At first, of course, it looked as if they wouldn’t even shake hands, let alone sit at the same table, and I even thought, watching the restraint with which the grandson greeted Daniel Atijas, that this was all wrong and that the grandson — and I was prepared to bet on it at the time — would soon be on his way. I reckoned that Guy Fletcher must have told him something, who knows what, for nothing else could have explained the grandson’s reticence. The next morning while we were at breakfast, actually while we were holding our cups of coffee, Daniel Atijas explained that coffee drinking was a ritual that now marked, without fail, every encounter between people from his former country, especially if they were in enemy camps, regardless of whether the person was someone who actually lived there, such as Daniel Atijas himself, or a descendant, such as Ivan Matulić’s grandson. All this, said Daniel Atijas, flagging down the waiter, is inevitable, and understandably inevitable at that, he said, for time is remembered, in the words of a poet, as a series of segments strung between wars, as a series of time markers — before, after, during the war — and therefore those who share war, he said, feel greater affinity than those who share peace. And greater distrust, he added a little later, when I’d already assumed he would not be speaking again, for he, he said, was from Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, and Ivan Matulić was from Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, and, he said, the greater part of the war went on in a conflict between Serbs and Croats, from which neither of them, though one was a Canadian and the other a Jew, could escape.
Short on sleep and long on caffeine, I could accept that explanation calmly, but the previous evening I had not hidden my surprise and dismay. Ivan Matulić’s grandson had shown, of course, typical western-Canadian politeness, but this was only a façade. I believe that Daniel Atijas could feel it too, but he never, not even for a moment, betrayed himself. He walked to the grandson’s right and I to the grandson’s left, and spoke as if the existence of the world depended on what he would say. They spoke in English, though not so much for my sake as for the sake of the grandson, for his Croatian, he said, had been reduced to everyday niceties, stock phrases, and, of course, swear words. That is how it started: with a story about language. We had strolled around the streets of Banff talking about language and the identity problems of first- and second-generation immigrants, along the way settling on where we might go for dinner. Daniel Atijas mentioned local specialties, Ivan Matulić’s grandson was all for Ukrainian, I was up for sushi. In the end we went to The Coyote’s Den. The grandson had grown gentler by then; his face was fuller, his answers longer, and his questions less frequent. From that moment until about midnight he addressed me more often than he did Daniel Atijas because he was talking about things that I, he believed, could understand. And I did. All of us in Canada, after all, were immigrants, some earlier and some later, with only a handful of people, five-six hundred thousand Indians, who could claim to have come from here, who really belonged to country and clime, so the story of Ivan Matulić’s grandson, the first part of his story, actually, was very familiar.
In order to give voice to everything that was bothering him, said the grandson, he would have to start from the middle and move forward and backward in time, sometimes in space as well, though that shouldn’t worry him, said Daniel Atijas, as there are stories that can be told only that way. There are those, he said, that have to follow a linear sequence, in which what follows cannot be told before what precedes it, just as there are those, he said, which should be told backwards, starting from the end, though he always felt, he said, that the best are those which, like the grandson’s, start from the middle and then, a little like a tangled skein, resist anyone’s predictions about how they will unravel. We kept walking along the main street, on the stretch from Buffalo to Wolf, because this is where the restaurants were that we had been debating about. The grandson’s story had not begun until we stepped into The Coyote’s Den, though he had already been talking for nearly an hour. Two or three times till then we had stopped so that they, Daniel Atijas and the grandson, could settle a difference, but nothing grew out of it; even when they raised their voices, it didn’t seem to become a point for serious contention. First there was talk of language, of that double world, the twofold microcosm of new immigrants from which, said the grandson, when he’d finally left his family home, he came out dazed, split in two, as open as a seashell but also glad, he said, that at last he was on his way to becoming whole, complete, alone — and he was not shy about saying this. First of all he stopped eating any kind of Croatian food, for there was nothing quite so awful, he said, as when he’d come home from school, open the front door, and be assaulted by the smells of food, after which he would sink back into the Croatian language in a world in which there was simply nothing else.
He didn’t know, he said, whether he would be able to explain this clearly, but sometimes because of being split this way he thought he was losing his mind. The front door to his house was like a magical gateway, he said, because on both sides of it there was a reality that was unreal in terms of the reality on the other side. He wouldn’t want someone to think, he said, that he didn’t love his parents or his grandfather, but while he watched his friends at school his only thought was how he wanted to be like them, living in only one language, in a body that wasn’t cleft in two. When he came home from school, he’d see his grandfather snoring on the living room sofa, his mother’s mother, a kerchief over her hair, fussing in clouds of steam over pots and pans and brandishing a wooden spoon, and he would start thinking right away about how to be as different as possible from them. He remembered, he said, how at the time he longed to be an astronaut, who could live, he earnestly hoped, in outer space, far from his home in the northeastern part of Calgary. At that point we were already sitting at a table in The Coyote’s Den having a beer. Daniel Atijas had raised the issue of multiculturalism and embarked on a long sentence, but both Ivan Matulić’s grandson and I almost simultaneously broke in, claiming that what we were talking about, or what the grandson was talking about, had nothing to do with multiculturalism. The world either opens or it closes, I said, and that is all that counts.
Multiculturalism is an ideal, said the grandson, which is not doable. Living in layers, I said, doesn’t work. Or being in two places at once, said the grandson. Daniel Atijas looked first at him and then at me and asked why the two of us had attacked him in unison. He smelled a conspiracy, he said, and in that case, the best thing would be to order another beer. He turned to look for a waiter. I had nothing against beer, I said, nor was this a conspiracy of two Canadians against a Yugoslav, but he, Daniel Atijas, I said, had touched on a painful nerve in our society, and we, I said, nodding at Ivan Matulić’s grandson, were compelled to react. Daniel Atijas said that now he was really confused; he had always assumed that the politics of multiculturalism were the best way of overcoming and eradicating differences. Oh, no, I said, multiculturalism actually exacerbates differences, even making them insurmountable with its pointless insistence on the fact that everyone is sufficient unto him- or herself and that traditions should be preserved in a vacuum beyond the reach of other influences; yet the only way to survive, I said, which is true for the whole living world, is to mingle: there is no other way. The waitress brought three steins and set them in the middle of the table. We clinked glasses, drank in silence, then licked the foam from our lips. Only our table was quiet, of course, for The Coyote’s Den, as always during the summer months, was packed. We could hear words of Dutch, French, and Japanese, as well as strains of a song that German tourists were drunkenly singing. Don’t get us wrong, I said to Daniel Atijas, or rather, I corrected myself, don’t get me wrong, because it is difficult enough to speak in one’s own name, let alone for someone else, especially, I said, when you don’t really know the someone else.