One night one of my neighbours was standing by my door with a carton of cigarettes and a bottle of wine. I had seen him in the hall, always alone. Perhaps he suffered as I did from Parisian coldness toward people like us. He said his name was Rafiq and I told him mine was Gota. I was afraid and told him in my accented French that he could not come in, that I slept only with women, and he laughed and said that he did not believe me and do not worry he would not hurt me and then we both went back into our separate rooms.

Soon after, I saw him coming and going with a new girlfriend called Lulu and we became friends. Bonjour, Rafiq. Salut, Lulu. They nicknamed me Goat in French, which sounded funny, and they called across the street, Ciao, Chèvre! Sometimes we sat together in the café downstairs and talked about movies and books.

I had a camping stove to boil water and I drank instant coffee standing on my balcony looking over the city. I enrolled at the Sorbonne, which was very cheap, and with my student card I could go to museums and galleries and eat in cheap student restaurants and sit in libraries. I was especially fond of a small library on the top floor of a building on boulevard Saint-Michel with a window looking toward Versailles. In Paris I often perched in places overlooking the city, a temporary roost in this life I had created out of flight and migration.

—

Kosmos was in the kitchen at Shakespeare’s with other travellers, pouring damson plum spirits, telling stories and swearing. I liked how his long hair fell across his eyes and the way he spoke English as if it were coming from a grave in his throat. He wore a black jacket over a dark green T-shirt. He was performing, joking about an Olympic skating routine in his hometown of Sarajevo, said that the repeating-like-a-broken-washing-machine-Bolero was inferior to Ravel’s melancholy Don Quichotte à Dulcinée. I left the doorway to sit down at the end of the table facing him. He lifted an empty glass toward me, eyebrows raised, poured me a half tumbler. I took it and drank it all. He lifted his own glass and drank, his eyes not leaving mine.

In truth, I think Bolero is a finer piece of music, I said.

Not at all, said Kosmos.

J’étoilerais le vent qui passe, I said.

We were showing off because we wanted each other, our bodies two strings on a spike lute. Soon we were walking alone along the Seine. By midnight he was telling me about the play he wanted to write and had I read this famous book, The Bridge on the Drina, in which the main character was a silent bridge? He was wound up and telling me about his theatre group, Mess, and that his play would be about lovers on bridges in his country, where they met and joined their souls or jumped off, everyone trying to be somewhere else no matter where they were born centuries before and would it not be a marvellous play?