But you think differently: “I cover my hair with a scarf so it doesn’t get in my way when I’m taking photographs. Or I soak the scarf in water to cool me in the desert.”
Our desert soundtrack: “Blood Like Lemonade,” Morcheeba—“Scott & Zelda,” Tiny Victories—“New Dawn Fades,” Moby—“Blackout,” Hybrid—“Chord Sounds,” Moby—“Beachcoma,” Hybrid—“The Ghost Inside,” Broken Bells.
Zagreb, November 1995–January 1996. You escape obsessively into video games. Super Mario’s musical phrase, repeated ad infinitum, was our Croatian refugee soundtrack.
What did you say this town is called? Above the front doors of the houses in the main street, lights are on all day long.
It was already pitch dark, we were driving toward an abandoned mining town (Rhyolite), when a wild rabbit leaped out onto the road in front of us, disappearing under the moving car. Crazy bunny! But there was no sound, nothing had happened. We stopped and looked into the darkness beside the road—“I didn’t kill it.”
“No, you didn’t.”
Last autumn, we were driving after midnight through Shenandoah Valley, when out of the fog in front of us a group of alarmed deer—stags, does, and their young, hundreds of them—crossed from the left to the right side of the road, it must have been the time of year for them to migrate, and we had to drive very slowly, and we were in a hurry to get home. Fog and fear of blood and damp, warm fur.
What am I doing? I’m describing events that you witnessed on this journey, or you were present in them, in the recent or more distant past. But that’s all right. It’s not wrong to describe for another something he can see for himself. What else do sports commentators do in the course of a broadcast match? What they describe can be irritating for the spectators watching it. But I’m doing this because I’m interested now above all in events where we were both present, I’m interested in images from our shared memory. I came here with the intention that we should compare those memories, so that I would discover something about my forgetfulness. And have I discovered anything? No. In fact I’ve found that you suppress certain memories (above all of the war). Your reasons are understandable. I envy you that, because my most intense memories are of events I would gladly forget. Remembering and forgetting stand side by side, they’re made of the same substance. “Forgetting is the absent brother of Remembering,” says Cees Nooteboom.
An abandoned mining town on the edge of the desert. After the miners left, artists lived here for a while. Then they, too, left, while their sculptures remained. Art and ruins.
When nature takes them over, when ivy covers the walls, when a pine tree starts to grow through a roof—abandoned houses have an unexpected beauty . . . But abandoned places are unprotected and there are always those who come to wreak havoc and destroy with impunity.