“Area 51, you say?”

An elderly couple, with walking sticks, lean on each other as they walk. They got out of their car at a gas station, and, dependent on each other in their mutual support, they went inside to buy a sack of ice. Ice is something you can’t do without in the desert. But what are such old people doing in the desert at the very end of their lives? Of all places in the world? A desert? With their sticks, leaning on each other, they inch forward together, step by step.

I’m reading in the desert. I bought this book after I heard that it contained a story by an acquaintance of mine. It’s a book of very short stories, which they call here flash fiction because of their striking brevity. The contents state that the story is on page 43. But when I opened the book, the story was not there, my acquaintance was not in the book, only in the table of contents. There is no page 43 in the book, page 42 continues on page 44 and so on. I wanted to exchange my copy of the book (with the error) for a correct one, but in the bookshop it turned out that there was no page 43 in any copies of the book. A book with a vanished story, an anthology with a vanished author.

But everything I read in the desert lacks weight. The desert silence drowns out our sentences. And I think about the fact that our writing was flawed, because we were in a hurry to transpose into words an event in which Something happened, whereas over and over again we should have been describing a state in which Nothing happens.

At the beginning of the 1990s, I had a small bookshop in the Sarajevo Society of Writers, beside the stairs leading to the upper floor and the garden behind the building. I sometimes went there with you, when you were seven or eight, your interest in the space and the people who gathered there didn’t last long and you would begin to get bored. If my friend Dario happened to be in the building, he would take you to the video shop in Kralj Tomislav Street and you would rent some videocassettes. You would stay in his apartment near the military hospital, watching films, while he came back to keep me company in the bookshop. Later, in the war, the video shop ceased to exist, an acquaintance of ours opened a restaurant on the premises, a very attractive and agreeable place, with old sofas and comfortable armchairs. There were some forgotten videocassettes there, and they were used as decorations in the restaurant. Someone else occupied Dario’s apartment during the war, and he tried for years to get back into his room. When he finally succeeded, he died. The bookshop, too, ceased to exist. In the early summer of 1992, I went there to see what state the books were in, but the writers who were supposedly taking care of the building had thrown them out, into the rain. My books in the rain.