I emerged from Rome’s vast, unruly Tiburtina Station utterly lost, following only a vague set of poorly translated directions past a confusing array of other entrances and exits to the metro and bus corrals and taxi stands, way out past everything to a fenced field with a rip I climbed through. A banner on the fence proclaimed merrily in Italian, “We’re all in the same boat!” At the center of the field stood the abandoned building I sought, the former station with its windows shattered and gaping, surrounded by tents and smoking fires. In the largest tent, hastily erected by local volunteers, I taught an English class to a dozen migrants from various parts of north and central Africa. They took notes, repeated after me, and practiced in pairs, and I think I taught them how to discuss the weather. As I wrapped up and gathered my things, I felt a tap on my shoulder.

“Excuse me, can I ask you a question?”

“Of course,” I replied.

The young man standing before me in an overlarge beige coat leaning on an umbrella asked, “Um, how can I publish my novel?”

Eltaj explained that his uncle had arrived in Europe decades ago and become a famous novelist, and that he himself had always dreamed of following in his footsteps. When the war in Sudan finally made life unbearable, he began his journey north with a clandestine ride through the desert of Eritrea in the trunk of a car in the hopes of finding a publisher for his already written novel of Darfur. He also had a poetry collection called “Waves and the Sea.” Both were in Arabic. I wish I knew how to publish his work, let alone my own, and said as much. He thanked me anyway.

As a consolation, I took Eltaj to John Keats’ house on the Spanish Steps a few days later. As we rode the metro together, he said that he had been delayed in Libya, enslaved for half a year until he could escape in the night, run, and find his way to the shore, get on one of the human smuggler’s boats and cross the Mediterranean with fifty others to Italy where he was hiding in Rome waiting for his asylum application to process. “I hope to go to Germany where my uncle is.”

Keats, the English poet, came to Rome in the 19th century as a last ditch effort to stave off the tuberculosis he knew was killing him. He rented a house and slowly passed away writing final letters which are splayed now on the small museum’s walls among very tall dark wood bookcases. You can stare out the window as he did from the bed where he died or look into his face at the moment of death, because they have preserved his death mask.

Eltaj traced the letters on the wall with a long finger, sounding out what he could quietly in gathering awe that culminated as we stood on the threshold to leave. “Excuse me. What is his most famous poem?”

The best I could I paraphrased “When I have fears that I may cease to be.” “When I am afraid that I might die before I finish writing everything I hope to or before I get to express how beautiful the world is or before I fall in love … ‘then on the shore of the wide world I stand alone, and think till love and fame to nothingness do sink.’”

Tears welled in Eltaj’s eyes as he listened, and he said very quietly, “Yeah, nature heals us. Nature is a gift from Allah that heals us.”

We became friends on Facebook, but his account vanished a few weeks after I left Rome.