After we came to America, he quickly mastered the language, his new world opened up to him far more quickly and clearly than to me, he soon became a local, while I remained a foreigner. And then came generational differentiation. He stopped asking me questions, my world was as familiar to him as a book he’d read or a film he’d seen, while I began asking him questions about everything I found foreign but was part of his reality. It was as though we had changed roles overnight.

Besides, he rarely opens up, he doesn’t show emotions, indeed he hides them resolutely. He is the diametric opposite of me: I immediately make all my feelings public. This makes him old-fashioned, the way Bosnian fathers used to be, and probably still are, believing that showing emotion is a sign of weakness. In that division, it was as though we had changed ages or generational places. He behaves toward me like a father, while I am a child to him. I’m more foreign here than he is. But I know that he also sees himself as foreign, from the way he reacts to the Asian tourists taking photographs of themselves beside his pickup, convinced presumably that both the vehicle and its driver are authentic locals. He laughs at that, as though it is a misunderstanding. That we are foreigners I know from the silence that sets in when a policeman stops us on the road, as we sit calmly in the truck waiting for him to speak to us.

Arizona. The question the policeman asked him after he had stopped us on the road: “How many guns do you have in the vehicle?”

This evening we looked at the photographs taken the previous day. I was surprised to find myself in the pictures, as I had not been aware I was being photographed. They are chance portraits. Harun had arranged his cameras to record the landscape in front of us for several hours, and during that time we stayed here, we chatted, stretched, looked at the sky, moved to the left or right; I forgot about the cameras around us, and that’s how I happened to wander unconsciously into the space in front of their lenses and those chance portraits came into being.