Dmitry Berkut

It started raining in Rabat, and honestly, I’m a little relieved we don’t have to go anywhere outside the medina to look at architectural excesses. The truth is, I’m not really a tourist. I can easily fly to another country just to sit with a cup of mint tea and watch people go by. Ticking off sights from a list doesn’t interest me.

We arrived in Rabat. The road made me a bit nauseous; my mom is holding up like a champ. The atmosphere here is completely different — calmer, and you barely see any foreigners. The sun is out, the muezzin is calling, everything’s cheaper. After touristy Chefchaouen, the contrast is real. I’m trying to get my mom into keeping a travel journal. It’s actually pretty therapeutic — writing things down while they’re still vivid. She seems willing so far; we’ll see how long that lasts.

And yet, when I look at the locals in their hooded robes up here in the Moroccan mountains, all the Bowles stories I’ve read come back to me. The inner world here is closed off, foreign to Western ways of thinking. If you were born into a different environment, you simply can’t understand it on its own terms. You can only watch — and form your own, inevitably naive, impression.

Chefchaouen is a blue city in the Rif Mountains. The walls are painted in shades from light to nearly black indigo. They say blue repels mosquitoes. In reality, the tradition came from Jewish refugees from Spain in the sixteenth century — they settled here and painted their houses the color of the sky as a reminder of God, who suddenly felt too distant. My mom touches the walls and asks why there is still so much blue. I say: because it works — people come here to take photos. Here, unlike in French-speaking Tangier, many people speak Spanish — the trace of those refugees remains not only on the walls. On our first day, after getting off the bus, we headed up the road into the hills because Google had placed our riad not in the medina but somewhere in the slums among the clouds. We realized this too late — it turned into quite the quest. That was my first impression — dragging my own bag and my mom’s suitcase up a forty-five-degree slope while the city lay below us, white and blue, compact. The air turned cold and damp. Then we literally walked into a cloud — it was hanging right over the slope. The houses dissolved into haze, the sounds became muffled. You walk, and around you is gray emptiness — only walls appearing out of the fog. But soon we switched on critical thinking, turned around, and went back down into the medina. There we asked every shopkeeper, showing the photo on our phone. Eventually we found it and checked into a very traditional riad, under whose windows loud Arabic conversation doesn’t stop until late at night. We’ll drink mint tea here for a couple of days and then move on — to Rabat.

We’re still in Tangier. Spent the day around the Cap Spartel lighthouse. Lighthouses always inspire me. And Tangier itself is like a lighthouse — except it shines in all directions at once. A crack between worlds. A place where the Atlantic argues with the Mediterranean, where Europe tiptoes into Africa, and time loses its rhythm, spilling in every direction. Tangier is weathered not from poverty, but from freedom. Its walls have peeled from seeing too much: smugglers and spies traded stories here; poets gambled away manuscripts in poker games. The city is a misfit by nature — too Arab for the French, too French for the Arabs, ultimately belonging to no one, not even itself. Tangier’s soul lives in that gap — in the smell of fresh mint battling the diesel fumes from the port, in the call from the minaret dissolving into rock ’n’ roll from an open window. Tangier doesn’t choose sides; it is the argument itself — that Atlantic wind carrying Sahara dust onto the tiled roofs of the medina, where it swirls, settles, and rises into the air again.

— This writer lived here? He’s everywhere. — You bet. Hiding from the American authorities. — What did he do? — Accidentally shot his wife in the head. — How do you accidentally do that?! — Playing William Tell. Aimed for the apple, missed. — You really know how to find places. We’ve checked into Burroughs’s old motel. The room looks like nothing’s changed since the fifties — his portrait on the wall, a wardrobe, a sink. Downstairs there’s the Tangerine bar, bass thumping up through the floor. It’s one a.m. I’m lying here, looking at the moon through the window, thinking: I always get what I want. One way or another.

Some families meet in the kitchen over tea. Ours has a slightly different geography. My mom and I live in different countries, and to see each other we have to pick a third place. Ideally — somewhere with as few triggers as possible and plenty of novelty. Last time it was the Camino de Santiago. Two weeks of rain, wet boots, heavy backpacks. But we made it. Not without mishaps, but we got there. This time it's Morocco. I'm flying from Porto, my mom from St. Petersburg. We're meeting in Tangier and figuring out the route as we go along. We'll see how it unfolds. But the fact that we keep trying — that's already something. upd: Right now I'm at the Tangier train station, waiting for her train from Casablanca.

There’s a mode where everything is about achievements and goals. And there’s another one — let’s call it the “Portuguese way” — where you simply let go. Not giving up, just releasing the need to hold on. That’s where I am now — as if I’ve dropped a backpack full of stones I’d been carrying for no real reason. In this mode there’s no “must”, only “want”. You read, watch films, dive into whatever sparks curiosity, write music for the first time, learn a language simply because it’s interesting. You map out trips you’ll take light. The world stops being a ladder to climb and becomes an open field — you walk, and under your feet there’s grass, stones, dust. You’re not rushing anywhere, yet you still end up somewhere. Because the important part isn’t the end point — it’s the journey itself. No strain, no perpetual race against time. Everything is already here.

Upon returning to Portugal, even after a short time away, I immediately notice how my view of the place I live in has shifted. The same river, the same streets, the same coffee, the same ocean — yet everything feels different. As if something had shifted within me in those few days. It’s a reminder, every time, that we never see the world as it is — we see it as we are. And the “I” is anything but constant. As we get older, it’s not that we become wiser; we simply change our lens. At twenty-one, it feels like you finally understand things as they truly are. At twenty-eight, you realize that was only one of many temporary insights. Those fabled seven-year cycles aren’t a straight line of growing up but a spiral: you move forward, yet each turn reveals a new layer of illusion. Someone who thinks at thirty-five, “now I really see it all,” simply hasn’t reached the next bend. And when you finally grasp the depth of your former blindness, that’s the surest sign that you’re still blind — just to other things. You always look from a single vantage point and mistake it for the only truth. #Porto #Portugal

https://open.spotify.com/track/25hPoqtODEhAuQzLhEb9Kh?si=28e28c4a160b4c5a A trip-hop track I wrote to the poetry of Alexander Vvedensky, a Russian poet of the Silver Age who was killed by the Soviet authorities.

Туманный Порту похож на призрак. Улочки спускаются к Дору, и в молочном свете выцветшие стены выглядят словно акварель. Кажется, дождь смоет её в любую минуту. Идёшь по мостовой так, будто шагами пересекаешь слои времени. Никаких туристов — только местная жизнь, проступающая сквозь туман: дед, скручивающий самокрутку на крыльце, запах влажного камня, одинокий трамвай, возникающий из ниоткуда и тут же исчезающий. Такое блуждание похоже на медитацию. Туман убирает всё лишнее, оставляя детали: изгиб лестницы, отсвет в луже, тень за шторой. В эти минуты город говорит не словами, а намёками — запахом, влажным воздухом, мелкими жестами. И ты понимаешь, что Порту открывается только тем, кто готов немного потеряться в его утре.

мой новый трек https://open.spotify.com/album/748uLG0fzGsPNAVSGprD7E?si=E4ogN92cS5KkfQVEnmO51Q

Просто утро. Не хорошее, не плохое. Обычный день. Такие, без лишнего смысла — самые настоящие. Они не пытаются быть чем-то. Просто дождь, просто чашка кофе, просто португальская речь фоном. Иногда календарь выдаёт нейтральный сюжет. День без эпитетов, без оценки. Пространство, которое можно заполнить чем угодно — или ничем. Такие дни напоминают, что жизнь — не только события, но и паузы между ними. В этих паузах и начинаешь слышать самого себя.