He didn’t know what, but the absence was there, it was real, so he figured, he said, that there had to be something left unsaid or unviewed. I shook my head. I don’t believe I convinced him, but soon afterward he left. I could have breathed a sigh of relief, or I could have wept. I did neither. I went to the corner where the pile of canvases lay, moved them over, and pulled out the pad with the drawings in it. So much effort, I thought, for naught. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t the truth, for never is any effort a waste — I have always subscribed to that idea. Effort may merely change a drawing’s shape or structure, its color, its aggregate condition, but the matter itself, the quantity of matter, remains unchanged. Even if I were to burn all the drawings, they would still exist, at least in the number of molecules, elementary particles, or whatever it is that everything is made of. Just as a word that has once been uttered can never be silenced, no matter how silent one is afterward, so it is that a drawing which has once been put on paper can never be entirely erased. That notion still might not stop me from destroying the drawings, but it alerted me to something else: that I would never be able to destroy them in me. In a few days’ time, Daniel Atijas would be strolling the streets of his city again, yet at the same time he would be walking along the path that leads to my studio; he’ll be there, talking about how he had met interesting, though naive, Canadians here, yet his voice will still be echoing over the waters of the Bow River, and wild birds will be listening to the inscrutable tales of local Yugoslav politicians; someone will knock at his door, and he will, I am certain, open the door quickly, but here that will not happen, and whoever knocks here will stop, hesitating, after the fifth or sixth tap of a crooked finger, and think that perhaps he should lean his ear to the door.
Nothing, only silence. Most often it doesn’t matter where a person is, I thought; it matters much more where he is not. The art of absence, I felt like saying, is more important than the skill of presence. Showing up at the right moment, I said, is worth less than a no-show at the right moment. My voice sounded fragile and hollow in the empty studio, like the croak of a frog. True, I thought, it is good at times to be an enchanted frog, especially when a person knows for certain that he will find a prince or princess who will not be squeamish. I attempted to find the right order for the drawings — not chronological, naturally, because there is nothing simpler than laying out a chronology, but instead an order that gradually, with barely visible gradation, led to the acquisition of a broader and, I hoped, more profound insight into the meaning of what the face was or could be. I wasn’t certain whether I was actually ordering the drawings to see something that had earlier eluded me or to squelch in myself the thought of destruction, but the work slowly absorbed me, pulled me away from everything else, and when I looked up, I saw the shadows of twilight advancing. I couldn’t believe it, because that would mean that I had spent five, maybe six, hours engrossed in mastering the structure of the given form, so I opened the door, and out I went but — no doubt about it: darkness was silting in among the conifers, thinly still, though nearer the forest floor along the path it had already started thickening.
Wonder of wonders, I was not hungry, though I couldn’t remember when I’d last eaten. I went back to the studio, clicked on the light, switched on the electric stove, and put the teapot on. The drawings were on the table, arranged finally in an order that led in a trajectory toward greater openness, so that the first drawing, the one on the top, showed only a single line, and the last, on the bottom, depicted the entire face. Several drawings on the bottom, perhaps the last six, showed the whole face, of course, but I had succeeded, or at least I believed I had succeeded, in pinpointing the subtle differences that led from the first of them to the last, which was, at the same time, the final drawing made, the end of it all and the beginning of everything else, as I had read on the spine of a book many years ago. I put a teabag into a cup and poured hot water over it. The teabag floated for a moment on the surface and then began to sink, leaving behind it a reddish swirl as if it were burning. I shouldn’t have been thinking of fire, incompatible as it is with water, I should have been thinking of blood, a trace of blood, undulating and lithe in the water currents, like the liquid around it in part, but still distinct. I thought, however, that I should go to Daniel Atijas’s room, lean my ear against the door, and listen to hear if he was really there, as he had promised, or out roaming through the Art Centre and Banff, attempting, finally, before his departure, to become somebody else. And I did leave the studio, leaving the drawings piled out on the tabletop, because there was no longer any need, I told myself, to stow them away, but I did not go to Lloyd Hall, where our rooms were; instead I headed deeper into the woods until I found myself surrounded by total darkness.
The time has come, I thought, to admit that I have lost. I could not remember what it was I had lost, but that was not what mattered; the point was the act of losing, the feeling that something had been permanently taken away and would never come back. I cannot say how long I stayed in the darkness, in the underbrush, among the pines. When I finally returned, I didn’t stop till I reached my room. I took off all my clothes, lay down, lifted my arms over my head, and sank into sleep before the sheets had time to get warm. I got up several times that night: twice because of bladder pressure, once because of a dream so real that I had to tell myself, mid-dream, to wake up, and once because of a feeling, which proved false, that someone was sitting on my legs. The dream had to do with something that happened years ago, and while I waited, lying on my back, to go back to sleep, I couldn’t find any points in common with what had just happened, unlike what I understood about the feeling of weight on my shins, which I was certain was a sign of the presence of Daniel Atijas’s astral body in my room. When I opened my eyes, I couldn’t see anything, and I wasn’t sure whether astral bodies leave a trace. The weight had, meanwhile, let up, though a mild pain kept hovering around my shins, preventing me from sinking into sleep. Outside, it was almost light. The depth and sharpness of the azure of the sky promised a beautiful day, as I could tell from experience, which, under any other circumstances, would have delighted me and hurried me along through the getting-up and morning rituals, but this morning I had been hoping for rain, and I took the promise of the beauty of the day as betrayal.