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.