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: [email protected]. 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.