INTRODUCTION – Namibia

... I was walking along a strip of damp sand where, after every retreating wave, the setting sun caught for a brief moment. Its reflection stretched ahead of me in a copper glow, broke apart over the tiny unevenness of the ground, and disappeared as soon as the water sank deeper beneath the surface. A few steps farther on, the next wave assembled it again. Near the ocean, the ground carried me firmly, while along the drier edge my feet sank in and left behind footprints with crumbling borders. I kept myself between those two surfaces, moving closer to the water or stepping a little higher up according to how far the foam had reached.

Above the horizon, a wide orange band remained, fading upward until it dissolved into a cool blue. When I turned my head toward the desert, the low light revealed the folds of the nearest dunes, their taut ridges and shallow hollows where shadow had already settled. On the sides facing the sun, the sand had a warm, almost rusty shade. Just beside them, the slightest tilt was enough for the same ground to look greyish. I watched these transitions as I walked, and their borders shifted with every change in my position, so that a slope which seemed smooth from one place revealed another ripple a moment later. From time to time, a low veil of grains slid over the dry ground, caught on some small unevenness, and fell apart before I reached it.

The wind cooled my cheeks and left a salty taste on my lips. The surf sounded with a deep, continuous roar, but close to the shore I gradually began to distinguish softer sounds within it: the brief hush of falling water, the crackling of bubbles in the foam, and finally the quiet hiss as the last thin layer of ocean withdrew. Now and then I came so close that the water washed away the edge of my footprint before I had even shifted my weight onto the other foot. I did not have to decide anything larger than the next step, and after a while I noticed that my shoulders, which I had been holding slightly raised, had dropped freely.

I stopped when the lower edge of the sun touched the horizon. The water beneath it was darker than I expected, and the brightness on its surface was breaking into short fragments that appeared and vanished again on the distant waves. The glowing disc diminished so slowly that at moments I could not perceive its movement. Yet it was enough to lower my eyes to the foam at my feet, and when I lifted my head again, a smaller part of it remained above the water. I watched until it narrowed into a low arc and the last bright edge disappeared as well.

The sky held its colour for a long time afterward. On the coast, however, the change became visible almost at once: the small grooves in the sand stopped casting clear shadows, and the slopes behind me lost their separate shades, merging into larger, calmer surfaces. The wind, which until then I had felt mainly on my face, began to pass through my clothes as well. I walked a few more steps and looked back once more toward the place where the sun had set, as if I needed to see even the moment after its departure.

On that coast, Remíza was coming to an end for me. When I thought of its black-and-white pages, I felt a strange relief that the story they belonged to had already taken shape and could now remain open before other people too. There were things in it for which I had once struggled to find words, and yet, in the end, I had allowed them to be spoken, without the possibility of taking them back every time uncertainty stirred. Remíza had set me free, and I felt that freedom in the most ordinary way too: in the chance to stand on the Namibian coast and give my full attention to an evening that wanted nothing more from me.

Even then, I knew I wanted to write a second book. I carried within me experiences from my travels that I longed to return to, places and moments where I would have liked to give someone else the same slow looking around that I had just allowed myself. When I looked at the last colour above the ocean, I did not want to let it disappear simply because the day had ended. I imagined it on a page, beside words that could preserve the chill growing on my skin and the slight hesitation of a foot in soft sand. That book had to be in colour. At the thought of it, I could already see shades I would not want to turn grey.

But relief had not removed all caution from me. When I imagined the people I would want to tell about this evening, with some of them I still caught myself reducing my own joy in advance. In harder times, their closeness had seemed self-evident to me, but since I had better news as well, I had begun to feel gaps in it that at first I could not explain. Some of those voices had belonged to my life for so long that it had never even occurred to me to wonder whether one day they might feel distant. I did not know enough about their reasons. I only knew that new restraint in myself, with which I sometimes kept good things to myself, even though they were exactly what I wanted to share.

Meanwhile, the water ahead of me had darkened, and on its surface mostly torn strips of foam remained visible. I lifted my head, took one more breath of ocean air, and turned back toward the tent. In the dry sand I had to lift my feet higher, and after each step part of the ground slid from beneath my sole. Only then did I feel the tiredness in my calves, until that moment scattered by the steady movement along the shore. The tent appeared in the dusk as a low outline, its stretched fabric giving way for a moment in a stronger gust and then tightening again.

At the entrance I bent down and opened the zipper. Its rough sound rang very close, sharp and distinct after so long spent listening to the ocean. I crawled inside, sat down, and took off my shoes. Sand poured out of them, some onto the ground in front of the tent, some toward its edge, from where I pushed it out with my palm. A few grains remained stuck to my skin. I could feel them between my toes even after brushing off my hands, and for a while I occupied myself only with that small discomfort, while the space outside the open entrance turned into a more and more continuous darkness.

When I closed the tent, the ocean remained audible, but I no longer had an image to go with its sound. Above it, with each gust of wind, came the rustling of fabric and the occasional brief tightening of the wall near my head. Inside, there was the dry smell of equipment mixed with air from the coast. I lay down, adjusted the position of my legs, and let my tired muscles slowly release. Beneath my back I felt the hardness of the ground, which the thin layer under me could not completely separate me from.

I waited for the new day, and fragments of the evening still returned in my mind. The one that stayed there longest was the moment when the sun was no longer visible, yet its light remained on the landscape, as if each surface were cooling at its own pace. I thought of the second book and felt the desire to begin, mixed with uncertainty about how much of myself I would still recognize in it. I had the experiences, but some of them I needed to return to more slowly than I had once passed through them. I wanted to allow myself to remain also with moments from which no immediate answer had come.

Inside the tent, there was no longer enough light to make out small details. I could see only the place where darker areas of fabric met above me, and with every gust their edges shifted slightly. I stopped following where the wind was coming from, and gradually stopped following what I had just been thinking about as well. The images of future pages loosened, longer and longer gaps appeared between them, and into those gaps the surf returned, still present, even though I was no longer paying attention to it.

When I opened my eyes in the morning, the canvas above me was letting light through. At first it seemed flat and without a clear direction, but after a while I recognized a warmer shade on one side and delicate shadows in the folds. The air was cold. I sat up, ran my palms over my face, and remained still for a moment, listening. The ocean sounded just as persistently as it had in the evening, while the tent moved only lightly in the wind. Everything around me fit into a few nearby objects and into the fabric behind which morning had already begun.

I reached toward the entrance and felt the cold zipper pull between my fingers. When I tugged it, a narrow bright slit appeared in the wall, slowly lengthening and widening. A clear strip of light fell directly across my hand. For a moment, I could see in it every tiny line in my skin and the grains of sand caught near my nails. Then I pulled the fabric aside, and the sun struck my face so sharply that I had to narrow my eyes. For a while I perceived mostly the light and its warmth on my cheeks, until shapes began to emerge from the brightness.

In front of the tent, the desert stretched out.

The nearest slope was so clear that I could make out the thin grooves left by the wind, the small regular ripples, and the places where their order had been disturbed and the grains had formed a smoother surface. Across the lit side spread a pale yellow, lower down shifting into a warmer sandy shade. In the hollow at the foot of the dune, a grey-violet shadow remained. Beyond this dune, others rose up, at first with sharp edges, then softer and softer, until at the limit of sight their outlines almost merged with the sky. My eyes moved from one ridge to the next, and each time found another behind it, less distinct.

In the evening, I had gradually lost details in that same landscape; now they were appearing everywhere I looked. The light caught small unevennesses and gave them depth, so that even a patch of ground very close to me offered more than I could take in with a single glance. When a gust of wind came, a thin layer of sand shifted across the surface, so low that all the larger forms remained visible beneath it. In the lit place, individual grains briefly flashed, and a little farther on they blended back into the ground. I remained in the entrance of the tent longer than was necessary for an ordinary look around, leaning on one hand beside me, my face turned toward the sun.

For the second book, I had the title BYŤ sám, and ahead of me the year 2028, when I wanted to give it to readers. At the thought of creating it, I felt something similar to what I felt before this space: I could distinguish the nearest details, while the more distant things still had no fixed outlines. I wanted to capture my journeys in such a way that the person who had passed through them would remain there too, with everything he understood at the time and with everything he realized only later. And I wanted to give room to a moment like this, even though outwardly all that had happened in it was that I opened the tent in the morning.

My shoes still remained by the entrance. I slipped under its low edge, stepped outside, and straightened up into the fresh air, which cooled the parts of my body turned away from the sun. Behind my back, the loose fabric moved and lightly touched my hand, but I kept watching the nearest slope for a little longer. Then I shifted my weight forward, and my foot sank into sand that, beneath its thin, already warmed surface, still held the cold of the night.

- Jakub Kováč -