It’s Too Early to Say It’s Over

My dad and my country: My complicated relationship with my father and my fatherland. Two stories, some parallels.

My dad died 10 days ago at about 9 a.m. while I was in the little town of Tonberg, about one hour by train from Oslo, staying with my friend Vesna Evans, a Czech-Bosnian writer who recently moved to Norway. I spent the evening before his death reading Oksana Vasyakina’s autobiographical novel Wound, in Vesna’s daughter’s room. The whole novel circles around how the author copes with her mother’s death. I read straight through until late in the night and woke the next day with a fleeting memory of my dad. An image of him that passed me by like a car on a highway. An hour later, I got a call from my father’s caretaker in Prague informing me that my dad had died about an hour earlier.