Multiculturalism, I went on, has its good side, too, and if one takes into consideration the long tradition of British, and white men’s, racism in Canada, then the introduction of multiculturalism as an official state policy is entirely justified, but in the end, if multiculturalism has no other objective than continual self-affirmation, then it turns into a kind of soft racism, stripped of the violence, rage, and polemical overtones. I sounded silly to myself as I said these words while the German tourists were vying to out-yodel each other. Daniel Atijas took another sip of his beer, licked his lips again, and said that he had believed his whole life that multiculturalism was the pinnacle of societal achievement and that it was what had made him glad to be living in a country such as Yugoslavia. But, Ivan Matulić’s grandson interrupted, it was precisely the collapse of Yugoslavia that showed that the policy of multiculturalism led, in extreme cases, to inflaming differences until they became irreconcilable. Besides, he said, if there was someone who should be disheartened and dismayed, then that should be he, for he, and he could say this to us now, had done his part to bring about the downfall of multiculturalism. A small part, true, he said, but sometimes a single grain of salt is all that is needed to disturb the equilibrium and send a wave hurtling outward, destroying everything in its path. The German tourists had stopped singing and were studying the bill the waitress had brought them. Daniel Atijas stared at the grandson, and for the first time since we’d met, I couldn’t read precisely which it was in his gaze, hatred or pity.
Who knows, my gaze was, perhaps, giving off something similar, so I made an effort to look at no one, nothing, not even the beer mug. I had needed ten days to work out a strategy and elaborate all the details for how I might get close to Daniel Atijas, yet Ivan Matulić’s grandson had come closer to him, I could feel it, in less than three, or was it four, hours. Even if what I had sensed was hatred, it was a hatred that attracted, unlike the hatred that might have been in my gaze, and which belonged to that more sincere variety, a hatred that raises obstacles, that is capable of murder. I would have given anything, I thought, to be back at my studio just then, focused on the face as never before. Later, of course, I regretted even thinking of hatred, but at that point it was too late to do anything, and it seemed somehow unjust that I be the only one to come away from it all unscathed, so I brought the almost-forgotten hatred out, which until then I had suppressed under the clamor of German yodeling and shouting, and cloaked myself in it as if it were some sort of cape which I wear to this day. All of this is now moot, of course, like the countless other things that at one moment mean so much to us, yet later, after only a few minutes, we can no longer understand how we could have paid them — the thing or person, regardless — so much attention. Later, much later, I realized that, albeit unintentionally, Ivan Matulić’s grandson and I had confronted Daniel Atijas with challenging dualities: light versus darkness; here a door opening, there a world closing; first a hush, then silence. But the road to silence always traverses noise, and so we, too, had first to suffer with the commotion at The Coyote’s Den, then the crowds at The Sailor’s Pub, until finally, taking shortcuts and back alleys, we came out on the path by the cemetery along which Daniel Atijas and I had come into town, except that now we were climbing it up to the Banff Centre.
We went to Lloyd Hall, veering around three little dark mounds, which we were convinced were three slumbering deer, and went up to Daniel Atijas’s room. By then we were very drunk, we staggered and propped each other up, and later, when Daniel Atijas took an unopened bottle of whiskey from his suitcase and placed it on the table, the night turned into a series of fragments with blunt edges between which there were blanks. I woke up in my room on the floor by the bed, fully dressed. I didn’t know how I’d gotten there, how I’d left Daniel Atijas’s room, what had happened to Ivan Matulić’s grandson. All I knew was that every movement, even the slightest, made my head fall to pieces and then, in some magnificent way, reassemble itself. The red light on the phone was blinking, a sign that someone had been looking for me and, not having found me, had left a message. I thought, of course, of Daniel Atijas, then of the grandson, and then, though I tried to fend it off, of Mark Robinson and the director of the Literary Arts Programs, but I could not bring myself to press anything, even the telephone receiver, to my temple, though if I had rested the phone on one of my big ears my ear would have held it far enough away from my skull for comfort. The light blinked, and slowly, as if in a slow-motion film, I moved from lying down to sitting. I rested for a moment and then managed to stand, though only for a second, because I had to sit right down again on the edge of the bed.
If someone had suggested just then that I should lean over and look under the bed, I thought, I would have punched him so hard that I would have knocked all his teeth down his throat. This was pure exaggeration, for there was no way I could even lift my arm, let alone get the momentum going or direct a blow to a specific spot. But suddenly I thought that maybe this was exactly what I should be doing, that I ought to lean over and look under the bed. If I had turned up next to the bed without knowing how I’d gotten there, mightn’t there be someone underneath it? The light kept blinking in closer and closer sync with the pain pulsing in my temples, the back of my head, my neck, and it made no difference at all whether I was watching it or had squeezed my eyes shut. Slowly, quite slowly, I crouched, then kneeled with my palms on the rug. When I tried to bring my head to the floor, keeping my balance by thrusting my bottom into the air, the blood rushed so violently into my temples that it nearly toppled me over. There was no way around it: I had to lie back down. Some people are so destined, I said later to Daniel Atijas, no matter what they do, no matter how hard they try, to always end up at the beginning. Daniel Atijas dismissed this with a wave. He was the one who ought to be complaining, he said, noting that at least until he left, there would be no switching of roles; in other words, he was the only real loser, and he would stay that way to the end. But under the bed, when I finally raised the hem of the bedspread and peered into the wan darkness, no one was there. I don’t know what I was expecting to find, and probably, considering the shape I was in, I was expecting nothing.
When you contain emptiness, you cannot hope for much better than more emptiness, though it would make more sense to call this hollowness, for emptiness can be filled, whereas hollowness is what remains when everything else is taken away — the closest description of my state that morning. Emptiness, said Daniel Atijas in response to this, is the presence of absence; hollowness, he went on, is the absence of presence. Of course, I replied, though I was miffed that I hadn’t come up with this myself. Ivan Matulić’s grandson said nothing. Maybe he hadn’t yet joined us at that point, maybe it was just the two of us, but that doesn’t matter so much now, even though who is listening to someone’s words always matters, for just as a tree falling, unheard, in the woods makes no sound, a person who is speaking only to himself is not actually speaking to anyone; he is silent. All I had left to do, I told Daniel Atijas, was to stand, which I finally did after who knows how long, and then, just as I was, at last, on my feet, the light on the phone stopped blinking. I suddenly remembered everything that Ivan Matulić’s grandson had been talking about, though I couldn’t decide whether it was at The Coyote’s Den or The Sailor’s Pub, or in Daniel Atijas’s room. I remembered how at first I had listened to him with a little smile, the way we usually like to show the person speaking that we are, genuinely or otherwise, interested in what they are saying, and how that smile began to fade. Actually, it froze, then it changed into a grimace, so all I could do was cover it with my hand and, using my fingers, poke downward at the corners of my mouth. I remembered how at one moment Daniel Atijas plunged his face into his hands as if to bury it and how I noticed then for the first time that his hair was thinning.