Fragment No. 20

The fragment never really left my apartment. Whatever journeys it once made across centuries, in my life it stayed in the living room, quiet, steady, part of the everyday. I wanted it close, among us.

It rested on the coffee table beside a small wooden box inlaid with mother of pearl. Inside lay bars of Aleppo soap, their laurel scent slowly filling the room. The smell carried memories of another place, another life.

The fragment seemed to belong there, next to these small inheritances of home.

I needed that gentleness when I began thinking about my son’s first visit to Aleppo, the city he comes from but only had the chance to see at the age of seven. I worried about how to prepare him. How do you explain that a place can be both home and ruin, that streets once full of life can become rubble?

The city we live in, Freiburg, had once been reduced to ruins as well. Before traveling to Syria, we visited an exhibition and watched a documentary about the Allied bombardment. He saw photographs of familiar streets turned to rubble and listened to survivors, who had been children or teenagers at the time, describe how they lived through that night. The city he knew suddenly appeared fragile, something that could break. But when we stepped outside, Freiburg was still there, rebuilt, alive, full of people. It did not look exactly as it once had, yet it had found its way back to itself. For him, destruction no longer meant the end of the story.

Back home, Fragment #20 seemed to echo that same lesson. Once part of a magnificent seventeenth century Caucasian dragon carpet, it had travelled far from its original setting, partially survived the damage of a bomb, and been restored in a way that revealed rather than concealed its wounds. Now it was one of one hundred pieces moving through the world, hosted by different individuals, each fragment changing as it changed homes. Yet here it was, still present, still speaking. Not whole in the way it once was, but not lost either.

In our living room, it became a quiet bridge between past and present. While my son played, the fragment lay nearby, carrying its worn patterns and long memory. He accepted it naturally, as part of the landscape of our home.

Living with it shaped how I understood my own journey. Migrants too move in pieces. We carry fragments, smells, stories, languages, small objects, and build new lives around them. Nothing remains exactly as it was, but something essential endures.

The fragment reminded me that survival does not always look like restoration. Sometimes it simply means continuing, finding new places to belong.

So it stayed with us, beside the soap, beside the toys, quietly witnessing our days. Less a museum object than a companion. Less a relic of loss than a sign of persistence.

It is fascinating to see how a piece of dragon carpet, brought to a small town like Soissons, finds its way into its old churches. It's as if it's looking for carpets that adorn the floors of religious buildings, with the aim to weave a new story that blends elements of the East and West.