It’s usually best to call my father in the evening, around eight o’clock – after he’s eaten but before he’s done with the day. If I call too late, he will already have his head propped up in bed and his neck will be in that position where his voice sounds constricted, faint and worn out. It’s also a good idea to ask him what he’s doing before getting into the reason for the call. What I’m doing? he will say, reminding me that still, after fifty years in the United States, he’s not perfectly fluent.

“People will disappoint me if I get to know them, you know,” he says. That’s all he says, as if it’s an obvious statement without any further explanation. I can hear him shuffling around, arranging the bright orange persimmons on his windowsill. I inherited this fascination of arranging small things in the sun by a window. It makes me happy as it makes my father happy and so I can depend on his mood right now as I initiate questions.

It is two in the morning, and the dogs in the town square outside my hotel window won’t stop barking. The Hotel Grand Hedonist is quite assuming and tall for this town and has the usual thick-framed heavy large windows I remember from when I spent time in Germany with my aunts and uncles, but most of the buildings we saw coming into town are of a different aesthetic – less modern, more cement. A lot more cement. There are many stray dogs here in the Pančevo town square, day and night; seemingly the same square where my father says he played soccer as a child. He alludes to areas of town in his fragmented memory of time and place…

I am sitting with my father. He is now an old man, a grandfather. His wife, my mother, passed away almost a decade ago and perhaps because of this he is starting to relax enough to open up about things that he never has in the past. Plus, “I have a project,” I tell him. “This is important for my graduate work at school.” You can always get him to agree to something if it’s for school even though now I’m in my late forties going back to school for the third time. My father values education more than anything as he never really had one growing up and struggled as an adult because of it.

It is a crisp but sunny day in September of 2023 as I sit in the backseat of the dirty Toyota Corolla my taxi driver uses to shuttle tourists to and from the Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport. My driver is chatty and his English is decent; he is excited to learn that my father is Serbian and if he could embrace me in a bear hug from the front seat as he shifts from fourth to fifth gear to speed past the cars along what is seemingly east on Highway 47, he would. He is shocked to hear that I have never been to Serbia and proceeds to talk about how he drives to make money no matter the weather, “because I am Serbian and Serbians we can do anything,” adding that…