I have always wrestled with what is missing, and my paintings depict absence rather than scenes of presence — it’s just that no one has ever remarked on this. By six I was at dinner. I dined quickly and went back to my room: the party at the home of the director of the Literary Arts Programs began at seven thirty, and I needed time to get ready. Once I was done with the bathing, shaving, hair drying, the choosing of the right lotion and tie, it was eight. I was not, however, the last to arrive. A playwright from Toronto came after me, and then two Japanese women, though not the same ones who had sat with Daniel Atijas at breakfast. When the wife of the Director of the Literary Arts Programs caught sight of me, she shrieked and flung herself around my neck. The director merely extended his hand in silence. He had never liked me, I knew. His wife said that we must get together, that I simply must not leave Banff before I’d been by to visit them one more time to give her the news about every person she knew who was still living on the prairie. There aren’t many left, said the director of the Literary Arts Programs. He was from Halifax and had no notion of what “prairie” meant, regardless of my explaining it to him whenever I came to Banff. How heartily he had laughed one summer when I told him that the prairie is just another form of water. When I said this, I did not mean the waves of grain that often show up in Mark Robinson’s poems but the geological fact that there used to be a sea here and that a prairie is, in a way, an absence of water, an absence of presence — something along those lines. Anyone who was not born on the plains cannot understand this, his wife said at the time, which was interesting, especially because she and I, from the prairie, claimed also to understand the mountains, but we refused to accept that people who came from mountainous climes could grasp in its fullness the essence of prairie.
I wondered what Daniel Atijas would say to all that, and by then the host and hostess had gone off, leaving me holding a bottle of beer, so I decided to go find him. I scooped a handful of cashews from a bowl on the table and set out on the habitual pilgrimage I undertook, whenever I was at the house of the director of the Literary Arts Programs, to a great wooden sculpture of Buddha seated on a lotus leaf, blissfully smiling and fat. They had brought him back from somewhere in Asia, where they had, long ago, spent two years as teachers of English as a second language in adult education classes. Whenever I visited them, I would visit the sculpture, bow to it discreetly, and stroke its rotund belly. I’d read a while ago in a book that this was supposed to bring luck and a windfall, and just then I needed both. The sculpture stood in a niche in the dining room and seemed, as I came over to it, more serious than ever, yet all I had to do was look into its laughing eyes to forget everything. I nodded to it, wondering whether it remembered me, and stroked its belly with my fingertips. Buddha said not a word, but the voices in the living room swelled with noise. Partly responsible for this was the music blaring from the lower level of the house, but the true culprit, I discovered, was Daniel Atijas, around whom a largish group had drawn, including the director of the Literary Arts Programs and Mark Robinson. The noise was actually coming from Mark, whose rumbling was louder than the muffled thumps of bass and drums, but the clamor was also caused by several people, three or four, talking at once.
I mingled with them, found a handy angle from which to study Daniel Atijas’s face, and did what I could to follow the threads of the conversation — more a quarrel, actually, no matter how many of the words were cloaked in courtesy. Whatever the case, Daniel Atijas defended himself, and they attacked, or rather prodded him to self-defense, raising criticisms and foisting on him impossible-to-meet conditions. Daniel Atijas repeated that the notion of collective guilt was simply wrong, there was no positive experience with such a thing, and the only outcome of insisting on nationwide guilt for what had been happening was to give those who really were guilty the feeling that as individuals they had been let off the hook and had not just been forgiven but were being encouraged to go right on doing more of the same. The wrongdoers are people, said Daniel Atijas, people with first and last names whose guilt can be proven; one cannot try a community in court, he said, especially because the community is not the decision maker, at least not in situations like the ones we are talking about. No, no, no, rumbled Mark Robinson, that’s pure bull, like when people claim that the German people cannot be blamed for Nazi crimes in World War II, that the misdeeds were the work of individuals who can be counted on the fingers of your hands, and over time, fewer and fewer fingers are needed to count them, until it comes down to a single finger, one man, usually dead by then, and since he is dead, he can conveniently be blamed for everything. Daniel Atijas shook his head. History does not tolerate comparisons, he said, especially not ones rooted in prejudice; the saying that history plays out first as tragedy and a second time as farce, that saying, he said, was emphatically untrue, as the events in his country showed: where there was no evidence of farce, historical or otherwise, but only of tragedy.
Their voices were by no means the only ones sparring; several other guests were elbowing their way in to voice an opinion. They mentioned the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, de-Nazification in postwar partitioned Germany, the camps for people of Japanese and German background in the United States and Canada during World War II — and Mark snorted scornfully at all of it. Sanctions against a country, said Daniel Atijas, best suit the people in power; the only thing isolation does is boost their position. He couldn’t understand, he said, why those who were imposing isolation as a universal solution for all political maladies couldn’t see this; and worse yet, he said, is the insistence on blaming a whole population, which is nothing short of covert racism. It has nothing to do with racism, shouted Mark. It has to do with sound logic. Did anyone, he asked, coerce the Germans into embracing Nazi ideology? I know nothing about the Germans, answered Daniel Atijas in a conciliatory tone. He struck me as someone who was averse to conflict and who would do anything to evade it or capitulate immediately if that failed. But only if doing so defuses the situation, said Daniel Atijas when I asked him before his departure whether my impression had been right. If the conflict is inevitable, he would never give up without a fight, and he would even be prepared, he said, to contemplate suicide, because if there was no other way out, then a plunge is better than defeat without a fight.
If he knew nothing about the Germans, said Mark, maybe there was something he knew about the Yugoslavs or the Serbs, or whatever the people he lived with called themselves, and could he say, asked Mark, whether anyone had coerced them into embracing the ideology of nationalism, or had they done so all by themselves, of their own free will? Nationalism needn’t be a bad thing, said the director of the Literary Arts Programs, barging into the conversation; in Canada we could use a little nationalism, the good kind, of course, he said, because then we would finally see what really makes us what we are or, actually, what we should be. Ah, said Mark, so we would be just like the Quebecers, and that, to be frank, holds no appeal for me. Daniel Atijas asked whether that meant that the Quebecers knew who they should be. They define themselves in positive terms, the director of the Literary Arts Programs hastened to answer, while we define ourselves in negative terms — that’s the difference. The difference, again Mark rumbled, is that you from the east don’t know who you are, while we in western Canada have no doubts about ourselves. The prairie defines us, I said, and Daniel Atijas looked at me for the first time that evening. He looked at me, he later explained, with amazement, but also, a moment later, with a tinge of tenderness, because, he said, that was the first time he had heard someone prepared to define himself not by language, or background, or history, or military conquest; it was the first time, he said, that he had heard someone seek the limits of their being purely in nature, and he immediately thought, he said, that he could have an ally in a person like that if he were in need of an ally, and he wanted, with that gaze, in which amazement gave way slowly to tenderness, to let me know how much this had meant to him, especially here, among the mountains, where he had really never been.