Daniel Atijas did not respond. Instead, he shrugged and kept his eye on the women in the pool. He did not strike me, I have to say, as the type who was incapable of catching subtle allusions, but everyone makes mistakes, so perhaps I was mistaken in my judgment, though I was more inclined at that point to think of certain life circumstances which can at times have an impact on a person’s personality, and there could be no doubt that Daniel Atijas, when in that unfortunate country of his, was living in circumstances that were not likely to arouse anyone’s envy. None of that, however, helped me formulate the right response to the words and behavior of the director of the Literary Arts Programs. I had stayed there, standing in front of him like a culprit, lump in my throat, hoping to latch onto some words. Of the triumph that was surely filling Mark Robinson I dared not think, nor could I dwell on the likelihood of this becoming a favorite topic of conversation in the Saskatchewan art circles during the autumn. It would be best, I told the director and Mark, for me to bring Daniel Atijas himself over, and they could ask him directly whatever they wanted to know. Without waiting for their response, I stepped boldly over to where Daniel Atijas was still standing amid the bevy of women. When I got there I turned, before saying anything, and looked back at Mark Robinson and the director of the Literary Arts Programs, but they were gone from sight.
Daniel Atijas smiled at me and raised his glass in greeting as one of the women launched into her impressions of the latest Woody Allen movie, particularly the music, which she had been coming back to ever since she saw the film and could not forget no matter how hard she tried. I didn’t know how to respond, but she wasn’t waiting for a response; she went right on retelling scenes and interpreting, as she said, the remarkable examples of ingenuity on the part of the director, editor, and cameraman. While I nodded politely, I fidgeted and shot glances in all directions until I glimpsed Mark Robinson by the hall entrance. I couldn’t see the director of the Literary Arts Programs, but if Mark was looking to get out of there, the director wasn’t far behind. I tried to draw Daniel Atijas’s attention, and when I failed, I inserted myself, not without a jostle, between him and a woman who was picking crumbs and lint off his shirt. I don’t know exactly why, just as I didn’t know what I’d say to him, and I knew even less why the words of the director of the Literary Arts Programs had so upset me, but while Daniel Atijas went right on conversing over my shoulder I hissed that this was the last minute, that we must leave at once, and I was already dragging him toward the entrance through which the sizeable frame of Mark Robinson was just then ambling. It would have been easier, however, to push our way through brambles than through a cluster of art and literature lovers. Every two or three steps we were forced to halt, not because of me, of course, but because of Daniel Atijas, who was asked questions, asked to shake hands and smile, and even asked to sign copies of his books in English, and when we finally made it to the door, Mark Robinson was no longer anywhere to be seen.
If such a big man could disappear so readily, I knew we had no hope of finding the director of the Literary Arts Programs. Daniel Atijas threatened not to take a single step farther until I explained what was going on, but instead of offering a real explanation, I mumbled something about there having been a misunderstanding and asked if he’d join me for a walk. At first indecisive, he did agree, but while we were walking among the buildings of the Banff Centre he insisted — my efforts to divert the conversation to other subjects notwithstanding, to the art of preparing sushi, for instance — that I explain my, at the very least, unusual behavior, and having no way around it yet also quaking at the thought of him flying into a rage and leaving me in the lurch out there in the dark, I explained that this behavior of mine, which was out of line, no argument there, came from the realization, which hit me during the reception, that he had enemies at the Centre. By the way, lest I forget, that evening we did not encounter a single elk, and that fact persuaded me to promise myself that at the first available opportunity I would pay more attention to the habits of elks, for each time I noticed their absence, I’d wonder where they had all gone and how it was that they all knew they didn’t have to be standing where they otherwise stood every day and night. Daniel Atijas laughed, not at the elks, since I hadn’t mentioned them, but at my claim that he had enemies at the Centre. I told him this shouldn’t worry him, because it was mostly a consequence of something typical of prairie dwellers — not all of them, of course, I said, but a number — especially those who were right-wing in their political thinking or bent.
Somewhere, I told him, I had read that the prairie populist movements were rooted in the rich soil of intolerance that had produced a dualistic view of the world, and this dualism produced, I said, a simplistic divide of people into friends and foes, and everyone who was not a friend, or whom you didn’t understand, or whose customs were strange to you, everyone like that could be only a foe. Daniel Atijas laughed again, adding that he had never bought into generalizations like these, and now, after all that had happened in his former country, he believed them even less, particularly because, as nearly everyone claimed, the country had come apart at the seams and the war had erupted because of similar hostile feelings from times gone by or perhaps, as some claimed, he said, because hostile feelings were always there in the genes, mind, heart, and guts of every person who lived there. Because of that, he said, he had made an effort to pin down the crux and thrust of the hostility and knew, he said, of no better explanation than one in the wisdom of the Talmud: if two people come to us for help and one is a foe, help the foe first. This, of course, he added, had to do with the wise Talmudic saying that a true hero is a person who turns enemies into friends and also with the biblical admonition that one should not harm foreigners. Those, like the Jews in Egypt, who have felt on their own hide what it means to be an outsider, are especially enjoined not to do that, though folk wisdom has reduced this to a much more practical measure; hence among Yiddish sayings there is one asserting that a friend costs nothing while a foe you pay for, so, he said, it follows that making friends is better and costs less and that he who is a foe to himself will have the most enemies.
I told him I understood what he was saying and that I could respond with the words of Paul Muni, who said something along the lines of, if you ain’t got enemies, you ain’t got nothing, but that my intention, my response, was merely coming from my concern, really my fear, that he might be needlessly hurt. In saying so, I added, I understood full well that a person, whether he wanted to or not, had made habitual the idea of enemies and that I would not be off base if I were to say that having enemies spurred one on more than having friends did; in my thoughts I gave more time to my real enemies than to my true friends. What I still didn’t understand, I said, or what I was not prepared to accept, had never accepted, was the notion that human society could prevail only by basing its development on hostile feelings, hatred, rupture, and division. No one could convince me of that, I said, attempting to send him a knowing look just as we were standing under a street lamp. I doubt he noticed, even though I was twisting my neck around and even leaning into it a little; just then he was staring up at the sky, his head lifted, as if summoning witnesses. He was of the opinion, he said, that the two of us were speaking of more or less the same thing, though perhaps in different words. He, too, he said, was convinced that enmity was not an inevitability for humankind but was learned, which would mean, he said, that this was one more of the things bound to the evolution of human consciousness, to the elevating of mankind above unconscious nature, and that it represented a part of the price a person paid.