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.