I was sitting at home looking at my photographs. Italy, Baykal, Namibia, Belgium, America... I put the pictures aside and "looked anent". My house... I mouth these words with great tenderness, for it's only recently that (first in my life, when I'm close to seventy) I finally have my own house... I looked around, leaving my eyes for a moment on each object...
And suddenly I realized I do not know my house... I think that there are not so many people who are familiar with their own house. We put an object somewhere and forget about it. The order of gradually accumulated things reflects the character of their owner...
I took my camera and started taking photographs of my house, feverishly, as if afraid that it will run away from me... In a couple hours I made, without thinking, about three hundred pictures.
I was tired. I sat down and my eye lighted on the photographs I had laid aside earlier: Italy, Baykal, Namibia... Some strange and completely new feeling descended upon me, the one I was not able to define...
As if it was not me looking at these photographs but they were looking at me and telling me where such estrangement comes from. Why are you taking such detached view at everything? Don't you feel that we are your house, too...
People's eyes looking at me saying: we are your brothers and sisters...Silken grass of Toscana landscapes making my bed... The fancy lines of Kalahari sands and orange dunes of Namibia repeating exactly my childhood drawings...I must sound magnfical but, honestly: I drank water from Baykal! The gaze of a black from Harlem was no different than that of Misha, the railway station attendant in my native Bakhmach. There was a sort of common denominator to all of them, something that bound the photographs of my travels and those of my home...
I'll make a confession now that would be a good reason for taking someone to a madhouse. It is one of my revelations, too. I won't talk of it at long. Once, amid my morning rituals, I realized that in one moment I ... saw everything. It is hard to explain it in words, but, believe me, I saw everything.
And that was my house.