Today in Budapest, a strong, cool wind from the northwest. I sit on the warm sandstone wall at the edge of the Danube, and I turn my face toward the wind, and I button my cardigan and close my eyes.

The Danube gives way to the Sava. As I remember it, the Sava moves slowly in July and a woman stands beside it, the edges of her mind softened by disease. My sister shares this disease, stands by the window, follows me to the laundry room, stands beside me and shouts. I don’t tell anyone this history, but I’m heartsick over it all the time.

In Budapest, in the kitchen overlooking the alley, Vesna boils coffee on the stove and pours it into glass mugs. I search my memory for the Serbian words for gratitude, and I think about drinking coffee this way in Chicago, in Sremcica, in Ivanjica.

Three summers ago, we sat in his grandparents’ house outside Belgrade, in the little kitchen with two narrow beds and icons on the walls. It was late, and we had a flight the next morning. I remember his grandmother crying, her insistent Serbian through the tears, my bewilderment. But then she fixed her gaze on him, still crying, and linked her hands together like a bird that rose and disappeared. When the bird was gone, she kept looking. I turned toward him and thought, I know exactly what she means.

I’m sorry for the way my pronouns are running together. I’ve given myself ten days to be alone in countries where I have no history, where these memories surface as I wander through strange cities worrying over love. There is a past and there is a present, and there is a distance. I make promises to myself, and I walk for hours.

An old Budapest flat filled with books, a high-ceilinged bathroom, a cast-iron tub. I plug the drain and turn the hot water faucet, and the gas heater hisses. I take off my dusty clothes and climb in. My legs are bruised from nights braced against adjacent seats in the bus or on the train. My thigh is burned and blistering from an accident with hot water four nights ago in Bamako. My back aches, and I’m just coming out of the loneliness of three days of anonymous travel. For a few minutes, my desires are winnowed to this single bath. I take my time. Above the tub, a clothesline has been pulleyed up toward the peeling ceiling. There is a bright washing-machine in the corner. Out in the kitchen, there is a man whose family has lived in this apartment since it was built ninety years ago. The mirror over the sink is distorted with age.

There was a long night on a plane diverted through Dakar, then out from West Africa. A day in Paris, an hour watching the sun on the windows of Notre Dame. On the night bus to Munich, the man behind me shared the food his sister had given to him. Two days ago I was in a dust storm in Bamako, and this afternoon I walked alone through Dachau in perfect weather.

This morning, I stood on one leg in a European restroom and tried to wash the sand off my feet, then painted my toenails pink. Standing, now, amongst the teenagers in an Apple store in Munich. I’m content, somehow, traveling farther east, carrying a bag of tiny apricots, e-mailing my father before the late train to Budapest.

Deep in the unbuilt industrial district of this city, we sit at a terrace bar that shares a wall with an unfinished hotel. We listen to music at a dark table, my friend closing his eyes and shaking his head in his quiet way. I do not know how to describe the music here, the amplified kora, the melancholy cry. We stay for hours. Sometime near midnight, an airplane passes in the near distance, heading north. My friend looks at his watch and says Ah. The Air France flight is late. The singer pauses to smoke his cigarette; the tip of it glows against the red wall behind him, and the cinder scatters across the tiled ground.

I come home in an impossibly broken taxi, watching from the window the nighttime tailors working the ancient foot-pedaled Singer machines on the old colonial balconies. I’m a little bit drunk, exhausted, wondering if there is space enough in my heart to love another place that I will leave.

The sun these mornings is pale yellow and blotted by dust, dulled and suspended high over the half-paved streets. I carry an old Malian coin like a talisman, I take it all in.

Last night, we dragged our foam mattresses up to the concrete roof of the house, tied a mosquito net to the underside of the satellite dish, and slept under the nearly full moon. This morning I woke up to see the egrets overhead, white and crooked-necked, flying west to the river.

An hour later, we finished packing the car and began the day-long drive back to the capital.

And so I’m back at the urban guesthouse with the fluorescent lights and mildewed walls, unable to sleep. There are all these things that deserve explanation: The pigeons received as a gift yesterday evening, the way the moon looked at dawn. The eight year-old neighbor who sat against the wall of the compound this morning and refused to smile. Goodbyes alongside cars that are already running, I’m always leaving.

She was nineteen years old and already ten days blind. On Friday, I touched her shoulder, then lifted her eyelid with my thumb and leaned in with a borrowed ophthalmoscope. She fixed her eyes straight ahead, rested her hands in her lap, did not speak. The fundus of her eye was red and crossed with vessels. The pediatrician said Follow the veins back to the optic disk, and there it was: yellow-gold, somehow like a coin. Above it, an irregular white ischemia. I whispered my thanks in Bambara, and she remained still, or perhaps nodded once. Her heart was a riot of murmurs. There was talk of bringing her to Bamako. Tuesday morning, she leaned on her arms and struggled to breathe. I wasn’t in the clinic when her lungs failed, then everything else.

When I returned late in the afternoon, she was gone and her father was pacing the grounds, wearing the long, loose robes of the villagers.

I worked until seven, then walked home in the orange light of early evening. The streetlamps came on, the motorbikes spun dust into the air, the children greeted me and disappeared behind mud walls.

Halfway to home, the boy with Down Syndrome waved to me across the paved street, crossed to follow behind, and finally joined me. We walked the last half mile together, and we parted in the dark, down where the main road encircles the unfinished monument.

In the yard, I make airplanes out of torn notebook pages, the creases in the paper already red from the dust on my fingers. A young man roasts a rat over a small fire, then eviscerates it with a dull knife and hangs the charred body from a tree. The little boys fly the airplanes briefly, then fold them into guns.

At sunset, I sit outside the walled compound, in a plastic chair, in the patch of dirt alongside the new ditch. The older children have been digging this ditch all afternoon, the younger dangling their legs over the edge and watching boys play soccer across the way. Dark comes fast; the soccer game and the distant grove of baobab trees disappear into it. When I switch on a battery-powered light to read, the younger children gather behind my chair. For awhile, they quietly watch my book, but then they turn into a little circle, whispering and tracing shapes in the sand by the cast-off light. There’s heat lightning to the south, but no rain.

The call to prayer begins at a quarter to eight, amplified and crackling over some cheap loudspeaker at the nearby mosque. The children spread out, then lie on their backs in the piles of sand that have been shoveled out of the earth. I turn off my light and look up, too, and we watch the stars through the atmospheres of cooking-smoke and dust.

We drove ten hours north and east from the capital, speeding over new roads. Camels kneel on the sidestreets here, and the wells at the edge of town are crowded with people lowering and lifting plastic containers for water.

Late last night, I was woken by the sound of metal shutters clanging against the window-grates. Then the thunder, then the lightning just discernible through my own shuttered window. I closed my eyes and waited for the rain. It fell, finally, hard and fast against the flat roof and tin doors. At sunrise, I ran the road toward Burkina Faso. There is a bridge along that road where boys quietly chant the Koran; below them, the riverbed was still dry.