When we came to the camels‘ watering hole, the herdsman asked you who you were, and when you lifted my green scarf you had wrapped around your face he told you that he had known you as a small child, and pulling the water out from deep under the sand he asked you: Why do you cover your face?
– I’m not used to the sun anymore as I was as a child. I live in the city now and my face can’t be burnt black.
I wandered around these steep, long-legged animals as if they were tree trunks of some dry and ancient forest, and all of a sudden I had the overwhelming feeling that I was a small witness of something earth-old, something that was reaching back so long in history as the names Sirius, Aldebaran and Rigel were tall, something that had been there for thousands of years and had been repeating itself over and over ever since. And for the tiny, but endless circle of a split second I understood there was no such thing as time.
– What is he saying?
– The water is getting less every year. Soon there won’t be camels anymore. People are moving away from here to the city. Because nothing is here.
You show me the house of your grandparents in the distance of the horizon, hidden behind layers and layers of dry fields and thorny shrubs.
In the late afternoon we walk through wide fields of green wheat, lush and unexpected in the desert like an oasis, and under a huge acacia tree we would sit down and become a temporary part of the landscape.
The horizon remains enormous in every direction. And how many stories there are hidden in this leaden, forbidding land, silently waiting, longing to be told, like nests in which birds with colored plumage are hiding, improbable and marvellous in this dry, faded land.
– When my grandfather got married, he did not see the face of my grandmother for months because during the day there were other men and at night there was no light
That story to me was so far away in time, in space, in everything, that it seemed unreal, almost like a myth. But then I remembered how close their house was and that I had just seen it with my own eyes. Did that mean that we were unreal, too?
The last hours of the afternoon bloomed until all of a sudden, dawn approached and erased another day which later I would remember blurry like your face now is for me, veiled by layers of new days of which you were not part anymore.
(Thar Desert, 29. February 2017)
The image shows the artwork “the escapist”, an hand-colored aquatint etching. It is available here