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133 The True Path When my ­ father was con­ sid­ er­ ing the var­ i­ ous re­ lo­ ca­ tions of his fam­ ily, his ­ thoughts would ­ quickly reach the inter­ sec­ tion of two paths. One led east­ ward, to­ ward Con­ stan­ tin­ o­ ple and Cairo, the other to­ ward the West, to Rome and Paris, and, from there, to Amer­ ica. For him there was no third path. This was the cross­ roads at which many of the­ family’s pre­ de­ ces­ sors had found them­ selves. Un­ like his pre­ de­ ces­ sors, my ­ father had ­ traveled along both those roads and had re­ turned: first in the twen­ ties, when he spent time in Con­ stan­ tin­ o­ ple and Cairo, and then, to­ ward the end of the thir­ ties, when for the first and last time in his life he ­ traveled with my ­ mother to Italy, vis­ it­ ing Rome, Bari, Brin­ disi, and Ven­ ice. My ­ father held on to the mem­ ory of these ­ travels his whole life, never ex­ haust­ ing them. If that mem­ ory wore down, he re­ vived it dur­ ing dif­ fi­ cult times in our lives. My ­ father spoke so often about Con­ stan­ tin­ o­ ple, and my ­ mother so often about her trip to Italy, that we chil­ dren ­ adopted their ­ travels as our own. My ­ father often pon­ dered the mean­ ing of these two trips ­ within the con­ text of his ­ family’s un­ cer­ tain fate. In his heart he felt that it would have been, at the same time, both easy and dif­ fi­ cult to steer the fam­ ily gal­ ley to­ ward the east, to­ ward Con­ stan­ tin­ o­ ple. In travel­ ing to Con­ stan­ tin­ o­ ple he would have con­ tin­ ued the ­ family’s un­ broken pro­ ces­ sion­ through time; there we would have had a se­ cure ma­ te­ rial moor­ ing and ref­ uge. This ­ travel ­ reached its happy con­ clu­ sion in his ­ thoughts; at times he was un­ happy be­ cause it had not hap­ pened in re­ al­ ity. But those mo­ ments were rare . . . As much as it had fas­ ci­ nated him in his youth—and my ­ mother con­ stantly kept the idea alive—­ travel to the West ­ through Italy was 134 un­ cer­ tain and dif­ fi­ cult to ac­ com­ plish. There the link ­ between the­ family’s dis­ tant an­ ces­ tors and fu­ ture gen­ er­ a­ tions had long been lost. In other words, no third so­ lu­ tion was pos­ sible. He had to re­ main in the Bal­ kans with his fate. He re­ mained in the Bal­ kans, con­ demned at its very roots, with the cer­ tainty of wars to come. He fol­ lowed some sort of fam­ ily in­ stinct for sur­ vi­ val, with all the pos­ sibil­ ities for mis­ for­ tune it car­ ried, into the un­ cer­ tain and con­ tin­ gent fate of the iden­ tity he pre­ served. ...

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