Soon I come to the water. I sit cross-legged on the beach and choose a small piece of the sea to watch, a tiny piece that changes with the light and the wind and some force far below. A child is sitting at the shore’s edge, shouting with glee every time the waves lap her legs, while her parents sit in plastic chairs, talking and sharing a thermos of coffee. It’s easy enough to understand what drew my father back here. More difficult to understand is why he stayed away for twenty years. He left with me after my mother died. He got a job teaching in New York, I started school, and we spoke less and less about my mother’s absence, or our lives before. I became a native, but he could only ever be a foreigner, and now that I am here, in his city, I wonder for the first time why he waited so long to return, after I’d already grown up and finished college. When I first opened the door of the apartment I hadn’t known about, I was overwhelmed by what I found: the walls lined with books, the faded rugs my father must have hunted for in the market, his opera records, the baubles on the shelves, mementos from his travels, the tin tea caddies and the colorful dishes in the cabinet, the battered upright piano with Bach still open on the stand. Even the smell of spices in the kitchen. It was my father’s place, there was no question of that; here were all of the things he loved. But it was exactly this thoroughness that surprised and unsettled me. It was as if I was looking at my father’s life upside down: this was his real home, and the apartment I’d grown up in was merely the place he stayed when away from here. Standing in the middle of his living room, I felt a stab of betrayal. If there were such thing as a soul, however refracted, to where would his return?

By the time I get back to my father’s street, it’s already dusk, and I see the lights on in his apartment. My eye catches something moving on the washing line that extends from the bathroom window. Some shirts—my shirts—are swaying in the shadows. I follow the cord until my gaze arrives at a pair of large hands, delicately pinning my underwear up to dry.

Racing up the two flights of stairs, I bang the light switch in the hall, fumble with the keys, and fly through the door. “What are you doing?” I explode, gasping for breath, the blood buzzing in my ears. “Who gave you the right to go through my things?”

The municipal engineer has stripped to his white undershirt. The basket of wet clothes is balanced on the stool beside him.

“They were on top of the washing machine. I stained my shirt cooking, and it seemed a waste to run a wash for nothing.”