2 boys are walking through a land they do not know. It is 2 days since they have seen anyone or eaten any food. They ascend a foggy mountain road, very tortuous from what they can make out. Soaked through, they begin to feel snow underfoot. At midday, hardly any light. They try to find a shepherd’s hut or some cave for shelter. Then, behind them, the roar of an engine, followed a few seconds later by the headlights of a car. It pulls up alongside them: a white Mercedes taxi, not old precisely but antiquated. 2 men inside: the driver and another man in the seat behind him. The driver wants to carry on, but the other man, addressed by the driver as Mr. A, motions for him to stop. Mr. A gets out, saying, What are you doing here, children? Where are you going? We don’t know; we were on an outing and we got lost. The man, short, thickset and with a broad, Anglo-Saxon looking face, tells them to get in. In the meantime the driver has opened his door and, legs stretched out on the road, begun taking swigs of vodka from the bottle. The taxi starts, sliding a little on the covering of snow. The boys ask where they are going. The man introduces himself as a film director, telling them he is Greek but has lived in America for many years. He is back in Europe now searching for a blank stare, an empty gaze, in the form of 3 very old videotapes made by the Manakis brothers, also Greeks. They are, he says, possibly the oldest-known European film recordings. I was in Sarajevo not long ago, he tells them, but I realised I had to come east, towards Ukraine, like Ulysses on his journey – do you boys know who Ulysses was? The boys say nothing. Neither does the taxi driver. He takes some sweets from his pocket and offers them back, but the boys, though they are very hungry, decline. Our stomachs are hurting, says one, my brother’s especially. The driver turns on the radio. The important thing with a movie camera is that the filming eye must not be reflected in the lens separating the 2 worlds – the filming and the filmed. Like when you look at a shop window and you see yourself reflected in the glass – that is to be avoided. The skin of an adult is approximately the same thickness as a 16mm film, and that of a child a Super 8. The driver, one hand on the steering wheel, the other on the gearstick, bottle clasped between his thighs, says, Right or left, Mr. A? Mr. A does not answer. The boys were found a number of days later in a truck going west, inside the drums of some industrial washing machines that were destined, among other places, for an island in the Mediterranean. They later said that they were so accustomed to oil pipes that the washing machines seemed to them the perfect mode of transport.