A Balkan Man in the Americas

  “The best witness to the Mediterranean’s age-old past is the sea itself. This has to be said and said again; and the sea has to be seen and seen again. Simply looking at the Mediterranean cannot of course explain everything about a complicated past created by human agents, with varying doses of calculation, caprice and misadventure. But this is a sea that patiently recreates for us scenes from the past, breathing new life into them, locating them under a sky and in a landscape that we can see with our own eyes, a landscape and sky like those of long ago. A moment’s concentration or daydreaming, and that past comes back to life. But if that is true, if the Mediterranean seems so alive, so eternally young in our eyes, “always ready” and willing,” what point is there in recalling this sea’s great age? What does it matter, the traveller may think, what can it possibly matter, that the Mediterranean, an insignificant breach in the earth’s crust, narrow enough to be crossed at contemptuous

The story of Abas is part of my second novel My Name Is Europe (published so far in French and Greek). The novel is a combination of fiction and oral history - with 18 real stories of border-crossers around the world. Review of the novel in English: https://www.thenewfederalist.eu/book-review-my-name-is-europe-by-gazmend-kapllani?lang=fr         Over 600 Afghans cram into U.S. cargo plane in desperate flight from Kabul in August 2021. Source:Reuters My name is Abas. I was born in Kabul in 1975, or 1359 according to the Afghan calendar. During my childhood Kabul was a beautiful city. But then it was razed by the Soviets, the mujahideen, the Taliban, the Americans… How many shells and rockets fell on it in those twenty or twenty-five years, thousands, millions? I have no idea. I was a kid when one day I opened the door and saw a tank with a Russian soldier on it, wearing a bright red helmet and petting an enormous dog that was sitting next to him. I was terrified. For as long as I can re