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.