When the Paper Drank the Sea: A Story Inspired by the Life of Paul Klee

Paul Klee arrives in Tunisia in spring carrying a box of colors he does not yet know, and an official at the city gate, asking him to declare the colors he carries, tells him that blue, red and yellow are only their names. In the city the walls are white enough to erase passersby, the doors are blue as if the sea had left its waves standing on them, and the sun walks through the alleys rearranging things from within. Sitting before the town of Hammamet, Klee watches the water carry his pigment past his pencil line, and the paper asks who told him it had made a mistake, since boundaries are no law of water. Domes dissolve into blue squares and a palm tree turns into music, and inside a color he meets a man resembling himself who says he must now paint what things do to his soul, until Klee writes the words that stayed with his name, a confession that color had taken possession of him. The book then becomes a watercolor workshop on listening to water and building light in transparent layers, and ends with a drop on a white sheet from which no one knows what sea may rise.