He couldn’t speak for me, said Daniel Atijas, but for himself he was sure that such a spiritual condition could not last long, especially when, as with Ivan Matulić’s grandson, he found himself in a situation for which he was not responsible, in which he had done nothing wrong. I didn’t know what to tell him, just as I didn’t know whether, with these words, he meant to justify Ivan Matulić’s grandson or, possibly, to blame him. Ignorance, and Daniel Atijas accepted this, was no excuse; not knowing does not mean being free of responsibility; intending is sometimes the same as doing. I had nothing new to say, and there was nothing new that could be said. I didn’t want to say anything. All I wanted was to keep my mouth shut, and if there was something that didn’t compel me, if there was a story, at least as far as I was concerned, it was over, and it was the story of Ivan Matulić’s grandson. And besides, despite all my efforts to follow the details as closely as I could, despite the hours and hours we had spent together, sober and drunk, I was still missing meanings that the two of them, sometimes without a word, were perfectly attuned to. Daniel Atijas interpreted my silence as a sign of continued interest, and he went on about the skewed nature of the world into which, as into the world beyond the looking glass, Ivan Matulić’s grandson had stepped. The first thing that was skewed, in Daniel Atijas’s opinion, was the trajectory of time along which Ivan Matulić’s grandson traveled, and that was the inevitable reflection of something else that was skewed, the time frame of fifty years back, when the ideological impact of a state was measured by its insistence on the eradication of everyone who stood apart, either through religion or ethnicity, from the majority of inhabitants.
To mask this distortion, for there was no place in current time for such a position and its consequences, there had to be an additional skewing of the time trajectory, explained Daniel Atijas. So the crimes that were happening now were accorded greater value than the crimes that had happened before. The regime of one totalitarian system, communism, was seen as having outstripped the earlier totalitarian system, fascism, in its horrors. There was, supposedly, so much evil in communism, said Daniel Atijas, that everything else paled by comparison, not only in Croatia but elsewhere in his former country. Hence Ivan Matulić’s grandson at first really believed he was doing something for the good of the newly minted state, forged in the glow of a terrible ordeal, but later, once he stopped heeding his heart and began listening to reason, he realized that neither partly nor wholly had this state yet emerged from its previous ordeal. Everything had become so tangled that I could barely keep myself from begging him to stop, though I have to admit I was far more vexed by the passion with which he was telling me all this than I was by the complexities. This passion was so boundless, I thought, in comparison with what I had seen, while we were standing out in front of the studio, in that segment of his sentence in which he had declared his resolve to wait no matter what. The thrill I had felt faded now like a sheet of paper in the sun, yellowed and brittle. That was when Daniel Atijas declared that we should spend the next day together on an outing. He had talked, he said, with the Japanese artists, and they had suggested several attractive destinations.
In that case, I said, they are the ones who should go with you. I didn’t even try to hide the disappointment in my voice. Indeed, answered Daniel Atijas, he had asked them that straightaway, but it turned out they had another firm commitment, which was a shame, he added, because it would surely be best to go with someone who already knew the lay of the land and the paths, but he had purchased the necessary maps and guides, and during the evening he was planning to study them, so as soon as Ivan Matulić’s grandson arrived, and that should be right after breakfast, we’d be ready to set out. Perhaps I should have left the pad with the drawings out in the open, I thought, but that change was not possible. To be frank, I didn’t want to make the change, though something along those lines had occurred to me several times. I could only chastise myself. Had someone hinted to me only ten minutes ago that I would be eager to see Daniel Atijas leave my studio, I would have laughed, but now I had to turn away to the window to hide the twitching of my cheek and jaw muscles, a sure sign of fraying patience. It takes so much time to build and so little time to tear down, says one of Mark Robinson’s poems, and now that line shone somewhere in the back of my consciousness. Who could have guessed, I thought, that I’d find comfort in one of Mark’s poems? I suddenly wanted Daniel Atijas to leave my studio quickly and for it to get dark quickly, and then I wanted to go to a theater and watch a movie about a natural disaster. The quantity of human tragedy in movies like that always pushed me to feel embarrassed by the niggling troubles that I imbued with meaning and which plagued my life.
It used to be, in that same mood, I would go to a performance of a Shakespeare play, but then I got tired of how every single character in these plays, even the greatest fool, was always so wise. What I needed were the trite phrases of a Hollywood blockbuster, not the high-flying wisdom of the Stratford bard. It turns out that at that same moment Daniel Atijas, too, was thinking of heights, though not of the human spirit but of the surrounding Rocky Mountains. His first idea, he said, had been for us to climb the highest nearby peak, allowing us, at least temporarily, to distance ourselves from the human race. Afterward he realized that this would require skills none of us probably had, and there wasn’t enough time left, at least for him, to make headway in the fundamentals of alpine climbing, so he decided to take the well-traveled road, so to speak, and chose a route that was challenging and yet accessible to all of us right near Banff. The effort we would make to conquer its heights, he said, would be his symbolic yet real farewell to the Art Centre while at the same time it would foreshadow his return to his country, the effort he would need to adjust again to life there. He doubted that I would be able to grasp, he said, what this stay, the twelve or thirteen days that he had spent in Banff, had meant. He himself couldn’t fully grasp their real meaning; perhaps the meaning would open up for him only when he started to wish for what was no longer within reach and rail at himself for all he had failed to do. It needn’t be something big, he said; little things are what make us what we are. For instance, he said, he hoped he would still have time to get over to the store on the Banff main street, somewhere near the beginning, where he had seen a little onyx owl, and to the museum dedicated to First Nations history and culture.
He had cradled the owl twice in his hands, but both times he had put off the purchase, and who knew whether he’d still have time to buy it, just as he didn’t know, he said, whether he’d have a chance to visit the First Nations museum, even though he’d set out several times from the Centre with what had seemed like an unshakeable determination to go through the museum with great attention to detail. Our lives, he said, are based on perpetual dispersion, our inability to follow forever the threads we have chosen to follow, and our readiness to blame others for this. How many times, he asked, had I blamed myself for a failing, and how many times had I blamed others? I couldn’t come up with an answer to such a tricky question, but he didn’t stop looking at me until I said the first numbers that popped into my head. There was a time when I blamed myself, I said, and there were a hundred times when I looked to blame others. Daniel Atijas beamed as if we had reached some terribly important truth. The same was true of him, he said, though he was, perhaps, more inclined to self-accusation, which could be, he said, a reflection of his background, but in most cases, as with me, he said, he would blame others and close his eyes to his own shortcomings. So as far as tomorrow was concerned, he said, he didn’t want to leave anything to chance, and all afternoon, and even into the night, if necessary, he intended to dedicate himself to preparations for their outing. He started for the door, turned, and once more surveyed the studio. He kept having this feeling, he said, somewhere at the back of his mind, that we had missed something.