What does it mean to belong to a country

In 1959, when I was seven years old, my father went missing under mysterious circumstances; several weeks later, we received word that he was in Paris, living in a cheap hotel in Montparnasse. He was filling up the notebooks that he would later give to me, and from time to time, from the Café Dome, he’d spot Jean-Paul Sartre passing in the street. At first, my grandmother sent him money from Istanbul. My grandfather had made a fortune in railroads.