youth.

‘My parents – your grandparents – spoke to me in Arabic,’ he went on to say. ‘But the peasant girls at home knew only Kurdish, so I must have learned it with them. But since Kurdish was never spoken at school, as I grew up and my parents could no longer afford to keep the girls, I soon forgot it completely. I don’t know at what point in time this or that translated itself. It could only have happened later, after we had taken refuge in Istanbul. I never probed into the matter; perhaps I was afraid to destroy my most precious memories with too careful an examination. I can say only one thing with certainty. Those stories from my earliest childhood are present in my mind in all their freshness, but they are tied to words I did not know at the time.’

Through all his explanation, his eyes were wide with amazement recalled. And he concluded by telling me it seemed natural to him even now to remember them in this language. ‘I don’t have the feeling that I am changing anything,’ he said. ‘It’s not like the translation of a book from one language to another; it’s a translation that happened of its own accord. I can understand it in no other way.’