Twenty minutes
July 21, 2016

We had been slowely circling up the mountain, and stepped out of the car on its highest point. A restaurant, a terrace, a parking place, the usual. Cold and windy, but with a good sight over the valley. We strolled along for a bit, and I guess I didn’t immediately notice these buildings because they were located on a small hill, right beside the road. When I came closer, I felt the same thing as when I entered that underground cemetery in Buenos Aires, that exciting feeling of having access to something hidden, to a small world that seemed to exist on its own, different from where I just came from and miles away from it. This handful of buildings looked like a Siberian labour camp and it seemed abandoned (but it wasn’t).

As the weather became nastier by the minute, I hurried through the dirt roads, the mud and melting snow. Fog and rain coming in from the other side of the mountain rather quickly. Soon it would take away my sight, and the whole thing would disappear in whiteness. Twenty minutes. At the most.