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.