Darmstadt! In the autumn of 1999, during the Frankfurt Book Fair, I stayed in the Jagdschloss Hotel in Kranichstein near Darmstadt in the company of some cheery Balkan writers. It rained most days. It always rains in Germany. We talked about literature and politics. On our last day, the sun came out. And this is the only image that I remember vividly from the few days I spent there:

The poet Ali Podrimja smoking a cigar in front of the hotel and holding an empty wooden box of Davidoffs. A snail was making its way gradually along the concrete wall. The poet had placed the wooden lid of the box in front of the snail, expecting, I presume, that it would slowly enter the box.

I ask him: “What are you doing?”

And Podrimja says: “I’m establishing a dialogue.”

We sat down on the place where the ice had melted and stayed sitting on the bare ground for a minute or two while your camera took a few photos of us. When we got back to the car, you quickly checked the photos on the camera’s small screen, and we looked carefully at one of the two of us. A photograph is successful—I’m paraphrasing Barthes (Camera Lucida)—in which one detail, the punctum, has a magnetism that brings us back to it repeatedly. The punctum on our picture shows an obvious symmetry. You are holding your left lower arm in your right hand. That’s an unconscious movement at the moment you are looking at the lens waiting for the camera automatically to take the photograph in front of it. I am also looking toward the eye of the camera and holding my lower right arm with my left hand. The same unconscious movement.

Do you remember M.? The photographer? It could have been 2002 or 2003, I took a roll of film to be developed (in those days there were shops processing film everywhere, digital photography had not yet taken over). When I collected the envelope with the printed photos a few days later, I found among them some that I first thought had been included by mistake. But they did after all show something familiar. It took a few moments for me to recognize objects from our apartment: bottles of medicine; the Sunday Washington Post on the floor beside the wastepaper basket; the shoes I had taken off in a hurry in the hall, and so on.