It used to be that the finest artists were like giant sequoias, he said, towering above everyone else, but today, in the best of cases, they are no more than dwarf pines and cannot see themselves, let alone others. We, he said, are now regressing, and this, for certain, is a period of backward movement, like many others in human history, no doubt, but never has one lasted so long, nor has one offered us so little hope of radical change. This, he gestured toward the ceramic installation, is admittedly a consolation, but that is all that is left to us, consolation. We can hope for little else. His head dropped to his chest, his eyes closed, and I thought he would fall sleep, but then I saw that his eyelashes were fluttering and that he was peeking out beneath the lids. Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea for us to come to the gallery, I thought, because the coolness coming from the air conditioners refreshed the spirit and then dulled it, and the stimulating effect of the caffeine was slowly wearing off while its diuretic effect was becoming more pronounced. A dark-haired woman stepped into the gallery. She had on a dress with a flowery design, her hair was done up in a ponytail, she was in sandals. She went over to the mesa, crouched, and dipped the tip of her right index finger into the stream. Did he have any idea, I asked Daniel Atijas in a whisper, why Ivan Matulić’s grandson had spoken so often the night before of a secret? Daniel Atijas said not a word. The woman stood up, circled the mesa, stopped in the same place, crouched again. And did he know, I went on whispering, how I got to my room? Without standing up, the woman looked at me over her left shoulder.
With her right index finger she again touched the surface of the water. Daniel Atijas softly smacked his lips. The woman stood up and stretched, and for a moment her arms, outstretched, and legs, akimbo, described an almost-perfect letter X. Then she left. Daniel Atijas was convinced, he said a few minutes later when we went out after her, that she was the artist who had made the installation, and he could readily imagine, he said, the horror she must have felt when she came into the gallery and saw that there were only two discombobulated visitors there. Had I ever, he asked, sat in a gallery during one of my own shows and waited to watch the gallerygoers? And what did I then, he wanted to know, expect to see? He, he said, was appalled whenever he saw one of his readers. He of course had nothing against readers, he said, and in fact, he wasn’t at all concerned about them, but some of the people he saw, especially some of the women — no, he wouldn’t wish readers like that on anyone, not even on the writers of socialist realism. I continued to be interested in how I had reached my room the night before, but Daniel Atijas avoided answering, claiming that it wasn’t that he was avoiding an answer but that he did not know. Perhaps Ivan Matulić’s grandson, who’d be arriving shortly, would be able to help, said Daniel Atijas. The only thing he knew, he said, was that at one point he’d noticed I was no longer there, but he couldn’t remember whether Ivan Matulić’s grandson had said something to him, which didn’t need to mean anything, because it was quite plausible that he hadn’t asked him anything. Words by then had become as heavy as sandbags, he said, and every time he tried to speak, he had the impression that his tongue might snap off.
At the thought that Ivan Matulić’s grandson and he had been alone together after my departure, no matter what had transpired, everything inside me snapped. I staggered, and if Daniel Atijas hadn’t grabbed me by the elbow while at the same time opening the gallery door, I would have gone straight through the plate glass. I am certain of it. As it was, leaning on his arm, I managed to stay upright and stepped bravely out into air that, though warmer than it had been inside, was actually cooler, at least for me. It seemed, remarked Daniel Atijas, that neither he nor I was fully sober yet, for everything had been rocking back and forth for him a moment before in the hallway; for a moment he’d felt as if he had been standing still while everything else moved around him, but then he looked to his side, he said, and saw me, and everything somehow reverted to normal. He began walking again, keeping step, and again everything settled back into the way it was supposed to be. The sense of stillness couldn’t have lasted long, he said, but he knew this would be one of those moments he would never forget, that surge of certainty when he observed my steady pace, when he saw my eye blink. Interesting, he said, that in life it is often moments like these, apparently so trivial, that we remember more than we do the grand adventures or major thresholds, which last longer. It’s as if our consciousness, he said, no matter what that consciousness might be, accepts that a grain of sand means more than a whole desert, that in one grain of sand all the other grains are hiding; he who recognizes the grain, with his heart, if possible, can then understand the desert, he said, even if he has never set foot on it.
I wasn’t sure how to understand these words, just as I wasn’t sure whether they had anything to do with me, and what — if they were referring to me — was implied by “grain” and what by “desert.” Was Daniel Atijas speaking of love or devotion? Was there a difference? Whatever the case, I knew from that moment on that there was something that could serve as consolation, and things are always easier to take with consolation, even the least likely sort, than without it. When I think of his earlier words, I feel that Daniel Atijas would have approved if only I had asked him. I did not, however, say anything. We stood next to each other on the little terrace out in front of the restaurant, and while Daniel Atijas squinted and basked in the sun, I was fidgety with restlessness, clinging to my fragile consolation. Later, when we came over to the staircase leading to the entrance to the dining hall, we caught sight of Ivan Matulić’s grandson. While I was watching him, hunched slightly over, walking along the path that ran from the parking lot, I promised myself that I would be courteous and that I wouldn’t say anything I might later, ever, regret, but I did not succeed, I admit, in fully suppressing the malice I felt when he had almost reached us and I saw that his face was showing traces of the events of the night before: the bags under the bloodshot eyes, the ashen pallor, the visible wrinkles. It did not, of course, occur to me that I might look the same, just as Daniel Atijas did, after all, and that the malice belonged to all of us at once and to the same extent. I mustered the stamina to greet Ivan Matulić’s grandson with a smile, and then, looking out of the corner of my eye while being extremely nonchalant, I paid close attention to how Daniel Atijas and he greeted each other, what they said, where their hands were, and, in the end, whether they were arching their eyebrows as a sign that they were overjoyed at seeing a person they cherished.
Ivan Matulić’s grandson was, in fact, quite restrained, and it was easy to see that he was being cautious when we began talking about the previous night. It turned out that each of us remembered the night as a sequence of blank stretches between which events played out that at times made sense and that at others were extremely cryptic. So Ivan Matulić’s grandson knew how I’d made it to my room, a trip of which I knew nothing; Daniel Atijas knew exactly when Ivan Matulić’s grandson sat in his car and, despite his drunken state, drove off toward Canmore, while the grandson remembered only the driving but not the instant when he took his seat in the car or the moment he got out of it; I remembered when Ivan Matulić’s grandson tried to kiss Daniel Atijas’s feet, which neither of them recalled and which neither really cared to recall. When he had gotten tired of hearing me say over and over that I was going to die or some such nonsense, said Ivan Matulić’s grandson, he resolved to take me to my room, no simple task, he said, for first he had to figure out where my room was, but once he’d extracted that information, he said, the journey was not so arduous, certainly not as difficult as the effort he’d had to invest in working out how to keep the door to Daniel Atijas’s room from shutting while he was taking me, because he could not, he said, get the key from Daniel Atijas, who was snoring loudly and refused to stir, no matter, he said, how hard he tried to wake him, as, God knows, he did.