We are created to be worse so we can be better. But if this is the price of improvement, I said, then I do not intend to pay it, even if I ultimately end up without friends or enemies. Daniel Atijas disagreed. No matter what he thought of the war in Yugoslavia, he said, though he had trouble with the prevailing opinions about inbred hatred, he had to admit that the presence of an enemy created a certain vital, even intellectual dynamic that could never be sparked merely by the company of friends. It might be, he said, that the prairie provinces were advancing precisely because their mechanism for finding enemies was prompting a constant closing of the ranks, and such a cohesion, he said, would probably not be possible without that duality, not possible in a world in which there were only friends. After all, he said, though he didn’t know where he’d come across this, it is easier and more reliable to believe foe than friend, and the thinker, whose name he couldn’t recall, was right when he said that one should be more careful in choosing one’s enemies than one’s friends. At that point we were on the road that ran down to the visitors’ parking lot and the exit from the Centre, and I suggested we go back, but he was prepared, he said, to go all the way to the place where the road curves and there’s the view of the grand old hotel and the Bow River, and he would be glad if I would go with him, especially as I hadn’t yet informed him, he said, of who this enemy was that he had acquired at the Centre, whether he meant to or not, now that his departure was steadily approaching; this enemy, or enemies, who could say, could not now play such an inspirational role as he, or they, would have played had he met him, or them, on his first day in Banff.
He did hope, he added, that it wasn’t Ivan Matulić’s grandson, because for reasons that he would rather not go into just now, he said, that would have really saddened him and marred the beauty of his stay at the Banff Centre. I hastened to reassure him, preferring not to go back to the grandson’s story, but it was too late. I felt a warm tremor in his voice and sensed a vigor in his steps, and probably, had there been more light, I would have seen a glimmer in his eyes; and while we stood there and watched the lavishly lit hotel, I mindfully erased the grandson’s features within myself until there was nothing of him left. It seemed as if Daniel Atijas, having listened to my dissuasions, had lost interest in the identity of his enemy; a full fifteen minutes passed during which he said not a word, but when we turned and started back up to the Centre, he explained that the encounter with Ivan Matulić’s grandson stirred in him a long-since-extinguished faith that there was a chance, in the region of his former country, to rekindle the trust which, he would have said if anyone asked, had been lost forever. It’s a bit of a paradox, he said, that he concluded this after encountering a person who was not from there, but sometimes one must start from a distance to come to the heart of light, or heart of darkness, either one. This did not mean, he said, that he was not interested in who his enemy was at the Centre, but what mattered to him more now was mending bridges that, he had thought, were burned forever, and he was convinced, he said, that I would understand with my whole heart and approve. Of course, I said, though I was grateful for the darkness, because I always blush when I lie.
What Ivan Matulić’s grandson has shown me, said Daniel Atijas, is especially precious as a confirmation that there can be no remorse until one admits to one’s own guilt, a stark contrast to the demands being heard from all over his former country, that there can be no repentance of one side until the other, or a third party, or however many, confess to their culpability. And in the process, he said, there was no talk of one’s own guilt or responsibility, because the premise was the certainty, he said, that there was no guilt at all to be borne by whichever party was speaking. So, he said, where he came from, in his former country, it turned out that no one, in their own eyes, bore any blame; Sartre had put it that hell is always other people. Ivan Matulić’s grandson, he said, was the first person who, one way or another, had offered something different, meaning that he had shown the readiness — when he said “hell”—to point to himself. And that, Daniel Atijas went on, was from a person who was not directly involved, though, he said, one could say that in a special way, no matter how many generations a person is away from his ancestral turf, his membership there can never be lost. You can go away, he said, you can live on a different continent, you can plow another field, but you will never get that first dirt out from under your fingernails, that fertile black loam that always, no matter what, marks your only true home. Most important, he said, and it happened after he had heard the grandson’s story, was a resurgence of his will to go back to his country, what was left of it, led by a new hope, or anticipation of hope, in contrast to his feeling when he arrived in Banff, when he first appreciated the serenity of these mountains and when he thought there was nothing that could budge him from the spot, that here he would stay forever even if it meant living in the woods or under a bridge, because he was so sickened by everything he had left behind, which he was seeing, as never before, in such a harsh light that it was painful.
Incredible, he said, how a person gets used to altered living conditions, how much he himself had been prepared to give up on everything, including morals and shame, only to stay alive as long as possible. Survivors, those of concentration camps in World War II, have written about that eloquently, he said, particularly Primo Levi, though Levi’s suicide, he said, does bring into question the likelihood of healing completely after such an experience confirms that sometimes life is only a mask hiding a death that actually happened long ago. He would not want, he said, for me to think he was comparing his lot to the hideous fate of those who bore the brunt of Nazi ideology, but the drop in the standard of living and values in his country, also the result of ideology and obviously lower on the pain scale, had an equal impact on the scale of genuine psychological horror, for life crumbled irreversibly in both cases, and irreversibility is what mattered. But, he said, that was not what he had meant to talk about. Responsibility for one’s choice, for the decision to stay in his country, no matter how it turned out, was something he could not shrug off on anyone else; it had to be his responsibility, and he would not be shouting his pain from the rooftops or, like many of the artists of his former country, hawking it to an assortment of world artistic and other foundations, which, by supplying funding, were washing clean — and he believed this deeply — public opinion in their countries and contributing in practical ways to concealing the truth about what they, with their political and economic decisions, had really done to the countries that had been vilified, such as his.
He was not sure, he said, whether I would be able to understand all of this, a tangled morass, and also the subtle play of daily and global politics as well as the manipulation of the media, for all this, one way or another, was interrelated and had contributed to his belief that nothing better than his meeting with Ivan Matulić’s grandson could have happened. It was good that we were already near the Art Centre at that point, for had we been further down the road or in the woods, I probably would not have been able to resist walking away. I would have spun around on my heel and left him in the dark. As it was, we were so close to the reception desk that I bit my lips and held my silence until we neared Lloyd Hall, where our rooms were. American society, Daniel Atijas then said, as if this was what he had been thinking about the whole time, is founded on respect for the individual, while European societies are founded on respect for the collective. To rise up in the name of America, he said, means to champion individuality, while to rise up in the name of any European country means to champion the right to be a part of the collective. At first glance, he said, this had nothing to do with what we were talking about, but he was sure that in this rift, which, by the way, was growing larger by the day, hid one of the key assumptions needed for understanding the current world order. Could it be, I asked, that he had not seen the paradox of such a statement, for it was precisely the European states, almost without exception as far as I could tell, who had denied this right to his country? I am not sure he answered.