Just then, thinking there might be no difference at all between light and dark, I tripped over a tree root, one of the many intersecting the forest path, lurched, staggered, but still held my balance. When I straightened up again, I saw Daniel Atijas. He was sitting on the steps to my studio — on the top step, to be precise — reading. I don’t know what the book was, I never asked, but it entranced him completely, because though my staggering must have disturbed the serenity of the woods, he was glued to the open page, showing in no way that he was aware of my presence. Every painter dreams of a moment when he can dedicate his full attention to a subject who is totally free of any awareness of that attention, but I had no benefit from the moment. I had no paper or pencil, no canvas or brush; only for a moment did it occur to me to slip into the bushes and continue watching him unobserved, and then, as if he sensed my quandary, Daniel Atijas licked his finger, turned the page, and looked up, and I coughed right then the way a person does who has just reached the end of a trying journey. Daniel Atijas’s whole face was open to me, and more than ever before he looked like a boy. If I hadn’t stopped myself right then, I wouldn’t have stopped even once I was between his widespread thighs. This I know. He had started by worrying why I wasn’t there, said Daniel Atijas, which did not mean that he had stopped worrying; in fact, he would be worrying still had he not had a book in his pocket, which he had begun, fitfully, to read, he said, as if he had never before in his life read a book, and soon the events in the book so engrossed him that every worry fell away, and the only thing he wanted to find out was what would happen next, which would have been a simple matter had he not started reading the book from the middle, so he kept having to flip back to figure out why some of the characters were saying or doing things, and this became more and more complicated as he leafed back and forth — a movement between past and future, which is, in essence, he said, like real life, what life really is, just as he had said before to Ivan Matulić’s grandson.
In the end he had begun to think that all books should be written that way or at least published that way, with the pages displaced, which would turn reading into the constant search that is, in his profound belief, he said, the very essence of reading, though that doesn’t matter so much; more important is that all this contributed to the absence of all worry, and now, when I had finally turned up, he said, it was clear just how much this, his reading, had been the right choice. Now, he said, he could put the book back into his pocket, and into his pocket it disappeared. If we were in Saskatchewan, I thought, none of this could happen. I still didn’t dare move. On the plains, I thought, every movement is a form of standing still, while in the mountains you are always active, at some stage of moving, forced to climb or slow your descent. What goes on in the plains only happens through conscious effort, while in the mountains, it happens by itself. When I stand here, I thought, I am actually walking, or falling, which may be the same thing. Of course, had I really been walking, I would already have been between Daniel Atijas’s widespread legs, and I was not there — that at least I know. But still he had thought of something at one point, Daniel Atijas went on, patting his pocket gently as if to console the book that had suddenly dropped into darkness; he had recalled why he had come looking for me at the studio and resolved to wait, no matter how long it took.
Now this, no doubt about it, was passion — albeit unexpected — for though I knew that under his serene demeanor Daniel Atijas possessed a fervid spirit, I had not believed he would be able to show it. I wasn’t sure whether to be glad or worried: glad that I still, at least like this, could stir someone’s passion, or worried that my judgment — which I prided myself on, and not without reason — had lost its edge. All of a sudden it hit him that afternoon, continued Daniel Atijas, that I had never once invited him to see my paintings, and the thought had stung him like a lash. He had been sitting in the living room of the home of the director of the Literary Arts Programs, where he was sipping Ceylonese tea with the director’s wife, when one of them mentioned me in passing. The wife of the director of the Literary Arts Programs remarked that I was known for my “broad sweeps.” What are “broad sweeps”? asked Daniel Atijas, and how could it be that I had never offered to show him my works? I don’t know why he felt the need to refer to my paintings as works — he didn’t look like the type who so readily forgets the words for things — but I was no longer sure of anything. Had I been able to, I would have melted under the rays of the sun, which was somewhere high in the sky, up above, covered at times by clouds, as could be seen by the shadows that occasionally slid over the conifers and the studios. I took a step somehow to the side instead of forward, but I had to move if I wanted to speak, and I told him I had no explanation for it, that some things happen despite our best intentions and that regardless of how much we take part in them, we can only watch ourselves from the sideline as if we were a stranger.
Daniel Atijas said this was silly, that nothing, nothing at all, happens despite our will, for which there was solid proof, he said, though he didn’t give a single example but instead explained that he was loath to contradict me, which flew in the face of all of his convictions, but we had so little time left and shouldn’t be wasting it on squabbles; we should be talking instead about how we’d spend tomorrow with Ivan Matulić’s grandson. I could have turned and left, I was so infuriated by the mention of the grandson, but there was already a lot of passion in that little space out in front of my studio. Instead, as if repeating the secret signal, I patted my pocket, pulled out my key chain, and moved toward the door. I had nothing to fear: the drawings were tucked away in the pad in the corner, safe behind a pile of canvases, and only with a thorough search — which there was no call for, nor would such a thing even occur to Daniel Atijas, he’s not that type of person, or, I corrected myself, he didn’t look like that type of person — could the drawings be found. Daniel Atijas followed me, came up the steps, waited for me to unlock the door, then cautiously, when I opened the door, stepped into the studio as if he were fearful of knocking something over. I offered him coffee; he asked for a glass of water. I didn’t know what he expected to see, but he seemed disappointed. The smile with which he entered and with which, I’m convinced, he meant to greet the teeming chaos of creativity, slowly faded. He turned around once more, cast a glance over the only paintings he could see, hung on opposite walls, one exactly across from the other, and he came over to A Rainy Day on the Prairie, right up to the canvas until his nose was almost touching the layers of paint.
The other one, I later explained, had the title A Bad Day for a Reaper, and a reaper, in a light-blue worker’s overall, reclining on a lounge chair, was watching a combine in the middle of a grain field. His face was reflected on the blade of the scythe on his lap: the left side of his face, his bushy eyebrows, his cheek bristly with stubble, and a bead of sweat there, transparent and slighty irregularly dented, whose convoluted surface exactly reflected the red combine. I do not believe Daniel Atijas noticed this little game, this multiplication of reflections, for he spent less than a minute standing in front of the painting, actually both paintings, long enough to praise my ability, as he put it, to remove the barriers between different levels of reality but not long enough to convince me that he was genuinely interested. He still wanted to know, he said, what the “broad sweeps” were that the wife of the director of the Literary Arts Programs had spoken of, for though he couldn’t, with confidence, say what this had meant to him when he heard it, clearly these paintings, despite all their qualities and unusual angles of observation, were no groundbreaking novelty, which, he said, as far as he was concerned, would be the only sweep that would allow movement sideways or forward. I don’t understand, I said, how “sweep,” which is more evocative of a movement to the right or left of center, could also suggest forward movement, but her words, I said, remind me of the time when I was painting barns and grain silos for hardly any money.