RED BANDANA

Somewhere in Virginia, I lost my cap.

—JOHN CAGE

Dear Son,

Last Thursday I went for a routine six-month checkup at the doctor’s. I would like to free myself from the medication I have been taking for nearly five years now, which makes me tired and slows me down. I want to speed up, to run, because I want to get back into my life. The doctor, a young Sikh with a pale mauve turban, said: “No, no. The medication is to prevent a heart attack.” I know, I say, but I would like to free myself of its side effects, and I’ll worry about a heart attack in a different way. He assures me that the side effects of this medication are innocuous in comparison to its positive effects on my organism. I ask: “And, in fact, what are its real side effects?” He says there are several, but none of them kill you. “For instance?” “Well, say, memory loss.” “Does that mean I could forget everything?” “Yes, but forgetting doesn’t kill you,” says the cardiologist. I ask: “If I forget everything, my whole life, if I can’t recognize my child’s face, if I forget my own name, isn’t that the same as dying?”

After the checkup, driving home, I thought: What if I’ve already begun to forget? I looked for signs of my forgetfulness. But—how extensive is my forgetting? That can’t be measured. What’s forgotten is now inaccessible because it’s invisible, because it’s in “the darkness of oblivion.” Then I felt the need to be in the company of a person with whom I had shared a lot of time in the past, so as to compare our memories of the same events. I was looking for a way of returning to my past, and so, the same day, I bought a plane ticket to Arizona. And maybe the conversation with the doctor was just an excuse for something that I had been planning for years—going back to see our apartment in Phoenix again, our first American address.

And two days later, on 16 April 2015, I flew to the other side of the continent. Over the last week, during my journey, I wrote this diary, which is probably only of any importance to me. But it might be important to you, too, because it is written for just one reader, you. It was vital for me to hide a few sentences that I wanted to say to you, here, among a mass of others. And you will find them easily. If you don’t find them, that will mean that you haven’t read it. And that’s always a possibility lying in store for every text: to remain unread. Books are lonelier than people.

I flew Delta. In March 1996, at the airport in New York, a woman told me: “Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Delta airplanes serve to carry packets of banknotes to Russia and to bring gold back to the U.S.” Over the last twenty years, whenever I flew with Delta I remembered that woman and the Russian gold. I looked around, there were still ashtrays on the back of the aircraft seats, admittedly screwed up so they couldn’t be opened, smoking has been banned for a long time. Judging by the ashtrays, this plane had been flying in the early nineties, maybe even to Moscow.

But the flight from Washington to Phoenix lasted barely four hours. Allowing for the two-hour time difference, it turned out that I had flown west for a little more than an hour (the plane left at 6:00 and landed at 7:20 a.m.). I rarely travel north or south. The journey west can start at night, but for me for some unknown reason it’s connected with the morning. Which means that I always feel that dawn has just broken when I fly toward the west. While moving east is always connected with weariness and I drift off to sleep in my seat in broad daylight, as though it were a night flight. That’s how it is when I travel from the East to the West Coast of America; it’s the same when I fly from America to Sarajevo and back.

Phoenix airport. The first thing I saw when I came into the parking lot was the red bandana around your head.

For the next five days we were going to wander aimlessly along American roads. Wander aimlessly? That means feeling the real proximity of the world and being aware of oneself, of one’s body in space. Back in the nineties, you remember, we drove without a map through the minor country roads of Virginia, with the idea of getting lost, and then searching for a road that would take us home. To wander means to confront a simple, healing truth: the world is bigger than I am! Aimlessness was the only purpose of our journeys, even though we moved farther from home with every second. Although that could be a definition of home, too: it’s always wherever you’re in the company of those closest to you.

A red bandana. My gran, your great-grandmother, used to wear a similar scarf on her head. Hers was white, but it seems to me that it had the same pattern on it as the bandana on my son’s head.

The first time we landed at this airport, on 1 February 1996, our luggage didn’t arrive with us. It got lost somewhere along the way. The airport official said it wasn’t a problem and that, as soon as it arrived, they would forward our suitcase to our address. But at that point we didn’t have an address. The luggage was lost, and that filled me with indescribable anxiety. Later it turned out that the contents of our suitcase were quite inconsequential: some winter clothes that we wouldn’t need in the desert and books that, in all probability, we wouldn’t read again. But because we were refugees from a war, that suitcase was our entire property, it was our all.

Today, when we reached the door of our old apartment (the address at which twenty years before, our suitcase had arrived a week late), we were met by a young man, a caretaker or the director of the complex. He was agitated, possibly a bit afraid of our presence, he asked us not to hang around, and added: “Don’t take any photographs!” Something had happened here. After I explained our reasons, pointing at the door of the apartment where we had lived twenty years earlier and after he was convinced that we had not come with any evil intentions, he said: “You can stay for five minutes, but you can’t take any pictures.”

There was a blue canvas chair by the door, quite faded by the sun, and an empty beer bottle . . . The place looked abandoned, I thought no one lived behind that door. But then a man appeared in the doorway. He startled me because his face looked somehow familiar. I explained at once that we used to live here. Clint, the man was called. He understood the sentimental reasons for our visit, but when I asked whether we could take a photograph of us all together, he drew his head into his shoulders, looking at us suspiciously. He let me take our photo on my cell phone, but later, when we were already in the parking lot, he did after all let himself be photographed with me, hidden behind sunglasses. Something terrible had happened here, but I didn’t ask what, and in fact I wasn’t interested. I had just needed one minute standing in the silence in front of our apartment door, as in front of a mirror.

When we were alone, Harun said: “Did you see? Clint looks like you, you could be twins.”

Today Phoenix looks like a city from the future. Over the last twenty years, there has been new building all around, and meanwhile it’s only our apartment block that has begun to collapse. But Harun doesn’t see it like that. The complex has remained a genuine poor ghetto, he says, the difference is that we came here from a war, at that time this was a great luxury for us. In February 1996, there was an orange tree growing in the yard, and after the hunger, mud, and ice, that was a heavenly contrast: the aroma of orange blossom came in through our window at night. He’s right. My nostalgia (nostalgia?) had grown on an idealized and inaccurate image. Most of the people in the block at that time were Bosnians. The traces of war were still fresh: one young man in a camouflage uniform had a drum set with a lot of cymbals in his apartment and the noise of it was the soundtrack of our American exile; above us lived an old man who used to hold to his ear a plastic transistor radio with a bunch of batteries stuck to it with Scotch tape and at night he would climb onto the roof of our building to catch long-wave Radio Bosnia and Herzegovina; in the apartment opposite ours, while the children were eating watermelon in one room, their father hanged himself in another . . . I could go from door to door like this. Instead of Bosnians, other dead souls now live here.

And it all happened too fast: twenty years later, we entered the atrium of the building where we once lived, spent just a few minutes outside the door of our former apartment, because our arrival had disturbed the inhabitants and managers of the complex, so we left quickly. I don’t know what else to say. And I don’t feel good, it’s as though I’ve been driven out of my own past.

There isn’t an orange tree by the entrance anymore, they’ve planted palms instead.

Our “return home” was supposed to be an important encounter with my own past, but in fact nothing occurred, apart from the coincidental oddity that our old apartment was now occupied by my “double.” And I don’t know how alike Clint and I really are, but I would like to believe in Harun’s explanation, although he probably exaggerated that similarity to give our visit a particular symbolic meaning. But isn’t that quite something in itself? Didn’t I come here to confront myself, convinced that we don’t in fact ever entirely leave the places where we’ve lived, some trace of us remains, our enduring presence, the way hotel mirrors retain the faces of all the people who have passed through the room? But it’s never like that. We remember the place where we once lived, but it doesn’t remember us.

And for a moment I believed again that it was nostalgia that had brought me here. But no. It was mere curiosity. While nostalgia is an emotion I connect with a concrete time: my late childhood, that sensitive adolescent phase when we have an infinite number of paths before us, but a few years later, when we reduce our choices to one, we feel a yearning for the time in which we could have chosen from among many different possibilities. That’s nostalgia for me.

Twenty years ago, as I drove to work in the morning, I would always glance to the left at the large brick-colored hill (Camelback Mountain) that reminds one of a camel’s hump and gives its name to the street where we then lived, just to be sure that the castle was still there. Someone had built a real medieval fortress that looked unnatural in this desert landscape, like a geographical misunderstanding, like an optical illusion . . .

Today, twenty years later, we were driving uphill, toward the castle, along narrow serpentines between villas, and then—in front of one of the gates, we caught sight of a stone sculpture of the Buddha adorned with gold chains. It had probably been dressed like this by children playing. The sculpture of a smiling (hip-hop) Buddha going to fetch water. A thirsty Buddha. I left him my bottle of tonic water and we went on our way. Buddha, admittedly, is not God, but that is just how God should behave. And as we drove toward the top of the mountain, I thought about the fact that God’s, Jehovah’s, and particularly Allah’s greatest shortcoming was that they were not prepared to let children decorate them or play with them in other ways.

The castle is being renovated. We saw its gate and walls from close up. But, sitting on its outer wall beside the steep road, I was able calmly to view the panorama of the city. Seen from above, the city itself seemed to me hidden: low buildings, stunted palms in a valley. Had it not been for a few skyscrapers in the center, I would have thought this wasn’t a city. It’s only at night, when the lights come on and stifle the stars in the sky, or become reflections of them, that the city reveals itself.

I was sitting on the low stone wall and looking from a height down onto a landscape in the valley that ought to have been familiar to me, but in fact it was quite alien. Why was I expecting to see a familiar scene from this height? We hadn’t been here long enough to have integrated into the space, so that this landscape would remember us. We lived here for not quite five months, it’s our distant past now, and my most intense impression is connected with the heat of the desert. It’s an artificial city, it couldn’t survive without the water that is constantly poured over it, sprinklers poke up everywhere in grassy areas, activated from time to time so as to spray the surrounding earth. But nevertheless, the grass is always scorched. Phoenix is perpetually thirsty. In my memory the city is connected with Dalí, with that surrealist painting of his with the melting watches. Here, in the searing summer months, all the plastic parts of the cars melt. And all the vehicles look like that, as though the plastic parts had been patiently melted, forcibly, with cigarette lighters; the plastic slides downward, over the control panel behind the steering wheel. I remember warnings printed on VHS tapes from the video store, that they should not be accidentally left in the car, because the cassette would melt in the heat and then no longer serve its purpose. Dalí’s watches, yes. It is said that time flows. In other cities time flows, but only in Phoenix does time melt.

In the 1990s there were no houses here, only a network of freshly asphalted roads. Between the roads, low desert plants and cactus grew. It’s interesting, in recent years I have often dreamed about this terrain, although I don’t understand why such a desolate landscape as Camelback Mountain should have left such a deep impression on my subconscious.

In one dream the Slovene poet Tomaž Šalamun is a real estate agent in a panama hat and gray linen suit, very crumpled where the soft material easily creases, at the knees and elbows. He’s showing me the reddish earth and cactuses beside the road and trying to persuade me to buy a house. I say: “But, Tomaž, there’s no house here!” And he, as though expecting that reaction of mine, has his answer ready and says: “Plant tobacco! Plant tobacco!”

Where the Safari Hotel I worked in from February to June 1996 used to be, there is now a broad avenue of restaurants and shops, and on its sidewalk a man in a Hawaiian shirt is playing a trumpet loudly and atonally, so that passersby give him a wide berth . . .

“Oh, it’s you, angry bird!”

So, in other words, something has survived of “my” hotel!

In the hall there had been a large cage, with a parrot in it, and it was forbidden to touch the bars because of the bird’s dangerous beak, and whenever it shrieked in a voice that ricocheted off the marble walls, the horrified guests would hurry to take refuge in their rooms.

We’re driving north. Harun is talking about a local film festival that has just closed, still affected by something that had happened there. The projection of a film by an acquaintance of his was supposed to have taken place the previous evening, but there was something wrong with the video and the image refused to be projected onto the screen. The organizers had tried to “open” the video in a different format, but it didn’t work. The images refused to start moving and no one knew why. For the rest of the evening other films were shown without a hitch. And this morning, that acquaintance of his, the unfortunate film producer, went out for his usual morning exercise and died. He was on his bicycle when death came.

We’re on Route 17, rare drops of rain have started falling, and I want a strong black coffee.

Father and son. When I’m stuck for words in an argument with you, I say: “I know what the world looked like before you were born.”

You can’t remember this. In the hospital, I’m looking at you through a glass wall: you were born the night before and the nurse is changing your diaper. First I see your naked, vulnerable little body, and then I recognize my crooked nose on your face. That nose. My nose. Duplication. My solitude has just been dizzyingly diminished.

At night, when you’re driving and need someone to talk to, you call me. And then we talk. We live in different time zones, there’s three hours’ difference between us, it’s midnight, or past midnight where I am, but you know that I’m awake and working, reading or writing. Whenever this happens, when you call, I become aware of my solitude. And of your solitude. We talk, we encourage each other, we breathe into our telephone receivers, alone in the void of the cosmos.

When we reached Arcosanti, the evening light was breaking on the tips of the larches and cupolas of the experimental town. In the parking lot in front of us, a small girl on a bicycle was riding in a circle, completely immersed in her game. In a little blue dress, she was spinning around, until her father appeared and put an end to the bicycle pirouette by picking the child up with her small means of transport and hugging them to him, then they disappeared from our sight.

After we moved to Arizona in 1996, we visited this place, the primary concept of which was the connection between architecture and ecology (arcology). And now, twenty years later, I had to talk Harun into turning off the main road to come here to see how the settlement had changed in the meantime. The architect, Paolo Soleri, had died two years earlier. Half a century since the building began, the town is still not finished. We spent too little time there, because Harun was in a hurry, but I was nevertheless left with the impression of that incompleteness. This is how everything ought to be built, so that the process lasts indefinitely. That’s how a book should be written, over a whole lifetime, and still unfinished. I would like it if everything of mine was like this town, in a state of constant youth.

When we came out onto Route 40, Harun drove west for a time and then stopped at the side of the road, turned off the engine, and said: “Do you remember this place?”

Did I remember the 4 January 2005? We were traveling from the East to the West Coast. When we reached Arizona, the rain turned suddenly into a snowstorm. As soon as we saw the exit for Flagstaff, we turned off the road and took a room in the first motel we came to, with a window from which I could watch the snow enveloping our car in the parking lot. I managed to fall asleep, but sometime after midnight, you woke me and said: “Let’s go, the Weather Channel says this is an unprecedented storm and the snow is going to completely cut the town off, but I have to be in Los Angeles tomorrow.” Naturally I objected, but at that moment the power went off and you said: “You see?” We packed quickly, the elevator wasn’t working, so we made our way down the stairs in the dark to the ground floor, woke up the receptionist, and signed out. The snow was dry, we raked it off the car roof with our hands. When we got out onto the road, you turned on your camera and photographed the roadway in front of us. Snowplows had cleared the city roads, but when we reached Route 40, all we had in front of us was a white expanse, with pine forests to the left and right of us. The snow was swirling, making miniature white tornadoes along the way. I drove slowly, I had the impression that we were no longer on the road but wandering over snowy meadows. But then a heavy truck appeared behind us and I slowed down to let it pass. After it overtook me, I followed its red brake lights, they were our compass in the snowstorm. And as long as we were driving uphill, everything was all right, the problems began when we started to go down, because the truck sped up. We sped up as well. Then I lost control of the steering wheel, the car began to turn vertiginously and gather speed, and I don’t know how long it all lasted before we plowed backward into the snow on the right-hand side of the road. The engine died. I remember my indescribable fear that we would be forever stuck in the snow, in the middle of the mountains. I turned the key, the lights went on in the car, and at that moment it was as though colors had returned to our world!

Ten years had passed; you stopped the car, we got out and crossed the road, and only then did I see that at its edge was a sheer drop. “We got off easy!” We looked into the abyss, and from under my shoes pebbles started rolling downhill.

But do you remember the snow in Sarajevo? In the winter of 1988, we took the cable car up Trebević Mountain. The road from the overlook was icy, but some rare cars passed us nevertheless. The snow was deep, we had brought a sled. The photograph taken at that time by the photographer from Our Days magazine is a reminder of the month in which I let my beard grow, for the first and only time in my life. We had met him on the way, before the path began to go downhill toward that mountain hut, whose name I’ve forgotten. Walking down the icy slope was more effort than sitting on the sled and letting it take us where we were headed. However, the road here runs along dangerous edges above steep drops, which I hadn’t taken into account. The sled sped up dizzyingly, and I remember my inexpressible fear that a late vehicle could appear from the opposite direction. Sanja went silent, you covered your eyes with your little hands, while I had no choice, I hugged you to me and threw myself, together with the sled under me, to the right. I tore my jeans, Sanja injured her knee, and I think she hasn’t forgiven me to this day. But had the sled taken us to the left, into the abyss, that photo of the little family in the snow would have been our last photo. And, I remember, that same evening, when we got home, I shaved off my beard.

We drive through Flagstaff. This is the town where Harun lives now. I want to stop, to see his apartment, to look around the district where he lives. Simple curiosity. But he refuses. “It’s not important,” he says. It’s more important that we should reach the desert as soon as possible in order for him to photograph the night sky in time, because the map of clouds on his mobile forecasts rain before midnight. He’s a photographer. And I like his pictures. But there’s something natural in my wish to get to know the area where he lives. If he had come to my new address, I would have been glad to show him the place, because I think that the space where we live redefines us, shows us changed, the way we are now. That’s why I want to see what he is like now. “I want to see the view from your window,” I say. And he raises his arm irritably from the steering wheel, points at the glass pane in front of us, and says: “That’s my window!”

We drive through Flagstaff. For some reason, all the events connected with this town have the flavor of a dream. This occurred in the winter of 2008, I was working for Reuters at the time. I came to work, put my knapsack down on my desk, and then from the studio I heard alarmed fragments of a report about an atomic attack. Soon afterward I learned that terrorists had dropped a nuclear bomb on Flagstaff, Arizona. My first thought was: Why Flagstaff? And then, interested in the news, I got up and went into the studio as though hypnotized. And there on the monitors the program was live, a reporter in Arizona was describing the consequences of the attack. Experts on terrorism were sitting in the studio, and all those faces were familiar to me from the broadcasts of the big television channels. And then I realized: this was all set up, it was an exercise run by a team from the Ministry of Homeland Security, which rented our studio from time to time to record their programs.

At one moment, one of the producers noticed the appearance of a foreigner (me), came up to me, and said: “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

“I’m from here,” I said, pointing to the archive, my windowless room. “I’m interested in the news from Arizona,” I said.

He asked me politely to leave and then closed the door, and I believe that he locked it. I was quite unnerved: the reporter’s dramatic voice, the aggressive graphics accompanying the living images, the names under the people speaking, and so on, that was all real television, I thought. The recorded program about this “nuclear attack” could one day be shown as a real event, live, in some future now. And that was a fairly troubling thought.

In the passenger seat, I endeavored to fall asleep. It was not yet midnight. The phone rang. Aleš from Ljubljana. I said I was traveling. I explained the reasons for our journey. I said that we were parked in the dark somewhere on the border between Arizona and Utah and that I felt as though I had gotten lost on my way home. I didn’t know where I was.

He laughed, and then explained: “In English they say ‘home, sweet home,’ while we say ‘Love home, wherever it is.’ In principle, no one can call an American’s home into question, so he can simply state that ‘home is sweet,’ while it’s different for us, for us the existence of a home is always questionable: you can love your home only if you have one.”

Clever Aleš. At the end of 1996, he was our first acquaintance from Europe to visit us in America. We were already in Washington then, still young thirty-five-year-olds. He arrived with a virus, stayed a few days, largely treating himself by putting drops of propolis on lumps of sugar. Do you remember propolis drops? A winter medicine from bees at the time of Yugoslavia. The last time I saw a little bottle of propolis was that week when Aleš Debeljak stayed with us.

And suddenly the car filled with the scent of an Alpine plant!

Aleš. We talked for a few more minutes. Outside the temperature dropped below zero. But stars could be seen behind the clouds.

Monument Valley. Harun arranged his cameras in the dark and came back to the car. We sat in the van for hours gazing into the darkness. It had grown quite cold outside, late snow must have fallen somewhere nearby. I don’t know what Harun was taking photographs of in the pitch dark. The camera lens sees more than the human eye. Sitting calmly in the driver’s seat, he fell asleep for a few hours before dawn while I stayed awake till morning. It was only after daybreak that I caught sight of the amazing stone forms in the valley in front of us. So that’s what our cameras were photographing all night? Those stone forms had been shaped by the wind. I got out of the car. I sat down on a stone and looked at the sculptures that I had until then believed existed only as “matte paintings” in Ford’s films, just a drawing in Italian cartoons, published in my childhood, and later in Harun’s by Sergio Bonelli . . . A wind had gotten up from the north. I sat on the stone, watching. After all, the wind was a greater sculptor than Ivan Meštrović.

Well done, wind!

On the plateau from which we had been photographing the sky all night, just before morning a young Asian man, a photographer, appeared. I watched him putting the lenses on his camera in his white Toyota. Then he tied a flashlight around his head. It was not yet daybreak. He got out of his car into the darkness and, with a beam of red light from his forehead, set out into the desert. A unicorn. He had not been there at dawn. As far as the eye could see: desert, and not a single human shadow.

So, it was only after dawn that I became aware of the place where we found ourselves. I had not known that the desert was so beautiful. We like to ask ourselves metaphysical questions about the world, life, and man. But we ought to ask ourselves again and constantly: Why fill our lives with such effort and torment, when we know that we will be here only once and when we have such a brief and unrepeatable time in this indescribably beautiful world?

The parking lot in front of the hotel is empty, but at reception a young Navajo claims that all the rooms are taken, apart from one special one that costs $380 a night. Impossible! That’s outrageously expensive, I say. The parking lot is empty, but he insists that this is the only room. It can’t be that this boy is punishing me because in his eyes I’m a white male, a tourist in his country. “Young man, I haven’t slept for two nights, the hotel is empty, and I just want a bed where I can close my eyes!” He shakes his head, there aren’t any empty beds. It’s impossible that he sees me that way and is punishing me accordingly. And then I say: “Look at me, young man! I’m not white!” Drawn by our conversation, hotel workers begin to gather behind him, smiling awkwardly. I go outside. But how else can I say it? I’m not a white man! Always, on every continent, I’m an endangered minority. For Europeans, I’m Muslim. For Asians, I’m European. For Americans . . . I’ve been told several times here “Go back to Russia!” and that’s the mildest form of identity rebuke. Why am I forever being punished for other people’s sins? Always out in the open, with no shelter, prepared in advance for blows. And I carry with me the remnants of all the shells that have fallen on the houses where I have lived, like a confirmation of survival, and as a warning. That was a sudden, brief attack of self-pity. And do I have the right to self-pity, in this place?

I haven’t slept for two nights, it’s drizzling, I’m sadder than I’m prepared to admit. We’re in a desert, the so-called high desert, and it’s cold.

I want to fall asleep in the comfort of a motel bed, but my son is against that, asking: What greater comfort is there than sleep under the open sky, under the stars? Not that long ago, on a journey like this one, a few hours before dawn, we fell asleep in this car in a parking lot somewhere in West Virginia. In the morning my neck was completely stiff. It’s good that I quickly forget pain. I remember that I was in pain that morning. And I remember watching, barely awake, as a young man at dawn changed the text on the advertising board of the restaurant across the road. It was a large board on a high post, and he was skillfully using a long pole made for the purpose to place magnetic letters and arrange them into a short text, giving the price and menu for breakfast that day. It was a dreary day, and he was lifting up the letters, constantly gazing high up at the board, whose top touched a cloud. Watching him made me tired. And I thought: If I had to do his job, with the pain I was currently feeling, I would not have the strength to look up at the sky and place letters above my head. Letters had never seemed so heavy to me as then, that morning in a little town called Fayetteville.

At the entrance to the Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park a car had just drawn up. An Indian man, with long hair tied in a ponytail, peered out of the little hut beside the entrance and tried to explain to the couple of gray-haired Americans in the expensive convertible with its roof down—unsuccessfully (because they kept insisting on additional clarification)—why the park was closed, and asked them to turn around and go back the way they’d come. He was getting tired of explaining and suddenly, in midsentence, he switched from English to his own native tongue . . . He talked, they listened although they didn’t understand a single word. In fact, it was only now when they couldn’t understand that they listened. And after that, mutual comprehension was established.

Today we drove through northern Arizona, westward, and I was tired so fell asleep in my seat. I hadn’t slept for more than an hour, but, evidently under the influence of the previous night’s conversation, I had a strange dream. In my dream, Aleš was driving me to the airport. “Your Ljubljana’s lovely,” I say. He smiles with pleasure. It’s a sunny day. We stop at a car park outside a family home; on the left is an unusual tree, and a strange flower is growing from the middle of the trunk, with thick green resin running out of it. I watch Aleš using scissors to carefully cut the long stem of the red flower, which looks like a poppy. It’s important that the resin doesn’t touch the skin because it’s poisonous. The flower is rare—he explains to me in the dream—and blooms only once in a hundred years. I ask what the tree is called. And he says: “Maple.” And, as though justifying himself, he explains: “I need this flower for a new poem.”

When I first wake, I have two mental windows through which I can look. One faces into reality, the other, backward, into the dream from which I have just woken. If the image from the dream is intense, that’s the first thing I think of when I wake up, and that’s why I remember the dream.

As he drives, when Harun lifts his left hand to the steering wheel, the little finger is separate from the rest of his hand, and the top is crooked. He had crushed that finger badly with the iron top of the water manhole in the courtyard. That had happened more than twenty years earlier. Do you remember that pain now? It was wartime, the hospitals were crammed with the wounded. We saved his finger with a mixture of herbs, a balm that had made a man by the name of Handžić famous. This balm had, allegedly, treated wounds throughout the long history of Bosnian wars, as far back as anyone could remember. I wrapped gauze around the “little warrior’s” wound, and in the end it all turned out fine, apart from the fact that the finger had remained a little bent at the base of the nail.

You were always afraid of doctors. You were three, a rose thorn was stuck in the palm of your hand, I took you to a clinic, where nuns happened to be working that day. You refused to go into the clinic, while they encouraged and cajoled you. You resisted, screaming and arguing: “No, no!” Wanting to insult them, you shouted: “Penguins! Penguins!” And the nuns laughed.

The scent of a three-year-old boy’s hair has stayed in my memory.

Page, Arizona. After two sleepless nights, here we are in a hotel. I take a shower. I wait for the trickle of water to shift a blue thread from my shirt that had settled in my navel.

Stretched out on the hotel bed, Harun is absorbed in the photographs he has taken today, so that his laptop is constantly in danger of falling off the edge of the bed onto the floor. That’s how it always is with him, something is always threatening to nose-dive off the edge of something . . .

I remember, he could have been three or four, I am holding him in my arms, but he’s restless, he struggles in my embrace, and then succeeds in getting away and falls so that he cuts his tender child’s chin on the edge of the chair. As he grew, the scar got bigger. He never reproached me for it, maybe because men like their scars. But his mother, whenever she felt a need to put things straight, would scold me as a joke: “Come on, don’t flatter yourself, you weren’t capable of holding him even when he was a baby!”

I was woken by the sound of the door opening. I sat up in bed and looked out the window at the mauve neon sign on the roof of the motel opposite us. For a moment I regretted being jolted out of my comfortable sleep. And I tried in vain to remember what I’d been dreaming about. I was woken by the sound of a door opening, and after I became aware of that sound, I looked automatically out the window, listening to all the sounds from outside. And so my dream vanished. If everyday reality is intensive, and if I think of it the moment I wake, I forget my dream. I was woken by the sound of a door opening. Awake, I looked out the window. I dragged myself out of bed and discovered that the door of our room was unlocked. I went out and surveyed the parking lot from the motel veranda. In the middle of the parking lot was a swimming pool surrounded by a high wall. The swimming season had not begun, there was no water in the pool, but around the empty egg-shaped hollow, there were several sun loungers. On one, a woman wrapped in a gray coat was sitting, rocking from left to right, as though soothing an inner pain. I watched the glow of her cigarette. A black jeep had just come into the parking lot, a man got out, set off toward the motel reception, but then stopped, changed direction, and went up to the pool wall. He stood right beside it, listening. He couldn’t see the woman, and she couldn’t see him. Only the wall separated them. In all probability, she was not aware of his presence. In the silence, the man laid his hand on the wall. Delicately, the way one lays one’s hand on the belly of a pregnant woman, and as though attempting to discover through his open palm what was not accessible to his eyes. And that was all. Nothing else occurred. Exhausted from our journey, we had fallen asleep in a motel room with an unlocked door.

Lake Powell. While we were looking at the water from the shore, I took a photo of him with my cell phone. He’s wearing my T-shirt. It used to please my father, too, when he saw me wearing a sweater of his . . . My son’s wearing my T-shirt and I’m pleased with my photograph. I once asked Harun to take a photo of me, but so that the photograph made me look like a miner (as my father had been in reality). And he took photographs in which my face is the color of lead, and the pores on my face full of coal dust. I never asked him how he did it. But actually I don’t want to know, because if he revealed his method to me, I might think that I didn’t look authentic in those photos.

I like it here. Along the shore in front of us a girl walked by carrying an upside-down kayak over her, like an enormous yellow hat, which prevented us from seeing her head. In the distance is a thermoelectric wheel, with three stable semicircles like scoops of ice cream growing over it. This is an artificial lake. I know something about this. I grew up beside an artificial lake. Modrac. Tall dry grass along the shore rustled in the wind, and out of it disturbed pheasants flew in front of us. It was the artificiality of that lake that formed my melancholy. The water had filled up a valley, there were waves over the trees and the roofs of houses. And I remember the tips of poplars poking out of the water; we used to tie our rowing boats to their branches. My father would dive out of the boat and swim down, he wanted to see the foundations of his school under the water. That was where he had learned his first letters.

Modrac. I have a deep connection with my childhood, which was, put simply, happy, but I’ve very rarely written about it, because I’ve never mastered the skill of motivating myself to write about days filled with happiness. It’s far easier to write about problematic events, about tragic and desolate days. When we arrived here, we had one email address, our whole three-member family: Modrac@aol.com. The word modrac was unknown to my new, and many of my old, friends, or they thought it just had some vague meaning connected with the color blue (modro). Few knew that it was the name of a lake, albeit an artificial one. I remember a misunderstanding from that time as well. A European acquaintance, a poet, on several occasions in his journalistic essays and articles, whenever he used my name, would also call me mudrac (wise man). At first I didn’t know why, and then it dawned on me. “Mudrac!” He must have thought that’s what modrac meant. He thought that I was calling myself a wise man by integrating that word into my email address. Horrendous! Others on the whole see us as we would not like them to see us. And the way others see us is the root of our shame.

The best photographs are always the ones we don’t take. That’s all right. Not everything has to end up as a photograph. What’s most important needs to stay in the memory.

It was a sunny day, the road wound through a valley. The white line at the edge of the asphalt disappeared in the distance. We got out of the car to stretch our legs and to let Harun take some shots of the road. A fine uninhabited desert all around us. A slightly bitter aroma of plants. It was spring and the sky’s gravity drew flowers and grasses up out of the earth. It was windy. Not a strong wind. A breeze. And then in front of us, down the slope of the road rolled a Ping-Pong ball. Where had it come from? Surely a puff of air could not have dislodged it from the stones by the roadway? It rolled briefly and came to rest in the low grass on the other side of the road. As though it had sensed an invisible human presence and for a moment there was terror in its movement. And I said: I know where this ball has come from! It’s come here from May 1980. In the Botanical Garden at the Sarajevo National Museum, young employees were playing table tennis. I was woken that morning by the monotonous sound of their game. But then the ball got lost in the undergrowth by the fence, and after that, to my relief, silence fell again. The museum staff looked for it in vain. Among the local scrub, there is also endemic undergrowth from some other continent transplanted to the Botanical Garden at the Sarajevo National Museum, under the window of my student room at number 2 Franje Račkog.

We’re driving. A car is an instrument of time. An aircraft can’t be that. In a car, on the road, you’re reduced to bare existence and the body is focused on real time. A plane is something else, a flight from one place to another is a violent contraction of time that completely interrupts your real experience of space. The two of us have often driven together from one coast of America to the other. I’m always bad-tempered before a journey, but once I’m on the road, I relax and enjoy this constant succession of vistas. When I’m on the road I forget myself and become aware of the outside world . . . We’re driving. No one is coming to meet us, just occasionally, across the road in front of us, the shadow of a bird passes.

There’s a truck in front of us, pulling a horse trailer. It’s dawn already. I watch dents being noisily thrust into the metal back of the trailer, the marks of the hooves of an agitated (or frightened) animal.

And to our right: Some soldiers, men and women, in green and brown camouflage uniforms, are slowly moving in all directions, all with their heads bowed, as though they are looking for a lost earring in the desert.

Harun has devised the plan of our journey, and he doesn’t deviate from it. While we’re on the road, there’s not much we agree about, one of us is always on the verge of erupting. I ask him: “Must you have your way in everything?” I remember, some time before the war, the Sarajevo Youth Theater put on a performance of Hamlet, but the actors were children. My friend Kaća Čelan, who was directing the play, asked me whether Harun could act the young Hamlet (he must have been six or seven then). And when I later put her question to him, he replied: “No . . .” But then he changed his mind—he would, he would act, but only on the condition that he also directed the play! On our journey, everything had to be done his way. It was only when he brought me into the desert (Death Valley) that something in me calmed down, I stopped objecting, I began to enjoy the air, the food, everything . . .

An abandoned gas pump. There’s nothing for miles all around, desert scrub and a cloudless sky. On the overgrown parking lot is a new red Ferrari with its roof down; the engine is off, but the key is there, and shoes are on the floor under the driver’s seat. The building beside the pump is a ruin with no door, there’s no one inside. There’s desert all around and we wonder where the driver is. On the passenger seat is the March edition of The New Yorker. We both had the impression that someone was watching us. Something wasn’t right. We got back into our car and drove on in silence for about half an hour, as though we were fleeing from the plot of a well-known American film, the name of which we couldn’t remember. The previous week, in Arlington, while I was waiting for my appointment with the cardiologist, that same edition of The New Yorker was on the table, and I had read half the articles by the time it was my turn.

A campsite for caravans, arranged in a circle so as to form a small square in the center. A sandy square. It was already completely dark. On the square there was a thick beam of light, and a film projector was moving living images. A desert cinema for campers. We couldn’t see what film was being shown, but we could hear its muffled sound: music and incomprehensible dialogue. The sound of the film merged with the voices of the audience.

The name of this place is the title of a film by Michelangelo Antonioni, Zabriskie Point. It’s probably because Antonioni—or Sam Shepard, who wrote the screenplay for the film—was fascinated by the color of the terrain. Those pastel shades, hills that seemed to have been shaped by an ice-cream scoop, in various colors, strawberry and mint, banana and caramel . . . As I look at the hills, I feel the taste of cloud on my tongue. Zabriskie Point. The 1960s were the age of communes, dissatisfaction with the existing structures of society. The idea of escaping to the desert was appealing. To go where there was no one or where no one wished to go. But this is where Charles Manson escaped to as well, we saw the abandoned log cabin where he had lived, overgrown with dry desert grasses, his truck rusting in front. Escape is possible only as an individual act. Only an individual can escape. To escape as a group, even if into a desert, ends with one form or other of the problematic structuring of life in a human community. Manson himself asserted that even the smallest community tends toward a totalitarian structure and eventually ends in massacre. Zabriskie Point shows that escape is impossible, or that you can escape only alone, and only on the condition that you are not attached to other people, or possessions. And you know that. But what are you escaping from, my son?

At the gas station—Harun emptied a bag of ice into our blue plastic box in which we kept bottles of water and fruit juice. A pair of twins followed his every movement with great interest. They could have been three or four years old, the boy’s hair was cut short, the girl had long hair the color of wheat (this is common in little girls from Nebraska or Iowa). But regardless of the obvious difference of their hairstyles, it was very easy to see their similarity. Twins. Harun cut the transparent bag with a knife, held it over the blue plastic box in which he had already placed several bottles of water, and scattered some of the bag’s frozen contents over them. Then he put the bag down so that he could add more bottles to the box. After that he went back to the bag of ice. He carried out all these actions slowly and methodically, with great attention, taking care that not a single ice cube fell over the edge of the box onto the asphalt. The twins watched in wonder. And then, for some reason known only to a child’s consciousness, they both simultaneously burst into tears. Their mother appeared from behind a large jeep and patiently, hugging them, took them one after the other back to their vehicle. She waved in our direction, as though apologizing for the children’s crying, and then got into the vehicle herself. An attractive young mother, she had a yellow bandana tied around her neck.

It’s exactly midnight! We are moving from 18 into 19 April. We got out of the car into the pitch darkness for you to show me the sky. And, truly, I had never seen so many stars above me. The night sky, provisionally speaking, is the only reliable scene to open to our eyes for thousands of years already. As I look at the stars, I become my own nameless forebear from the most remote past, who raised his head and saw, more or less, what I am myself seeing now from the darkness, in a place called Badwater Basin, 282 feet below sea level.

Only once have I seen more stars in the sky. It was a winter night, January 1993, at midnight we left our apartment in the very center of Sarajevo, the city was in darkness, the icy cold froze the heart, but the sky was clear, studded with frozen stars. The sky above the Sarajevo valley had never been so open and bare as on that winter night, in a city without electricity. We stood and stared upward in astonishment, and my friend Ivan said, in his long, drawn-out Belgrade accent: “The staaarry sky above us, and moraaal laaaw within us!”

We’ve turned off the main road and now we’re zigzagging along the tarmac. Harun is looking for a rise from which he can photograph the half-light in the desert basin and the sky above it. He is taking a time-lapse. We don’t have an adequate expression for this in our language. I think that in our language, too, this method of taking and connecting photographs in a video would also be called time-lapse. Like the way in our language we use the word makadam. The word comes from McAdam, the name of the man who invented this kind of crushed stone for the stable body of a roadway. John Loudon McAdam. I remember that, in my childhood, our roads were spread with macadam. And I remember fear, because careless drivers would go too fast and scatter the little stones under their tires and hurt the children beside the road. This may have been true, but perhaps our mothers used that fear to keep us away from the roads. Lucia Berlin wrote a very short story called “Macadam.” She writes about the joy of macadam that covered the red dust of the road out of her childhood in Texas. And at the end she says that she used to repeat macadam out loud, to herself, because the word “sounded like the name for a friend.” And this is one of my deepest impressions from my early childhood, one of my earliest memories: I’m sitting on the wooden veranda of a house watching the road in front of it being spread with macadam. Then, as a cart pulled by a horse passed the digger with its sharp-edged metal shovel, there was a collision: the sharp metal tore the horse’s leg, I saw its white bone, there was not much blood, the horse was shaking with shock and couldn’t be calmed. And I feel the same sorrow half a century later, remembering it now.

The front bumper of Harun’s pickup truck is broken, which makes it look mistreated and vengeful. Conscious of its threatening appearance, he abused it today on Artists Drive, a narrow one-way road that winds through the hills in the heart of Death Valley; he drove close behind a white Toyota Prius, which evidently alarmed its driver, who stopped to let us pass. In this country people are wary of trucks. The prejudice is that they are driven by white men from the interior, with a Confederate flag fluttering over their dusty vehicle. It’s true that along our way we had seen many of those trucks with racist, usually anti-Obama stickers in their back windows. And we had seen one two days earlier from close up, on a blue Ford pickup parked beside Lake Powell: MUSLIMS GO HOME AND TAKE OBAMA WITH YOU!

In the desert, our right-hand front tire burst. Harun is changing the wheel. My camera is swaying on my chest, and from time to time I point it at him. He is evidently irritated by my taking photos of him working. “Last week,” I say, “I was driving to my medical checkup, they were laying new asphalt, and I heard a bang. I thought a little stone from the macadam had hit the bottom of my car. A driver behind me kept sounding his horn, he was annoying me, I turned around and swore, giving him the finger, not knowing what he wanted from me. It was only when I reached the hospital parking lot that I saw that I had a burst tire. The unfortunate man had been trying to warn me, and I insulted him! I don’t know how to change a tire. I called a towing firm,” I said. He’s changing the wheel. He doesn’t say anything.

And later, in a restaurant, he refuses to eat. “What’s wrong?”

“While I was changing the tire, I swallowed a heap of sand and now I feel sick.”

I swallowed a heap of sand, you say.

It’s November 1992. Sarajevo is in darkness; by the light of a paraffin lamp, I spend the whole night writing. Refugees in our own town, we were living on the ground floor of a house belonging to acquaintances who had moved away from the war to Egypt. I had arranged black-and-white photographs on the table in front of me and was describing their contents. You and Sanja were sleeping in the same room. And, I remember, our room was separated from the boiler house by a glass door. In the boiler house, in a tin drum, in peacetime there had been oil to heat the house, and now we used that space to store wood. That evening I had used a rubber hose to extract the oil from the bottom of the drum, I remember that I had suddenly sucked in a mouthful of the dark liquid and I couldn’t rid myself of its taste the whole night. I used the oil to fill the old gas lamp illuminating the table where I was sitting, writing. And then it all happened. The sun came up, but the light refused to come through the windows into our room. It was already day outside, but in the room it was night. The two of you woke up and it was only then that I discovered, appalled, that everything around me was black, the photographs on the table were completely black, the covers of the books were black, my hands were black, the table was black, the duvet covering you was black, your face and Sanja’s. We looked at one another, but we didn’t recognize one another. Black oily soot from the lamp had settled on everything. It was an image of pure horror. As though we’d woken up in a different world.

I remembered that distant morning, after you said I swallowed a heap of sand and now I feel sick.

At the gas station. We went in to get coffees and came out with two large bags of ice, we haven’t anywhere to put them, I deposited one by my feet and set the other on my lap. My phone rang, and the voice at the other end asked: “What are you doing?”

“I’m hugging a bag of ice.”

We photographed the ice as it melted. That will be a record of the specificity of the desert, an image of indisputable heat. The camera took a picture every twenty-five seconds. When they are connected later, the images will become a video that speeds up the process of melting. Where does our need to accelerate time come from? From impatience to arrive in the near future into which we have projected our trifling desires. Our need to slow time down would surely be natural. But why this strong desire to speed things up? Why are we always in a hurry to reach the future? The process of the ice melting, which looks rapid in the photographs, is an image of time that can never be restored. But perhaps there is no such thing as time?

We were protecting ourselves from the sun with a large black umbrella.

But then some loud bikers rode up to us. At first, blown up in their Harley-Davidson jackets, they looked enormous, and before they spoke to us, you said: “I’ll have a word with them.” That declaration of yours was something new for me. You said that because you thought you would be better at making contact with those guys, who looked threatening. Or maybe you were silencing my strong Slavic accent that might have irritated American patriots? But you haven’t completely lost your accent, either, even after all these years. Or else you think that situations like this are less unusual for you than they are for me, because you spend a lot of time on the road, you sleep in the open, in the mountains, in the desert, and along the way you meet all kinds of human phenomena? Whatever it was, your judgment was obvious: on 18 April 2015, in the American desert, I was more a foreigner than you were. And in fact, I am a foreigner everywhere in the world: as soon as I leave my home, I step into a void.

The bikers asked us to let them shelter from the sun in the shade of our umbrella. The young man who spoke to us had a strong accent. And then they introduced themselves: Germans from Darmstadt, this was the second month they had been traveling through New Mexico, Arizona, and California. One had a completely white mouth, as though he had rubbed his lips with chalk, already totally dehydrated. I confessed that I worked for German television (ARD), and our recognition was followed by pure delight! It’s interesting—seen from Bosnia, Germans are entirely different from us southern people. But here, on a different continent, particularly since I’ve been working with them, I’ve discovered that our similarities are great. They are close worlds, or is that just a deceptive impression by contrast with American difference? Whatever the reason, in Death Valley, we were a small misplaced tribe, under your umbrella.

Darmstadt! In the autumn of 1999, during the Frankfurt Book Fair, I stayed in the Jagdschloss Hotel in Kranichstein near Darmstadt in the company of some cheery Balkan writers. It rained most days. It always rains in Germany. We talked about literature and politics. On our last day, the sun came out. And this is the only image that I remember vividly from the few days I spent there:

The poet Ali Podrimja smoking a cigar in front of the hotel and holding an empty wooden box of Davidoffs. A snail was making its way gradually along the concrete wall. The poet had placed the wooden lid of the box in front of the snail, expecting, I presume, that it would slowly enter the box.

I ask him: “What are you doing?”

And Podrimja says: “I’m establishing a dialogue.”

We sat down on the place where the ice had melted and stayed sitting on the bare ground for a minute or two while your camera took a few photos of us. When we got back to the car, you quickly checked the photos on the camera’s small screen, and we looked carefully at one of the two of us. A photograph is successful—I’m paraphrasing Barthes (Camera Lucida)—in which one detail, the punctum, has a magnetism that brings us back to it repeatedly. The punctum on our picture shows an obvious symmetry. You are holding your left lower arm in your right hand. That’s an unconscious movement at the moment you are looking at the lens waiting for the camera automatically to take the photograph in front of it. I am also looking toward the eye of the camera and holding my lower right arm with my left hand. The same unconscious movement.

Do you remember M.? The photographer? It could have been 2002 or 2003, I took a roll of film to be developed (in those days there were shops processing film everywhere, digital photography had not yet taken over). When I collected the envelope with the printed photos a few days later, I found among them some that I first thought had been included by mistake. But they did after all show something familiar. It took a few moments for me to recognize objects from our apartment: bottles of medicine; the Sunday Washington Post on the floor beside the wastepaper basket; the shoes I had taken off in a hurry in the hall, and so on.

In those days, you will remember, we were friendly with M. Whenever he came to see us, he would march through all the rooms in the apartment, sniffing around before sitting down in an armchair, and then he would begin to talk. There was nothing aggressive in this, on the contrary. He used to work as a photographer for Time magazine, traveling through war zones: Lebanon, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. His war experiences were turned into screenplays, and one film is about the last days of Somoza’s rule. A bad film, but there was one very strong scene in it: after the guerrilla leader had been killed, the news of his death spread like wildfire, and out of fear of the loss of morale and potential defeatism, the photographer was asked to photograph the dead man so that he looked alive. And a picture was taken with the newspaper of the day on the desk in front of the dead leader with his eyes open, which was published the following day on the front page of the same paper to confirm that he was still alive. Why does that scene appeal to me? Because it contains the ultimate power of photography and because no other medium is capable of bringing someone “back to life.”

As he toured our rooms, M. used my camera to take pictures of everything that his eye found interesting. If I’d been asked, I’d never have taken those photos, but it’s true that they told me a lot. It’s interesting to discover how others see us. It’s interesting to see one’s own world through someone else’s eyes, even when they show you a newspaper that you know for certain you leafed through but from which you can no longer recall a single article.

The temperatures are so high that nothing living can inhabit this part of the desert. There are no snakes or scorpions. And then I remembered. Sometime around the beginning of the war, in May and June 1992, we were living in the studio of the fine-art group Zvono, “The Bell,” with the painter Sead Čizmić, the photographer Kemal Hadžić, and their wives. There were a lot of glass walls there, a fairly risky place to live, but in the building next door there was a nuclear bunker, so we took shelter there on the days when shells were raining down on our district. I once went with Sead up to Golobrdica, where he had a rented apartment with a wonderful open view of the city and Trebević Mountain. We stayed just long enough for him to collect the rest of the clothes they had left behind. There were already sporadic power cuts in the city, so supplies of water were kept in the bath. While Sead was collecting the things we had come for, I looked around with interest, and so came to see a drowned scorpion in the full bath. I had never seen a scorpion in Bosnia before. I scooped it into one of those round, transparent Kodak film containers, the ones with yellow lids, and took it to Harun. And he kept it for a while in the war as a toy, and then the container and the scorpion disappeared.

“You were nine then . . . Do you remember that little Kodak film box?”

And he said: “Vaguely.”

Furnace Creek. We are sitting in the garden of a restaurant. At the next table, the German bikers have removed their boots and socks, stripping down in the desert heat. They have been cutting up lemons in front of them and are talking loudly. And then they take the lemon slices they have sucked the juice from and start throwing them at one another. German consonants in the air around us.

Harun is frowning, because I’m slowing him down in his journey. I say: “Is there anything in the world more complicated than the father-son relationship?”

We both have frequent attacks of melancholy. Our gloom is a consequence of the war. Or else, in my case, the war deepened that emotion, for melancholy was not unknown to me since my earliest childhood. And when I think of my first experiences of unbearable desolation, I see an image of the autumnal dissipation of the world, an October forest smelling of decay. I rarely write about my childhood, as though I were running away from it. If so, I’m running away from an October forest. Your childhood was different. You acquired the habit of going into the mountains quite young, in the red cabin of the Sarajevo cable car to Trebević, and then on up, along goat tracks, to the top. You memorized the rocks, tree trunks, and abandoned bunkers left over from the First World War. I would like to know how far back your memory stretches, my son. Today I ask you whether you remember the cable car to Trebević.

And you say: “I remember my childhood in 3D, down to the smallest detail!”

But when I remind you of an event from the war, your memory becomes unreliable and vague. You suppress the war into oblivion.

A man at the next table had been listening in to our conversation, looking at me warily. That’s nothing new, people around us display increasing aversion when they hear a conversation in an unfamiliar language. Over the course of the last twenty years that I’ve lived here, I’ve been able to monitor the way America has been closing up, screening itself from the outside world. It used not to be like this. When people heard a foreign language on the subway, at the airport, or like this, in a restaurant, it would arouse their curiosity, not aversion, certainly not fear. Twenty years is a long time, people pass on and worlds change. Foreigners are no longer welcome here. And, as I say, the man at the next table was looking at me awkwardly, surprised by the foreign language I was speaking.

But then there was a sudden reversal. A smiling young man in a white Armani shirt came up to our table and introduced himself: “Hi, I’m David from Murska Sobota. I was so happy when I heard you speaking our language.” Then we began to talk; he said he had landed in Mexico City a month before, he was traveling from south to north, in a few days he would be flying out of San Francisco back to Slovenia. David had said he was happy to hear us speaking “our language.” That language of ours was one of those spoken in Yugoslavia. But that country had long since fallen apart. In our shared country, David’s language, Slovene, had also been “ours.” Once, long ago, there was a world in which we called different languages “ours.”

Whenever I’m in the company of strangers and speak in a way that reveals my Slav accent, the question follows: “Where are you from?” I always reply politely. It’s very important to me that I say exactly where I’m from, and explain where that place is in case the person I’m talking to has never heard of my country (“in Europe, near Italy”). I suppose that’s a need in me to feel accepted for what I am. Furthermore, I have a belief in the importance of conversation, something sacrosanct that comes from a conviction that there is beauty in our remaining in the memory of strangers, particularly when we first meet, knowing we’ll never see them again. Showing one’s true identity means showing myself the way I really am; I want to be sincere. But what does sincerity mean? People gladly engage in conversation not out of mere curiosity, but from caution. They aren’t interested in who you are, they want confirmation that you’re normal and don’t represent a threat. That’s the sincerity in you that interests them. They’re afraid.

I found a fallen eyelash under your lower left eyelid and picked it up, holding it between my fingers, but you were tired and refused to imagine a wish and didn’t want to blow at my fingers. We developed this ritual in your earliest childhood: whenever we found a fallen eyelash, one of the two of us would hold it tightly between our thumb and forefinger, and then we would each blow—three times, taking it in turns, our eyes closed, each imagining a wish. Then we would choose, and if you guessed the finger the lash had stuck to, you had the right to have your wish come true. The lash would be carefully tucked under your shirt collar or pajamas, beside your heart so as not to be lost, to be close to you, so that your dream could come true. Those were the rules. But if you guessed wrong, then the lash would be mine and slipped inside my shirt to serve my wish. I ask: “Do you remember any of your wishes? And if you do, did any of them ever come true?”

And now, when it no longer matters, I can confess: I, too, had my dreams.

My wishes weren’t big, but still none of them came to anything. I longed for a small window from which one could see blue water. I imagined that in my fifties I would live a peaceful life, with time freed up just for writing. I wanted a small shady café where I would meet with friends on a Saturday or Sunday morning to gossip about our past. But I ended up as a prisoner on a vast continent, alone, without people to talk to. A foreigner. And I have grown accustomed to this solitude, I have accepted it as payback for the sins I have committed in my life. And in exchange for my unfulfilled wishes.

To differentiate oneself from one’s father? There’d always been that tension, it’s probably natural in adolescence for a son to compare himself to his father. And I remember your college admissions interview. Your interviewer came to Alexandria, you met at the Starbucks at the end of King Street, beside the river. It was early summer, a lovely day, at the end of the garden the two of you were sitting at a table, I was at another. The distance between us was not great, so I could hear your conversation, not all of it, but I strained to hear as much as I could, and then came the moment when you said to that stranger: “My father is a writer and I want to distance myself from his interests, I want the two of us to be different and I’m not interested in literature!” I think I understood your reasons then, as I understand them now. The difference is that then your announcement (“I’m not interested in literature!”) hurt me, but now I remember it all with a certain pleasure and sympathy for the you who perhaps didn’t yet know what you wanted, but you evidently knew what you didn’t want.

I was working in the Reuters Washington office, and Harun’s student film had been quite a success; invited for an interview, he arrived early and so came in to see me in the video archive. I asked him whether he had anything against my being present at the conversation, and he said no, on the contrary. I listened with interest as he answered questions about his past. And, since his student film was concerned with war, there was inevitably a question about the siege of Sarajevo. And then he said: “All I wanted was to get out of the city, but, when asked about it, my father would always say ‘No, no, I don’t want to go, I refuse to allow them to drive me out of my home!’” That was the first time we had talked about the war so openly, and the conversation took place through an intermediary, Harun was replying to a journalist’s question, but his answer was intended for me.

What does he think of me? He never showed any open liking for my choices. I never heard him endorse them or praise me for anything. Apart from once. While he was studying in Los Angeles, I traveled there for a reading, in a place called Villa Aurora, famous for having been an exile refuge for German writers and philosophers—Brecht, Mann, Adorno, and others—during the Second World War, and the house contains mementos of those few important years. In the days that I spent there, there were a couple of German artists living there, and a journalist, a Kurd who—people said—would have been arrested if he returned to Turkey. In the evening, I did my reading, the audience was unusual, mostly older people, escaping from the tedium of their afternoons, and my words didn’t reach them. But I enjoyed the reading, above all because I had impressed Harun. He was with his new girlfriend. And afterward, in conversation with our hosts, over a glass of wine, I heard him compliment me for the first time ever, he said authoritatively: “Sem is very perceptive!” (And, yes, from his first spoken words, he had always called me by my name; all these years I had been Sem for him, except when, transferring to English, to be understood by the people he was talking to, he began to follow a more formal usage, and at times, when he was speaking with his American acquaintances, he referred to me as my dad.)

On the other hand, he never displayed hostility toward my choices. He couldn’t identify with literature, especially poetry, which he read only reluctantly. Only later did he begin to read Rumi, indicating a tendency toward mysticism, although he made a clear barrier between himself and religion very early on. I had once tried to get him to “open up,” to discover what he really thought about poetry. He resisted, but he confessed that the people he met, ever since secondary school, particularly those at college, were “frightened of poetry!” I think he said that as a compliment to poetry, its seriousness. In his value system, everything that was not accepted by the masses was good.

There was a black pickup parked in a rest stop beside the road, and in the shadow of the steering wheel a man stripped to the waist was shaving blind, with no mirror.

As long as we’ve been on the road, I’ve been letting my beard grow.

Throughout the war, for the almost four years the siege of Sarajevo lasted, I shaved with just one razor blade.

Our clothes are dusty, there’s red sand on our shoes, the car is dusty, and the windshield is greasy and dirty so that one can hardly see out of it. (“It’s the tiny insects that get stuck to the glass as you drive. I keep cleaning them off and they keep coming back.”) Thousands of barely visible insects perishing before the driver’s eyes; their microscopic deaths create a consistent splotch on the glass, ceaselessly drawn by an invisible Jackson Pollock over the American road.

There’s a bunch of keys swaying from his belt. I’ve seen this in the United States before now, on the whole with young Latino men: they hang their keys from their belts like a decoration.

Interesting. I remember that he used to drag a similar bunch of keys around with him even as a very small child, trying to open locks he happened to come across as he toddled his way about.

I’m interested in his keys, and he shows them to me one by one, until we come to the one that suddenly becomes the most important: “This is the key to the apartment in Sarajevo.”

The three-year-old goes around the large parking lot in front of our building with his bunch of keys and opens car doors. Proud that he has succeeded in unlocking the trunk of a Lada; I quickly pick him up and clasp him to me to protect him from the sudden annoyance of a large man with a mustache, the car’s owner . . .

He still keeps the key to our Sarajevo apartment.

Beatty, Nevada. In our motel room, I try to remember the passwords that open my internet pages, I wanted to read the emails that had reached my inboxes and reconnect with real life . . . On my home computer these pages open automatically and don’t need a password. I’ve forgotten all of them. This is Harun’s laptop, a machine that treats me like an indifferent stranger. The past with its real keys was better. It would be good today to have a bunch of keys like the one swinging from his jeans belt instead of all these passwords. It was all far easier in the twentieth century because our privacy was less wary of the public gaze, and we were more serene in our solitudes. But now in a remote desert motel, in a town called Beatty on the very border of Nevada, I stare at the computer screen. I’ve forgotten my password, and for a moment I feel lost, as though I don’t exist. That’s a brief attack of helplessness. And, since I didn’t know the password, I closed the computer and felt some relief to be liberated from my daily routine. It’s good to travel. I went out of the motel room onto the veranda as though I had walked out of my personal prison into freedom. I was met by a blast of hot air, it was nearly midnight.

Las Vegas. The street is called Dean Martin Drive. A mechanic is changing the tire on the wheel. There’s a beautiful girl with us in the waiting room, sitting in an armchair and drawing on her bare legs with a felt-tip. The two of us were commenting on her drawings. She couldn’t have known that we were talking about her. When he had changed the tire, the mechanic came into the waiting room, waited for us to finish our conversation, then asked: “What language are you speaking?”

What language are we speaking? When we came here, you were young enough to adopt the rules of your new world without resistance, and for your new language to be closer to you than the one you arrived with. It was different for me, as I haven’t managed to tear myself away from the past, which means that I’m a prisoner of my language. Does that mean that you and I, father and son, speak different languages?

My world is in my language, and I’ve never begun to write in the language of the country where I’m now living. To be truly accepted, to transform myself from a foreigner into a local, a precondition is restructuring into the new language. And that’s fine. I have chosen to remain a foreigner. Once, some ten years ago, after the translation of my second book came out, an American poet explained to me, in a restaurant in Iowa, that all my problems would be solved as soon as I started writing in English. She said, very seriously, that I should just make a rough translation of my poems, she’d sort out the language, and then I could publish them as originals. She literally suggested that. I said that I didn’t have any problems that needed solving. I thanked her and explained that this one language in which I wrote was enough for me, and I wouldn’t want to change it. But, following my explanation, her eyes filled with tears. To be honest, her offer had offended me, but the fact that she ended up crying completely disconcerted me. I didn’t know what to say, because I didn’t understand the real reason for her tears. Perhaps she hadn’t expected my reaction, and now her offer had been shown to be discourteous, but perhaps she was really sad to see in me a stranger who couldn’t be helped? She looked at me as though she had just found out that I had a disease from which I would soon die.

About ten years ago, when he was in college, Harun went to the Slavic department to take a foreign-language exam. The foreign language in this case was his mother tongue, but from an American perspective there was no room for doubt, the local language was English and every other language was foreign. The examiner, Michael Heim, met him in his book-filled office. Harun introduced himself and asked about the possibility of taking an exam. The professor suggested that he take the exam immediately, if he felt ready. And then he went to a shelf and took down a book from which Harun was to read, to confirm his knowledge of his own language. Professor Heim put the book down on the table in front of the student and suggested that he read from the page to which he’d opened at random. And so it was. Harun began to read the text, trying to hide his smile. The professor noticed his student’s unusual behavior, interrupted his reading, and asked: “The character in the story has the same name as you?” And Harun said: “Yes, but that’s because this story is about me, I am the character in the story.” His response astonished Professor Heim, he took the book from his hand, looked at the open page, then back at the student: “All these years, I have read a lot of books in this room, but this is the first time that I have spoken in real life to a character from a story.” The book was Sarajevo Marlboro by Miljenko Jergović.

After we came to America, he quickly mastered the language, his new world opened up to him far more quickly and clearly than to me, he soon became a local, while I remained a foreigner. And then came generational differentiation. He stopped asking me questions, my world was as familiar to him as a book he’d read or a film he’d seen, while I began asking him questions about everything I found foreign but was part of his reality. It was as though we had changed roles overnight.

Besides, he rarely opens up, he doesn’t show emotions, indeed he hides them resolutely. He is the diametric opposite of me: I immediately make all my feelings public. This makes him old-fashioned, the way Bosnian fathers used to be, and probably still are, believing that showing emotion is a sign of weakness. In that division, it was as though we had changed ages or generational places. He behaves toward me like a father, while I am a child to him. I’m more foreign here than he is. But I know that he also sees himself as foreign, from the way he reacts to the Asian tourists taking photographs of themselves beside his pickup, convinced presumably that both the vehicle and its driver are authentic locals. He laughs at that, as though it is a misunderstanding. That we are foreigners I know from the silence that sets in when a policeman stops us on the road, as we sit calmly in the truck waiting for him to speak to us.

Arizona. The question the policeman asked him after he had stopped us on the road: “How many guns do you have in the vehicle?”

This evening we looked at the photographs taken the previous day. I was surprised to find myself in the pictures, as I had not been aware I was being photographed. They are chance portraits. Harun had arranged his cameras to record the landscape in front of us for several hours, and during that time we stayed here, we chatted, stretched, looked at the sky, moved to the left or right; I forgot about the cameras around us, and that’s how I happened to wander unconsciously into the space in front of their lenses and those chance portraits came into being.

In Washington it often happens on the street that I enter into the space between a person with a camera and the other person being photographed, or a group of people smiling at the camera lens, and then my picture is taken. Or else I pass behind the people taking photos of each other. I’m on my way somewhere, not thinking about what has just happened. This happens to everyone. I have many unknown people in my photographs, I don’t know anything about them, I have never, until this moment, thought about those chance passersby, or about myself in other people’s photos. But in fact, a small miracle has taken place: I’ve entered the private world of some unknown people: I’m that stranger on the edge, in the background of the photograph. They know nothing about me, they take no notice of me: they see themselves in those photos; unknown and nameless, I’m not the subject here, but rather an object, just like the façade of the building behind them or the glass shop window. Some future observer will be more curious about the bird on the shoulder of the bronze horseman in the background than about me. But, nevertheless, I still exist in all those photographs. In those pictures I will never see. In a similar but far more intensive way, we exist in other people’s dreams. If those dreams could be transposed onto film, it would be interesting to see the whole, your life grown out of other people’s consciousness! I would like to see myself in someone else’s dream.

There are a lot of photographs from our past in which I’m holding you in my arms. And a father carrying his son in his arms is altogether a common sight. Far less frequent—and its complete opposite in emotional impact—is the image of a son carrying his father. Such as Aeneas carrying his old, weary father as they flee from burning Troy . . . I would not wish to live to a great age.

You lived in that apartment for just a few months, in the summer of 2002. Los Angeles. An apartment on two floors, in the upper one were you and your girlfriend, while the lower one was occupied by a girl about whom you didn’t know much yourself, apart from her name. (“She’s one of those girls who come to this city with the hope of making it into film, but if that doesn’t happen they spend the best years of their lives waitressing in cheap bars and nightclubs.”) After I arrived for a short visit, I went down to the lower floor for a shower. And then the girl appeared in the bathroom doorway, in a short denim skirt and T-shirt. She was smiling, she didn’t ask me who I was or how I had gotten here, instead she took off her clothes and stepped naked into the shower. I was unprepared for what had happened, I already had one leg out of the bath, but she held me back in an embrace and kissed me, if it could be called a kiss. At the moment when our lips met, there was a little spark of static electricity and I covered my mouth with my hand as though physically injured by that kiss. I got out of the bath and, apologizing, picked up my things and slowly made my way to the upper floor. I was quite disconcerted. I didn’t tell you anything about it of course, and I’m not sure that I would even have known how to describe properly what had happened, but I remember the unease I felt then, as though I were on the verge of incest. I still remember that girl today well enough that I could easily draw her face. I don’t know why I’m telling this story now or why I remembered it. Perhaps I could have kept it quiet.

During the day, we make our way through the desert; at night he photographs the sky. Along the way, we both take pictures of the earth that catch our attention. Recording the sky is like hunting, like night fishing—he arranges his cameras and then we sit and wait for their lenses to catch a set number of pictures. That takes hours. (You’re a hunter, that’s now becoming quite obvious to me. Images of melting lead and making shotgun pellets in your early childhood, in northern Bosnia, filling the cartridges with tiny balls of lead, hunters’ tales round the fire, that’s what you remembered as essential, as your first memories to which you return . . .) Awake the whole night, we sit in the car, or stretch our arms outside, gazing at the stars, talking. When we run out of topics of conversation, we sit and each do our own thing. I draw. And last night, in the motel, I drew until almost daybreak. A photograph documents existence, although in fact it always shows something that no longer exists. A drawing is something else. It doesn’t have the strength of a document, a drawing is unreliable when compared to the reality seen with one’s own eyes, and so it fictionalizes my notes from our journey. And that unreliability is a good description of my journey with Harun, because over these last days my past has been dangerously mixed up with reality.

A red scarf. You belonged to the last generation of Tito’s “Pioneers.” Do you remember, when you started school, as part of your ceremonial uniform, you received a Partisan cap with a five-pointed star and a red scarf to be worn round the neck?

Little Pioneer! For five days now I’ve been watching you negotiate the roads and the desert. Tito would be proud of you!

I thought that your red bandana was your photographer’s uniform. Did we use the word bandana in Bosnia? Or were all the various kinds of scarves all called by the same common name? I don’t remember. I’ve begun to forget my own language. Did we use the word fedora, or was all headwear of that kind just called a hat?

It’s interesting, this spring a brown fedora appeared on our coat stand, bought many years ago, but I had never stepped outside the house wearing it. I should also say that I had not written anything for months and was fairly despondent as a result. And two Saturdays ago, as soon as I woke up, in my pajamas, on my way to my desk I picked up the hat and put it on, just to see what it looked like on my head. I can say that this little change pleased me. Every day now I go to my desk in my pajamas with the hat on my head, that’s now my working uniform, because I started writing again when I was wearing it. It’s a purely theatrical effect: once I had put the hat on my head, I entered into a role. Like a character, like someone else, I began to write unimpeded, perhaps because it’s easier to express one’s opinions in someone else’s name; in other words, with the fedora on my head, I freed myself of the responsibility of being “me.” That “I” is the source of my despondency, it’s my daily terrorist.

But you think differently: “I cover my hair with a scarf so it doesn’t get in my way when I’m taking photographs. Or I soak the scarf in water to cool me in the desert.”

Our desert soundtrack: “Blood Like Lemonade,” Morcheeba—“Scott & Zelda,” Tiny Victories—“New Dawn Fades,” Moby—“Blackout,” Hybrid—“Chord Sounds,” Moby—“Beachcoma,” Hybrid—“The Ghost Inside,” Broken Bells.

Zagreb, November 1995–January 1996. You escape obsessively into video games. Super Mario’s musical phrase, repeated ad infinitum, was our Croatian refugee soundtrack.

What did you say this town is called? Above the front doors of the houses in the main street, lights are on all day long.

It was already pitch dark, we were driving toward an abandoned mining town (Rhyolite), when a wild rabbit leaped out onto the road in front of us, disappearing under the moving car. Crazy bunny! But there was no sound, nothing had happened. We stopped and looked into the darkness beside the road—“I didn’t kill it.”

“No, you didn’t.”

Last autumn, we were driving after midnight through Shenandoah Valley, when out of the fog in front of us a group of alarmed deer—stags, does, and their young, hundreds of them—crossed from the left to the right side of the road, it must have been the time of year for them to migrate, and we had to drive very slowly, and we were in a hurry to get home. Fog and fear of blood and damp, warm fur.

What am I doing? I’m describing events that you witnessed on this journey, or you were present in them, in the recent or more distant past. But that’s all right. It’s not wrong to describe for another something he can see for himself. What else do sports commentators do in the course of a broadcast match? What they describe can be irritating for the spectators watching it. But I’m doing this because I’m interested now above all in events where we were both present, I’m interested in images from our shared memory. I came here with the intention that we should compare those memories, so that I would discover something about my forgetfulness. And have I discovered anything? No. In fact I’ve found that you suppress certain memories (above all of the war). Your reasons are understandable. I envy you that, because my most intense memories are of events I would gladly forget. Remembering and forgetting stand side by side, they’re made of the same substance. “Forgetting is the absent brother of Remembering,” says Cees Nooteboom.

An abandoned mining town on the edge of the desert. After the miners left, artists lived here for a while. Then they, too, left, while their sculptures remained. Art and ruins.

When nature takes them over, when ivy covers the walls, when a pine tree starts to grow through a roof—abandoned houses have an unexpected beauty . . . But abandoned places are unprotected and there are always those who come to wreak havoc and destroy with impunity.

“That fine house,” you say, “the one I photographed last month, has burned down.”

“What happened?”

“Vandals set fire to it . . .”

I understand your liking for abandoned places. A photograph of a starry sky above unpopulated houses has a magnetic beauty. But when destructiveness overwhelms that state of abandonment and absence, such a place loses all its appeal. We roamed with flashlights through the derelict town, looking for subjects suitable for the cameras. But we found nothing. It’s not worth taking pictures here, we’ll have to wait for nature’s power once again to cover over the traces of human presence.

You gaze at the sky through your camera lens, while I can just make out in the darkness in front of me the ruined wall of a building, and I think of Fred, a fireman who turned up in Sarajevo during the war. He carried out various humanitarian tasks, he was useful, he used to leave the city, travel back to America, and keep coming back to our besieged city. After Sarajevo, in 1995, he went to Chechnya, and all trace of him was lost. He vanished. And in the eighties, somewhere in Latin America, he had fallen asleep, weary, in a hotel. In the morning he woke, looked out the window, and saw destroyed buildings as far as the eye could see. He opened his door and realized that he was on the edge of an abyss, because the corridor and stairs had collapsed. He had slept through an earthquake that had turned the whole town into a ruin. It had vanished.

From our hotel room I see airport lights, planes like fireflies take off and land.

“What airport is that?” I ask.

“Military! Beyond the runway is Area 51.”

I stand at the window and watch. For more than thirty years, on various continents, we have lived within reach of an airport. The apartment where I now live is some two hundred yards as the crow flies from the runway of a Washington airport (DCA). On my way to work, I like to stop in there and have a morning coffee surrounded by travelers, I find their passenger tension soothing, and perhaps I’m also encouraging myself with the thought that one morning instead of carrying on to work, I’ll buy a ticket and fly off out of my life. Our first airport was the one in Sarajevo. We moved there in the early 1980s. There was a restaurant called Kula near the eastern end of the runway. It was an unusual restaurant, as it was staffed by prisoners. On the whole, petty criminals, or at least that was the word in public, although I always suspected that there were murderers among them. Beside the restaurant building there was a tidily maintained plot where the prisoners tended vegetables, fruit, and domestic animals . . . We went there from time to time. And once, in the early summer, instead of a leisurely stroll to the restaurant, we went by a roundabout route and then a shortcut across a field of tall grasses. When we reached the restaurant garden Sanja’s face was swollen and red, her breathing difficult—we didn’t know what had happened to begin with, but we were to discover in the course of the day in the emergency room that she had had a violent allergic attack. For the following seven or eight years, she was seriously ill, but she coped bravely with her allergy. When the siege of Sarajevo began, at the end of April 1992, we moved to within reach of the hospital, because of her illness, so as to be closer to the doctors. But, interestingly, during the war her allergy almost completely disappeared and she had almost no need for medication. My acquaintance and colleague the poet Radovan Karadžić turned the restaurant into a concentration camp. Many of my friends were among the prisoners there. On the whole good people. In the world there is a rule that great suffering happens to the good people. Then, during the siege, I left the city several times through a tunnel under the runway, and came back, and in the end I left, crossing that same runway, perhaps forever.

“Area 51, you say?”

An elderly couple, with walking sticks, lean on each other as they walk. They got out of their car at a gas station, and, dependent on each other in their mutual support, they went inside to buy a sack of ice. Ice is something you can’t do without in the desert. But what are such old people doing in the desert at the very end of their lives? Of all places in the world? A desert? With their sticks, leaning on each other, they inch forward together, step by step.

I’m reading in the desert. I bought this book after I heard that it contained a story by an acquaintance of mine. It’s a book of very short stories, which they call here flash fiction because of their striking brevity. The contents state that the story is on page 43. But when I opened the book, the story was not there, my acquaintance was not in the book, only in the table of contents. There is no page 43 in the book, page 42 continues on page 44 and so on. I wanted to exchange my copy of the book (with the error) for a correct one, but in the bookshop it turned out that there was no page 43 in any copies of the book. A book with a vanished story, an anthology with a vanished author.

But everything I read in the desert lacks weight. The desert silence drowns out our sentences. And I think about the fact that our writing was flawed, because we were in a hurry to transpose into words an event in which Something happened, whereas over and over again we should have been describing a state in which Nothing happens.

At the beginning of the 1990s, I had a small bookshop in the Sarajevo Society of Writers, beside the stairs leading to the upper floor and the garden behind the building. I sometimes went there with you, when you were seven or eight, your interest in the space and the people who gathered there didn’t last long and you would begin to get bored. If my friend Dario happened to be in the building, he would take you to the video shop in Kralj Tomislav Street and you would rent some videocassettes. You would stay in his apartment near the military hospital, watching films, while he came back to keep me company in the bookshop. Later, in the war, the video shop ceased to exist, an acquaintance of ours opened a restaurant on the premises, a very attractive and agreeable place, with old sofas and comfortable armchairs. There were some forgotten videocassettes there, and they were used as decorations in the restaurant. Someone else occupied Dario’s apartment during the war, and he tried for years to get back into his room. When he finally succeeded, he died. The bookshop, too, ceased to exist. In the early summer of 1992, I went there to see what state the books were in, but the writers who were supposedly taking care of the building had thrown them out, into the rain. My books in the rain.

Do you remember, once we were going to a soccer field behind your secondary school in Falls Church and you asked me to let us out of the car in the big parking lot, just so that you could show me the place where an angry, armed high school pupil had killed a girl from your class? We found a few wilted flowers on the spot. We stood there, you spoke softly, still unsettled by the event, you raised your arm and pointed toward the school building in front of us and said: “I was at that window, and I saw everything.”

My PTSD, and your PTSD.

We are two bodies filled with traumas that were never appropriately treated. I feel guilty for not having taken you out of Sarajevo during the war. That’s why I’ve been indulging you all these years, fulfilling your wishes and protecting you. And I know that this doesn’t do you any good: all these years I have been weighing you down with care and supervision, I’m a burden that slows you down and from which you would, probably, gladly free yourself, but nevertheless you put up with me. My additional problem is the way in which your PTSD manifests itself. You are attracted to danger, and that’s a consequence of the war, adrenaline dependency. That’s why you spend whole nights in empty spaces, under the stars, meeting people there who have their own reasons for insomnia. Everyone here is armed. The world is a dangerous place. I, too, am a frightened man. Perhaps you should have a dog to be near you on these nights and look after you. A German shepherd? A husky would suit you, one with blue eyes. Two wolves in the desert! I’ll bring you a puppy to grow up beside you. And I’ll buy a bandana, which you could tie around his neck. Maybe blue? To go with his eyes . . .

It was still light when we reached Phoenix, three hours before my flight; we had enough time to go back once more to “our” apartment. The sun was going down, so the evening light above the city was orange. In the parking lot in front of the complex, we found a free space. We went through the narrow door into the courtyard between the six buildings, linked by iron fences. The light of the setting sun no longer penetrated here, and suddenly it was dusk; lamps were being lit in the windows of the ground-floor apartments, and as we walked I glanced into the rooms in the hope of possibly seeing a familiar face. At a stone table beside the empty swimming pool a girl was sitting in the company of three men who paid no attention to us. She was very young, and I thought that at the time when we lived here she hadn’t yet been born. The empty beer bottles and the blue canvas chair faded in the sun were still beside the door of our apartment. The windows were dark, either there was no one there or the tenant had fallen asleep. I sat down on the canvas chair. “There’s no point in taking your photograph now,” said Harun. “The light’s not good enough.” I sat on the canvas chair, which I may have brought here twenty years earlier, looking at the empty bottles of Miller Lite beer, which I might have left behind, and waited for something to happen. It couldn’t be that I’d come back and this place had no response to my return. I sat on the canvas chair after a week spent on the road, after troubled dreams in cheap motels and deserts under the starry sky. And I had felt more or less at home everywhere, apart from here, at the address 1601 Camelback Road, no. 201! Here I am most foreign. And now I can calmly forget everything.

“Let’s go!” says Harun.

“Just one more minute,” I say. And then we wait for that minute to pass.

But what is most important always remains unsaid! We parted in haste, a quick hug, meager words still hovered in the air, your red pickup had already disappeared among the other vehicles in the dusk, and I wanted to say:

“Son, I came finally to free you of myself! There, you’re free, go off into your desert!”

Son,

You’re on your way to your home, and I’m at the airport and will soon be on the plane. And the moment I found an empty table in the airport café, I saw a sparrow flying over the large waiting area opposite and I thought of Tomaž Šalamun. A poet, he had the habit, whenever he came to America on his writer’s business, of calling from those hotels within reach of the airport, after his flight had been canceled, or he would simply call from an airport café like this one, and then we would chat while he waited for his flight. Ever since I’ve lived here, my most important contacts with friends have been carried out like that. Over the telephone. On one occasion, his flight from Denver was canceled because of heavy snow; I said that I was familiar with the boredom that engulfs one at airports, but that there is no greater loneliness than that of hotel rooms within reach of the airport, while we wait for the next day’s flight; he disagreed, because that was not the case with him, in a plane or at an airport or in an airport hotel he was never bored. And he said then: “Even when I’m not particularly in the mood for writing, I write a few poems on the plane.” Whenever I’m at an airport, I search for Šalamun’s password that would liberate me of my solitude. And I always look carefully around me until I catch sight of a sparrow. In every airport there is a sparrow fluttering its wings anxiously under the building’s glass cupolas. The official airport sparrow.

There. Our journey was good. Now I know that the two of us are very much alone. Two solitudes. When we first arrived in this city, you were thirteen, I was thirty-five, now you are thirty-three and the contemporary of the me of twenty years ago. Time melts more quickly than ice in the desert. In fact, time is not the issue, since I passed fifty, I know that everyone dies young. The question is: What will you make of your solitude? Look after yourself, drive carefully, and read clever books. Lock the house when you go out, and always take a sweater with you, the weather can change abruptly.

The clouds were the color of oil, Harun wanted to take

a few photographs of the sky. And then it began to rain.

We took shelter in a café, the one by the Russian shop

where we buy food from Slavic lands.

We scurried in and sat down at the only free table.

Now bent over a camera we look

at the pictures you’ve taken, surprised by the look of the clouds

that we’d seen in reality a couple of minutes ago.

There’s a sullen-looking type at the next table.

I didn’t notice him when we came in,

I pay attention when he asks: “Russians?”

And then he says: “Go back to Russia!”

He has The Washington Post on his lap,

who knows what he’s been reading there today

that makes our Slavic accent so irritating

that he lost control and said: “Go back to Russia!”

I was wounded and angry. When our eyes met, he drew his head

into his shoulders and sank more deeply into the leather armchair.

Only then do I see the woman sitting beside him.

She says: “Let’s go home.”

He says: “We can’t, it’s raining.”

She says: “So what? We’ll run to the car.”

The two of them live together. I paid attention to her,

because it was easy to recognize her Russian accent when she spoke.

They soon left, but when they were already at the door,

he turned back to tell me once again: “Go back to Russia!”

She turned to us with an apologetic look.

Then they started to run. And when they reached the other side of the road,

They could no longer be seen for the rain.