I would have paid for my mother’s family too, I was told. I learned that the boats my mother had made paper models of with her uncle Hysen, and the land, factories, and flats she had drawn as a child, had really belonged to her family before she was born, before the arrival of socialism, before they were expropriated. That the building that housed the Party’s headquarters, and in front of which she and my father had first explained to me what Islam was, had once been her family’s property too. “Do you remember the time we spoke about Islam when we were standing in front of that building?” my
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